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msagaraI've resisted comment on the question of vanity presses this weekend, and broke my embargo only recently, on Jackie Kessler's informative and humorous post. I don't actually say much about the current situation because it's been said very well by so many people now I can't begin to link them all.
But... (you knew there was a 'but', right?) one of the things I keep seeing on-line, and perhaps I fail to understand what I'm reading clearly, is the open declaration of the Fall of the Evil Empire of Gatekeepers -- publishers and agents -- combined with a declaration of democracy, of readers deciding what is, and is not, to sell.
I'm not a publisher; I've never worked for a publisher. I have friends who have worked in various editorial positions. All of my interactions with the industry known as publishing have come through the bookstores I've worked in since I was sixteen years of age. I've worked in chains, and in independents, and anything I understand about the industry and its workings comes both from that, and my experience as the third side of the triangle -- as an author.
But I felt, in the end, that I had to comment, and I've cut and pasted my post from the above-linked blog beneath the cut, and then added more (I would have added more on her blog, but it was already way, way, too long).
I suffer from familiarity with how bookstores, ordering, shelving, stocking and returning actually work, so I'm not sure how much of this is unclear, how much of it is opaque, to people who haven't the same decades working retail. And I kind of want it to be clear.
I honestly don't see how this explosion of self-published and vanity-published books is going to get on shelves. At the moment, we have more and more people walking into the store in person to ask us to carry their books. I know this is in part because the physical fact of a book in your hands implies the rest of the experience: the bookstores and the readers that come with them.
As I said in Jackie Kessler's blog, I do understand how this is supposed to work for ebooks, in which traditional retail exposure has never been important. But while I understand the theory that PoD self-published/vanity published Print Books are supposed to be an act of democracy in giving the widest range of people voices, I do not understand how that is supposed to work in this retail environment. It is expensive to rent retail space. It's expensive to pay staff, and all of the expenses that come with employees. It's expensive to do the initial laydown of stocking shelves and it is also expensive to handle the returns and the processing of things that haven't sold.
It is not expensive to host a file for download in comparison.
The people who are putting up the money to cover these expenses are also trying to make a living. They're used to their customer base, and they're trying to match that base with the stock they can afford to carry. Almost every person who has written a book they deem worthy of publishing -- and has gone to the expense of self-publishing it or paying a vanity press to publish it -- demonstrably believes that their book will be loved when it is read. All hundred thousand of them -- they just need to get it in front of readers. We can't actually begin to stock them all; we can't offer them the opportunity for the exposure that would begin this democratic process because we cannot afford to do so. Even if we were doing this as a charity, and not a business, we still couldn't afford to do so: we couldn't afford to rent the space it would take.
And I'm curious as to how the the loudest of voices about this incredible democratization of books think that's going to change with the fall of traditional publishing.
People who see no need for bookstores obviously don't have an answer for this because it's irrelevant to their position. I can understand that; it doesn't confuse me. I personally love bookstores, but I may be a dinosaur; I also love books; they're a physical geography, to me. But many of the people who decry traditional publishing and gatekeepers also seem to feel that bookstores are necessary to the furtherance of their careers, and it's causing a disconnect for me.
Anyone?
But... (you knew there was a 'but', right?) one of the things I keep seeing on-line, and perhaps I fail to understand what I'm reading clearly, is the open declaration of the Fall of the Evil Empire of Gatekeepers -- publishers and agents -- combined with a declaration of democracy, of readers deciding what is, and is not, to sell.
I'm not a publisher; I've never worked for a publisher. I have friends who have worked in various editorial positions. All of my interactions with the industry known as publishing have come through the bookstores I've worked in since I was sixteen years of age. I've worked in chains, and in independents, and anything I understand about the industry and its workings comes both from that, and my experience as the third side of the triangle -- as an author.
But I felt, in the end, that I had to comment, and I've cut and pasted my post from the above-linked blog beneath the cut, and then added more (I would have added more on her blog, but it was already way, way, too long).
The question is: Does iUniverse actually get your books on shelves in brick and mortar stores? I would agree that without a platform, it’s the most solid visibility around for print books.
But in my experience as a bookseller of many years (some in chains, the rest in an independent), iUniverse, AH, PA, etc. books are not carried.
It’s not just a matter of “non-returnable”. We’ve carried one self-publisher (and in this case he was entirely self-published; he took his stuff to a printer and had it printed) to success, but his first novel -was- traditionally published; he didn’t enjoy that process, and he had enough of a name that -readers- were willing to trust him.
We can’t carry every book that’s published traditionally, period. It’s not possible. We see thousands of titles from publishers’ catalogues and sales reps throughout the year. Yes, we can return any of these that we don’t sell - but having books on your shelf that -won’t- sell is a very, very poor use of linear shelf space, of which there’s too little to begin with.
The problem with the idea that visibility works on Shelves is that it -relies- on the traditional distribution models, and those models are traditional. I hear a lot of people talking about the wave of the future, and from the way they’re speaking, the wave of the future -won’t involve bookstores-.
I can understand this when talking about ebooks, whose distribution is -entirely- separate from the rigor of retail space (and from landlords and property tax passthroughs and shoplifting and etc). But if somehow there’s supposed to be a strong connect between waves and waves of vanity press published or self-published PRINT books and bookstores, I fail to see how, exactly, it’s going to evolve.
It is enough work to stay on top of the various books that will come through the publishers and the reps with whom we have accounts without also trying to wade through the 10,000 new self-published titles that will crop up — sans catalogue or grouping — in Ingrams.
Assume, in a perfect world, that we would treat all publications equally, regardless of publisher. We would require, what? Double the floor space (and growing)? Double the processing time (and growing), and therefore double the man-hours of the staff? It would, in fact, be much more than double, because the -returns- for these titles would be hideously expensive to pack up and ship, given that it would be what, 1 or 2 books per return? At the moment, distributors take returns for the publishers they distribute, so you’ll ship all of your returns in a cycle to a handful of locations.
For that expense, we would have to at least double the sales — and our experiments in the past with PoD/self-published titles has indicated that we would not increase -sales- at all. Only expenses.
I see this as siphoning money from writers; I don’t see this as impacting bookstores because, well, they won’t be there.
I suffer from familiarity with how bookstores, ordering, shelving, stocking and returning actually work, so I'm not sure how much of this is unclear, how much of it is opaque, to people who haven't the same decades working retail. And I kind of want it to be clear.
I honestly don't see how this explosion of self-published and vanity-published books is going to get on shelves. At the moment, we have more and more people walking into the store in person to ask us to carry their books. I know this is in part because the physical fact of a book in your hands implies the rest of the experience: the bookstores and the readers that come with them.
As I said in Jackie Kessler's blog, I do understand how this is supposed to work for ebooks, in which traditional retail exposure has never been important. But while I understand the theory that PoD self-published/vanity published Print Books are supposed to be an act of democracy in giving the widest range of people voices, I do not understand how that is supposed to work in this retail environment. It is expensive to rent retail space. It's expensive to pay staff, and all of the expenses that come with employees. It's expensive to do the initial laydown of stocking shelves and it is also expensive to handle the returns and the processing of things that haven't sold.
It is not expensive to host a file for download in comparison.
The people who are putting up the money to cover these expenses are also trying to make a living. They're used to their customer base, and they're trying to match that base with the stock they can afford to carry. Almost every person who has written a book they deem worthy of publishing -- and has gone to the expense of self-publishing it or paying a vanity press to publish it -- demonstrably believes that their book will be loved when it is read. All hundred thousand of them -- they just need to get it in front of readers. We can't actually begin to stock them all; we can't offer them the opportunity for the exposure that would begin this democratic process because we cannot afford to do so. Even if we were doing this as a charity, and not a business, we still couldn't afford to do so: we couldn't afford to rent the space it would take.
And I'm curious as to how the the loudest of voices about this incredible democratization of books think that's going to change with the fall of traditional publishing.
People who see no need for bookstores obviously don't have an answer for this because it's irrelevant to their position. I can understand that; it doesn't confuse me. I personally love bookstores, but I may be a dinosaur; I also love books; they're a physical geography, to me. But many of the people who decry traditional publishing and gatekeepers also seem to feel that bookstores are necessary to the furtherance of their careers, and it's causing a disconnect for me.
Anyone?
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 09:24 pm (UTC)I actually have nothing at all against self-publishing; I think it takes a lot of work, time, and marketing effort above and beyond what a traditionally published author would have to do, and I think the only people who make money or cover costs are generally people who have a platform already in place. I am not trying to talk people out of self-publishing.
What I was trying to do is to make clear what I think the problems inherent with self-publishing physical -books- are, if part of what you feel you need is bookstore placement. I don't think I said -- and I may be wrong -- that any of the books in question were by default bad books; I said that it is commercially impossible for our store to carry them; when we've tried, they've failed to sell, and if we have enough stock that fails to sell at all, we lose space for titles that we can sell, thus failing to generate enough money to pay rent, utilities and salaries, never mind pay publishers.
I make no assumptions about the quality of non-published fiction, because some of the non-published fiction I've read I have absolute loved. But I think that I, and maybe twenty others in total, would absolute love it; I think this because I've worked in the store for a long time and I know what I can, and what I can't sell, within a margin of 90%; I can love a book to death and sell it to anyone who crosses the threshold -- but I've learned with time that certain books that I love simply don't speak to, or perhaps entertain, a large number of customers. In the case of the book I'm thinking of, I don't think I could have given it to more than 2 customers, and even in those cases, I wasn't sure.
For me, it's not an assumption about quality because in the end -- absent people who simply cannot use the tools of the language at all -- quality becomes subjective. There are people who sneer at Romances. Or Erotica. Or Westerns. Or Science Fiction. Or 'kid's books'. They think it's all garbage.
It's not whether or not the book is 'good enough'. I have no idea if Charlie Stross's first fifteen books were brilliant. It's also whether or not they're commercial. Perhaps what we need is a definition of publishable work as commercial work.
Publishers get to decide this because it's their money; they spend that money to edit/print/get cover art/catalogue/present to sales force. All of the money to get a book onto shelves is by default theirs; it's their risk. But in part we send books to them not for all of those things (although they are all necessary) -- but for the solid and established distribution channels. They have enough of them in place that the books that fail to sell will fail at 4,000 copies, and not at 75 copies.
If, for instance, someone goes to Hh, and they spend the money on services that a traditional publisher would provide, they're spending -far more- than the average first book advance; it's coming out of their pocket. A 100k novel will cost them 7k to get -edited-.
But after spending the money that, traditionally, a publisher would spend, they have no access to the distribution channel. It's the channel that's actually important.
Which is not a solution.
Let me again say: I have no objections to self-publishing at all. What I want is for those who choose that option to see, clearly, what the obstacles are, and what the work -- post-writing -- entails. I've talked to any number of self-published people who truly did believe that having a book in their hands = having a book in the bookstores; they had no idea at all about the distribution channels involved.
Publishing your work to have it in hand? I could see doing that myself (for some of my short stories) via Lulu.com or something similar.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 10:43 pm (UTC)You're trying to warn people away from self (or vanity, which I know we both agree isn't the same thing) publishing for most types of books (including fiction), because just because you have a book in hand doesn't mean you have the distribution for it. Is this correct? I understand and agree with that on a practical level.
However, there comes a point where there's not much practical difference between being against self-publishing full stop and warning people away from it for practical reasons, especially when the non-practical reasons for wanting to go that route are strong enough to overpower any practical reason someone would avoid self-publishing.
Either way, it leaves the writer who hasn't been able to break into traditional publishing in the same spot. This person will hear you, but without a viable practical alternative between self-publishing, which at least offers the illusion that you might get read, and leaving the book on the hard drive where it's absolutely guaranteed the book will never be read, well, the lack of distribution (I am a former librarian, I understood the distribution issue long before I sent out my first query) is pretty much secondary from the desperate writer's point of view. A slim chance is better than none and all that.
Now, I'm not saying I don't know better. What I am saying is that until there's a better alternative than the three listed above (spending years or decades trying to get traditionally published, self-publishing with no hope of distribution, not trying at all), then it's going to be very hard to talk people out of self-publishing. Vanity publishing, not so much. Most writers I'm acquainted with know better than that.
But without giving them another place to stand, telling someone to stay out of the quicksand isn't much use. That's all I'm trying to say.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 11:06 pm (UTC)I can see your point, and I understand it. It's absolutely true that we don't offer another viable alternative. I think ebooks and epublication are an emerging alternative scenario, especially if you write in certain genres, and I think that places like Ellora's Cave work, in an on-line fashion, as a de-facto bookstore; readers go there and are willing to browse and pick up titles that may interest them because of their previous satisfaction with other purchases. Yes, there is still an editorial process and yes, slush piles, but the epresses have a broader range in both length and in substance.
This is a scenario that is entirely independent of the need for visibility in a bookstore, and it has worked, and does work, for a variety of authors.
My post started because someone felt that to be visible he needed to be in bookstores, and he had elected to publish with iUniverse because they in theory had that brick and mortar distribution. They don't, of course, and it costs a lot more to go to iUniverse than it does to go to Lulu. I wanted to point out that, quality aside--completely aside--the books that are published in that fashion don't get onto shelves, for entirely economic reasons, and that bookstores are the end chain of the traditional model.
Feeling that you require a bookstore while at the same time decrying traditional models does not seem to be logical, to me.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 12:21 am (UTC)I was really excited when I heard about Harlequin's Carina Press imprint, especially since they said they were looking for stories that by their subject matter weren't fitting in anywhere else, but I'm so afraid the Horizons vanity imprint they started up at the same time will taint Carina that I'm not willing to query them now.
Feeling that you require a bookstore while at the same time decrying traditional models does not seem to be logical, to me.
Logical, maybe not, but I can easily see why someone would think that way. From an outsider's point of view, one doesn't have anything to do with the other. If it's between covers, it's a book, if it's a book they have to put it in bookstores, because that's what bookstores sell. Sort of by definition [g].
What this person wants is another way to get into bookstores besides the traditional model. Heck, I get that one. That's what we all want. He just got desperate enough to believe there was one, is all. He's not going to want to hear you tell him it doesn't exist, because then he no longer has control over his own dreams. Nobody wants to hear that.
It's a fact just as hard as the one you're trying to tell him, unfortunately.
The hardest part about trying to break into traditional publishing, IMHO, is realizing that you have absolutely no control over whether it actually happens or not, beyond writing the best book you can, which isn't enough most of the time.