Moderator: April Hamilton self-published two novels as Kindle e-books recently. The views here are her own, and we’ll welcome other perspectives. – D.R.
Read many good books lately? Me neither, and as both a reader and novelist, I wanted to know why. What I’ve learned is by turns shocking and troubling.
Thanks to over two decades of consolidation, the U.S. publishing industry is now lorded over by just six media megaconglomerates, Viacom, Time Warner and News Corp. among them. If these names sound familiar, it’s because they belong to the artistic visionaries who brought us The Moment of Truth TV show, virtually every Adam Sandler movie ever made, People magazine and much more of the same. They’ve made a lucrative science of cranking out the media equivalent of junk food: overpackaged, overhyped, disposable distractions that never turn out to be quite as satisfying as they looked in the ad, and sometimes even leave you feeling a little guilty. To the media megas, the decision of whether or not to acquire any property, be it a manuscript, screenplay, or video of the starlet du jour going commando, hinges on just one question: how much money do we stand to make on this?
Greedy and blockbuster-centric
Media megas have a right to make a buck just like any other business, but the greedy, blockbuster-centric mentality they’ve used to bring the mainstream film and TV industries to heel is now being forcibly applied to book publishing. In a 2006 Wall Street Journal piece entitled The Hot New Advance: $0, Vanguard Press publisher Roger Cooper said, “Publishing is now very much like opening weekend grosses in the movie business, it’s about exploding out of the box and selling as many copies as possible.” The article spoke of the casino-like environment of the new publishing world, in which newly-released books have only a week or two to hit big before being relegated to the back of the store. As National Writers Union VP Phil Mattera said in his eye-opening 1998 article ‘Crisis of the Midlist Author in American Book Publishing,’ “Hardcover publishers lose money on most of their titles and depend greatly on a few bestsellers…the large publishers are increasingly inclined to concentrate their resources on books that have the greatest potential to become bestsellers. Like Hollywood, book publishing has become a business driven by the quest for blockbusters.”
In the 2002 writingonyourpalm.net article “What’s Wrong With Publishing,” writer Jeff Kirvin laments, “In a business that traditionally makes maybe 4-6% profit in a good year, today’s stockholders are demanding 15-18%. That’s a lot of pressure for editors and publishers to find books that will sell. Gone are the days when a publisher could nurture a writer with potential through several lackluster efforts. Today’s editors can’t afford a single flop.” Kirvin’s right; in his Report to the Authors Guild Midlist Books Study Committee in 2000, David D. Kirkpatrick reports average industry profit margins of 5%, with the highest end of the scale at just 10%. Clearly, media mega execs do not accept the fact that they can’t get blood from a stone. They seem to think the stone just hasn’t been fully leveraged yet.
Hands around the neck
Media megas typically hedge their movie bets by opening new films on as many screens as possible, to sell as many tickets as quickly as they can and keep a step ahead of any potentially bad word of mouth for at least a few days. They’ve found a way to apply a similar scheme to books: they pay for prime real estate in bookstores to ensure their products will monopolize the display racks at the entrance to the store. They offer large discounts to booksellers on certain titles in exchange for maximum display space, reduced retail pricing and 2-for-1 deals in stores. “The front of the store can’t respond to market forces if something from the back takes off, because that space is sold. So the big chains have their hands around the neck of the trade, and independents must look elsewhere,” says Anthony Cheetham, chairman of independent Quercus Publishing, in a Publishers Weekly article in March 2008.
Worse yet, the “back” of the store is getting smaller all the time. Anyone who’s been to a Borders or Barnes and Noble lately knows that books seem like the least of their offerings anymore; next to the incredible shrinking book department, I find DVDs, CDs, stationery, candy, iPod accessories, games and even cosmetics in my local store. Struggling Borders is experimenting with a few different strategies in its flagship Ann Arbor, MI store, and The Detroit News reports that chief among them is a 5 – 10% reduction in book stock. The store no longer carries books that move only 1 or 2 copies a month, and the liberated shelf space is being used to display more books “face out”: with the front covers, rather than the spines, facing into the aisle. The bad news for all of us is that the store is reporting a spike in book sales since the change, which means the same strategy will no doubt be coming to a bookseller near you in the coming months.
And what will be facing out at us on store shelves, if we make it past the barrage of hard-sell displays at the front entrance? Nonfiction, reliably-earning genre fare (i.e., romance, horror, sci fi, fantasy), recent bestsellers and award winners. The media megas have abandoned what was once known as the “midlist,” that part of a publisher’s catalog comprised of books expected to sell no more than between 5,000 and 40,000 copies in their first print run. Scores of authors with many published books and a loyal readership have been cut loose by their former publishers on the grounds that while they may be successful, they’re not quite successful enough. In her storytellersunplugged piece “Singin’ the midlist blues,” author Alma Alexander describes her unexpectedly precarious career status in the wake of a well-received run of books that sold well enough to be released in multiple editions and languages, yet failed to “break out.”
Dissing serious midlist writers
The few authors still on the megas’ payroll aren’t necessarily faring much better than their downsized peers, though. “There was a time when writers of serious books not destined to become bestsellers could expect to get contracts from publishers that included decent terms and large enough advances to survive until the next book. Today such expectations are rarely met…While publishers lavish large sums of money and lots of attention on a few high-profile authors,” says Mattera, “conditions have grown increasingly bad for those writers known as midlist authors.” Advances are shrinking and promotion has turned into a vicious circle for authors: they can’t get their media mega publisher to spend money on promotion until they’ve proven their books will sell, but their books won’t sell without promotion. Yet if an author’s book doesn’t earn enough he’ll be dropped by his current publisher (along with all their many imprints), and viewed as damaged goods by the few other publishers in town.
Non-bestselling authors often find they have little choice but to take their meager, long-awaited advances and immediately spend the funds on their own marketing campaigns. Accurate statistics in this area are hard to come by, but a figure frequently quoted at writers’ seminars is this: fewer than 200 American fiction writers earn enough money to support themselves through book sales alone.
The stigma
When this type of slow, inexorable crawl toward mediocrity and scorn for artists came about in film and music, hopefuls jumped at the chance to take their careers into their own hands by going independent. You may wonder, as I have, why writers aren’t following suit now that we have quality, affordable tools at our disposal to publish, distribute and market our books without any help or involvement from mainstream publishers. Given print on demand (POD), e-book technologies, Web 2.0 and the fact that Amazon is now the #2 bookseller in North America and #1 worldwide, going to a mainstream publisher for big, steaming helpings of rejection, disrespect and poverty-level wages is looking less like a viable career path and more like masochism all the time. So why aren’t writers going indie in droves? In a word, stigma.
Before consolidations began, back in the days when publishers generously dotted the landscape of America, there was a lot of truth in the assumption that the only author who resorts to self-publication is an author whose work isn’t good enough to attract a “real” publisher. This is clearly no longer true, but the characterization of self-published authors as talentless hacks persists in the publishing industry.
On her Gather blog, novelist M. Margaret Neil writes about a seminar with a well-known book doctor, “One nugget really got my attention. When writing a query letter and listing your credentials, he said, whatever you do, if you’ve self-published, don’t include that information!” In another seminar at the same conference, the editor-in-chief of a small press “went on to caution us that a first-time writer will destroy any chance of getting an agent or publisher if they self-publish first.” Why? Because in the highly unlikely event you ever manage to sell a manuscript and go on to make the bestseller list, your publisher will want to immediately cash in on any other, unpublished manuscripts you may have lying around—even manuscripts they themselves have previously rejected!
The price beyond gossip
It may seem like an author who’s made the decision to go indie shouldn’t care what mainstream publishers think, but there’s a price to pay beyond gossip. As luck (and again, consolidations) would have it, media megas who own the mainstream book publishing industry also own the majority of all media outlets in North America. It would be bad for business if their television, radio, Internet, newspaper and magazine divisions didn’t toe the company line with respect to indie authors. In other words, good luck getting your indie book reviewed in any major American magazine or newspaper, and have fun soliciting television and radio segment producers for interviews, too. Indie authors’ books are effectively blackballed from the mainstream entirely—regardless of the fact that mainstream publishers don’t want to buy them. It’s like having a jealous ex who dumps you, remarries, then threatens to break your kneecaps if he catches you dating someone else.
The media megas know the old bias against self-published authors doesn’t hold much water anymore, but they pretend otherwise to keep their future purchasing options open. Far more appalling is the fact that the same prejudice exists among writers as well. Author Lee Goldberg views all forms of self-publishing as “vanity” publishing. On his blog “A Writer’s Life,” he says, “The cold, hard, unpleasant truth is that there’s a good reason that most of these authors go to vanity presses…because their manuscripts are unsaleable, unreadable crap that no agent will represent and no editor will ever publish.” Okay, maybe we can understand how a mainstream-published author would take such a scathing view, but believe it or not, the same opinion is commonplace among unpublished writers too.
Bizarre Stockholm effect
One such aspiring author recently posted to a writers’ discussion board, “I believe that books that have been self-published should be excluded from major/national/international competitions for writing excellence among published books, that major media outlets should not review self-published books, and that self-published books should continue to be tagged in a specific way in on-line bookstores so that readers are aware of their provenance before they buy.” Many others chimed in on the thread to agree and offer their support of this view. It’s as if there’s some sort of bizarre Stockholm effect at work, in which writers not only accept the conditions of career captivity at the hands of the media megas, but have come to believe there’s some value inherent in those conditions. Can you imagine anyone seriously remarking to a friend, “Well, I’m just glad we’ve got the megaconglomerates deciding what movies and music get made. If it weren’t for the work of those fine people, we might be exposed to just any old thing!” More ludicrous still, can you imagine a filmmaker or musician saying it?
As a writer, I’ve had my share of tilting at media mega windmills. My novel “Adelaide Einstein” got a stack of glowing rejections from the big publishers’ editors, all of whom offered some variation on, “Of course I love it, but the American book-buying public doesn’t want comic fiction right now. Send me something darker.” So I wrote a dark comic mystery, “Snow Ball.” My agent didn’t like it and declined to go out with it at all. Life went on, and I forgot all about my novelist aspirations until last year, when I entered “Adelaide” in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest on a whim.
New York out of touch with readers
After accumulating a 4.75 star average out of a possible 5, across 36 Amazon customer reviews, I concluded New York editors don’t have any idea what the American book-buying public wants and made the decision to go indie. I published both novels independently, first in Amazon Kindle editions and then in trade paperbacks via CreateSpace, Amazon’s POD service. Customer reviews so far are overwhelmingly positive, and sales are respectable, at least for books that can’t get any mainstream editorial reviews and are largely being sold on word of mouth alone. Nevertheless, without mainstream media exposure I still face a long, uphill battle to attract readership.
With all I’ve learned about the current state of the industry and its likely future however, I’m convinced that an indie author movement is long overdue, and in fact inevitable. Apart from the boot they’ve got on the throat of mainstream media outlets, the megas don’t have much of a carrot to dangle in front of hungry writers anymore. They can’t promise a decent advance, promotion budget, career longevity, or even brick-and-mortar bookstore presence, and indie authors’ royalties run at least three times as high as their mainstream counterparts. As an added bonus, indies get to retain all rights to their work.
Indie group blossoming
Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s noticed that media mega publishers are no longer the only game in town. According to a Publishers Weekly report from October of last year, when mystery author Archer Mayor’s publisher dropped his backlist titles, Mayor started his own imprint and now publishes those books himself. At booktrade.info, independent publisher Darren Laws of the U.K.’s Caffeine Nights Press celebrates technology’s democratizing effect on the publishing world, and urges publishers and authors alike to make the most of these tools in a piece he concludes by saying, “Whether you are a large or small publisher or an author with a vested interest, you cannot simply ignore what is happening.” Terry Nathan, director of the Independent Book Publishers Association happily reports that over the past 15 years, his group’s membership roster has grown from 900 to 4,100.
These are encouraging signs, but indie authorship has yet to reach the critical mass that heralds a true movement. What’s needed now is enough quality work being independently produced to put the lie to the assumption that indie authors’ work is inferior to that of their mainstream counterparts. To help those numbers along, I’ve created a series of IndieAuthor how-to Guides for writers who would like to go indie but fear they lack the technical skills or knowledge to take advantage of all the tools available to them, and I’ve made all the Guides available for free on my Web site. I’m doing all I can to kindle this little spark of indie spirit into a fullblown bonfire, because as the movement fares, so fare we all: not just writers, but readers as well.
If you’re happy with what author and critic Janice Harayda calls “the Mitch Albom-ization of America,” move along—there’s nothing for you to see here. If not, support the indie author movement and pray it grows.
April Hamilton is a novelist based in Southern California. She runs a blog devoted to Indie publishing.. Reading samples from her 2 novels are available here.
I agree that independent publishing is the growth segment of the book publishing world. And I certainly support self-publishing — I’m one of three volunteer listmoms on one of the largest listservs supporting them. More than that, I left my corporate publishing job to become one of the very few financial/management consultants focusing on small presses, precisely because I deeply believe that small presses are important, and because I want to help them succeed.
BUT — self-publishing fiction is very hard to do well, and even harder to do profitably. There are very solid practical reasons that this is true, and not one of them has to do with some sort of conspiracy or collusion.
Transaction costs: It’s too expensive for the tens of thousands of bookstores to buy directly from the 84,000 small presses in the US. In fact, it’s too expensive for Ingram to do so. Even Amazon is trying to reduce transaction costs with its “Booksurge/Createspace or else” initiative.
Preparation costs: In order to produce a book that is able to compete with the output of the large corporate houses, an indie publisher must devote significant resources to the design of cover and interior. (Yes, I know you can get cheap designs from some of the “online publishers,” but they’re rarely of a better quality than their price would suggest.)
Market: The reason that publishers are abandoning the midlist in droves is that those books are defined by their low sales. If that same mid-list author publishes with a smaller press or on his/her own, that market isn’t likely to be larger. Usually the reverse is true. And fiction is much harder to market and sell as an indie than non-fiction is. The audience is less easily found, and less easily defined.
The Size of the Pie: Indie musicians can do quite well for themselves, even if they garner proportionately tiny audiences. The total audience is so very large, that a tiny fraction of it is still significant. That’s not as true for books. And the difference between the cost to print a book and the price at which you can sell it, particularly if you are trying to sell it through any retail channel, is not very large. Selling a thousand copies of your book won’t buy you groceries for very long.
In short, the time when multitudes of indie authors make a living may be coming, but it’s not here yet.
1. If Amazon.com were to disappear today, would the problem be better or worse for Indie Authors?
2. I think the problem has to do with publishers being conservative about author brands. Better to have Ann Coulter or Cory Doctorow or Rachel Ray in your spring catalog than unworthies like Stephen Dixon or Michel Houellebecq or Alvaro Mutis.
3. As I see it, self-publishing is already the norm. The role of NY publishers is to skim the most well-known and profitable brands from the Indies. That’s not going to change. On the other hand, I am bothered by the huge advances given to untested authors (and the media blitz given to them). All right, some media blitzes have been for worthy authors (I’m thinking John Kracauer, Amy Tan, Scott Turow). But the 4 hour work week guy? What the hell was Random House thinking?
Marion’s response leaves out another important but often ignored part of getting a good book out: editorial costs. it is the rare author who can successfully edit their own work and a good editor is as important as a good cover designer, perhaps even more so in the age of the e-book.
I think the e-book will alter the landscape, especially if a single, universal standard is agreed upon. Whether authors will get Rowling-rich with e-books is questionable, but I think indie authors can do well.
Richard, the question is whether editorial services are cost-effective in an age of Long Tail publishing. I think that because of economics, the onus of editing will fall on wiki/crowdsourcing and on the author herself. This is not a good development, btw, but it seems unavoidable. On the other hand, several writer’s forums provide great editorial feedback for manuscripts.
Another aspect not mentioned is time. Do you want to spend 5 years hunting for a publisher and agent? Or do you want to publish now? There are opportunity costs to consider. From a big publisher’s point of view, it seems easier to let self-publishers publish and then buy the ones which were actually well written and edited.
I think people who focus on the money, or lack thereof, to be made by indie authors are somewhat missing the point. Most indie filmmakers and indie musicians are neither getting rich, nor even earning a fulltime living off their indie endeavors…it’s a labor of love, a desire to get something out there that deserves to be seen, heard or read, a desire to entertain, tell a story, or make people think.
I expect the trend in authorship will follow the trend in music and film. In the mainstream, at any given time there will be a small group of artists enjoying short-lived stints of huge financial success at the top of the sales charts, to subsequently sink into obscurity. Also in the mainstream, a tiny group of artists will have huge financial success AND career longevity (the U2s, Ron Howards and Stephen Kings of the world). Outside the mainstream, a larger group will have long-lived careers of only nominal financial success in art while earning their living at day jobs. But theirs will be the voices of originality and dissent, and the best among them will attract a core audience. Occasionally one of them will cross over into the mainstream, but this will be the exception to the rule.
The editors at big pub houses reject many, many manuscripts solely because they don’t expect impressive sales for the titles, and I’m not saying they’re wrong in those judgments. Rather, I’m saying the fact that a given book isn’t likely to earn sales that look impressive by big publishers’ standards is no indication that the book is no good, or wouldn’t be greatly enjoyed by a smaller audience.
I think the optimal solution lies in the middle between megapublishers and self-publishers.
As a reader of e-books primarily, one of the things I look for is a small publisher I’ve whose editorial judgment I’ve come to trust. That helps weed out the sort of books for which the epithet “vanity press” was coined.
The advent of e-books and POD means (I hope) that small publishing houses actually because small editing and marketing houses. That is, the printing/publishing part can largely go away. The publisher can focus on finding good content, tightening it up, creating good marketing collateral (covers, etc), and working through online sources to connect with the target market.
Thanks for the look at the present state of publishing–and it’s a depressing state of affairs, innit? Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency 100 years ago was lauded because he insisted on pushing through legislation that destroyed “trusts” which are, essentially, monopolies. And look at the situation today: book publishing has been consolidated into the hands of a few mega-publishers whose corporate mentality is ruining the quality of fiction and driving new readers away in droves. To computer and RPG games, to 150 channel cable packages, to movies that can be downloaded on-line or watched in a “pay per view” format. The leisure time of North Americans is contended for by so many distractions and various forms of entertainment, how can poor, little books survive?
Answer: through the burgeoning indie movement. Here in Canada, for the first time an indie (i.e. self-published book) has just won a major literary award, the Stephen Leacock Medal. Indie writers are producing some of the most exciting and ground-breaking work out there, releasing their efforts on-line or by utilizing POD publishing, beating traditional publishers at their own game. Meanwhile, the authors control content, cover art, promotion AND instead of collecting a measly royalty rate, they keep the lion’s share of the profit. Traditional publishers take note: the chimes of freedom are ringing out and your time is nearly up. Indie writers will address the imbalance of power and out-write your corporate hacks and derivative scribblers. Watch for us, we’re COMING…
Marion –
I believe I have an effective rebuttal for each of your points re: why indie authorship is not yet a viable path.
<>
As I explain in my blog post, Big Chain Bookstore Deathwatch (http://aprillhamilton.blogspot.com/2008/06/big-chain-bookstore-death-watch.html), I believe brick-and-mortar, chain bookstore presence is no longer a necessary prerequisite to success in authorship. The blog post is too lengthy to easily summarize here, so if you’d like to know my rationale, please follow the link.
<>
Simply not true. I lay out my own books and design my own covers, and have received nothing but compliments on how indistinguishable they are from mainstream-produced books—even from booksellers. You can see the covers of my books for yourself by searching on my author name at Amazon: April L. Hamilton. As to the criticism I so often see levied against indie books, that publishing-industry professionals will know at a glance a given book was self-pubbed because it doesn’t meet industry ‘standards’ for layout, typesetting, etc., I say the opinions of publishing-industry professionals are irrelevant to me. Those people are not my intended audience, and the average reader is totally unaware and unconcerned about the minutaie of pica, serif vs. sans serif, and so on.
<>
Yes, but while that market may not be large enough to support the huge overhead of a megaconglomerate press, it may be quite adequate to support one writer.
<>
See my point immediately above.
<>
Again, simply not true. I’m earning author royalties of 30% or greater on every one of my books, and I price every one of them the same as a typical mainstream book of the same approximate dimensions, page count and type. This issue is addressed in-depth in another of my blog posts, on Choosing A Publisher (http://aprillhamilton.blogspot.com/2008/07/choosing-publisher.html).
<>
Meaning no disrespect, I’d say this is only because the majority of would-be indies still believe the kinds of assertions you’ve posted here. I’m doing my best to dispel the myths and outdated beliefs circulating around out there, but I’m just one person. =’)
Marion – when I posted my reply, I quoted you using the greater-than and less-than signs as brackets, but the text between them was dumped. I don’t want to do a double-posting just to get the quoted text back in. Basically, I took on each of your points one at a time, in order.
[…] April Hamilton has a great piece on TeleRead (a great resource) about the state of publishing: Media megas have a right to make a buck just like […]
I’ve been continuing to promote indie authorship in the 11 months since writing this piece, and I’m happy to say the movement is growing and gaining acceptance in the mainstream. In February of this year I launched Publetariat.com, a new online news hub and community for indie authors, and it went viral in its first week. A month following its launch, Publetariat was inducted into the Publisher’s Weekly BookLife web ring.
When I wrote the article above, self-publishing was still largely viewed by the publishing establishment as a fringe activity, the domain of hacks and no-talents. What a difference 11 months make!
Seriously, I’m astonished that people are still making the argument that self-published books don’t or can’t receive the good editorial attention they need. Anyone who cares at all about his or her book will have many, many excellent readers read it and offer feedback. I’ve gotten more sophisticated feedback from my local librarian than I’ve ever gotten from industry insiders. And I’ve also hired freelance editors who are well-published or work at big houses and do freelance on the side. So to pretend that lack of access to good editing is a major drawback to going indie is simply foolish.