I was going to blog about something else but since there's a major controversy going on in the publishing world, I'm going to blog about that instead.

Here's the details as I know then now. FYI: Things may change as this is ongoing.

1. Wednesday (Jan 27) Apple introduced its iPad. This touchpad computing device does a bunch of stuff. For this issue, you need to know it includes iBook -- kind of like iTunes for books -- and Apple's answer to the Amazon Kindle. Reader and writer types noticed right away that the book prices were pretty high. $14.99. For the most part Amazon sells Kindle books for $9.99 and below. They take a loss on books for which the publisher actually charges more.

2. Soon after the iPad announcement, video surfaced of computer techno-maven Walt Mossberg speaking with Steve Jobs. They talked about books and their pricing vis-a-via the Kindle and Steve Jobs told Mossberg that "They will be the same."

Now that's interesting, I thought when I saw that clip. How does Steve know that? Does that mean they're lowering their price to match the Kindle? (I am at times sadly naive.)

3. The CEO of MacMillan Books has said some pretty uninformed stuff about eBooks, mostly about the price Amazon is charging. The basic issue is that hardcover books, as you probably have noticed, cost a lot more than $9.99 which is what the Kindle version of the hardcover costs. Hardcovers are VERY profitable for publishers. Mass Market Paperbacks (MMP) are not as profitable, don't cost as much and sell in far greater numbers, excluding the odd blockbuster everyone buys in hardback because they just can't wait.

4.MacMillan, in particular, has been very vocal about this. They, and other publishers have done things like publish in hardback but delay the availability of the Kindle version because they don't want to loose a hardback sale to a (cheaper) Kindle sale.

5. Today, Amazon pulled the Buy Now button from all MacMillan titles. This includes Tor and St. Martin's Press, by the way. This means you can no longer buy these books at Amazon unless you want to buy them used and that means NO money going to the author.

Here are the links to check out:

• Amazon Pulls MacMillan Books Over eBook Price Disagreement - NYT This article is pretty sketchy as to detail.


• Jane over at Dear Author has done a much better job than the NYT: Game On, MacMillan pulls the Kindle Books and Amazon Removes the Buy Button


• Authors, as is so often the case, are getting screwed right now. See John Scalzi MacMillan Books Gone Missing From Amazon. Scalzi writes for Tor, among other publishers. His books are now gone from Amazon.


• If you subscribe to Publishers Lunch, they have a decent but brief article.


• From Silicon Valley Insider: Steve Jobs Says Book Publishers Hate Amazon's Kindle reporting the Mossberg, Jobs exchange, which was filmed by another techno-maven, Kara Swisher. You can find the smoking clip at the SVI article.


• However, here it is from Swisher's report at Boom Town if you want to check out the original posting.


• And here's a grand irony from Reuters: Books a must-have even in sluggish economy: poll

My Take on This

There are several things wrong with this. The first is the assumption that but for the availability of the Kindle version, book buyers would buy the hardback. This appears to be an egregiously wrong assumption. There is, to my knowledge, no evidence that a Kindle owner would be a hardback buyer if she didn't own a Kindle.

I think it's much more likely that a Kindle owner, if she didn't have the device, would wait for the MMP rather than buy the hardback. The MMP would be priced at $7-8. But the Kindle owner, instead of waiting for the MMP, pays a bit more for the book right now. Instead of waiting. By the time the MMP comes out, she's not going to want to pay $9.99. So what's actually happening is the Kindle buyers represent BRAND NEW customers with respect to this release. MORE people buy this brand new book because there are two formats. And the cheaper one comes with some well known and much hated limitations.

But anyway, that's what the publishers are thinking. They think this because they haven't informed themselves about the changing landscape of book buying. (which is different from the changing landscape of book SELLING) They are not only technophobes, they are techno-idiots. They don't understand the digital world and they don't understand the people in it. Instead, they're running around yelling The sky is falling instead of listening to the consumer, some of whom are NEW consumers, tell them what they want.

Instead, they're trying to force consumers, who are new and/or different than they used to be, to behave in the comfortable way that matches the spreadsheets they've already got. Which are about selling something these consumers would rather not buy in the manner it's being sold to them.

Publishers need to hire someone who actually understands technology. Someone who grew up with it or enthusiastically threw themselves into it when the world changed. And it did, people, it did. And then they need to actually LISTEN to that person. Any C-Level employee who didn't personally take a look at Twitter when the buzz started is automatically disqualified from this position.

That's my personal line in the sand, by the way. If you weren't curious to know what Ev was doing over there, you're not the right person to help lead Publishers out of the Analog world. If you don't know who Ev is, you're really not the right person.

FYI: Ev is the person who started Blogger. After Google bought Blogger, Ev went off and tried a couple things that were neat but not neat enough. Then he did Twitter with some buds. Blogger, by the way, does not look significantly different than it did shortly before Ev left Blogger (post acquisition). There was one big upgrade, then Ev left.

Carolyn's Demands

• Stop wishing this digital stuff would just go away. It won't.


• Believe in your heart, because it's true, that pissing off your customers is not a sound business practice.


• Start listening to what READERS want.


• Forget territorial rights. They are now only a fiction. (heh) Concentrate on translation rights for your eBooks. If someone in Singapore reads English well enough to prefer buying books in English, let them. If I decide I want to buy a book in French, even though I live in California, let me. You will sell more books that way.


• Do some fucking research about piracy. Fund it if you have to. Pick an academic to do the work. Get some real data instead of the fake data, knee jerk assumptions you're using.


• Listen to your tech person about how to get people to buy legally. Oh hell, I'll just tell you now:
  
  1. Make it easy
  2. Don't rip me off
  3. Don't break my shit doing it.
  
  


• Keep in mind that you sell stories. Authors write them. If we have to, we'll write them without you. Your (fiction) business goes away without the stories.
  

Update

Thanks for the comments. I appreciate people weighing in on the issue. I thought I should clarify a few things.

First, I don't write for MacMillan, so my books are still on Amazon. I write for Berkley (Penguin Putnam) and Grand Central (Hachette Books) I do, however, read lots of authors who do write for MacMillan.

Also, I have the Kindle app on my iPhone and have purchased and read a lot of books that way, including books from MacMillan. I also read books on Stanza, another iPhone app, because the Kindle isn't always the best way to go. Especially when my author friends send me their books to read before they're published (Oh, I am so lucky!)

At Christmas, I bought my 82 year old mother a Kindle. She and my dad have both read books on it. I loaded it up with free books and helped my mother buy a book she was interested in reading.

So, that said, this post is not about DRM (Digital Rights Management). I happen to think it's a mistake, particularly as DRM is typically implemented. So far, in my opinion, DRM does far more harm than good because it breaks stuff for the consumer.

This post also isn't about piracy. I've posted about that a few times on this blog. My books have been pirated. What frosts me about that is the people who pirate my books and then sell them. Yeah. They steal my stuff and then sell what they stole to other people. That is wrong. Other than that, there's only one person (Brian O'Leary) who is actually studying piracy with any rigor at all.

Therefore, my position on piracy is aside from the obvious issue of stealing, I don't know for sure yet.

BUT!

Please don't think I am totally on the side of Amazon here. I'm not. I'm not a lawyer but I'm not clear on what agreements were made about pricing for iBook, the Kindle or anything else. Was there a smoke filled room and nefarious dealings? I don't know.

I think Amazon removing MacMillan from its site is pretty silly. They're screwing authors and readers to make a point with MacMillan and, probably, Apple. It's possible to view Amazon's pricing decision, and its $9.99 price point as predatory in effect. They know what publishers charge. They're willing to take a loss on these books in order to create a market at at price point less than publishers charge.

What happens when Amazon decides it doesn't want to take a loss any more? History suggests they won't be raising their price. History suggests they'll go to the publishers and say, hey, we won't carry your books unless you charge us less. Publishers have seen it before: from the big chains and from Wal-Mart. That's a fundamental change in the economic landscape. Price isn't set by the cost of the product + markup - what consumers will pay. Price gets set by the retailer and the seller has to suck it up or else. In MacMillan's defense, that's scary. But it doesn't excuse publishers lack of understanding.

Hopefully, I've been clear that I think publishers are making decisions based on misinformation and misunderstanding and that can just lead nowhere good.

And, as usual, let me say that in an emerging trend, the facts are fluid, not everything is known. All I can say is this is what I think so far, but I stand really and willing to hear more facts and opinions and change my mind accordingly.

Labels: Amazon, publishing, Rant, Whoopsies

So, whoa, Nelly! If you're a Romance author, things have been very interesting the last couple of days.

Harlequin Enterprises, publisher of category and single title romances for 60 years is in the middle of a HUGE controversy . . . if you're an author or aspiring author.

For a really good breakdown of who's saying what and what it means, check out author Jackie Kessler's post

Read on for my rambling thoughts.

The background

Harlequin has started two new ventures. The first, less controversial (but not without controversy) is Carina Press. This is the digital publishing arm of Harlequin. The controversy here, more or less, is that Carina does not pay an advance.

The other venture is Harlequin Horizons which is a self-publishing venture. The controversy here, for members of Romance Writers of America (RWA) is that RWA has a list of Recognized, approved publishers. To be on RWA's list, you must be a non-subsidy/non-vanity press. Meaning, that the publisher does not require the author to fund any part of the cost of publishing.

Keep in mind that Horizons isn't really self-publishing. A self-published writer gets to keep ALL the money from any sales. Not so with Horizons. After the writer bellies up to the publishing bar and pays, Horizons keeps 50% of the net. Not the gross. The net.

If the author is paying the cost of publishing, what more expenses could there be? Makes me suspect hidden fees, but I'm getting cynical in my old age. How can Horizons be a self-publishing outfit if they're keeping half the income after the expenses, which, by the way, the author pays.

The Problem

Check out the Harlequin Horizon site. It's a pay-to-play game.

As of yesterday, Harlequin has been removed from RWA's list of approved publishers.

Why should anyone care? Good question. For Harlequin, they can no longer attend the RWA national conference without paying the registration fee. They won't get free space for signings and book give aways and they won't get a spotlight. You may ask, so? Well, where do you think Harlequin gets its authors (before this little brou-ha-ha)? Those 10,000 RWA members sure make for a nice, concentrated source of potential and actual authors.

For RWA members there are some interesting impacts that are kind of boring for readers or non-members. PAN (Published Author Network) membership leaps to mind. I won't go over them here.

If the Harlequin print lines remain as they were, what's the big deal? Authors can still query Harlequin and can still get paid royalties and still not be expected to subsidize the cost of publishing their books.

The Harm

The harm of Harlequin Horizons, in its current incarnation, is a subtler issue that's knottier to unravel. But let's give it a try.

Analogies Galore!

In a perfect world people who self-publish would understand that self-publishing is NOT the same as traditional print publishing. This analogy is probably going to get me in trouble but, oh, well!

It's the difference between playing football in the NFL and playing on your city-sponsored league team. If you're an NFL player, you get paid to play football. And you get paid because you're a damn good athlete. Elite, actually.

If you play football on your city-sponsored league team, you pay to pay. You're still playing football, but that does not make you a professional football player.

An NFL player does not pay to play football.

Now, it's quite possible that someone on a league team IS an elite athlete. If that's so, then if they showed up at an NFL tryout, they would make a pro team. I don't think anyone is confused about the difference between a professional athlete and someone who participates in an organized sport.

Professional writers get paid for their writing, and they get paid because someone else has determined that they write well enough to justify the check. A traditionally published author does not pay the publisher one red cent. They don't enclose a check with their query letter or with their completed manuscript. Ever.

Self-publishing means you pay to play. You are a writer, because you did write something, after all. But you are NOT a professional writer. It doesn't matter if you make money selling your self-published book. (But come on. Self-published books sell, on average, 54 copies. They don't get the distribution, co-op, marketing, editorial, cover art, publicity that a professional writer gets for her book.)

Selling Books vs. Selling your Writing

There is a difference between being paid for your writing and making money selling books. If you self-publish, you are not being paid for your writing. You are selling books. This is why a self-published writer is still not professional writer even if she's making money selling her book. (Which is rare.)

Here's another hard truth.

You can't make a living as a professional writer if your book sells only 10,000 copies. Heck, you can't make a living if you sell 20,000.

If you self-publish, how on earth are you going to manage 10,000 copies of your book? The stores that move significant numbers of books will not carry your novel. No Wal-Mart. No Sam's Club. No Barnes and Noble or Borders.

Amazon might carry your book but you aren't going to sell 10,000 copies on Amazon. According to author royalty statements, it's a lot if a book sells 1000 digital copies. Your average self-published author simply can't possibly make a living wage through self-publishing.

Is Harlequin Deceiving Writers?

Here's the first issue: Harlequin Horizons is conflating published with professional. It's vocabulary legerdemain. And it's deceptive.

Not so long ago, the difference between published and professional was too small to matter. Technology has changed this. Today it's possible to publish a book without being a professional writer. It now behooves us all to clearly make that distinction.

If you pay Harlequin Horizons to publish your book, you are not a professional writer. There is no editorial review process. There's no editor or editorial board. I could, if I wanted to, sign up with Horizons and have them publish my 250 page novel consisting solely of the letter A.

Why authors are so upset and you should be too

Harlequin says, outright, that they consider Horizons to be an additional pool of potential professional writers. Separate from the slush pile. Separate from agented submissions. This is where there's an ethical decision to make. Or that was not made.

They're holding out the carrot of becoming a Professional writer, but, unlike actual professional writers, these writers have to pay for the carrot.

In the world of writing, that spells S.C.A.M.

To use yet another analogy, there are now two doors to becoming a professional writer for Harlequin. One opens when you're judged worthy. The other opens when you pay AND you're judged worthy.

The criteria, by the way, is decidedly muddled between the two.

But I can clarify.

In the first case, it's quality of writing (assuming a project appropriate to Harlequin's lines)

In the second case, what triggers the worthiness look-see is sales. If you write a fantastic book, pay Horizons to publish it and sell 54 copies, no one at Harlequin is going to pay attention. If you write a crappy book, pay Horizons to publish it and sell 2000 copies, they're probably going to take a look. In other words, writers who are great marketers are privileged over writers who can write.

If Horizons were completely separate from the traditional print arm of Harlequin, there probably wouldn't be a problem. Random House owns xLibris, after all. But Random House isn't sweetening the xLibris deal by promising to pick writers out of the pay-to-publish pool for publication with a Random House imprint. Random's rejection letters don't include a referral to xLibris. Harlequin, however, intends to divert rejected writers to its pay-to-play division. The slush pile is now a source of potential revenue.

From Harlequin's perspective this must look like a total win. The thousands and thousands of writers who aren't yet writing at a professional level can make the company money. It's so brilliant I'm breathless.

In the current incarnation, it's also unethical.

(And is IS thousands. Thousands of writers are querying and only a handful of them will ever get paid for their writing.)

Some more truths.

Writing is hard. You need talent and you need dedication. You must be willing to look at your work product and accept that maybe it's not good enough yet. You have to spend time learning about story telling. Let me assure you that there are a lot of aspiring writers who are unwilling or unable to face the truth, let alone acknowledge the problem might be with their book.

If you want to be paid for your writing, you have to submit your work to publishers. The hard truth is that people who don't know you and who really only care about making money, will read your work and say yea or nay.

One of the ways a writer finds out if she's good enough is to submit to publishers who pay writers for work they think will make them money.

If you've been doing this and all you get are rejection letters, then chances are the book you're submitting isn't good enough. Yet.

So you go back and you revise and edit and maybe even write another book instead. You keep doing that. You keep working and studying and learning. Because writing isn't easy. It really isn't.

Paying someone to publish your book isn't going to change that fact.

Labels: publishing

I believe I've mentioned that I'm getting my website redesigned. I've approved the final design which is cool. In the meantime the folks I'm working with asked me to send them my book covers so they could format them for me. Now, this meant I had to go get all my covers into one convenient place. I ended up putting them all up on Flickr and sending them a link.

So there I was, on the Flickr page with my book covers, excluding the cover for Indiscreet because that's not final yet -- though it's quite nice. And there are nine of them.





So why do I feel like I'm still trying to make it? Because I am. Still trying to make it in this business. I'm not under contract right now. Maybe I'll never sell another book. It could happen. I'm writing proposals and wishing my sales were stronger so I'd be a hotter prospect. And that's the thing, writers keep writing because readers buy our books. They buy them, and yeah, we writers better deliver on that story.

I guess I'll repeat that. Draw your own conclusions about what's embedded in that.

Writers get to write and readers get to read because someone buys our books. We write even though we, almost all of us, have day jobs because we have to work full time. And families. And bills.

My father once commented about one of my brothers that, boy, my brother was going to be busy with his day job and the consulting work he wanted to start doing on the side. My brother is married with kids. Between him and his wife, they share custody of all three of their children with previous spouses. They do not have their children full time.

And I looked at my father and said, "I have two full-time jobs, Dad." And he looked back at me and wow, he did not get it. "I write," I said. "And that is a full-time job in addition to my day job." To his credit he said, "And you also have your son." So, yes, I actually have three jobs, and one income. My writing income is more than it used to be but it's nowhere near enough to pay all my bills.

For everyone who loves to read, remember that the odds are high -- 95% -- that author you enjoy reading probably has two jobs and a family. And some of us are single parents, writing because we're twisted that way and there's no quick way for most of us to write full time.

10 books. And because of the way I write, because there is no second income to build up a cushion or pay extra bills or what have you and because of the slow and rocky course of just about every writer's career, 10 books is not enough.

It made me think, that's all.

I'm off to fix a writing mess.

Labels: Carolyn gets maudlin, publishing, writing

Richard Curtis article on publishing

Wow.

Labels: publishing

Oh, Sir Thomas! I <3 you, indeed.

I am on my knees prostrating myself to a new god (to Americans) For this Brilliant Post

I read the original Forbes article and couldn't make my way through the ahem balderdash of the article or the comments in order to even think of posting my own comment or even a rebuttal over here. And even if I had it wouldn't have been as good as Sir Thomas's.

So, Amazon, where's my $8.7 Million?

Really. My day is complete.

Labels: Heroes, publishing, writing

First I'm setting the stage, as it were. I'm a Web 2.0 Beta Project slut. I admit it. I've beta'd a lot of products the vast majority of which Did Not Work For Carolyn (DNWFC); that is, I got nothing useful or fun from them. The thing is, I'm busy. A beta has to be either immediately (and I do mean immediately) usable or so obviously a value-add for me, including fun by the way, that it's worth spending time when I should be writing. So, Twitter -- so easy and fun that I twitter still. Pownce -- seemed too complicated given my deadlines. Flickr -- fun easy and now with the use of the browser Flock a dream for the MySpace time suck. Like that.

I was reading about a product in beta called Smashwords. Two links: Smashwords Press Release and More about Smashwords. For the lazy, they want to make it easy for authors to publish and sell multiple formats of their work. Hmm. On the face of it, quite interesting. Really.

The Beta sign up is stupid, however. You have to answer a bunch of questions including selecting from a list that 1) was obviously written by an insider who understands COMPANY lingo, but not the lingo of possible users and 2) requires that stupid selection BEFORE you indicate you're an author. And NONE of the selections seems to apply to their target group -- authors. So I'm not going to bother with the beta.

I did skim through the two links above and I'm bothered by a few things, even though I think the idea is kind of neat and possibly convenient for authors.

The press release is a monument to unintentional humor, misstatement, omission and common misconceptions about the publishing business.

Authors receive 85% the net sales proceeds from their works, and retain full control over sampling, pricing and marketing.

Net not gross. Can anyone say Hollywood style accounting? That's been all over Publisher's Lunch for crying out loud. Full control -- but not over rights? Who gets them? What happens to them if you use this company? If you want to attract authors, then address the issues that matter to them.

The site offers authors free viral marketing tools to build readership, such as precent-based sampling; dedicated pages for author profiles and book profiles; support for embedded YouTube book trailers, author interviews and video blogs; widgets for off-site marketing; reader reviews; and reader "favoriting."

Overlooking the spelling error, one omission here is the fact that readers have NO LOYALTY to a publisher. Their loyalty is to the author. Suppose there are readers who love my books (there's some, I'm pretty sure!) They don't care who publishes me. They care that I'm published and they can, therefore, buy my books. I care who publishes me because that decision puts money and other career goodness in my pocket. That loyalty is why if J.K. Rowling changed publishers, her old publisher would be feeling sick and nauseous and her new publisher would be hiring some long-needed staff.

So, what's here that an author can't do on her own website, much more effectively from the point of view of the reader? Possibly the favoriting. None of this is a huge selling point for me, an actual author. Gosh knows I don't need yet another place where I have to maintain a presence. The Smashwords folks are confusing reader-centric benefits (favoriting) and writer-centric benefits (money and audience).

Also Viral Marketing? The whole problem with viral-anything is that you can't make it happen. To suggest that this is a method for going viral is well, in my opinion, dishonest. That Jedi-Knight guy on YouTube doesn't get a cent for the video in which he appears. YouTube sure gets lots from it though.

Amazon and Google Books are two huge competitors for most of this stuff. Well, competitors for that group of Authors Who Can Write.

"We plan to do for ebook authors what YouTube did for amateur video producers," said Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords, based in Los Gatos, Calif. "We make digital publishing simple and profitable for authors and publishers."

Whoa. Talk about some slight-of-hand! What did YouTube do for amateur video? Gave them a forum. It did not put money in their pockets. There's no profit for YouTube content producers. None. Besides, YouTube created a fun and easy forum where none existed before. Before YouTube, there was no fun and easy method of sharing video. But legions of writers already post stuff on their websites and in their blogs. What Smashwords would do for them is provide a forum. But it won't have them quitting their day jobs anytime soon. Heck, writers who already get paid for their words can't quit the day job. Smashwords isn't going to change that. They will be profiting from all the people who want to write but can't really. I can do most of that stuff over at Amazon and it doesn't cost me anything but time. The Smashwords forum might be quite nice. But I' compelled to point out that for writers who CAN write, digital publishing is already cheap and profitable. More about that later.

The inspiration for Smashwords grew out of founder Mark Coker's frustrations as an aspiring novelist.

Prediction: Authors who know the business cringed inside when they read that.
Fact: 98-99 percent of all the people who think they can write a novel 1) can't and/or 2) don't work hard enough at it. The Press Release goes on to describe a Roman-a-Clef project that sounds pretty interesting on its face, but the Roman-a-Clef bit has legal issues all over it. If they were rejected for the stated reason I would like to point them to Ursula LeGuin's famous rejection letter. I'm guessing their project wasn't any Left Hand of Darkness but nevertheless, two years isn't all that long when you're trying to get published (see press release for more ifo).

Coker concluded that in today's digital age, there's no reason why authors shouldn't be able to publish anything they want - and readers should determine what's worth reading, not just publishers.

Ohmygosh. Authors already can publish anything they want. Can you say Vanity Press? Here's the reason publishers SHOULD have something to say about what gets published: POD-dy Mouth.

Readers already do determine what's worth reading. It's just that no one has a sure-fire way of figuring out what that's going to be.

From the other article:

The hope is that ebooks, which failed to gain a foothold almost a decade ago, have advanced far enough both technologically and in the eyes of readers to be an acceptable alternative to traditional books

Huh? eBooks didn't fail. The closed, proprietary eBook Reader device failed. eBooks have been profitable and flourishing for quite some time. And that profit has flowed to authors. See Ellora's Cave. eBooks thrived among the population most invisible to mainstream businesses and geek-types: women readers of romance. The money's been there for a long time.

OK, this is way too long. Smashwords sounds interesting and possibly useful, but someone needs to proofread their Press Release -- there's way more than one typo -- and maybe have them cut down on the hype.

Labels: publishing

I can't help myself -- does this sound cool or what? From Publisher's Lunch:

NON-FICTION: BUSINESS/INVESTING/FINANCE
Reclusive CEO of Blackwater Worldwide Erik Prince's WE ARE BLACKWATER, an insider's account of the controversial company that has supplied bodyguards and support-and-rescue personnel to hot spots around the world, including the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, promising to "refute criticisms of the company, and take the reader on thrilling missions into hostile territory," to Regnery.

Check out the Danger Room Blog for interesting background and links. I'm not so sure Erik Prince is reclusive, since he's certainly been in the news a lot lately. And can you say, Damage Control? Search the Danger Room Blog for the Blonde Rescue story. It's hilarious.

Also, here is the tea I drink every morning. I love it. I used my cell phone to take a picture of the Welsh side of the container as I am convinced that improves the taste.

Speaking of Fun Tricks With Cell Phones, my Grand Central editor emailed me about either faxing or sending her a scanned copy of my signature to stick in a teaser thingee for My Wicked Enemy. So, I'm thinking, Fax? Scan? What the?? Way too much work people. So I signed my name on a sheet of paper, took a picture of it with my cell phone and emailed it to her from the phone. Took about 2 minutes. A while back when my work laptop was blue-screening, I'd take a photo of the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) and send them to tech support so they could read the error messages. Because as any Windows user eventually learns, once you get a BSOD, your computer is frozen and there is no way except by writing it down to save the error message*. Until the cell phone camera... Same thing here, I thought. The lighting for my signature pic was not ideal, but so far I haven't heard that the jpeg wasn't usable.

* OK, I'm sure the Windows event log has the message logged, or if not there, then in the stack dump, but have you ever tried to read a stack dump? And besides, some of those BSOD's are fatal errors. You'll never get to that hard drive again. Sending a photo is a lot faster.

Labels: Fun With Cell Phones, publishing, Tea

This quote is from Publishers Lunch:

There is a slow but steady worldwide decline in the sales of printed products, roughly matched by growth in sales of electronic media, and gravity is reasserting itself in the UK trade. In 2006, it became clear that book publishers should probably expect medium and long-term sales stagnation and decline in their printed products, just as newspaper publishers do.

Anyone who checks out the A-list bloggers of the Tech Altiverse (I just made up that word since the Uber-Geeks do, in fact, inhabit an alternate universe: see e.g., Tech Crunch, Guy Kawasaki or Robert Scoble) knows that the geekish are rolling their eyes at newspapers for not understanding what's happening to their business model. For the most part, the Uber-Geeks are right. Newspapers moan about Craigslist taking their revenue without making the leap to gee, maybe readers want want ads that work like Craigslist so we better do that! It took me about 2 minutes, maybe three, to post my old printer on Craigslist and within 2 minutes, I kid you not, I had a taker. Could I have done that, as easily or as quickly on any newspaper want-ad site? No. Do I go to newspaper websites that are behind a pay wall? No, I do not. I go get my website news somewhere else, and by the way, view someone else's ads when I do. Lest you think that there's no money in Google's ad-sense, I've seen creditable reports (but not proof) that many of the the A-listers make a few thousand a month in ad sense revenue. (A-list bloggers have hundreds of thousands of impressions, not a few hundred. For comparison's sake Miss Snark, despite her avid fans, would not have been considered an A-lister, though before her retirement from blogging, I was starting to think she might get there.)

The cat analogy is coming up, by the way.

Have people become news averse? No. They're just consuming it in places where it's convenient for them. But I still look through 2 print newspapers at home, too.

So here's the cat analogy. My cat Jake loves to sleep on my printer. My brand-new printer! So I keep it covered with two thin-ish kitchen towels. The other day I thought, hey, I'm going to cover the printer with this much bigger and vastly thicker cloth! The printer will be even more impervious to cat hair and Jake will be comfier, too!

That's not what happened.

Jake refused to sleep on the printer. Instead, my big, fluffy 15 pound cat decided to sleep in the space where I put my manuscript binder when I am transferring paper edits to the computer. At first, I thought, man, this is just so inconvenient to have him trying to sleep on my MS! We spent a couple of days irritated with each other about that. And then I removed the big cloth from the printer and Jake got up on the printer and went to sleep on the two thin cloths.

Oh. There was no abandonment of cat-napping behavior, merely a displacement of its location.

See where I'm going with this? If this publisher is right, the medium is changing. But the need for stories people want to read is not.

So authors have no need to panic. Publishers do, if they don't wake up to the translocation.

In writing news, I've deleted two chapters from Magellan's Witch. But things are getting better.

Labels: editing, Magellan's Witch, publishing

Galley Cat on one of my favorite authors Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart was my intro into African literature. Mind opening.

Interesting blog post about imprints from a publisher who always has interesting insights into the business.

Even more interesting blog post about imprints. I TOTALLY agree with this. Readers just don't care about imprints. File this under the publishers should be doing market research...

Physicists blog about Being in Love. Read it. You'll be surprised.

Saving myself 15 years of bad luck. Maybe. I was cough cough mumble on mySpace cough working hard when I came across this, which unlike most horoscopes, seems to describe me exactly. Please read the foregoing and following, with no sense of being serious at all, okay?

TAURUS: The Freak in bed

Aggressive. Freak in bed. Rare to find! Loves being in long relationships Likes to give a good fight for what they want. Extremely outgoing. Sexy as ...u no!..... Loves to help people in times of need. Outstanding kisser. Very funny. Awesome personality. Stubborn. Sexual as ......... Most caring person you will ever meet! One of a kind. Not one to fuck with. Are the most sexiest people on earth! 15 years of bad luck if you do not repost.

In writing news, Magellan's Witch is going okay I think. I got to chapter 10 this time before I had to massively rewrite and that only took a day. Last night I got through a lot.

And now, I really do have to go work hard.

Labels: Authors, Magellan's Witch, marketing, publishing

There's a really interesting post over at Word Wenches. Erika Tsang of Avon is blogging today and posed a question about covers. Make sure you read the comments to the post, by the way or you'll have missed the point.

A week or two ago the blogosphere and the print press was abuzz with talk about how publishers do no market research into readers. Articles mentioned that RWA was the only organization that even came close to doing such research. As a reader, I know there are things that many, many readers dislike, and covers are a HOT hot issue with them (us). EVERYONE, (except apparently, publishers) knows that readers hate covers that misrepresent the story. Hate it. Go read the comments to the post above.

Does anybody believe publishers are really listening? That's valuable market research right there in the comments, and from people who buy a lot of books.

Just thought that was intereesting.

Back to work

Labels: Book Covers, publishing

Tess Gerrittsen has this post that's well worth reading. The comment trail is good, too. Romance authors are definitely not paranoid. Alas.

Labels: publishing, romance genre, writing

Here's an interesting post from Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog. I'm not sure I agree with everything that's said, but the notion that used book sales on Amazon have hurt publishing is quite an interesting idea. I don't know if that's right, but I know that when I see my January 2007 release on Amazon, practically on the day of release, mind you, with links to used copies at a less-than-new price, I don't feel so good. I need people to buy my book new. Otherwise, my publisher thinks I can't sell books for them.

I disagree that agents and publishers act as a closed door to publishable projects. My own experience with reading MSS by unpublished authors says 99% of the books aren't good and probably 98% are really, really bad. I know these same people are sending their stuff to agents and editors and getting rejected --- because their books are bad. If the author of a good book doesn't keep revising and submitting, that's not the fault of agents and editors. For proof, I offer up this post from Marjorie M. Liu in which she talks about her submittal process for her first book, a sale out of slush.

Rejection is typically a sign that there's something wrong with the project. If all you get are terse form rejections then, sorry to say, the problem is almost certainly with the project. But if you get nice rejections, encouraging rejections, referral rejections (and by the way, I've had all kinds) then your project is probably pretty good and you should be reading those rejections closely and re-reading your MS even more closely. And you should continue submitting.

I've read a few POD books by acquaintances who said they were frustrated by their rejections, some even said they thought NY simply wasn't ready for their opus. Without exception they were not good books.

Fellow writers: Rejection is trial by fire. Rejection tells you to keep working at your craft. So far, NY is The Show for writers. If you want to have the public read your book, then a print publisher with a editorial review board is where you need to place your manuscript. The editor's job isn't to reject worthy books. It's to publish books that readers will buy. (New. Not used.)

In my opinion, POD means you're accepting less from yourself. It's the worst thing you can do to yourself as a writer. You can't grow as a writer without rejection. I really wish it were otherwise, but it isn't.

Labels: publishing, slush, writing