Cap In Hand

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

This weekend I attended Fencon.  (Well, I went to my panel.  I never made it to my signing because you wouldn’t believe the roads around here.)  I only had a panel and a signing, since, with all the traveling I’ve been doing I seem to have missed their “choosing” emails.

The panel I was in was “Piftfalls in your publishing career” and I groaned inwardly because the other people in the panel were with people I chose to no longer work with.

You’d think it would be awkward, right?  I’d have to say things like “Did you read that clause in the contract?  And you signed it?”

Turns out I need not have worried.  You wouldn’t believe it, given that most of Dallas highways are under construction and that we spent most of our time looking like we were in a vast parking lot – but it turns out the car was a Delorian after all and we hit 88 on the way to the con.  Must have, because it was a blast from the past.

Publishing pitfalls?  Publish America and scam agents.

Now, while Publish America is … er…. Ethically challenged and while I know they’ve suckered decent, honest writers in the past, they are an almost charmingly innocent evil.  Their only twist is the whole “we don’t charge you for your vanity book” but even in that they’re not exactly alone anymore.  I mean, what do you think all the agencies publishing your book on the side are doing “We don’t charge you to publish your book.”  But, because of the number of books they put out and the low production costs of books, they stand to make money.  More money than you will if the stuff filtering back from non-bestselling-friends is any indication.

Then there are publishers – standard, “honest”, traditional publishers… who are doing anything from slipping clauses in your contracts saying they now own not just your book (forever) but your characters and even your name.  Which means if you walk on them, then they can have someone else continue your books under your name.  Oh, yeah, and you can no longer write your characters or use your name.  Then there is a twist I’ve been seeing in friends’ contracts (some of them for short stories!) recently, where if you sign that contract, you’ll need the publisher’s permission to write anything else, ever.  WRITTEN permission.

Oh, sorry, anything “similar.”  But if I choose to talk about elves in my blog, does that make the piece similar to my fantasy?  No?  Are you sure?  Better be safe, now and ask for written permission.  Every time.

This is explained – was to me, when a big publisher tried to put that in a contract – as “the publishers want you to have an exclusive relationship with them.

Oh, I believe that.  But the relationship they want to have with you is that a victorious invader has with the conquered woman.  They want to take the writer into their cave and rape him/her at will, with no hope of rescue ever.

Because the only way “I want you to only publish with us and we’ll make sure of that by contract” is to make sure you can’t run away and also that if they kill your career it will be dead.  Which keeps you subservient and willing to do anything and endure anything they throw at you, of course.

And of course agents are letting this happen.  In a moment of clarity one of the other panel participants told the audience “if you’re not the one paying your agent, then the agent doesn’t work for you.”

I’ve told you I didn’t want an argument and I didn’t want to make a scene.  Not there.  And there wasn’t much point, since I was outnumbered four to one and we were talking to RAW newbies.  If I started ranting, they’d just think I was insane.

So I bit my tongue so hard I’m still talking funny, but I let it slip.  I mean, what would the point be, PRECISELY of pointing out that in fact you never pay your agent.  The publisher pays your agent.  If you don’t get a publisher, there is no sale, and nothing for the agent to take a cut of.  So the agent who wants to make a living wants to be in good with the publishers.  You’re not the boss, you’re a commodity being sold… often up the river.

So  I bit my tongue.  I did get some words in edgewise to point out that no, there is no longer a stigma to going indie, and yes, you can do a professional job.  I don’t know if this countered their impression that they would have to hire a cover artist, a cover designer and four copyeditors – an impression fostered by my co-panelists.

The ancient chestnut that a paperback book takes a hundred thousand dollars to get to print was trotted out again.  I wonder if the figure was ever even vaguely true.  Somehow I doubt it.  Back when publishing was done the old fashioned way a hundred thousand was a lot more money than it is now.  Old fashioned way?  Sure.  I had a friend who was published ten years before I was and when her book went out of print they asked her if she wanted to purchase the – what the heck was the real name?  I studied journalism once upon a time, and I used to know this! — … page-molds, made of lead, used to print each page of the book.  If she didn’t want it it would be re-melted.

My first published book never had these lead-pages.  Instead, it was typeset electronically, from my file.

Also books used to be printed in fairly large quantities and had then to be destroyed/pulped if they didn’t sell.  They were also shipped out in massive quantities that might or might not sell.  Now?  Now the books are mostly pod with micro printruns, usually of less than a thousand books.  One of my editors in 2003 told me “we’re all pod now.”  And of course, they exist as electrons.  As for copy edit, edit (for those who get it) and cover design…  er….  Most of these are performed by low-paid staffers.  It’s not like they have to pay the entire 30k or whatever salary to the staffer for YOUR book.

I’d guess paperbacks are relatively cheap now.  If you print more than a thousand copies – which even in a semi-pod-model any traditional publisher will do, that brings the cost per book way down, and the aggregate even more so, since, you know, it’s a thousand copies, not twenty thousand which used to be a low printrun back in the day.

So, no, traditional publishers are not spending a hundred thousand dollars to put Ms. Newby’s paperback on the shelves.  I’d be very shocked if, all the staffers’ salaries being taken proportionally, etc, they’re spending much more than ten thousand.  And I suspect the figure is closer to five thousand – or else their marketing model is REALLY screwed up and they’d already be bankrupt.

Of course if you’re publishing yourself you won’t need that much either.  Most of us in the arts have friends who can do the cover design for us (or we learn, painfully.  It’s not like the traditional cover designs are doing really well with ebooks, either) and there is excellent – EXCELLENT – stock art you can get (in fact, I’ve caught some pieces I’ve browsed on the cover of traditionally published books!)  And you won’t be printing a thousand books because, let’s face it, you’re not shipping them.  If you put them on Create Space or similar, your costs are going to be around $100.

I tried to hint at this, but didn’t get into a discussion.  Instead, I sat there in shock that we’d taken the WAAAAY back machine to the nineties and Publish America was the most deceptive force preying on consumers.

Pull the other one, will you?  It plays jinglebells.

I did manage to wedge in that you must – you MUST – look carefully at every contract and that you must get an IP lawyer EVEN if you have a contract.

I did this, because one tries to snatch brands from the fire, even when the house is burning down.  And for some of those beginners it might be enough.  And perhaps no one in the world should be exposed to my current opinion of most traditional publishers.  I’ve found most newbies don’t listen, anyway.  They just say “but it’s my dream, it’s what I always wanted.”

I found out most professionals don’t want to listen anyway, either.  They’ve fought their way in, their in, they just want it to work as advertised.  If they believe hard enough, it will happen, right?  This is a disturbance and it will soon pass.

And even those who want to get out and who want to believe have a tradition of bowing and scraping.  Why didn’t I get in a fight on that panel?  Because I didn’t want to upset my colleagues.  Yeah, it might have done no good for the newbies, they might have thought I was crazy.  But, most of all, I didn’t want to upset my colleagues or the con organizers.

Habit.  Habit that still lurks in the back of my mind from when a bad word from another writer could mean your best bet to publish one of your books wouldn’t.

Habit of living bowing, tugging on the forelock, cap in hand.

It will take time to break.  Most indie authors who come from traditional publishing are like the proverbial freed lion, still pacing in the confines of his vanished jail.

It will change.  At least it can change.  And freedom is possible.

55 thoughts on “Cap In Hand”

  1. So you were at Fencon! I looked for you but couldn’t find you. If you were only on one panel, that would explain why I didn’t find you in the program guide after I got there. I barely managed to make it myself and didn’t have time to check out the program before I left.

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    2. Well darnit – I had hoped to make it to FenCon, but it just wasn’t going to happen this year (I went a few years ago, when Bujold was GOH, and thoroughly enjoyed it). Otherwise, I would have been there in the audience to give you some support. (Of course, I just went out and checked out the FenCon program schedule to see who else was on the panel with you.)

      I was just at ArmadilloCon, and I was surprised at the similar attitude I encountered against e-pubbing – I put it down as a holdover to the old attitudes of selfpub=junk. It’s annoying how helpless some authors are – one (very nice) Big Name said, “I write a book, I send it in, I get a check. I like this.” He didn’t want to do any more than that. But yeah, it’s the dream; I’ve had that dream, of being Chosen by the publishers. It’s hard to wrench away from that.

      But there was one very positive panel on epubbing, run by a bunch of mostly erotica publishers who had been epubbing long before kindles. They said one of the reasons Amazon has gotten it right is they talked to the existing e-publishers about it first, so they knew about what the prices ought to be, and such.

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      1. “I write a book, I send it in, I get a check. I like this.”

        So much for reviewing the salient documents to determine if your check was the right amount, eh? “I bake a loaf. I give it to the baker shop. They give me crumbs. I like this.”

        In his memoir of years teaching in pre-Depression Kentucky schools, Jesse Stuart relates the story of how he convinced his class of the usefulness of Geometry by calculating the volume of the truck bed of one of the local jack-leg miners. For years the man had mined coal on his property and whenever he had enough to fill his truck he would drive it to the local coalyard and sell it to them. He figured and they agreed that his truck held about 3/4 ton of coal. He mined it out. He drove it. They gave him cash. He liked it.

        Stuart’s class measured the dimensions of the truck bed and, doing the math, determined that each load of coal he had delivered for years probably amounted to one and a quarter tons.

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      2. I put it down as a holdover to the old attitudes of selfpub=junk.

        There was a lot of that at WorldCon panels, too, but the tide seemed to have started to turn. One very nice man (David Marusek, author of the epubbed short Yurek Rutz which is totally worth .99: http://www.amazon.com/Yurek-Rutz-ebook/dp/B008C4B5PK ) went so far as to admit that he’d spent YEARS trying to get that story to work, finally got it published in Asimov’s, and was kind of bummed that once it was published it was more or less done. Until epublishing. Now it can sit on Amazon forever, and if it doesn’t make him rich at least he knows anybody who finds it can buy it. He allowed as how maybe that was kind of neat. :)

        I think I already told the story of how I got called an elitist in the nicest, most indirect way I have ever been called that (it happens a lot.) It was largely due to me making references to discussions that had happened in the comments of this blog. :) Sarah, you’re a bad influence.

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        1. Please pardon me. The title of the story is Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz. And yes, there’s a very good reason that that is the title. My apologies for not typing the full title.

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  3. As it was explained to me early on, (about 2004) when I was doing my first book and the POD publishing route was in it’s first flush – certain POD houses like Publish America made their money from offering additional services to the author: an editing and publicity package, in addition to the basic formatting, cover design and printing. I eventually went with the one POD publisher who did the basic package, and made their nut through providing that and the re-prints as requested. I think it cost about $400, all told. Next book, I got a discount on the set-up fees because I was a returning author. I did my next four books with them, but eventually discovered that their charges made the cost per book too high to make the retail price compeditive. So I did what had been advised by other indy authors did – went into business myself as a publisher, only in my case, I partnered with an existing tiny publishing bidness.

    As you say, the actual publishing costs of getting a book out are minimal – I’d say more around $150 per title. (Counting editing, cover design and formatting as another category altogether, and printing enough copies at a time to get a bulk discount as a third.) If I was able to spend a whole lot more on my own books, I think I would have chosen to hire a professional publicist and wallpapered reviewers with free copies.

    Given my own inclination, I’d rather hire the editor, designer, publicist, accountant and lawyer to work on my own book projects – that way they would work for me and have my best interests at heart, rather than take my chances with a major publishing house … who doubtless would look on me as a writer as a sheep to be profitably sheered every season.

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  4. I watched Joe Konrath self-publish before the book digital revolution and realized that I didn’t have the health or money to do it that way. Up to that point I had been rejected by everyone (agents to magazines) except a small literary publisher and sci-fi/fantasy mag. Well the mag was a rejection too, but they wanted to see other stories. ;-)

    When Joe had been doing the digital book publishing for awhile, I decided to pull out the novels and short stories that I had been writing and try the Smashwords/Amazon publishing. So I have only been doing this schtick for a year and a half. So far I am not seeing a return… but I feel like I am getting noticed slowly. I am not a marketer so I don’t thrust my books on people. I really dislike that kind of advertising so I don’t do it. I do a mention on twitter, my blog, and sometimes a freebie.

    Anyway, I was really upset when I read on Kris’ blog about the predatory practices of traditional publishers. I can see a silver lining in that I became ill when I was getting my stuff published the traditional way. It pulled me out of the mainstream for a few years and just in time for the new indie revolution. I may not be in the front pack, but I support indie authors and am one myself.

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    1. Welcome to my world, Cyn. When even Baen tells you they’re not accepting anything from new writers unless your Terry Pratchett (“not ‘just as good as’, but the genuine thing”), you kind of get discouraged. I started putting my stuff on Amazon and B&N a little more than a year ago. I’ve gotten five checks so far, for a little bit over $50. The only thing I can tell you, as one newbie to another, is keep pushing, keep writing, and keep publishing. You never know when you hit that one book, or one fan, that turns the entire world on to you. BTW, freebies are nice. I, too, give them away by the dozens. Of course, I really don’t NEED the money (it does help pay for my other vices), but as I said before, those quarterly checks are what separate the professional from the amateur. Keep it up – you’ll get there!

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        1. JP – Yes. I won’t provide a name. This was back in the early 2000 period when things were REALLY screwed up, and even Baen wasn’t taking on any new writers. The word I received was, get a couple of books published, and we’ll be glad to talk to you. The old tirade that the only way you can get published is to prove you have material worth publishing, which can only be done by having work published. See the circle?

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    2. E-publishing is a marathon, not a sprint. If you’ve been reading DWS’ blog – and I can confirm this both from my own experience and from talking to other epublishing authors – you’ve heard him say unless you hit the lottery (and why not dream?) and get a runaway rogue viral whatchamacallit, what sells titles is titles Putting up just a few don’t do nothin’. You probably know this, I’m lecturing to the class. :) But every ten titles or so (DWS claims 30, but maybe he needs bigger jumps to count than I do) will put a little extra oomph in your overall sales. It’s a numbers game. The more titles, the more chances to come up in searches, the prettier you look to algorithms, the better the odds you’ll catch a reader’s eye with ONE title and then they go back and find all the rest.

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      1. And each one of your titles that you have out there is an advertisement for all the other titles; a reader who finds one of your books, and loves it, will go looking for all your other titles. KA-ching!

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  5. It is interesting to note that the Publishing Industrial Complex is in retrograde movement, inverting the trend of the Comic Book publishers.

    When the field first started, comic books were ALL done according to the Work For Hire model: Siegel & Schuster may have invented and developed the concept we know as Superman, but once the publisher agreed to put their panel stories in the marketplace, the characters and their likenesses became property of the publisher, who was eventually able to fire Siegel & Schuster from the Superman comics and develop the property further. And this was normal business practice in the industry until the 1970’s.

    A few escaped the trap, most notably Will Eisner who produced, packaged and sold his Spirit comic-book as an eight page Sunday newspaper insert (like Parade magazine today.) But the demands of being an entrepreneur and artist could be exhausting and the rewards were not great; it is hard to compete with entities who use control over access to the marketplace to extract concessions and keep their costs low.

    Book Publishing is apparently feeling the same pressures to keep costs down and is trying to reverse the Rights trend, turning books into Work For Hire. It will be interesting to see how that works out. So, Artie, you’re tired of writing as Dr. Watson? Fine, you’re fired, but do bring us anything new you come up with. In the meantime we’re turning your detective stories of to this Osborne gel; she’s a bright enough writer to get your lead out of that demmed waterfall you’ve tossed him over and she’s grateful for the chance to be published. No artistic temperament issues with little Stephanie, no sir. She appreciates the risks we take on her behalf and understands the opportunity we’re tossing her way. No, you’re being bored with your characters is no problem for us, we understand, but you understand we have contracts and obligationsto meet, and cannot indulge you, Artie. No hard feelings, right?

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    1. I was thinking about comic books, too – I remember the comics indie boom in the ’80s. I also remember the comics writers and artists suing and finally getting royalties.

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  6. About that $100,000 cost figure — you are right that it is an undoubtedly obsolete calculation, the sort of received knowledge often tossed about to intimidate the unwary. The appropriate answer is probably to whistle and murmur an appreciative “Wow.” … followed by batting of innocent eyes and wondering “how do they get that figure?”

    Knowing a little about cost accounting I can assure you it can be (ab)used to get almost any cost per unit you want, depending on how you distribute the fixed costs and overhead, such as the lease on the publishers expensive and lavish offices, the executive salaries, the marketing costs, administrative costs, editors’ salaries, the office supplies, all the way down to the bagels and cream cheese at the weekly meetings to review sales and marketing projections.

    Nobody (except accountants) wants to know how such figures are arrived at, and the rows of spreadsheet calculations quickly cause most eyes to glaze over. Which is why they get away with such nonsense — it is all part of the game, everybody does it (in accountant speak: industry practices) and hardly anybody finds it worth the hassle of cutting through the fog to find out what is really going on. Least of all, the publishers who are happy to continue along on their cruise on the good ship Everybody Knows.

    Screaming about being headed for an iceberg is useless or worse; better to quietly suggest those attentive enough to hear that it might be a good idea to have a GTH bag packed and handy and to pay careful attention during the lifeboat drills. And by the way, how strong a swimmer are you?

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  7. The whole point of the paperback revolution was that they were cheap to make and hence cheap for readers to buy. Thus the old names of the paperback lines, like Bantam, tiny and fierce.

    So yeah, me doubtie.

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  8. “They just say “but it’s my dream, it’s what I always wanted.””

    I’ve always wanted to travel on a big ship (passengers on the Titanic).

    It is a mindset. I can’t get through it, one on one with a good friend who writes well, but is stuck in the model of the previous century, waiting for Big Pub to validate her as good enough. She can’t listen to the fact that the cell door is open behind her, because she is standing at the window, holding on to the bars of the cage, as hard as she can: salvation (publication) will come from outside that window, when they come an graciously remove the bars and let her out into the sunlight.

    Drives me nuts. She CAN publish. Has a thriller that was good enough to get an agent (who died).

    She just put it in a drawer. When I say, “I’ll show you how to put it up on Amazon,” she just says she’s working on something new.

    How do you get through such pig-headedness?

    You don’t – unless YOU become good at it, and they finally ask you.

    Too bad – I like the book much better than some I’ve read recently, and I think she would have a good chance out there, and she won’t even try, because it would contaminate her name and her writing creds when and if 1) she finishes a new book, and 2) she gets an agent again, and 3)…

    Sigh. So I write, and plan, and will publish when I’m done.

    Worst part is, she could use the money – and would love the attention – but she CAN’T take that first step. Psychologically impossible for her to stop trusting Bib Pub and the (implied) promises to anoint her, if she’s ever good enough.

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    1. This is why the Hebrew Tribes spent an extra forty years in the desert. Sigh – sometimes you have to wait for a generation to spend themselves needlessly because they can’t let go of the dream and accept the world.

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    2. To be fair to the passengers of the Titanic, they can’t have known what risk they were running when they went onboard. The information just was not available to them anywhere.

      If it were more like the writers today, they’d be stepping over flyers titled, “UNSINKABLE? HARDLY!” and “PERILOUS JOURNEY AHEAD” while ignoring the shops across the street that sell personal flotation devices, iceberg warning devices, wet suits, and so forth – perhaps with special sales to ticket-holders for the Titanic. The newspapers beside the ticket office would have been shouting enough alternating messages about the Titanic that if they’d bothered to look around for further information, they can’t have missed that in the event that the worst happened and a certain number of chambers in the hull were breached there would be no coming back from it. They’d have learned that there weren’t enough lifeboats on board for all passengers and crew (even if they did meet legal standards for lifeboats – which would have been what the publishers White Star Line would have pointed out and various maritime organizations would have agreed to with such staunch support that of course it would reassure those who just assume that if they say it’s okay, when of course it’s in their best interests to, then it must be okay. ..) And, of course, they’d brush off the warnings of sailors about how long fell in the icy water how long they could survive, or the few White Star Line employees who dared whisper that there were no binoculars in the crow’s nest and iceberg sitings would have to be done by eyesight in poor lighting conditions and if there was a calm sea, their ability to spot ripples around an iceberg would be virtually nonexistent under those conditions), or other passengers who had been aboard the RMS Atlantic when it ran aground warned that the White Star line officers had a nasty habit of ignoring warnings so that when a disaster was sighted, it would be too late for the ship to respond to any attempts to correct the path.

      And I could go on, but that would require me to read my old Titanic report I did a few years ago in full. xD

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    3. Here is a comment that a friend of mine (who is himself traditionally published but doesn’t have a lot of time for writing what with the whole working on nuclear weapons thing) posted on my Facebook after one of my publishing rants. It was a response to my posting a link to a Fred Reed column on Big Publishing which can be found here: http://www.fredoneverything.net/AGA.shtml

      I thought it apropos:

      I’ve a friend whose first professional sale was a sale of a trilogy to a major publishing house. He got a nice advance out of it, saw his first book printed, did a bunch of signings, promos, had it feature as one of Scalzi’s Big Ideas and… not a whole lot of sales, thanks in part to his publisher’s doing essentially nothing to market it. Worse, though he’s delivered his second and third books’ manuscripts to the publisher, and though they own rights to and are contractually bound to print his books, it’s been a couple years since his first book came out; whatever momentum he had with it is long gone. In his words, “After this, I’d say my writing career is pretty much over.”

      I’ve another friend who considers himself “semi-pro”, has in the same time published three or four novels with a small publisher, started his own imprint to move other works (short fiction anthologies and novellas, mostly) that traditional publishers don’t take on, has embraced the ebooks thing fully, and, as far as I can tell, sells far more and makes quite a bit more in royalties than the first friend, the “pro”, and seems happier doing it.

      The former did everything right as a speculative fiction writer: he’s a full SWFA member and Clarion graduate, he rubs elbows with the likes of GRRMartin, Melinda Snodgrass, and others in the premier New Mexico writing group, and he signed with one of the top agents in the genre. The latter did all his own legwork and cut his teeth writing Harry Potter fanfiction of all things.

      Yeah, I’d agree that the industry is changing.

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  9. OK, my first image of authors and big publishers produced a mental image that I can’t clean up enough for PG-13. Let’s just say that in other, similar relationships, the “author” can at least safeword and make it stop when things go past certain limits.

    Has anyone sat down and compared author hours required to publish with a Big Press verses hours required to indie publish versus self publishing? I suspect that if you go by “my time is worth $X per hour,” you spend more with the agent/ Big Press system than you do with either indie or self publishing, including learning basic image-creation and formatting skills.

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    1. I’m not sure I follow you here. The writing time is the same either way. What is it that you think is going to use significantly more time going tradpub than epub?

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      1. Writing time may be the same but the writer has to do additional work when self-publishing. Work that the trad-publisher would have done.

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      2. Because of the time spent researching agents, sending material to agents, waiting, getting rejected, revising/resubmitting, waiting, et cetera before finally getting a contract. If you include that time in your count, I submit that traditional publishing costs you, the author, as much if not more time/money than does self-publishing or going indie.

        Sorry for the late reply – I’ve been in the 19th Century (aka the archive) and the internet access from there is spotty at best.

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          1. I feel your pain. Book number one was accepted in January 2012 following a tentative initial acceptance pending revisions in October 2011. It is on the Spring 2014 publication schedule.

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        2. E-publishing requires far more than just writing, true. It requires a certain knowledge of formatting, the ability to either self-edit or have someone that will edit for you, the ability to design and prepare cover art (plus knowledge and software to allow you to meet the different size requirements of different e-publishers), and most of all, self-promotion. The good news is that you only have to learn these skills once. Who knows what hoops “traditional publishing” will require the writer to jump through.

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          1. Actually, trad-pubbed writers have to learn self-promotion, too, because most of them will never see one dollar or one minute of effort put into promoting their books by their publishers — except for a rather desultory effort to get them carried in chain bookshops.

            If anything, now that the stigma against self-published work is evaporating (and anyway, who the hell, other than a trad-pub professional, knows whether Flybynight Press is a ‘real’ small-press imprint or an author wearing his self-pub hat?), most trad-pubbed authors have a HARDER time of it. They not only have to promote their own books, they have to work against the implicit negative promotion that their publishers gave them by abandoning them in the midlist. ‘If you’re so great, how come your publisher isn’t advertising your book?’ Not an easy question to answer, especially if your publisher is the same one that is spending zillions to advertise Snooki’s book.

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            1. who the hell, other than a trad-pub professional, knows whether Flybynight Press is a ‘real’ small-press imprint or an author wearing his self-pub hat?

              I just got the proof for my first novel from CreateSpace.

              I have a LOT of tradpub books. I am here to tell you if I saw it on a shelf, I would never suspect it was anything but a bog-standard trade paperback. (Well, physically I mean. Obviously it’s a work of great genius in the literary sense. You can tell just from picking it up.)

              Bye-bye, stigma.

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  10. Only tangentially (cuz that’s how I roll) to publishing in general…is/has anyone reading/read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell? I’m doing so before next month’s movie release and, I have to admit, the guy’s a pretty damned good writer, especially in the period pieces that comprise the first four chapters.

    …until he gets to the futuristic chapter. Here, we have what appears to be a literary type trying to do sci-fi. It’s not bad sci-fi in the sense of the wonder and the story, but it’s incredibly awful sci-fi in terms of the lingo he’s using. It’s like a bad 80’s sci-fi movie, trying to take contemporary terms and roll them into the future for common use. That’s all fine and dandy for a term or two…but it’s every other damned word here.

    As I’m only halfway (43%, says Kindle) through, it’s entirely possible this is all ironic and he’s making fun of sci-fi fans, but I doubt it.

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  11. It gets to the point that it’s not worth the argument. If they haven’t got it by now, whether you’re talking publishing, politics or economics, they won’t get it until it all crashes down on them.

    You did the best you can do, to suggest the need for an IP lawyer to check the contract, and mention that the bad rep of self-publishing is fading fast. Pushing harder is contraproductive, and public unpleasantness is bad for the digestion.

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      1. If you need to vent that anger, I have two batches of saffron buns to make. Each batch requires two risings and two kneadings: each kneading takes 10 minutes or until the dough’s texture is right. Reduces anger and builds better shoulders and upper arms.

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        1. I attended a very small Quaker Boarding school in eastern Tennessee the last two years of High School. We were all expected to do chores. I took on some extras, including producing Sunday night dinner every week during my senior year. I used to bake enough French loaves to feed 70+ at boarding school every Sunday evening. Did it all by hand. I had no problems with tension there, there was something about beating up on that much dough.

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          1. Back when we could eat carbs, I used to make Challah by hand every weekend, no mixer. Now I’m experimenting with low-carb mixes/almond/coconut flour, because there really is something VERY satisfying about baking.

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      2. Yeah. I’ve been known to vent. I don’t like forcing myself to not care. But . . . there are times when it just doesn’t do any good. So you swallow it, and go vent either in private or to good friends. Or online, where _someone_ might read it and think.

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      3. Amen, Sarah! One of the things that has ALWAYS made me angry is the self-serving foolishness and inability to learn of some people. I’ve been involved with training long enough to have quite a bit of experience with people that learn something one way, and absolutely REFUSE to change, even when the rest of the world has moved on to something easier, smoother, and faster. I’ve come up with a prayer for that kind of person: “may your hell be a world of your own making.”

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  13. FenCon is run by the LitFen — the folks who think Hugos matter, who think DragonCon is somehow “impure” for allowing in People Known Outside Of Fandom, who think “real SF” is “a bunch of forty-somethings sitting around talking at each other — IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!” — and who are constantly fretting about “the Greying of Fandom” (because god forbid they should let NewMedia have a seat at the table). I hear the exact same hopelessly-out-of-date twaddle being espoused at my local con; and I have great fun pointing out to them just how unutterably WRONG! they are (when I can be bothered to attend panels — mainly I go there for the Infamous All-Night Anime Music Video showing). It’s like everything else in my life — I can’t do anything to change it *now*; so I just sit back and wait for it to die from its own dinosauric obsolescence.

    And then… “After The Deluge — *US*!” >:)

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  14. I think a lot of writers are just so thrilled that one of the cool kids – ie, a traditional publisher – noticed them that they don’t want to scream too loudly about being mistreated or the cool kid won’t like them anymore. Then where will they be?

    Oh yeah…still in control of their work and career…

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    1. DWS has several times posted comments along the lines of “By the time an author finally gets a contract offer they’ve been rejected so many times that they just can’t stand the risk that they might hear ‘no’ again if they try to negotiate.”

      It’s pretty classic abuser/abused psychology, looked at from that direction. While I too understand how those rejection notices can go down into the pit of your stomach and just lie there and burn, I do have the advantage that I am an experienced IP lawyer. I don’t care how many rejections I get, if you think I will sell my copyright for a mess of pottage, you can think again. I’ve stared down Barbie’s Mom and GI Joe’s Dad: you don’t scare me, Mr. Traditional Publisher Dude.

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  15. VERY LONG COMMENT AHOY. You have been warned.

    I e-published a novel last September. After going through you-know-who’s blog all week, I was finally shamed into putting it into POD.

    Total cost: Zero dollars.

    Yes, zero. I used a photograph I took (and which *is* model-released) for the cover, did the rest myself. (I couldn’t use the e-book’s cover, it was the wrong aspect ratio for the trim size of the book I wanted to use.)

    The hardest parts – and the reason that while it cost zero dollars, it did not cost zero time – were getting page one to be on the right hand side (CreateSpace’s template sucks large red $CRUDEANATOMICALREFERENCE) and getting the effing page numbers to align properly. No. Seriously. That took five iterations. Rest of the book was perfect. (A little tip from me to you, because we’re friends: CreateSpace will not allow you to create two blank pages in a row. Now, they will tell you this, but what they won’t tell you is that their engine counts certain kinds of section breaks as page breaks even if they’re continuous section breaks. Put something – even if just a colophon – on a page if you need it “blank.”)

    Let’s assume I want to get them into actual bookstores. I can buy copies for $3.89ea starting at 1 per. If I do as DWS suggests and sell them to bookstores at a 40% discount plus free shipping for orders of ten or more (I’m not going to start doing this until I have enough POD titles they can mix and match) at $9.99 cover (these are nice big trade paperbacks, not MM) that’s $2.10 gross – .60 shipping = $1.50 profit per. That’s fifteen percent of cover, about what I’d get with a reasonably good traditional publishing deal – but I get my money IN ADVANCE, no returns allowance (oh Hell no I’m not taking returns) and no publisher’s overhead or agent’s cut off the top. And I don’t have to do ANYTHING. They send me the money, I order the books off CreateSpace and use the bookstore’s address as the “ship to.” (And the bookstore’s money to pay!) Easy, breezy, beautiful.

    Last night I couldn’t sleep so I turned six of my short stories into two themed anthologies which I’ll put up as regular books in the publishing schedule (I release one work every two weeks. Period. Yes, that’s a few weeks of sales I might miss not putting them up now, but it keeps me on the new releases list and that’s worth a week of sales.) That’s FREE MONEY. I paid $3.00 each to license new anthology cover pictures for ’em. That and twenty minutes each to copy and paste the text from the shorts into the anthology template, set up hyperlinks, and pretty ’em up. (One of them was my first published short and it wasn’t exactly in the standard format I use now.) After that, it’s gravy.

    You want to know what the biggest scam in publishing is?

    PUBLISHING.

    Miscellaneous note: I just sold a domain name and once the check clears I think I will buy myself a copy of InDesign – actually, I’ll buy myself a copy of Creative Suite Digital so I get the web site software too. (My creaky copy of GoLive stopped working with the latest MacOS upgrade.) Because now I have a template that “works” but it is a major patchup job. :)

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      1. WMG has like 700 works on its to-be-epubbed backlist and (though I’m still only in the middle of 2011) he keeps saying how he means to do it and life gets in the way. You may be slacking but you’re going to have to slack way harder if you mean to match that kind of effort.

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      1. You know what…that’s not your fault at all, Marc. I just just realized that when I get the email notification of a new comment on a thread and open the email to read it, there’s no paragraph breaks…though you obviously included them in your original comment.

        Is this just another case of WordPress sucking canal water? Yes, I think so. No edit or delete of comments either, or I’d have deleted my snarky, wholly unnecessary comment above.

        On the other hand…I’m nothing if not snarky and wholly unnecessary.

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