The Rope Over The Lion Pit

Today at the breakfast table, the entire e-publishing thing flipped on me. It started with nothing more significant than a flutter, a feeling of excitement.

Now, you know – if you’ve read me – that when it comes to technology and how it affects our lives, I’m a “the glass is brimming full” kind of girl. In fact, I have to stop and make myself THINK of the drawbacks of any technology that makes my life easier or safer or more interesting.

But I confess that lately, with the doom and gloom climate prevailing everywhere in publishing, with the confusion of non-paying bookstore chains and sinking numbers and the editorial houses seeming to scramble in the darkness, I’ve been having the sinking feeling that the entire field that I spent two decades breaking in/working in was turning to ashes and nothing under me and that, a couple of birthdays from 50 I’d find myself with no significant professional experience to do anything at all. Yeah, I used to be a multilingual translator, but like music languages are something that must be either practiced or lost. And I haven’t practiced in twenty years.

To be honest I never thought that my job prospects were that great, at any time in my life. My degree was modern languages and literatures, English major, German minor, with an option in education. (And before you boo and hiss, this was in Portugal, and English was not a gimme major and German was a TOUGH minor, and education was just good sense, because it gave you one more option for jobs.) In addition, I took four language courses outside the college, to maximize my chances at employment, because finding jobs in the mid eighties in Portugal was almost impossible. (Not as impossible as it is for young people now, but never mind.)

In fact, when I was in my last year of college, there was a joke going around that one of our classmates, after years and years of searching, found someone willing to offer her a job. That the job was in a circus and walking the tight rope and that she had never walked the tight rope could not scare her away. Not even the revelation that she would be walking over a pit of famished lions could scare her.

It wasn’t until she was halfway across the pit and felt her feet falter that she worried. Falling into the pit, she was shocked to see one of the lions pull back its head, to show a glimpse of a human face, and even more shocked to hear, “Class of 83. You?”

When you finish a tough degree with prospects like that, you’re not going to be a wussy. But the prospect of being a 50 year old receptionist did worry me. Only…

Only, it’s not like that.

Someone commented on one of my other blogs – Mad Genius Club – that he never bought ebooks because at least paper books, for all their flaws in distribution, kept printers and truck drivers and store personnel in business. And I – and a couple of other people – pointed out this was a counterproductive way of dealing with change. One of the other commenters pointed out that change always brings more jobs. And I wanted to believe.

This morning I finally believed it, perhaps because I’m starting to see the glimmers of that change and – through a looking glass darkly – the signs of what the new pattern will be.

Now, looking into crystal balls is always hazardous, and I might be wrong about the way things will stabilize, but here are some of the signs I see:

Someone offering her services as a free lance editor/copyeditor. – Make no mistake, writers need copyeditors. I’d say I’m exhibit A, as when I’m reading I tend to fill in whatever I left out and smooth out the grammar in my mind. I need people who won’t gloss over stuff like wording, grammar and – very important – internal coherency. When Bill doesn’t realize he was Joe ten pages ago, it can be awkward. And, yes, it does happen, in a novel, usually with very minor, walk on characters.

More, and this is something that reading the Heinlein bio made me realize – writers need EDITORS. A good editor can pull an author from comfortable competence to amazing or excellent. I will say, though, that nine times out of ten (and I could explain why, given trends in employment and in publishing, but let’s let it rest) these days, books don’t get that type of editing. Even the editors you know are able to do it, don’t have that kind of time. And a lot of the editors who think they can do this, really can’t, often being failed writers themselves.

Making editors work for writers, instead of the other way around, not only will keep the power in the hands of the creators of the work (and, really, look, who else should have it?) but it will make any VERY GOOD free-lance editor incredibly sought after. Possibly leading to him/her making a good living AND improving the writer’s work permanently AND providing better reading for the consumer. Win. Win. And, oh, yeah, win.

Writers who are just a little more established than I sharing expertise with each other on how to sell better, how they’re selling, how they’re publicizing.

One of the things that surprised me when I came into the field was how often, beneath the collegial attitude, there were deep rifts and jockeying for position in publishing. I think part of this was the “no room at the top” feeling caused by the fact that there were only so many publishing slots – often diminishing in number – and to make it in, you knew someone else had to be kicked out. Also, the often random way that the scant publicity/editorial interest fell created a “teacher’s pet and the rest of the class” atmosphere.

Epublishing with small presses or even self publishing seem to be breaking that. All of a sudden we are genuinely colleagues, sharing tips on how to survive. Perhaps this is just the conviviality of victims of ship wreck, huddled atop the grand piano, while the Titanic of publishing sinks, but I don’t think so. I have a feeling these bonds will grow and expand. Perhaps one say our organizations will actually be effective! And this is important because – no offense to y’all out there, but – writers are powerfully weird critters. A writer on the extreme left of politics and one on the extreme right, if they don’t immediately try to kill each other, will find they have more in common with each other than with their own families (unless those families are ALSO writers.) This going around with entire worlds in the brain leaves a mark.

I have yet to see someone offering to be an effective publicist for epublishing. Note, I said “effective.” Not so long ago, I looked madly for a publicist, but after interviewing five hired none. At least in the level I could afford, everything they proposed doing revealed less knowledge of the internet than I have. (Note to all – SPAMMING people with random messages about a book they might or might not want to read is NOT marketing.) Also, less knowledge of the world in general. Recommending I do articles for literary journals, to publicize my work, was probably my favorite suggestion, considering that doing articles for literary journals is a career in itself.

I’m sure, though, that right about now there are four or five laid-off PR people looking at the screen and going “Uh… I could do that. And given how many self published people there are, I could… uh… get two thousand clients, charge them a percentage of their earnings, and….”

And I’m sure there are other niches in marketing/editing/publishing/book doctoring that I haven’t even thought about and that will come to life over the next year, causing me to go “oh, now, that’s really clever.”

I know that a lot of artists are already finding niches in cover/book design/site design, etc.

Oh, yeah, and my colleagues are talking about the marketplace’s hunger for “content” – i.e. for story. I’ve spotted that too. I’m getting emails asking me to continue my Musketeer Mysteries, for instance. (Actually borderline threatening. Mission accomplished. I’m negotiating to get the first out as an ebook SOON, and after that I will continue the series with book six – since the publisher won’t give me back the rights to books two through five, and no, I don’t want to talk about it.)

Mind you, this will not alter some jobs in publishing. Traditional publishers/editors will always exist. Paper books might become more of a prestige thing, like hardcovers in a time of mass market paperback predominance, but they’ll be there. After all, it’s devilish hard to get your kindle edition signed, much less to will the signed copy to your kids. You can have my signed Pratchetts when you tear them out of my cold, dead hands. Ditto for my signed Bradburys. I’m just sorry I never got a signed Heinlein!

Agents, too, whether they transition to publicists or not, will exist for a good long while yet. Having just got my first contract for a foreign edition of one of my books – Japan, squee! – I can attest this is something I couldn’t possibly have done on my own.

But the field is opening, expanding, and offering a lot of other chances.

As for writers? Well, while there are books I’m not willing to let go small press or e-only – not yet – that is changing, too, and ask me again in three years and it could be quite different. For years now, being published anywhere but by the big boys/gals was an admission of failure. Just the lifting of that taboo is huge. As is the fact that being self-published is not the end of the world, anymore.

My second-worst year in psychological terms, i.e. the only year worse than the one when my first book crashed and burned, was the year when I wrote seventeen proposals. Seventeen. Proposals.

To the uninitiated, a proposal in my genres (not in Romance, I gather) consists of an outline that can range anywhere from ten to fifty pages, plus the first three chapters of a book.

The outline is not so much of a problem. Publishers are okay with it changing, when/if you write the book ten years later (sometimes.) But the chapters were death. For me to write sample chapters, I need to nail the voice. I’m not exaggerating when I say that once I’ve written three chapters, in terms of work, the book is half done.

(I was actually quite cheered when hearing of Heinlein, in this phase of creation, lying on the sofa moaning so alarmingly that Ginny thought he was ill. I’ve never done that, exactly, but I often get myself in such a nervous state that I catch whatever bug is coming through town at the time. Also, my husband – bless him – is a tower of strength. I don’t know what men with less patience might do when I come downstairs for the third time that day and announce I’m giving up writing because it all reads blah and I’ll never be able to write another book again, never, ever, ever.)

The year of the seventeen-proposals was soul-crushing, particularly because I knew a lot of those I’d never be able to write and be paid for. And once the characters had come to life for me, I wanted to write them, so it was like… breaking off little pieces of myself.

Yes, I know that sounds melodramatic, but truly, truly, it left me completely drained and feeling like I’d aged ten years in one.

Now, well… a couple of those books are on to be finished as soon as I get a month or so. So they might never sell, so what? I’ll put them up in ebooks. Even if they sell slowly, they won’t go out of print, and they’re bound to earn enough, over time, to justify my bother. And in the future I have that outlet for any books that want to be written and aren’t that “commercial” as the publishers see it.

That alone might save my sanity. But, as more and more readers come into an expanded market and as the economies in the process of producing an ebook mean a larger share per-book for the author, I think we’re about to see an explosion in the market for stories…

And all of a sudden I saw all this, and I got really excited. Come on! There’s a new reality shaping up. There’s all sorts of cool chances.

Walk that tightrope. It’s all right and tight. Never fear. Class of 85 down here. You?

*crossposted at Classical Values*