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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 02:50 am (UTC)I have bought self-published original fiction, once, after I had already read and commented on the full text as it was written and posted online, so I not only knew that the final product was good, but also felt a sense of community (and was correspondingly touched when I saw that the printed book was dedicated to those of use who had posted comments on the in-progress version). And I was only reading this author's original fiction because I knew and loved his fanfic. So that's one way of getting your writing in front of readers' eyeballs, but absent that sort of...exposure, yes, that's the word, self-publishing seems like the proverbial tree in the forest without humans.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 03:27 am (UTC)This is not to say that I don't think that there are flaws in the publishing industry as it is now, or that there isn't a place for self-publishing and vanity presses, but I *do* disagree with the claim to democritization.
/rant on classism
(I should add that I say this as someone who is totally outside the industry in every way except, perhaps, in that I write and would rather like to be published someday.)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 04:44 am (UTC)There may be a few people who have the marketing savvy to get their self-published material to the attention of bookstore buyers, but I'm willing to bet that 98% of the people who take this route don't. Nor (frankly) do most of them have the energy necessary to pound pavement/virtual pavement in order boost their signals above everyone else's. It may be the best book in the world, but it won't sell itself.
As much as I malign marketing and sales departments (hey, I'm former editorial!), they perform an extremely valuable service. They know how to make books attractive enough in appearance to catch a fickle and time-stressed potential reader's eye, and how to get awareness of the book out where potential readers can make a decision as to whether they want to to pick it up or ignore it. When there are over 100,000 books (or more, now, I imagine) published a year, a publisher's marketing department, and their good will, can keep your book from falling between the cracks. This, either on the web or in a bookstore, vanity press publishing cannot provide.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 05:58 am (UTC)Considering the way our local Borders has been reducing the variety of books carried to a few big name authors, I don't see where this is going to work out, long term. Right now, I'd be pretty darned leery about anything Borders is signing on to.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:19 am (UTC)But given what I know about bookstores, I'm not sure how I would actually attempt to get those physical books out to a wider audience beyond that. I'd have a few ideas because of my experience, but...if I wanted the wider audience, I wouldn't choose that route.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:22 am (UTC)I think that economics are already a barrier, though; it's just expressed in a different form. At the moment, the publishers have the money (well, in theory), and they choose how they want to spend that money by the selection process that leads to their publishing list.
They then bring the books to bookstores and the booksellers choose how they want to spend their money from that subset of things already considered.
Both do this in the hopes of generating revenue for their perspective businesses.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 09:59 am (UTC)In those cases, "getting the book into bookstores" may in fact involve getting it into the gift shops at a couple of local museums or even libraries -- which can be a somewhat different ball game from the problem of cracking traditional wholesale book-distribution channels.
The trouble is that what works for self-published local history more or less can't be made to work for genre fiction. Nor, I think, is the problem entirely that traditional bookstores are harder to crack for a self-publisher. Rather, the self-publisher of local history has several built-in advantages from the start: his audience is highly concentrated, that audience tends to gravitate naturally toward sources of new material, and the demand for works of local history generally equals or exceeds the supply (or put another way, the self-publisher of a new work usually has few if any direct subject-matter competitors).
By contrast, the audience for genre fiction is very widely dispersed, comes together only intermittently, and has widely divergent reading interests. And the supply of new works -- counting in commercial print publications, professional e-publications, and fanfic -- is already very, very large.
This has a variety of implications, not least of which is that the definitions of commercial success are on different scales. A self-publisher of a local history book who moves 200 copies has probably done really well -- that may amount to a very high percentage of the book's probable audience. But a self-publisher of a fantasy novel who moves 200 copies has penetrated only a very small percentage of the general audience for fantasy novels. The pond in which fantasy readers live is large enough that self-promotion by itself pretty much cannot penetrate a significant portion of the audience.
Which is not to say that self-promotion can't be useful, because clearly it can, particularly on today's Internet. But for a writer of genre fiction, I think there's no way for self-promotion/self-publishing by itself to reliably yield commercial success.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 10:41 am (UTC)So, given how many established publishers are already facing for the shelf space (and are sometimes willing to pay extra to be seen) I don't see any store taking more than two or three self-published titles at any one time, even if they're open to the prospect. More self-publishers streaming onto the market aren't going to change that.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 01:14 pm (UTC)I like the way you put that. Economics is always a barrier, it's more a matter of whether the author is directly responsible for it or not depending upon the publishing route taken. Poor authors can still get published in the traditional manner without bankrupting themselves, while that isn't so much of an option with the other route.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 01:31 pm (UTC)It can work for non-fiction, but only if you've written to a very specialist niche (say a book on trams which the shop in the tram museum agrees to take) and aren't expecting high sales (or even to recoup costs). There are a handful of well-respected books in my academic field that were produced this way, but they were done for love and because the author felt the material was important, but not commercial enough for a professional publisher.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 02:11 pm (UTC)Getting that book onto bookshelves is another significant financial hurdle that self-publishers/vanity press writers don't realize is necessary when they get started. This, I think, contributes to their idea that an elimination of the tyranny of publishers will make it easier to get their books into bookstores.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 03:16 pm (UTC)Having never published something, I certainly don't know what the process is like from either side. But as a reader, a publisher is the way to go.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 04:04 pm (UTC)As someone who's been reading novel-length fanfic online for more than a decade, I'm not enthused about traditional publishing moving in that direction. That model may have the advantages of 24/7 availability and incredible niche marketing, but it can also take days of browsing/searching to find one story worth reading. A reader's odds of finding something good to read, quickly, continue to be astronomically higher in any bookstore or library.
The industry is in flux right now, with several contradictory market models at various stages of existence/maturity. Until things shake down (and who knows how long that will take?), it's probably only going to get more confusing.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 05:26 pm (UTC)Except that readers already miss terrific books. Of the books publishers put out, some percentage of them are wonderful but never draw in the expected readership. I think we've all be disappointed to find out that an author will no longer write books in a beloved series because it wasn't beloved *enough* and bookstores don't want any more of them.
How much harder will it be for debut authors with amazing books if there are no more big publishers, and the market is flooded with raw slush?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 05:27 pm (UTC)Yes, the democratization of publishing.
And I did a thought experiment that went something like this:
Assuming that printed books go away (which would make me very sad) and everything went digital (no more reading in the bathtub for me!) and publishing companies went poof, so now, literally everyone with a word-processor and a dream could make a book...
How would readers find good books to read?
I'd assume out of the chaos would emerge some good review sites for different genres. So readers will flock those sites to find good books to read. Sure, there will be the sites that give 5 stars to every book for a fee, but those will sink to the bottom. Honest review sites with professional reviewers will be what people will look for.
Now, authors aren't dumb, so they'll also flock to those sites, to get the reviewers to read their books, in hope that the reviewers will post about it.
So the review sites will become swamped with... wait for it... a slush pile.
There will probably be an eventual consolidation of review sites under a few big umbrella sites. And you'll start seeing books endorsed by these review conglomerations. And perhaps certain cites becoming the "home" of certain popular authors.
Eventually, the slush will get too big, and the review sites won't read everything sent to them -- so authors will have to get marketing managers of sorts to help them be discovered by the review sites.
Does this sound vaguely familiar?
The real kicker will be if the fad turns back to paper copies, and the review sites start printing the books they endorse.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:49 pm (UTC)That's an often-overlooked aspect of self-publishing. Not only do you need to gather the expertise to produce a good product (and if you can't do it yourself, you need to trade/pay for people to do the copy editing and design etc), you also need to spend your time selling and marketing, which leaves less time for writing, which means fewer, and less polished books.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 06:52 pm (UTC)What's another five hundred books between friends?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 07:55 pm (UTC)That assumes that the market will be flooded at all, which I'm skeptical of. Each author would have to do their own legwork in getting the books into the stores, and the massive amount of work involved would seem to be more prohibitive than the anti-big publisher movement would anticipate.
One would hope that there's not a big Pollyana-esque viewpoint behind that movement, but sometimes it sure seems that way.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 08:19 pm (UTC)Yes, but my point is sort of: I think there wouldn't be much in the way of bookstores in this scenario, unless the model changes slowly and some sort of flexible distribution method is already in place.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 08:21 pm (UTC)With web-comics, there's the question of color which, for PoD, is likely to send costs through the roof in a way that offset standard printing won't; color generally demands a higher quality of paper. That, and the dimensions of the book itself are often not standard. PoD publishing works for small numbers of text-based books, though.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 08:24 pm (UTC)Unless and until a viable alternative pops up, those desperate writers will keep touting the nonviable alternatives, because that's all they've got.
Speaking as someone for whom posts like this (and I've read dozens of 'em) are about the only thing keeping me from going the self-publishing route with my novels after ten years of trying unsuccessfully to get my foot into traditional publishing, getting beaten until morale improves is not a viable alternative.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 08:25 pm (UTC)Yes -- but to be fair, 'good' is subjective in the extreme, and we are all guilty of dismissing bestsellers we literally couldn't read half of as ... not very good. It's not just publishers that require bestsellers, however. Bookstores also require some model of it. Specialty stores will have a totally different bestseller list than the general big box stores.
We'll stock books that sell one copy a year if they're part of a series, part of an author's oevre (think someone like Harry Turtledove, who takes up 3 full shelves on his own with almost no face outs). But that rate of sale wouldn't keep us in business. The reason to keep that book on the shelf is that the person who does buy it will usually also buy the books he or she could have easily found in any other store -- the ubiquitous bestsellers. Without the breadth of stock, much of which can move slowly, there is no reason for him, or her, to seek us out.
But... without the books that sell very strongly out of the gate, it's much grimmer.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 08:34 pm (UTC)Thank you :). I mean it -- I sometimes feel we're not reaching the people at whom so much of these businesses are targeted.
The thing is? We've all been there. Some of us were lucky enough to get a hit out of the ballpark on first submission; some of us didn't try to submit although we wrote and wrote and wrote for years. There is a curve. I think Charlie Stross said he sold his sixteenth novel in a post somewhere else in this LJ. But he certainly had to write the previous fifteen.
And you know? When you're struggling with rejection and the natural insecurity of any writer (I'm almost a poster child of neurosis in this LJ in general), it's really easy to be upset and to feel that so much of what's being published is inferior. It's an almost natural, human reaction, and I've seen it in so many now-published writers. But yes - it's not the whole of the way one feels; we feel it when we're low.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 08:52 pm (UTC)So I do get a bit frustrated with those dozens of posts I've read on the subject, because they tend to go completely over to the other end of the pendulum and work from the assumption that the only reason people don't get published is because their work is not good enough. They never take into account that perhaps they aren't talking to beginners, that they're talking to people who've paid their dues for possibly decades and multiple manuscripts, just like the published folks have.
Nothing personal, but if those of you who keep writing those dozens of posts about the evils of self-publishing just say don't without following up with a viable do, you're not going to accomplish what you want to accomplish. Something has to fill that vacuum. If you can't, and I'm not expecting you to or blaming you. I'm just saying that you're not going to accomplish what you want to accomplish.
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 09:50 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 04:14 am (UTC)I truly didn't think of this as ignorant -- but again, I'm so very, very mired in the whole bookstore business and bits and pieces of terminology, I almost can't tell what's clear and what isn't from the outside anymore =/
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 05:27 am (UTC)Let me ask this: What if bookstores eventually turn to the "Book Machine" model. Behind the register are five or six (or ten) insta-printing and binding machines. Customers browse shelves with a bunch of flats on them--cover art with maybe a sample chapter inside. The customer brings the flat to the register (or scans it maybe), pays and the book is printed out in a couple of minutes.
Any book in the computer could be purchased there, but only Big Name Authors would have shelf advertisement (face out only, I guess, since the flat would be too flat to show a spine.
It doesn't really address a world without Eeeevile NY Publishing, because I don't think the utopian meritocracy of self-publishing land would ever put NY out of business. frankly, I don't think that utopian meritocracy would even come about. I guess the real worry is that books might go the way of the theater--ever marginalized and trying to recapture an audience that has moved on to other media, until theater-goers are left with community theater or nothing.
I don't see it happening anytime soon, for a lot of reasons.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 01:07 pm (UTC)Unless publishers start looking at different kinds of books again, or unless I improve to the point where they just cannot overlook me (hey, a girl can dream), I am likely to remain unpublished.
Self-publishing is starting to look really good for the one mss (Second World Fantasy in Diary form) that appears to be unpublishable. I'm no longer willing to take the advice of waiting until I've had two or three sales and trying to place it on the back of that... by the time that happens, I'll have other, better mss I'll try to place first, and it is, and remains, a fun book :-(
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 06:39 pm (UTC)Neither am I. I suspect that by the time I got the chance to do that, it would be my heirs doing it, not me.
Alas.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 09:10 pm (UTC)Reading your post, and noticing your love of bookstores, it occurred to me that if the PoD book is printable at the bookstore (independent of chain), it would short circuit some of the issues brought up in terms of distribution (and would create others I'm sure.)
Say Ingram distributed finished book files on demand, and the bookstores would have a specialty printer that would download the file, print and bind it as a book, independent of publishing house. Instead of 20 copies of the same title burning linear footage or warehouse space, there could be a couple of copies for perusal only. There would be no remainders for one, and the shelf space could be used for more, not less titles.
Such system does not exist today. This idea is a flight of imagination, an investigation of what may be possible. It does not make booksellers into printers as the expertise of suggesting, picking titles, helping steer customers to titles, instilling the love of books and of literature & knowledge remains intact. To a great extent, so does the tactile, visual experience.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-07 06:43 pm (UTC)I can understand an author investing money in reprinting their backlist, but even there, the business of publishing is different from the business of writing. You need some sort of printing, sales, accounts receivable, marketing, and distribution system.
There are problems with the industry. Small press imprints have expanded to fill niches that the big publishers are leaving. And for people who have an urge to write, there are plenty of ways to give your writing away. But producing any product for sale should involve some sort of marketing and quality review to ensure that customer's needs are met.
There is the whole Long Tail issue; brick-and-mortar bookstores may not be the right marketing channel for non-traditional small-print-run publications. But seriously I wonder why anybody has the idea that "self-publishing" is a useful way to spend their time.
Backlistbooks, e-books and bookstores
Date: 2010-01-07 01:22 pm (UTC)I’ve loved your books for a long time, both the Hunters & Sun Sword world and the Chronicles of Elantra. Like probably everyone, I’m wondering what will happen with the Hunter’s daughter, and Cynthia & Steven/Bredan’s twins, as well as all the people we’ve had to leave behind at the end of the last Sun Sword book.
So, while I enjoy the Elantra books a lot, I’m very glad to hear that you haven’t stopped writing on the House Wars books, and intend to expand them into the new times as well.
I’ve been reading C.J. Cherryh’s blog for a long time, at www.cherryh.com/WaveWithoutAShore (and yes, it does need those 4 capital letters), and this last year there has been a lot of discussion over there about the developments in the book-publishing business.
So I was very interested to read your ideas about that here, from a different viewpoint: I found it an interesting addition to my new view of the whole bookpublishing and bookselling business.
C.J. Cherryh’s explained some of the difficulties with keeping backlist books available, and adding to an existing series (especially if it was running with a defunct publishing house), and suchlike.
She’s also gone into some of the troubles that can create for authors: backlist sales were a solid part of their income, and that has suddenly fallen off due to the effect of the tax-laws on publishers; and gaining new readers for a book that’s part of an existing world-line is more difficult if they can’t get the earlier books anymore.
As a result, she, Lynn Abbey and Jane S. Fancher have just started a small e-book store, at www.closed-circle.net, in which they aim to offer their own backlist-books as e-books. If the venture works, they may even be able to write the stories they’ve wanted to write but couldn’t sell, as they are part of an older series-world (for instance a new Chanur or Morgaine story: as far as I can gather, they as authors weren’t finished with some of their worlds when their publishers went out of business, and no new publisher will touch an existing series from another publishing house). As a reader, I’d both love to be able to buy some older books by favourite authors that just haven’t been available since I discovered this author; and to read some of the books such a good author really wants to write but hasn’t been able to sell for the abovementioned reason.
So I’m happy that they’re trying to get this off the ground.
They are mostly very experienced authors, and have been working for years as editors for each other’s books, so I’m not worried about the editing quality on their e-books. Jane Fancher is an artist as well, so the cover-art on their e-books is or will be of good quality too.
But they are primarily authors, and all this internet-work on the e-bookstore is costing them a lot of time and trouble, with very uncertain pay-offs.
If other authors want to try something similar, they’d need to form groups with all the necessary skills: writing, editing, art & layout, and the computer- and internet-skills necessary for setting up shop and converting files etc.. In order not to spend too much time on all the extras so there’s no time to write left over you need a small but not too small group, and even then it’s very time-consuming. And then all those small-but-reputable ‘e-book-stores’ need to be able to link to each other, so an F/SF reader who’s found a favourite author can be encouraged to browse a bit further … it seems a very complicated way to have to find a new book or author for me as a reader.
I thought that something like SFWA might play a coordinating role in this, but apparently that’s not likely to happen soon.
(Continued)
Hanneke
Backlistbooks and e-books (continued)
Date: 2010-01-07 01:24 pm (UTC)I agree with you and the commenters here, that I would really miss the one good bricks-and-mortar bookstore that I go to once or twice a year to browse for new-to-me authors and get recommendations from knowledgeable people. I still prefer a paper book to my laptop-and-ebook, though I’m very happy to be able to read some books that way if I can’t get them in solid form.
I try to keep ‘my’ bookstore in business by ordering most books that I’ve found online through the store: nowadays they’ll even order secondhand books for me, and they’ll send them to my home, so what with savings on the overseas postage it doesn’t cost much more.
It’s made me think: wouldn’t it be great if some sort of link could be established between the smaller e-book-publishers (like Closed Circle) and the enthousiastic and expert booksellers (like you, or my ABC in Amsterdam), so that you could recommend books from CC, and the buyer could get their POD printed copy from the bookstore, so the store would make some money on the deal as well.
Something to keep in mind for a future development in this whole book-business, though I can’t see how it could be implemented immediately.
The bookstore would need some sort of bookprinting-on-demand machine like Lulu or CafePress, and I’ve no idea how much of an investment that would be – but if all this ebook business is indeed the start of the really big wave it’s supposed to herald, it might be the only way to keep the stores open.
Hanneke