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A lot of the comments (and some of my posts) relating to the changes in publishing here have been a sort of astonished shock at how slow publishers are at “getting” it. I don’t know if it was here in comments that someone mentioned the tactics designed to “herd the consumer back into hard covers,” starting with delay in publishing ebook, moving on to some really badly formated ebooks, passing through the fact that they’re priced at hard cover price.  These moves actually only seem to hurt both hard cover and ebook sales.

The image in my mind is of Lord Cornwallis surrendering to George Washington, and the song, weaving through the air “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Yes I know, there’s a good chance that never happened. But these folklore moments persist because they capture something profound and revelatory. And at the time, if not now, it would be understood that to Cornwallis this was far more than a simple military defeat. It was the upending of what he had always known about the world and his place in it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Men are social creatures, but the specific kind of social creatures we are is hierarchical creatures.

Those people who posit – or have faith in! – an equalitarian human past, before civilization corrupted us have never read about the social organization of chimps or baboons; or they’ve been mainlining Jean Jacques Rosseau without knowing it; or they cling atavistically to the idea of Eden even though most of them are not religious.

Humans, like all apes were designed to live in a band where social organization had very fine grades. As such, we have finely tuned hierarchicy-sensing devices and certain set ways of responding to certain types of social organization.

What started the idea for this post going was the Passive Voice’s article entitled Your Agent Is Not Your Mommy. He’s talking about how many authors post about “my agent right or wrong.” (He’d probably be really shocked about how some authors talk about their publisher/editor.)

His reaction is this:

To PG, these kinds of reactions seem weird and a little icky, but mostly adolescent, maybe even babyish.

They’re sound like a shy sophomore who has a giant crush on the high school quarterback and slips anonymous love notes into his locker. Bobby can do no wrong because he’s just so cute and wonderful and she knows he likes her because he said hi one time in the hall between classes.

Or (rolling away from sexism), they’re like Napoleon Dynamite after someone agreed to go to the dance with him.

This is a business relationship, not a girls and boys club. The class of trust that speaks to PG in quotes like these is a mommy trust or a clingy best friend trust, a deeply codependent and needy trust. If the agent terminates representation, it will feel like a breakup instead of like switching to a new doctor.

Here I must make a full confession. I never felt this way about Lucienne, because she was my fourth agent. Until we’d worked together for about five years I didn’t believe it was even semi-permanent as an arrangement. And besides, until we worked together about two years I didn’t unbend even to the level that most people do in business relationships (you know, the occasional joke, etc.)

BUT when I sold my first book, and learned the editor has heart trouble, I remember feeling incredibly afraid she would die. Because – see – after thirteen years trying to break in, I had this foot in the door, and if it accidentally closed, I might never be published again.

Was I icky to my editor? I was never particularly demonstrative one way or another in public with any of them, but I know I spent many years in a state of cold fury at one of my editors without daring to be anything other than very cordial in person. (This, btw, is not good for the soul.)

I think I was icky to my agent before Lucienne, agent #3 – perhaps not in public, but in my head. Look, she never sold anything for me. Regardless of the fact I sent her little – she should have asked for proposals, when I was in a strange mood where I thought I should write a book out – what I sent her rarely made it out of her office and what did got rejected so fast it probably caught fire on re-entry. It doesn’t in any way justify the fact that I had a near breakdown when she dropped me. But again, I thought I would be locked out of publishing forever.

And it wasn’t only authors who were icky. The editor who gave me ulcers referred to agent #3 – a very junior, starting out agent – as “the incomparable X.”

I’d been listening to a Heinlein short story when walking before I read that Passive Voice post. And the story I’d been listening to (talking about slavery) said something like “when an economic system is like this, then slavery is inevitable.”

Perhaps that was why I cast about for political/economic equivalents to all the fawning you used to see towards agents and editors. And found them. The one that came immediately to mind was North Korea, where Dear Leader is always referred to as Dear Leader, even though his people are starving, and is acclaimed as a poet, a fashion icon, a dietician, a…. You get my point.

I’m not suggesting any editors or agents are the equivalent of Kim Jong Il, of course, (Oh, please, when is the last time your agent or editor could slam you in jail! I’m not that stupid.)

What I’m suggesting is that publishing as it existed had certain similarities to a totalitarian regime. We knew, or learned very quickly, that if you made the wrong move, you could be shut out of publishing forever no matter how talented. More importantly, we knew that how well we did in the marketplace had less to do with what we put between the covers of the book than how the book was packaged, marketed and pushed, all things over which the writer had no control whatsoever and all things over which their editor (and after the change in model to have the agent be the only way to access the editor, the agent – which makes me wonder for those who are older in the field than I am, if the way agents were treated changed) had power. It became a matter of “upset the agent and your book might never sell to an editorial house or might sell for a low advance and as ‘disposable’ which is, of course, how the editor will regard it too.” Or “upset the editor, and your book will print a thousand copies and be instantly remaindered.” Even worse “Don’t make yourself special to the agent/editor and your book will languish uncared for.”

So… is it any surprise that editors and agents alike got the “dear leader” and the “brilliant aesthetician” “masterful business person” treatment? Hell, most writers I know didn’t say anything else, even to themselves in the quiet of their own heads because they didn’t want to admit to any discrepancy.

This is called Preference Falsification and it explains why once a revolution tips over into “likely to succeed” things change so fast and people will seem to become turncoats wholesale. Because most of them had been lying in public and private and often in their own heads about what they would prefer.

I’d say the epublishing revolution has JUST entered that phase. Even a year ago, I sat on a panel next to a writer heartily defending his poor publisher, who couldn’t survive on $5 an ebook, because it cost far more than that to produce and who would be, against their will, forced to fire him if his hardcover sales didn’t pick up, even though he was selling a lot of ebooks. He was begging people not to buy ebooks. He was full of empathy and defenses of his publisher, and at the time, since I already knew a) how much it costs to produce an ebook b) that more than likely his publisher was making a lot of money off his e-sales, this nauseated me a little and like the Passive Guy I thought “is this Stockholm syndrome? Why?”

Well, because we’re hierarchical by nature and when the hierarchy is not based in meritocracy but on fawning and submission to the leader, regardless of what the leader does, this system results.

So why would the publishing hierarchy react rationally to what’s happening? For years they’ve been making huge errors and were still called brilliant and wonderful. For years, they cut themselves off from the feedback of the market but had authors (and at conventions “fans” who were wanna be authors) tell them how exquisitely correct they were in holding back or pushing the books they did. And now suddenly people are telling them they were wrong? They made mistakes? Suddenly, the levers of power and money they used don’t work? HOW can that be possible?

They’re frozen in error, behind the wheel which just came off in their hands, with the brake pedal and gas dead and the gear shift not responding. Of course they are reacting badly and making bad decisions. People in shock often do.

Meanwhile writers are jumping out the windows (and some from the trunk) to save themselves and not a few are finding more efficient conveyance.

Just like the sick fawning should have told us there was something wrong with the system, the bizarre, lurching decisions of the hierarchy of publishing should tell us they’re in shock and not reacting rationally.

“If ponies rode men and grass ate the cows” “If writers fired their editors and published themselves”

Just What Tune was in the Air when
The World Turned Upside Down?

The title of this post is based on my friend Dave Freer’s* The Elephant of Surprise, a brilliant parable on finding bestsellers that compares it to shooting elephants through a keyhole of an apartment in NYC.

The part of the text relating to this post is this:

And he gives the grayness a 50 mm slug through the door and rushes out to start butchering his new fortune. Because it was gray, it was probably a pachyderm, right?

And once in every 1 000 000 times it might even be. The rest of the time he’s obliged to hastily butcher the mailman in a once gray shirt with a final demand letter, and sell him as finest wild boar. Or he’s shot a mouse on stilts peering in the keyhole. Or merely shot a gray day.

Dave is of course going on about how hard it is for any editor/agent to guess what will be the next bestseller – particularly since bestsellers have to sell to people in areas of the country these people rarely set foot in. It was hard even when they could control how much shelf space a book got, how many copies of it were sent out, how much push distributors were told to put on it, what cover it got, and to a large extent what press it got. In the days of Amazon it is much harder. But most publishing houses work still on the presumption that they’re always right, or if they’re not it is because that mailman was deliberately impersonating an elephant and therefore they can’t be blamed.

You’d think that when a book comes out and fails to earn its advance or fails to do as well as the house claims to have hoped, the editor would be first in line for firing. After all, they’re the ones who are paid to anticipate public taste. They’re the ones who bought the book, the ones who picked the cover, the ones who decided (okay, in conjunction with the sales force, but most editors these days are also “Director of marketing”) how much distribution and publicity it should get.

It’s never that way. When a book tanks spectacularly, it’s always the writer who is at fault. Even though (like my very first book) the volume might never have made it to the shelves. Even though the cover might have given no clue what type of book it was. Even though people who were actively looking for the book couldn’t find it in the narrow window of a month or so it was available, and stores were reluctant to order or reorder after that – it’s always the writer’s fault. It’s always held that there was something about the combination of words, the way the writer uses language, the characters? Perhaps the way the writer named the characters? Which the poor publisher couldn’t have anticipated and which caused the book to tank. “He was impersonating an elephant, yer honor. Why else would he wear a grey shirt? How was I to know?”

Of course, publishing and marketing a book, in the expectation of its selling really well is always, always a risky business. The system is after all chaotic. In the two years it took for books to wind their way through the publishing grinder, the public appetite for vampires might wane. (It has been predicted for 20 years. Haven’t seen it diminish yet, myself.) Or your competitor might bring out a book that’s almost exactly the same. Or your main distribution channel for this book might collapse. Blaming the writer saves the publishing house having to rotate editors so fast that they barely warm their chair. This, of course, is because beancou… er… Business majors demand a bestseller every time. Which is like demanding that you win the lottery every week and win only the main prize.

However, like most such convenient things, possibly EXACTLY because it’s irrational, it’s become unquestionable. This is why, for instance, agents refuse to submit your work to an editor under a “completely closed” pen name. The “closed” pen name will be closed to everyone else BUT NOT the editor. The editor has to know, you see. Because, you might be a mailman impersonating an elephant, and the editor has to know before he shoots you. Aka, before he gives you a bestseller’s advance, when you’re a lowly midlister.

This insistence tells you that “A writer will always sell x books regardless of what genre he/she writes in, and what type of support the property gets.”

Mind you, if you look at recent years – say 10 to 15 – you’d think so. But that’s because publishers could to an extent control distribution. But look further than that, and you realize this idea is completely insane – as it should be, at first sight, because if you think people would always the same, in all genres, visualize Agatha Christie writing quest fantasy or Stephen King writing Regency Romance. Yet, if either had for some reason (and the labyrinth of submitting often pushed people in very unnatural reactions) started in those fields and tanked, in the “now passing from this world” system it would be assumed they were no-hopers at Mystery and thrillers as well. For real life examples, meditate on the career of Stephen Donaldson. Or look at how well known Agatha Christie’s romances are now, even though her mysteries continue to sell. Or take one of my favorite authors, Georgette Heyer. I have re-read to shreds every one of her regencies since Dave Freer forced me to read her seven years ago (I thought she had romance cooties – smiles sheepishly.) Her historicals I could take or leave. And, sorry, but you can’t pay me enough to get through one of her mysteries. I’ve started two and abandoned them unread.

Not only should it be obvious that the book is the book is the book, but that just because a given author has had a string of duds (particularly when the market is rigged to order to the net, meaning your first failure or success sets up the rest of your career) it doesn’t mean his next book won’t be a brilliant success. And if you can’t evaluate the book without looking at the author’s sales figures, then there’s something seriously wrong with your evaluation methods.

There is no logical reason the publisher needs to know who the author of the book “really” is. The illogical one, other than sales figures, is that publishers sometimes think they’re Hollywood. One manifestation of this was “we want beautiful people” or “we want people with an interesting life story.” Both of these are insane because 90% of authors get no promotion or tours, so what they look like or their life story doesn’t matter.

However, I knew it was widespread when, after the collapse of my Shakespeare series, my editor tried to get me to write an autobiography because I had an interesting life story. Which is true, in a way, except all the interesting parts belong to other people and between libel laws and relatives I’d prefer don’t disown me, (not to mention the ones who are armed to the teeth), or who don’t deserve the notoriety, I can’t really tell much of it. Besides, the idea that my life story would make me famous and therefore sell my fiction seemed utterly backwards to me.

Writers are not actors and publishing caters to quite a different frame of mind than Hollywood’s star factories (which from what I can see aren’t doing so well themselves, these days.) I will confess I find Terry Pratchett mad sexy, but I find him so because of his mind. I’m fairly sure if I’d met him on the street without knowing who he was, I’d never even have noticed him. And while his lifestory is interesting now, because of the early onset Alzheimers, I and all his fans very much wish it weren’t QUITE so riveting and tragic.

We are people who tend to be far more interesting when making up stuff. It’s our job. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a book from the heyday of pulp, and then turned to the back and looked in astonishment at the picture of the coke-bottle-glass wearing nerd who’d written this riveting tale.

So, there are NO logical reasons why pen names should be open to publishers, except… Well… so the result can be fixed and justify their prejudices.

I’ve been a mail carrier in a grey shirt for years and been forced to shout ahead so they know who I am. But perhaps, just perhaps, given half a chance, I could be a were-elephant.

* If you aren’t reading Dave’s adventures settling into his adopted new home in Flinders Island, Australia, give yourself a treat.  Dave is unfailingly interesting.  Follow The Flinders Family Freer Blog.  You won’t be sorry.

Sorry to be so late posting today, but it’s been another of those “being nibbled by ducks” day, and the post I have in mind requires some thought so as not to appear to be maligning people I’m not in fact maligning. (And in case it isn’t obvious, this post will be about the business model that’s now crumbling, not any of my agents past or present, living … wait, they’re all living as far as I know, so that’s enough.)

In the way these things do, an unrelated comment and a post over the last week have worked themselves into a post in my head. The comment was by Jeff Dwyer, who I understand has for some years been an agent, working mostly in children’s picture books, and who is now to some extent mothballing that part of his business, according to a separate comment.

He said, in part:

One of the benefits of aging is hindsight and one would hope an acquired perspective. As I read this post, I remembered when the slush pile went away and the submissions began to flood into our agency mail box. We’d had dinner one night with a publisher who had just announced that she wasn’t accepting unagented submissions. I complained that she was forcing us to become her non-compensated first readers, and she smiled and said, “Yep. We’re no longer paying first year Radcliffe grads $25K plus benefits to read thousands of submissions that we won’t acquire.” Soon, it was apparent that we’d become gatekeepers for the editors whom aspiring authors wanted to reach. It placed the agent in a position of need in the publishing food chain, and agency world grew. Outsourced legacy publishing editors had a second act when they received the pink slip. They could take their Rolodex with them and sell work to their old friends. With the evolution of indie publishing, the role of the agent will continue to diminish in importance as will the role of legacy publishers.….

I think I came into the business – in the sense that I started to submit and trying to break in – shortly after this. To me, this was “business as it’s done” but may I say that from the very beginning it seemed to me that there was something wrong with this idea. Of course I can perfectly see how, from a publisher’s point of view this made perfect sense. Outsource costs.

Perhaps part of the reason it made me nervous is that while I was a raw beginner in publishing, I had vast experience from the fast-moving, crumbling/building work of computer programming, if at a remove and second hand. It seemed that every time a computer company got in trouble, it fired its entire R & D department and decided it would just be fine and dandy to buy new startups with fresh ideas. The results of this were always the same for all the companies my husband worked for. In fact, this was such a reliable precursor of collapse that my husband would start looking for work the minute they made this move.

When publishing as a business made this move it was different, of course. It was different in the sense that they were the only providers of a form of entertainment that most of us were – let’s face it – hopelessly addicted to. On the other hand, the whole idea put my hackles up.

For a long time, I thought that this was only in the personal sense. When I started trying to be serious about writing and submitting, I was a newly wed. More, I was a newly wed whose qualifications for earning money were completely useless in my adopted homeland. I could not teach – my teaching certificate wasn’t valid. And as for translation, I didn’t even know where to look for work. (Lest we forget this was year 10 bi (before internet) or so.

How broke were we? Well… let me see, printing paper was a major expense, and I routinely typed/printed both sides of a page, numbering them differently, for the drafts to go over. Stamps even for sending out short stories, were a major expense. And yet, it soon became obvious my novels were coming back unread.

The more up to date books on how to break into the business, informed me with a heartbreaking breeziness that of course no one ever got anywhere by just sending stuff over the transom these days, and that the way to break in was to go to a few conventions or workshops, make personal contact with editors/agents, and then from there springboard into publication.

Look, we didn’t even know WHAT conventions were. My husband didn’t grow up in fandom of any sort – he’s a mathematician! – and his parents weren’t involved in writing. Oh, the information was out there, and I gathered it over a few years (before internet, remember?) but then I came up against the hard fact that I either didn’t have the money or I didn’t have the time. Because in those few years I found a job as a multilingual scientific translator BUT then I had (I think) a week of vacation time a year. I had trouble getting time off to attend a friend’s wedding in another state, and the cons attended by editors/agents (usually the bigger ones) took about five days. The workshops took longer, particularly Clarion.

The thing is if you’re going “these obstacles aren’t insurmountable” – of course they weren’t. And eventually a very kind editor who shall remain nameless as I do not wish to embarrass him, to whom I’d been submitting my short stories for a few years wrote to me half in exasperation to say if I wanted to attend Clarion he’d (I don’t remember what he said exactly) help me get in and give me a “scholarship” to pay for it, because how close I was and yet how far away was driving him insane. At the time I was in the beginning of a very complicated pregnancy that eventually resulted in Robert Anson Hoyt, but that was not (I know. The kid looks like my husband) the editor’s fault. So the obstacles were not insurmountable. Not if you were gonzo enough to keep trying to get in despite everything in your way.  (How many people are that crazy-persistent is a matter for another blog.  How many promising writers lacked the insane persistence and had only normal levels is something I can’t even hazard to guess.)

But eventually the system came to annoy me as a reader and not as a writer. Because after five or so years of this, it became obvious to me – I don’t know if to anyone else – as a reader that the perspective and breadth of books was narrowing. I’m not talking politically or even socially. I’m talking about a certain… pov, a feel. All the books – even the ones that purported to be about a quite different sort of person – had that breezy, easy feel of people who thought that “just go to a workshop or a convention” was perfectly reasonable advice.  Or they dwelt lovingly upon poverty-porn — the idea that some great benefit attaches to being dirt poor.  They all (save for a few highly publicized cases) betrayed the perspective of people to whom a couple thousand dollars and/or two weeks off meant nothing. People who by and large were in two narrow ten-year age bands either side of me (the older ones already had agents and access and the younger ones had time for all the conventions and workshops) had all attended the same colleges, gone to the same shows, spoke in the same slang.

Now it might have been more obvious to me because I didn’t grow up in the US, but these books could be incredibly opaque to someone who didn’t know the right labels, hadn’t watched the “right” tv shows and wasn’t listening to the same music. A lot of the characterization seemed to depend on these touchstones, and while I could infer them from the context – of course I could. I was used to reading stories about cultures I didn’t live in or know first hand – it detracted from my “reading for pleasure” feeling.

Was I alone? I don’t think so. I might have felt it earlier. However, I know at one time – say the seventies – a 70 thousand unit laydown was the kiss of death for a book. Nowadays it will put you on the bestseller list and cement your reputation forever.  The number of people buying and reading new books has decreased that much.  (Yes, I know there are many other factors.)

But the only problem of the system wasn’t access. Access is where it began. I can’t blame the agents for not wanting to sift through piles and piles of raw slush and therefore giving preferential treatment to people they saw face to face or people who had already sold and needed the agent only to close the deal. Agents are after all human.

The problem was deeper than that. And I realized it when reading my friend Dave Freer’s parable on this called The Elephant of Surprise. It is nakedly a parable on finding bestsellers, and it covers the same ground I covered here, but in far more disguised and insanely witty manner.

At the beginning (though not in as straightforward a manner as it sounds) he states of editors:

He knows what people want to read, and so he’s a key employee, in case any accountant is thinking of making anyone redundant.

This was, in fact, the claim of editors “we know what people want to read.” (We won’t touch on the ancillary “or should want to read.” That’s a perversion best left to the interpretation of psycho historians.) THAT is an editor’s job.

Presumably when slush was filtered through houses, the slush readers were imbued with the feel of the house, if for no other reason that their job was finding what a particular editor wanted to read. After a year or so, I suspect a slush reader would get very good at it or be fired. This means the editor had a good chance of what landed on his desk being relatively “highly tailored.” Or else it was just everything that was “readable and caught my attention.” From then on, the editor could apply his highly specialized filter. This meant “I have a hunch about this property” was as personal as it could be.

When the selection went to agents, agents of necessity filtered by the properties that would bring a “bidding war”. I.e. the ones that were more “universal” in nature.  Gone would be the quirky selections that went something like this “I know this is fantasy and Mike likes science fiction, but this novel feels SF, so I’m going to pass it on to his desk. If he isn’t in the mood, he’ll see “fantasy” on the cover letter and put it aside.” It was a much bigger deal for agents to pass on a book an editor wouldn’t be interested in, particularly one that caused the editor to go “What was so and so thinking?” because that could mean less attention to their next submission and eventually could mean the agent’s career. This meant that of course the books passed on would be “safe bets.”

Look, I hate getting presents from people who don’t know me very well. And by very well I mean live with me. Why? Because inevitably they are the sort of generic gift that embarrasses me, like a jar of expensive sauce because they know I like to cook… But isn’t a sauce I’d ever use in anything and/or contains something I or my family are allergic to. (There are exceptions to this, of course. Some people have a gift for giving. However, the vast majority don’t.) Or someone will know I crochet (neurotically – why?) And will give me yarn, while I only do filet crochet. It’s been found I’m not alone. Studies have revealed that gifts are usually something like 80% inefficient in being something the receiver actually likes and can use, much less something they’d choose for themselves.

I suspect books to publish are even more difficult to get “right” than gifts, particularly when “gifting” a wide set of people.  Going through the agents applied that sort of filter – twice.

Yes, I’ve heard all the excuses. “It’s the internet. It killed books.” “It’s TV, it killed boks.” “It’s games, it killed books.” To which I have to say, “It’s bwshwa. Humpty Dumpty didn’t fall – he jumped.” Harry Potter – which got through the filter by being immensely successful in England FIRST should have proven that. Instead, it seems to have given editors and agents the misguided idea “we shall buy YA only.”

As Dave put it, it’s mighty difficult to shoot an elephant through the keyhole of an apartment in NYC. And when the problem is always the elephant’s: “The mailman was impersonating an elephant, yer honor. I’m harmless.” then you never have to face this fact.

The publishing industry thought it could isolate itself from the market and survive. (There are other facets to this isolation, and I’ll take on Impersonating an Elephant tomorrow. But the two layers of semi-clueless semi-informed different-purpose filtering made for a pretty big problem.)

It is grim but true that the market always wins. It’s not a matter of how things should be, but how things are. Economics are no more a philosophy than mineralogy is a philosophy. Either there’s gold in them there hills or there ain’t. Nothing you can think/dream/say will change reality.

As the publishing industry is finding out. Hopefully fast enough to save itself.

Why do people write? Is it natural talent making the path easy for them? Is it that some people have so much to say? Or is it a compulsion, akin to a need to wash one’s hands early and often?

I don’t know. I doubt natural talent. I’ve known too many naturally talented geniuses who never seemed to understand that they should study the craft or even apply some rational thought to their work.

I also doubt people who write to send a message. Oh, certainly, writing like raising children are ways to pass on a certain way to look at the world. In fact, it’s almost impossible to do either without transmitting to others certain ideas about how the world is organized or works. Mind you, both are an uncertain deal. Both are as likely to make people determined to oppose you as to make them believe as you do.

Compulsion probably comes closest. I’ve never met a writer who didn’t feel a strong need to write.

But by itself compulsion is not enough. Compulsion can be satisfied by writing snippets and bits and “fun parts.” A writer can easily spend her life hiding away to write and produce nothing of more interest than the “fun parts” of books. Since the rest of the book remains in her head, this amounts to a “cut scenes” reel, without the story to lean on. Watch those for any movie, and tell me what you’d have got without the movie.

Look, I’m going to level with you. Writing, real writing, the sort that produces a full novel, particularly the sort that produces a novel that someone – editor or a significant number of readers – will pay for is hard. REALLY hard.

Is it as hard as ditch digging in the hot sun? I don’t know. They’re completely different skills. Speaking as someone who has always enjoyed heavy, sweaty work outside, there are days that ditch digging appeals infinitely to me. When that need gets too strong I go play with power tools or dig up my long-suffering garden.

It’s tough working with your hands, under the sun, and it leaves you sweaty, hot and achy. But it doesn’t leave you worrying about how plausible this character you made out of whole cloth is, or whether readers will run screaming from your fight scene or… It doesn’t make you worry obsessively about things that exist only inside your head, which, frankly isn’t a safe endeavor.

Worse, writing to sell involves constantly playing chess against yourself, being both players in a single move. Or more plainly, it makes you second guess how total strangers will view your work. You might have lived months or years with these people, this civilization, this murder mystery, in your head; you might know everyone in your made up small town AND their little dog too, but you have to present them in such a way that a stranger will understand the story and get introduced to these people naturally. It’s not as easy as it seems.

When I was young my mom designed clothes. Then she retired and designed clothes only for me. Since she retired when I was about twelve, I remember that second phase better. Mom would sometimes dream up, draw and start building something, and forget some major detail where the work intersected with real life. For instance, in the late seventies, she was trying this body-suit on me, and pinning it in place and a problem occurred to me. Took me a while to ask her about it because, well, she was the professional. Surely she knew what she was doing. And then I said, “Mom… uh? How do I get out of this?” I’ll never forget her stricken look.

Yes, that’s right. After weeks of drawing the suit, planning the construction, etc. She had forgotten it needed to somehow open and close so I could get in and out of it.

If you have that sort of major design fail with your novel – which trust me, I’ve seen very often and committed once or twice – it’s usually not that obvious. People don’t read into the novel far enough to tell you, “You idiot, your character doesn’t want anything. He just whines and has stuff happen to him.” They just read the first chapter or the first page and go “blah. This didn’t engage me.”

In fact, depending on how much talent you have, people might not know what’s wrong. Or if they know what’s wrong and tell you, you might be incapable of hearing it. If I had a dime for every time I’ve had a conversation with a newby that goes something like this, “It’s not a bad concept but you don’t have a plot. Your character is feasted, adored, loved and patted on the back.” “Oh, but you missed how he had a horrible childhood. I mentioned it in three paragraphs on page three.” “Okay, but compensation for a horrible childhood might be good therapy. It’s not good plot.” “Oh. Well, I’ll have an anvil fall on him on page ten. That will fix it.” “No, you don’t have a plot.” “Maybe he’ll go mad and kill his cousin on page 348 and then spend the rest of the book lamenting it.” “Er… what?”

Without going into other major pitfalls of learning how to do the thing – which would become a manual on how to do the thing – let’s establish that writing novels is hard. It is not as depicted in books, movies and the occasional TV series all about “gathering the material” which involves fun adventures and looking cool. Writing involves a lot of time alone with yourself. It involves a lot of time cursing the keyboard and stalking the house muttering that “Why couldn’t they just fix the spaceship? And what’s with the three legged horse?” while your family members jump out of the way. (Or if they are my family members – two of which, my husband Dan and older son Robert are writers, and the third of which is a writer-in-denial right now committing poetry [and he’s not even apologetic!] – trying to stop you and going “Okay. Tell me why they can’t just fix the spaceship. And what the heck is with a horse in the spaceship? You know that’s been done, right?”)

Worse than that, writing for a living involves navigating a world which until very recently was so loony (and probably will seem even loonier, even if it gets more rational) that I could never get any of my non-writer friends to understand that there was a difference between agents and editors. Heck, the writer in denial in the house confuses them too. (No, I’m not going to insert snark here, mostly because it was a fight I didn’t want to get involved in to begin with.) I tried to explain to my friends about a dozen times, “No, see, the agents work for me. I work for editors.” They would scratch their heads and go “But either can reject you, or say a project can’t go forward. How come?” until I said, “oh, never mind. So, how is that promotion thing at work coming?”

Writing for a living means that: when you’re not actually typing, people think you’re taking time off; most people don’t consider what you do real work; people feel free to project upon you whatever they think writers are “so, you write about women having sex with vampires?” is something I often hear (I can honestly say I’ve yet to write one of those.)

Writing for a living means people assume you’re rich “but why can’t you pay for an $800 a month office? I googled you and you have seventeen books out. J. K. Rowling only has seven and I saw this program…”; people assume you have more control over your career than you did till now “why did you put this cover on your book? It’s ugly.” People want to share their bounty with you “I have this idea for a book” and everyone knows how to write better than you do, “Now, when I write my vampire book, when I retire, there will be lots of hot sweaty sex between chicks and vampires. That will sell. Maybe you’re not J. K. Rowling because you don’t have enough sex between hot chicks and vampires.”

So for most of us it’s an intensive learning curve, hard work, low pay, low prestige occupation. Oh, and it makes the neighbors think you’re weird and possibly a sex fiend.

I have no idea why other people writes. I’m not even sure about why I write, but here it is:

As difficult as it, I write because it is a continuous challenge. I’ve taught and I’ve been a multilingual scientific translator, both demanding jobs. But compared to writing they’re a piece of cake, and they become routine. In writing I invent the job everyday. It’s sort of like building the road and being the first to drive on it. It never gets stale.

As low prestige as it is, I write because I can compete with myself. I never understood status symbols and money beyond enough to be secure tends to leave me cold.

As little as I care for “honors” I write because I want to be read. Story telling implies someone listening to the stories. There isn’t anything more gratifying than getting an email telling me “I was having the worst day of my life, till I read….” And getting five or six of them in a day is better than a standing ovation. These days when I have a few fans, I write because of the pitiful letters asking for more Kyrie and Tom or Thena and Kit, or even “what happens next in the Magical British Empire?” I often find myself putting a note in and going “oh, so and so will love knowing there will be kitty dragons of sorts.”

And most of all, of course, I write because I can’t avoid writing. I write because as far as that goes, I’m a machine for turning world into story.

And this is why I struggled for sixteen years to break in, why I have refused to let the screwed up establishment kill my career, even if it meant writing six books a year (they’d bury my career and it would shove its head out of the grave screaming “Brainz” and lurch merrily on), and why I am now, when the mid century is running full tilt at my face, I am in a way starting anew, in a field that has changed so much as to be unrecognizable and which will require me to learn marketing, as I’ve learned other things in the past – things that weren’t immediately and obviously part of story telling.

Because I can. Because I must. Because I am writer.

And you? Why do you write? And if you don’t, why do you read?

*(Yes, there is another post by that title here – by my friend Tedd Roberts whose Rat Lab is linked from the side bar)

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

At the time I didn’t realize it, but I grew up in a very strange time and place. In the late mid 20^th century, a small town on the outskirts of Porto, Portugal was a bewildering mixture of old and new – our doctoring for instance went from medieval to somewhere around the thirties for the rest of Europe.

Medieval because most of the time you tried to take care of things with herbs and traditional knowledge and, if that failed, you ended up reluctantly sending for the doctor who could prescribe a lot of things but mostly – at least to me – seemed to prescribe aspirin, which people treated with all the careful respect reserved here and now for the more potent chemotherapy drugs.

But probably the feature of my childhood that would strike most people as truly odd was the summer nights. You see, I can’t swear that I had relatives in EVERY corner of the globe. It’s entirely possible that between both families we left Burrundi and possibly Tuvalu untouched. But the impression I had as a kid, was that I had relatives everywhere. And in the summer, they all came back.

My grandmother’s house fronted on the street with only a narrow sidewalk  We lived in the back, where the kitchen door opened to a flagstoned patio. There were stone pillars around the patio and crisscrossing wires above. The wires supported grapevines, which grew in little flagstone-free spaces by the pillars. This was a perfect system because in spring and summer, when the vines were in full leaf, it made the patio a cool place with varying patches of green shade – kind of like being underwater.

In summer, when we had varying (but always largish) numbers of relatives staying with us or with other relatives nearby, everyone gathered at grandma’s for dinner. My grandfather had a deck chair he’d brought with him from his travels (don’t ask) and which was my particular property.

After dinner, for which we always brought my grandmother’s big kitchen table outside, the adults would sit around the table talking and (the men) smoking. I’d setup the deck chair a little ways away and read my comic book while there was light, and then just lie there listening to stories of faraway places.

There were of course stories of marvelous fruits and strange dressing habits, of things people believed in those faraway lands that we knew just weren’t so, and… well, you know. Travelers’ tales. (I’ve often toyed with writing a space-version of my family, maybe as a YA.)

However, this was the late sixties and early seventies and the world was in ferment. More often than not the stories were of societies being upended; of revolutions; disruptions; businesses that could no longer be carried out; governments that failed. The stories talked of the relatives jumping ahead of the turmoil, sometimes just in time, sometimes so late that they left behind all their possessions and everything they’d worked for all their lives. Almost always, they left behind their livelihood: the hotels they’d built, the career they’d established, the shops they’d grown from little stands. These men and women usually in their forties and fifties were moving to new countries, learning new languages and new customs, starting anew.

At the time, of course, the world was very new, and anything that was then had always been. (I always thought now and forever, world without end works perfectly read backwards that way when said by a very young child.) Conditions changed suddenly, unexpectedly. The change wiped out your entire livelihood. You had to retool, learn a new language, go elsewhere. And if you found a safe patch of ground, a place where you could start a business and grow it, you called your relatives and you said, “Hey, guys, this is a great place. Bring the kids!”

I thought this was what it was like being an adult.

I was right.

Perhaps I’ve mentioned on the blog before that when I was fourteen my parents gave me a typewriter. This was very expensive and our family wasn’t doing that well financially at the time. But they knew I wanted to be a journalist and a novelist. So they bought the best machine they could, a manual Olivetti which could take a beating and continue working with minor tuning. It was, after all, something I’d use my whole life.

Only at 22 I got married, and had to learn to type again with a different keyboard, on my husband’s beat up electrical typewriter. (You had to wind the ribbon manually.) I wrote my first novel on that, but proofreading it proved too much for my husband’s nerves. So two years later we bought me a computer, and I learned the programs needed to write, to spell check and to chain the programs (since even with a freakishly large hard drive, we couldn’t keep the entire novel there. So there were tricks and work arounds so the pagination was right when you printed the novel.) And we invested in a daisy wheel printer because I wanted to be a writer, and I was going to use it the rest of my life…

You know how that went. In between a lot more things happened, including my learning the protocols of a new society (well, stereotypes exist because they’re predictive. Portuguese society in general is far less demanding of exactness be it in time-keeping or proofreading) and tried to learn the ropes of publishing. A lot of the books I read on how to write and submit were so outdated that they were actually counterproductive.

And then I took a workshop in the Oregon Coast with Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, and I realized that what I’d observed in publishing made sense, because the field convulsed and changed every few years, upending itself. What used to be “the way to build a career” suddenly was a fast track to nowhere.

Of course, I managed to break in in 2001. In Kris’ post You Are Not Alone she mentions that as the year the industry went nuts. Well… yeah. I only know from nuts. Or, to be more polite, I came in at a time of change faster than any experienced before in SF or the rest of the writing field.

The problem is that change is never uniform. I’ve actually been reading a lot about slow and sudden societal change because it’s relevant to both societies (Eden and Earth) in Darkship Thieves sequels. What I’ve found is that change that is society (or industry) wide happens in pockets and by fits and starts.   Mathematically, it follows the mechanics of a sand pile which seems firm, till it all slides at once.  Worse, it happens before anyone realizes it. Because humans are primates set up to fit in and climb a social structure, we have certain ways of ingratiating ourselves to power. Even the most rebellious of us – stands up to be counted – doesn’t realize how far he/she can rebel. There’s always a “well, that’s just crazy” backstop.

The other problem is that often change seems to be moving in one direction, and then something happens and it turns and runs in the other faster than ever before.

A great part of the insanity since 2001 as far as I can tell came from concentration of power in a few hands. This went all the way up and all the way down and started in 85 or so with the consolidation of the various publishing houses under mega conglomerates; their abolition of slush reading; the emergence of mega-chain bookstores and somewhere around the 90s the emergence of computers and ordering by computer to numbers that didn’t take in account: distribution; cover; “push” or how attuned the book was to local audience. On my side of the business there was the abolition of slush, or rather its moving to agenting houses, which gave the agents a lot of power and took them from being “the author’s advocate and employee” to a de facto first line manager, a middle manager if you will, or perhaps the Metraton taking the word from on high to the masses. If your agent said “this will never sell” you tabled it, because there were very few agents and they all read from the same hymnal. Again, Kris has mentioned this, but there were entire books, entire workshops, an entire industry telling you how to sell to the big six houses and how to sell in such a way that they’d promote and “push” your book. Because without it, your book wouldn’t even be on the shelves.

Yes, publishers could determine how many books you’d sell. That they WANTED to is the thing that never made sense to me, but they thought their duty was to “educate” public taste. (Go figure.) Also, within publishing houses the incentives were set up so that “guessing” correctly how many books would sell was something to be desired and rewarded. And of course, the concentration of the chains and their top-down management style allowed this.

Then in the late nineties I noticed things changing. The internet allowed agents (and one house) to be away from NYC and I thought “uh. I wonder how that will change things, just in terms of experience that allows agents and editors to not live in each other’s pockets? In twenty years, how different will things be?”

And I will confess that for all my knowledge, the thing that took me by surprise is how fast this change has been. Perhaps more so since we’d ALL given up on ebooks ten years ago. And now, as a pocket changes, and then another, our perceptions race to catch up, and the entire sandpile is shifting, moving, reforming.

Humans react to change in different ways. Some antecipate it. Some jump just-in-time. Some lag it. And some stay, toes dug in firmly, refusing to admit anything changed. Oh, and some jump the wrong way. From a bad place to a worse, say.

When you’re in the middle of it, it’s very hard to anticipate. Sometimes if you’re absorbed in your own life and work, you might not notice how things have changed. I confess even when I wrote about the changing times, I didn’t realize how fast they were changing. It was the reaction, the sudden panic and mad fury that what I thought was a rather dull and obvious post inspired that made me realize the sandpile was already moving under me.

Will agents survive? Probably not in the current form, though I’ll note that Europe lags us and the rest of the world still likes dealing with constituted authority. Will publishers survive? – probably. The question is WHICH and in what form. The thing about creative destruction is that you never know who will adapt and who will crash hard. Because my preferred outcome would be to see the conglomerates disgorge some of the nice houses they swallowed it doesn’t mean that’s what will happen. D W Smith says that right now it’s too risky to send stuff to the big six. And he might be right, though of course it depends on what portion of your output it is. If you write six books a year, risking one or two isn’t too bad.

But as The Passive Voice points out, ebooks are the growing segment of the audience. And most of us – myself included – haven’t managed to stay abreast of what was going on, because we were still writing –furiously —  for the legacy structure.

So, come October, I’m headed to the Oregon Coast where Dean Wesley Smith is running something called How to Be Your Own Publisher, which sounds from their description like part workshop, part sharing reunion about how to re-tool for the new publishing age. And I had an interesting email exchange with a writer who has taken a break from writing to create a website with resources for writers for the new working space (I haven’t checked it out yet, but I will and report on it). And I’m working with a copyeditor who is retooling to serve us instead of publishers. Laura Resnick has given us a list of IP lawyers. And… If I had time, and if I didn’t love writing so much, I’d retool into a translation services agency for writers. As is, I hope someone else can do it.

I’m sure someone will, because these things tend to organize spontaneously.

One of the things I like about this change is that writers are coming together.  the old system gave us the impression that you had to climb up over the bodies of others, but in the new system abundance encourages abundance.  And writers are acting just like my relatives. As each of us finds a patch of ground to get a toe hold in, we email (okay, things have changed) all our “relatives” and friends and say “Business is great here. Let me teach you how you grow this new, weird fruit.  Come along, and bring the kids.”

And as we learn from each other, we build the shape of what will be “the way we do things” in the probably not too distant future.

This time the future taking shape seems to be, much like the one in the seventies, the death of empires and the fracturing of – in this case intellectual – geography into more idiosyncratic, but ultimately freer spaces. There will be a terrifying time before that freedom fully manifests, and some of us will go under, but let’s try to make it as few as possible, okay?  The end of empires is a terrifying place. And an exhilarating time to be alive.

The future is right ahead. And there’s gold in them there hills. And land so rich you spit on the ground and get a crop. Come quick. Never mind everything you’re leaving behind.  Bring the kids.　

So, here I was, trying to explain the reason I’m unagented, so that I wouldn’t have to answer a bunch of questions at Worldcon, and so that rumors couldn’t circulate that turned this into the big Hollywood divorce.

Can you say “misfire”? Sure, I knew you could. All that’s lacking now to complete this circus is for me to be caught with a blond in a skimpy bikini (and wouldn’t his chest hair look funny poking out of the top) and for Lucienne to be caught with an heavily tattooed contract (No? Are you sure?) and the farce will be complete.

Ah, well, as we know these Hollywood breakups usually are great publicity for both parties. Let’s hope that’s true this time. Lucienne and I deserve it.

I’ve been writing blog posts online for well nigh on ten years, most of them under various noms de blog, and something that I’ve found out is that there is absolutely no way to state something so clearly that someone, somewhere doesn’t take offense. If I wrote a blog post which in its entirety is “Kittens are adorable and cute” someone will email saying I hate dogs, and next thing you know, twitter will be a-twitter with rumors that I am into kitten white-slavery.

Even with all that, I was surprised at the storm in a teacup created by my VERY personal explanation as to why I’d chosen to go unagented for the first time in my career.

I thought I made it fairly clear to all and sundry that I’m not quitting this agenting relationship because I think Lucienne is a bad agent or in any way crooked. On the contrary, I explained up front that Lucienne is a great agent, the best I ever had, and that she is also a fine author. As for the Knight Agency, all the contact I’ve had with them is through Lucienne, save for a party at RWA three (?) years ago.

Not only didn’t I mean to say or imply anything that would hurt Lucienne’s or Knight’s reputation, but I believe – and have told several friends looking for representation – that if you absolutely must go with an agent (and right now, as my post makes clear I wouldn’t) then Lucienne should be your first choice.

Yes, I did say that Knight had become a publisher as well as an agency – I confess that was based on my interpretation of their letter and that some parts of it still lead me to think that they’re treading too close to that line. However, Lucienne is an honorable professional and she says that’s not what they’re doing so I’ll take her word for it. Below I will post their letter (not breaking confidentiality, both Lucienne and her agency have posted it on their blogs already) with notes on which parts led me astray. I will freely admit I might have made a leap of reasoning on that, but it is part of how my mind works to try to figure out how these things would work out contractually and also – as a science fiction author who was taught early not to call a rabbit a schmerp – to strip away semantics and try to understand the essence of something. Again, since there was no sample contract attached to the letter, it’s entirely possible I went one leap of reasoning too far. If so I apologize. I really, really, really am not a kitten white-slaver.

For that matter, my entire post was based on my interpretation of where the field is. I just re-read it and I seem to state several times that I’m working without a net and taking a leap based on my impressions of the field just now.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve posted several times – starting circa January – on the direction of the field and the demise of the gatekeepers.

Having taken the rather momentous step of going unagented, I intended this post as another point in that discussion. I did not view it and still do not view it as an attack on Knight. For that matter, if they had become publishers, I would not view that as something bad necessarily (I love two of my publishers) but only as something that is bad for me right now.

When I saw Lucienne’s email and comment this morning, I was going to be satisfied with simply reiterating the fact that nothing I said in the post on Wednesday was meant to reflect negatively on either Lucienne Diver or The Knight Agency. However, as I sat at my desk, still naked and about to miss my ride to the undisclosed location I call office-ish, a phone call came in threatening me with legal action. Now I learn that Deidre Knight tweeted “So, the blog by @SarahAHoyt stating that we are publishers is fully inaccurate and dangerously misleading.”

So I put up Lucienne’s email to me – yeah, I shouldn’t have labeled my comments as PS, which is confusing, but I was sleepy and trying to get dressed – and said I’d deal with it more fully this evening. So, now I am.

Once more with footnotes – if I had been dissatisfied with the KNIGHT AGENCY or LUCIENNE, or if the post had been about THEM at all, it would have been called “why I’m changing agents” not “why I am unagented.” They were not the main subject of the blog, nor the main focus. Part of the problem seems to be they THINK they are, and so agglutinate comments on agencies and the agency business in general with my passing remarks about what I understood their venture to be.

It is clear from e-mails, tweets and the phone call I received (more on that later) that my thought process and generalizations of the changes in the industry were “misunderstood” by some. So, let me clarify even further.

First, I reiterate what I said in my post and in comments later. Lucienne is the best agent I ever had and she is a very talented author. Nothing I said in the post was meant to do harm to or reflect negatively on her or on the Knight Agency.

With that said, in the original post, one of the first things I said was that the post was “to explain my reasoning” in coming to the decision that it was time to go without an agent. My reasoning and my deductions were based on communications from the Knight Agency as well as others in the field.

When I said “they’ve started their own digital publisher”, I said what it appeared to be true from my understanding of an email. The phrase used in that email was and “assisted self-publishing initiative”. However, several questions were raised that led me to believe they were entering the digital publishing arena. I presume this conclusion was wrong, since they posted the letter and don’t seem to think their words are in contradiction with their statements that they’re not becoming a publisher. Since these are people used to dealing with the exact language of contracts, it must be my understanding that was at fault. I apologize for that fault – But, as I said, the original post was to explain my reasoning, nothing more.

Apparently exception is being taken to comments made several paragraphs below the one referenced. In that paragraph, I noted the following: “First, they’re not transitioning. They’re remaining agents and charging you for the privilege of selling to themselves”. However, I was not referring to the Knight Agency or anyone associated with that agency as is clear when the paragraph is read in context. In the preceding paragraph, I said “I know I’ve said here in the past that this was the logical next step in digital publishing. Agencies already sift through slush. They already promote their writers, to greater or lesser extent. So, why not transition?” Clearly, I am discussing agencies in general and not The Knight Agency in particular.

Later in that same paragraph, I refer to the fact that agencies are loading the deals with upfront costs. Again, in context, it should be obvious that I am speaking in generalities and trying to figure out what a viable agency model will be in the future and not speaking about the Knight agency in particular.

I appreciate the fact Lucienne responded this morning to the post. It is good to know that my faith in her had not been misplaced. However, I still have issues with literary agencies that are supposed to be trying to sell any author’s work to publishers entering any sort of publication role, whether it is as a publisher or as part of an “assisted self-publishing” format. While I do not believe there would be any malfeasance on the part of Lucienne or the agency, it is still too close to a conflict of interest for my liking. (For more on possible conflicts of interest, see here.  Also here.  (That is how I feel and should not be taken as anything more than what it is – I’m uncomfortable with this new role and so, instead of having it strain my relationship with Lucienne and impact how we would work together, because I value her as a colleague, I decided to exit the professional relationship. (As you can see that has worked wonderfully, which should encourage you to take my advice whenever you can, of course.)

Also in response to Lucienne’s comment posted to the original entry, I am glad to know they still believe in the viability of traditional publishing. THAT comment, again, was in generalities. However, having talked to other authors, agents and editors over the last few months, it is clear to me that there are those in the agenting field who do believe traditional publishing is done for. There are some in the traditional publishing field as well who believe this, though I have that information at a remove (or several different removes, since this has come at me through several colleagues) and am therefore not going to pass on particulars. Hence my comment.

If I haven’t said it enough (have I said it enough?) I do want to assure Lucienne, and The Knight Agency, that nothing I said was intended in any way to damage their reputations. In her letter that I posted to this blog earlier today, Lucienne concluded by saying ” I’m very disappointed that you’ve said something very publicly that I feel damages my reputation and that of the agency.　I do hope you will print a retraction.　” While I don’t feel anything I said in the post did this, I hope this new post clarifies that position. I don’t want to damage Lucienne’s reputation. I like her as a professional and as a woman and writing that letter terminating our relationship was one of the hardest, if not the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. (And this blog thing is probably second.)

However, I must comment here about the phone call from the agency which I mentioned earlier. Instead of giving me time to read and respond Lucienne’s comment and e-mail, I was threatened with a law suit. Now, those of you who have read my blog for a while, or even my books, know this is entirely the wrong way to handle me. (I don’t kow tow to bullying.) It is also a bit puerile.

Saying that someone has become an epublisher might be wrong – I’d have been QUITE happy to have posted Lucienne’s clarification of this and hers and Knight’s response, since I have no malice toward either of them. In fact, I was considering how to ask Lucienne for a short statement to insert in my blog (Look, morning, no caffeine, words hard. Particularly when words relate to a misunderstanding I didn’t think could exist.) I suppose someone forgot I live in Mountain time and while I get up at six in the morning, I don’t sit at the computer till eight or later. In fact, in days I go to office-ish, I often don’t see it till the evening. It was a minor miracle I saw that email at all. But apparently, two days after being up that post had become an all-fired emergency that required threatening me.

Be that as it may, last I checked, calling someone a publisher was neither an insult nor a libel. Heck, my favorite publisher has it put on her name tag at conventions. So it would be REALLY hard to make that stick. As is to make the idea that I perceive a conflict of interest as being a problem into a libel. It would be fairly hard to make it stick in any case when speaking of a post that labels itself as my reasoning process – i.e. my opinion.

And worst case scenario, if they managed to make it stick – Guys, I’ve talked about my financial situation before as relates to payments due and also to whatever insanity is going on in the field. And ALSO to two sons in college (note when I reference the field I do not mean The Knight Agency. I know these things can be hard to remember, but I refuse to label all my posts from here on out... I know, this is a hard thing… Just try to remember ’kay?) In the unlikely event they would bring a lawsuit and make it stick, the sentence “you can’t get blood from a stone” applies, and pretty much all I have to spare plus a bit more goes to the IRS.

Of course, a lawsuit would be great publicity. However, frankly, I prefer to write than to engage in publicity stunts. Which is why I’m rather tired of this Hollywood divorce thing, too. Guys, I am not that important to deserve that kind of attention. Just an obscure writer with an obscure blog. Go back to more productive work and let me get back to mine.

So, is The Knight Agency becoming a publisher? According to them, no. I’ll leave it at that. Did I mean to impugn their character? Absolutely not. Do I agree with the path they are taking? No. Does this mean I think everyone should run madly away from them? Positively not.

I was simply explaining my own reasons – and reasoning – for taking the action I did. And everyone informing me by various means that I’m wrong and the Knight Agency is the way to Win The Future or whatever it was, please note I made it a point of saying that making predictions is hard, particularly about the future. While my decisions often cause friends, acquaintances and passing strangers to say “WTF” I don’t think this is what they mean at all.

If you are happy and confident in your going with Knight’s offer, or ignoring it, but continuing to use TKA for your representation, then DO SO. I don’t feel either comfortable or confident, so I’m not doing so. In fact, I think the way the industry is going, I feel better and more confident pursuing opportunities that are hard to do with an agency, including co-op and micro publishing, as I’ve mentioned. Your mileage not only CAN but WILL vary.

Yes, as in all good Hollywood Divorces, while this marriage could not be saved, due to the party of the first part having decided the concept of agency is outdated, the relationship would have been fine with better communication and if someone hadn’t tried to scare someone else with a lawyer. As is… (Waggles hand) I hope all parties involved can find a way to dismount from the soap box and shake hands and be friends, if not now at some future point.

Below is the letter from Knight with my comments in bold below the sentences that misled me. Once more, Lucienne says that I was wrong, and Lucienne is an honorable agent, so I accept that I was wrong. But I do not aknowledge their right to try to intimidate me. Now or ever.

　

Dear Authors:

As you know, The Knight Agency has been working on a very exciting assisted self-publishing initiative that will aid authors in digitally republishing backlist titles, as well as allow clients to publish select front list titles which the author and agency will hand-pick together.　　For example, clients and agents may select novels, collections, or shorts that mainstream publishers may not consider remunerative enough for acquisition, or that the authors and agents believe would be better served by our sleek new system, which will allow us to monitor and act quickly in terms of pricing, promotion, bundling, etc.

I admit here, I said in the blog they “started their own digital publisher”. They call it an “assisted self-publishing initiative.” One of my issues with this is that there can be the appearance that the agent – be it someone from Knight or any other agency entering into this sort of venture – might not put as much work into placing a title with a legacy publisher now that there is another alternative that the agency has a large amount of control over. I’m not saying it would happen. I’m saying there is the appearance that it could and that is something I don’t choose to be part of.

We’ll be taking our standard agency commission of fifteen percent (15%), absorbing all costs except those associated with copy editing. As always in our work as your agents, our objective is to allow you as the author to focus on what you do best, which is writing the most wonderful books possible while we take the time-consuming and tedious business elements off your shoulders. For our fifteen percent commission, we will provide self-publishing assistance in the following areas:

Okay, this was the crux of my problem. They don’t tell me they’re taking the 15% fee to cover the costs, they tell me it is their “standard agency commission.” I am a simple woman who reads these things far too literally, perhaps. “Agency commission, as far as I’m concerned means that they are taking a commission for selling the book. But to whom are they selling the book? Well… to the public. What does a publisher do? A publisher absorbs all costs, cover, etc, then sells the book to the public to recoup those costs and make a profit. Oh, hey, I’m going to be the first to say that 15% is a great deal in relation to what publishers offer. And if that contract has a firm termination date, it might even be a great deal overall. (As someone has noted on a blog, the costs associated with processing a book are arout $300. $1k if you go fancy. While for most small publishers publishing most authors the cost might well never be recouped even at a much larger percentage, the author has to ask himself how much he hopes to earn over the lifetime of the book. Income compounds, see. Suppose your book earns $200 this year but $1k next year and $10k the next… how good the deal is depends on how good your income is. I’m going to say – not just about the Knight Agency’s deal, but about the entire field that an author should insist on any epublishing contract coming with either a termination or a cancel at will after x time.) For all I know the Knight Agency does this. (According to Lucienne, it’s a 2 year term.) I haven’t seen a contract. This is merely a side note for those unfamiliar with digital publishing.

Meanwhile and for the record, the 15% means the agency has to collect it before forwarding the rest to the author, right? Which again is a function of publishers. Again, they say they’re not publishers and I believe it, but do you see the source of my confusion, and the source of my remaining discomfort? I’m perfectly willing to believe it drinks ammonia and eats arsenic, but I hate the fact that this schmerp looks like a bunny, okay? I would never trust it not to dig up the backyard. This is my paranoia and not meant to dispute the opinion of experts.

 

Content editing – the agents will act, as we regularly do, as editors, reading material and offering suggestions for revision.

Line and copyeditor referrals – since none of us are copyeditors ourselves, we’re creating a database of quality freelance editors who can provide line and copyediting services.

 

ISBN Number assignment – we’ll take care of the cost and work of getting an ISBN assigned to your work. Not all venues require an ISBN, but many do, and of course you’ll want the widest possible distribution for your work.

 

My first thought here, after realizing it doesn’t take much time at all to acquire and assign an ISBN, was is there going to be language on the front page of the e-book tying the publication to TKA? If they’re not a publisher, I assume it’s not. On the other hand for the widest distribution some sort of aggregation of titles is often needed, so this statement worried me.  Wouldn’t they need an ISBN that lists them as publisher to take advantage of the aggregation?

Copyright registration – in the event that a book is backlisted, this may already be taken care of, but if a work predates automatic extension or is a new work that requires initial registration, we’ll have it covered and absorb the cost.

Cover copy – although previously published titles will have cover copy, it will be proprietary to the publisher of that edition, and new copy will have to be written.　We’ll handle writing or provide feedback on author-written copy.

Does the agency have final word on cover copy? It is unclear from this provision, especially since it says they will handle writing the cover copy if there is no author-written copy.

 

　

 

Cover design and consultation – we’re well aware that it takes good, professional quality covers to indicate high quality works, and can handle cover design in consultation with the author.

This is one of those areas where I wondered if this would be “expensed” back. Since no sample contract was included with this letter, I couldn’t check there. Other questions that arose were along the line of where was the art coming from and how much decision power would the author have if they left cover design to TKA? If TKA is paying for the cover, would they let an author pick a more expensive artist? If not, why not? WHY is TKA paying for the cover if they’re not a publisher? Do you see how confusing this is?

File conversions to ePub and mobi – this is where a good deal of the work comes in, and it’s something we’re equipped to handle.

This is a wonderful statement, but since this is a new venture for them, I couldn’t help wondering if they were doing the conversion in-house or if they were shopping it out. Also, there is nothing here about whether DRM would be applied, or recommended. If DRM is not applied or recommended, the going rate for this seems to be around $200 to $300, so “a good deal of work comes in” seemed a bit odd.

Uploading files to major retailers – there are many places self-published authors can’t reach on their own, but we’re establishing relationships with e-tailers to make works widely available.

Such as? I will believe they are only assisting self publishers and that they are not a publisher, but since etailers make these relationships with PUBLISHERS, you can see, again, where it left me confused.

 

　

 

Dynamic pricing – as mentioned above, we’ll have detailed pricing plans and will be able to move quickly to change pricing to build sales momentum.

This clause concerned me because it implies, at least to me, that TKA will be in control of pricing. If that is the case, that brings them, again in my mind, very close to the line of becoming a publisher.

Metadata – the agents, in conjunction with the authors, will develop a list of key phrases to serve as tags to increase title visibility on various retailer sites and search engines.

Search engine optimization — When promoting e-book titles, TKA will employ the latest techniques in SEO to maximize search rank visibility

Marketing plan – one of the advantages to the assisted self-publishing program is that The Knight Agency will help promote the works in various formats, including a digital newsletter, a new digital showcase area on KnightAgency.net, on Twitter, in blogs, etc.

Subsidiary rights – as with all titles we represent, we’ll work on the subrights for these books, including film, foreign, audio, etc. at our standard commission rates.

Royalty tracking and payments—collecting and tracking revenue with a variety of digital outlets will require vigilance.　If any problems arise, authors will have TKA as their advocates.

Having talked with a number of authors who have gone the indie route, as well as with small e-press publishers, the major platforms open to e-publishing are quite easy to monitor. Also, my thought here is that it still adds a layer of delay in the reporting. Instead of getting the reports directly from the e-tailer, it will go through the agency and then later to me. While this is normal between a publisher, an agent and author, if you remove the publisher, the agent is reporting on my sales to the public, which IS what the publisher does. Another source of my confusion.

 

　

 

Oversight of existing contracts and obligations—non-compete and option clause language will become even more important in existing print contracts. TKA will have full career oversight, making sure that authors are covered and clear to enter into digital self-pub arrangements.

So can my attorney and honestly, my current one doesn’t charge me in perpetuity for the life of the contract. This is not intended as a comment on TKA in particular but on all agencies. When it comes to midlisters, full career oversight is often somewhat less than exciting, from what I hear.

Down the road, TKA has long-range plans to help clients arrange for print publication of these titles via print-on-demand or other avenues.

We’re developing a simple agreement that states our terms in writing so that our responsibilities and yours are clear.　We have our first wave of titles in the works and anticipate launching the first books in September.　 Please let us know if you have any material you’d like to discuss putting into this program and also, of course, if you have any questions.

This letter was received on the 20^th of this month. No, I didn’t send questions because on the 20^th all it elicited was a sinking feeling that I would have to break the relationship. I’d been suspecting for some time that going unagented was the best for me. The letter just made it real. Should I have sent questions? No. As I’ve said before, I thought that I was better off unagented. The British galleons versus the Spanish Armada in historical terms – the smaller, lighter vessel moves fast in stormy waters. And publishing waters are frankly roiling, just now.

All the Best,

Deidre, Judson, Pamela, Elaine, Nephele, Lucienne, Melissa, Jia and Jamie

Of those above, I’ve had contact with Lucienne and Jia, both of whom I recommend heartily as professionals, should you decide you need an agency. I think that this is the very first time Deidre mentioned me in her tweets in the two? Three? Years with the agency, so hey, the Hollywood divorce was good for something. Frankly, I thought I was too far below her notice to matter, and I’m immensely chuffed that I’m not.

 

 

Meanwhile, for the people who read my blog before the tabloids came by to snap flashes in my face, you’ll be (I hope) glad to know that I finished Darkship Renegade. I’m entering changes and edits right now and hope to send it to “beta readers” tomorrow morning. After that I intend to go on vacation for three days, so, if any of you intends to sue me (hey, maybe the settlement will give you my debts!) or send me email threats for me, my children or my cats, please hold your fire till Monday. I’ll be out of internet reach till then.

* I’m crossposting this at Classical Values and Mad Genius Club, we due apologies to my fellow MGC authors for stomping a bit on Chris’ McMahon’s post and tomorrow’s poster. It simply seemed important this be on all those venues.*

When I started out, like 90% of you, I did what newby writers do – I wrote a good time for my characters.

Look, most of us – unless there’s something seriously wrong with us – don’t like hurting people. Very few writers I know would consider going up to a total stranger and kicking him or her where it hurts. We just don’t have it in us. Much less would most of us go up to our kids or cats and hit them really hard for no reason.

Characters are somewhere between total strangers and kids or cats. In a way, you feel like they’re independent adults, but in another way they’re created by you and at your mercy.

Now, I was a little better than the average bear because I’d read so much. I was aware that characters had to be put through the wringer and twisted at some point. I just reserved the right to do this for two pages, then spend the next hundred pages letting them have fun and get nice things because, duh, they suffered.

It wasn’t very good. I once told a rape in half a page, and the word clothes let alone the word rape or even assault were NEVER used.

So I had to learn to write the hurty parts out. And this particular book, I’m stuck with characters who are in a world of hurt and trying to fix it for almost the entire novel – it just let up a little on the emotional pain fifty pages from the end, and it feels like a weight was lifted off me, even though they still have to fight for their lives and their world.

And here’s what I’ve learned about writing pain and putting your characters through a tough time (I learned this both from doing it and from reading other people who do it – particularly their mistakes. And yes, some of the ‘mistakes’ were published, just not very good):

1 – Your characters got to hurt. No, I don’t like hurting mine, but if I’m reading a book by someone else where all the characters do is get nice surprises, get patted on the back, pick clothes and have breakfast, I’m going to get bored REALLY fast. Even if these people truly are the bestest in any world. The only books I’ve read that fail at this are not published. The only authors I’ve read who don’t understand this rule will never be published. Study the perennial models for stories. I know Cinderella got to laugh and sing with cute woodland characters in the Disney version, but read the real thing. She gets to suffer quite a bit before the triumph. It’s what gives the triumph meaning. (And no, having all the hurt be in the past, so you get to write the triumph part doesn’t work.)

2- Particularly if you hate writing these bits, be aware that your faculty for sensing “enough is enough” or even “ew” will be blunted. You truly don’t need to give us a 10 page description of how the wounds infected after your character got beaten. Most readers aren’t sadists. They want to read enough to know there was damage (not just be told) but they don’t want to be DRAGGED through it. (I’ll grant you most books that do this are horror.) There is a balance. It’s hard as hell to strike, but you can learn it from reading other people who do this well.

3 – Do NOT have your character “magically healed” or some other dodge after some hellish physical torture or some massive fight. Well, not unless it’s part of the setup. My characters in Shifters DO heal very fast. However I make sure they still feel their hurts. It’s just I can get them hurt to where a human would be dead. Particularly do NOT have your character magically healed by forgetting they’re hurt. (The early Laurell Hamilton did this regularly. She only got away with it because the pace of her action was so fast.) Let us see the character coming up from the bottom slowly. The fact he’s vulnerable for a few chapters will keep us on the edge of our seats, too.

4 – DO NOT have your character make some terrible mistake (and create emotional suffering) and then be told “oh, it’s nothing. No, darling, no one suffered because of your faux pas.” This is the emotional/psychological equivalent of instant magical healing.

5- DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES have all your other characters be extra nice to your main character because “he’s suffered so much.” Oh, sure, if your main character is elderly and his sufferings kept his city free or saved a bunch of kids or whatever. Or if your character is a young lady who just got raped. For a chapter or two these get the “poor thing” exemption from SOME of the rest of the cast. But all of them? Forever? And if they’re not in these positions. No. Look, if one of your friends had gone through hell would you cut them slack forever? Or do you at some point say “well, you know, it’s time to put your behind in the past”? (Okay, I like some Disney movies.) And how does an entire city/civilization know about someone’s private suffering, anyway? And why does everyone care? And no one gets jealous? What? Suffice to say I’ve read books like this published, but it’s usually the last thing I read by the author. It’s a newby mistake, where the author is trying to soothe the characters and compensate him for having to hurt him.

6- KEEP PERSPECTIVE. A good test is “if I had a friend this happened to, would it be such a horrible thing?” If you do that, you probably won’t have characters talk about their “great suffering” because they sprained an ankle last year. (Okay, most of this is in romances, but still.) Remember from the ouside the readers don’t care if your baby’s toe is pinching. Imagining you read it in someone else’s book and/or that it happened to a friend of yours will help you figure out how to treat it.

I’m going to get back to my novel. It just feels good to have the characters out of the emotional iron maiden, even if I’m still handling them with brass knuckles…

I’ve talked before about the blissful zone I hit, when everything in the novel comes together and I’m just running to keep up with the writing.

This usually only happens the second half of the novel. The first half, I’m pushing a rock up hill.

However, even while working on the first half, I write much faster than most writers. One of my fans recently asked what my secret was. I don’t have one as such, but I do have a list of recommendations that I THINK will make you a better and faster writer. Some of these apply to all arts. And of course, as always in things controlled by subconscious compulsions, your mileage may vary. If you find it doesn’t work for you, DON’T do it.

However, you might want to try, more or less in this order

1- set a place aside to write in. Make sure it’s a place where you feel comfortable, and arrange it in a way that’s pleasant to you. (i.e. for me, with my hatred of basements, an office in the basement would be a baaaaaaaaaaad idea. Also, for some reason I have to have SF/F posters/pictures on the wall. No, I don’t know why.)

2 – Now that you’re comfy, arrange for the minimum interruptions you can tolerate. What do I mean minimum you can tolerate? Shouldn’t that be maximum? Well, no. When I had toddlers or even young kids, being in an office COMPLETELY insulated from sound drove me nuts. I had to keep my “ear” on them to reassure myself they were fine. Also nowadays I must be where I can hear the doorbell and/or pounding on the door. Why? Because it has happened before some city service needed my car moved, or a friend needed immediate help. If I can’t hear that type of thing I imagine it, and keep checking on the front door.

3 – arrange for MAXIMUM interruptions you can tolerate and no more than that. (Easier said than done. I have two teen boys. Free to a good home. At least during the work day.)

4 – Use an area/computer you don’t use for anything else. If you play games, do email or social media, do it elsewhere. I have an issue with this RIGHT NOW as I use my computer for promo work, reading news AND writing. Makes it very difficult to concentrate. As soon as I can I plan to split those functions. (Now it only happens when I go to “office-ish.” Note however those are my MOST productive days by far.)

5- Find the music that works. Be prepared for this to be a music the WORK needs, not necessarily you. (Yes, one of my series wants Evita, despite my snark about romanticized communism.)

And now, the most important

6- separate writing and editing. If possible, get separate computers for each.

a) when you’re writing WRITE. Give yourself permission to suck royally. (Nowadays I don’t need to do this much, but there were years when I had to rewrite practically every sentence because I’d never met an adverb I didn’t love, and I seemed to am for the most roundabout way of saying things. I often cut books in half when I edited.) JUST stay with the story. Ignore wording, ignore order you’re introducing things. Ignore everything but being in the story and getting it across. There is always time for

b) editing. Do it in a separate computer. Do it after sending the book to some beta readers. Do it no more than three times. And

c) don’t let the editor in your mind when writing. Writing should be pure artistic fun. (I’m not saying don’t have structure, mind. If you’re like me, you HAVE to work out plot/outline in advance. BUT after that, as long as you’re sticking to it losely, have fun.) REMEMBER scenes can always be moved around – later. Wording can and probably will change – later. You can always drop the character that everyone hated – later. Character names can be changed – later. Not sure if that cathedral is where you need it? Make a note and check… later.

This method works for me. Will it work for everyone? I don’t know. But isn’t it worth giving it a try?

(Or Why I’m No Longer Agented)

… or I won’t be when the thirty days for contract expiration run out.

First of all, because dropping one’s agent in publishing is a lot like a Hollywood divorce, particularly when you’ve been together for eight years, as Lucienne and I have, I’d like to say it’s not her; it’s also not me; it’s the field and the way it’s changing (and how fast.) Lucienne was the best agent I ever had and is also a talented YA writer whom I can tell you without reservations to check out. (And now it’s not a conflict of interest.)

To explain what I’ve done, I need to explain my reasoning, which at the time is a little hard since part of me wants to sit around in a robe all day eating rocky road ice cream. (Inadvisable, since I need to finish Darkship Renegades and also because I’m not allowed marshmallows on this diet.) I haven’t been unagented since 97 and every time I dropped an agent before I secured one first. This time I chose not to do so because I think an agent won’t help. I could be wrong, in which case I’ll shop for an agent sometime in the future. However for now I’m alone, working without a net.

Things have changed so fast, you see, that a year ago because it looked like my series might all crash, I was very afraid Lucienne would drop me. Because she’s my fourth agent and because I haven’t even looked in so long, I was terrified of the process of looking and how much it would take away from my writing time. And yet now I voluntarily drop representation. What gives?

Let’s go back to 97, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and publishing houses not only weren’t reading unagented, they were lying about it. I.e., you could send your manuscript, and it would come back in x time with a rejection letter. The editorial assistants had the option of reading slush, but it happened only once in a blue moon. Mostly getting rid of manuscripts accumulating in the little slush room was a task involving putting in a rejection letter and speeding it back to its owner. There were exceptions, even back then. I had a couple of personal rejections. But, by and large, this was the protocol.

Once I understood agents were now the effective slush readers, I started courting agents. My first agent, let’s call her Ms. A, signed me on the strength of a novel now rewritten and published. Then she proceeded NOT to sent it out. And to lie to me about it. Look, the novel was flawed and I knew that. She gave me some re-write advice (good one) and I took it. Why didn’t she tell me about the main thing that made the novel unsaleable? I don’t know. Perhaps she was afraid how a newby would react. Or perhaps she liked lost causes. Who knows?

Eventually, I went to a workshop and there pretty much sold my first novel, Ill Met By Moonlight in proposal. To get the contract it needed only sending it out and getting it formally accepted. I sent out the proposal to my agent the day I got home. Three weeks later I heard through a mutual friend the editor was disappointed I’d dropped the project. So, I started shopping for agent #2.

Agent #2 was my dream agent, the one I’d have wanted first if I had a chance. We hit it off, I hired him right after meeting him. And then… And then I realized he had a “formula” for writing bestsellers, and he was going to make my rather quirky Shakespearean fantasies fit into it. One piece of advice he gave me was very good and it was something that I – frankly – should have known (make emotional action visible through physical action) but I wasn’t ready to understand it. He sold the sequels to Shakespeare for me, taking “a smaller advance than we could, but this will keep us writing on this series a long time.” He was wrong, and even at the time I knew he was wrong. (Someday I’ll do a post on why getting the biggest possible advance was the way to survive, back then.) Oh, Agent #2 also refused to send out anything not in that series.

Agent #3 was a bright up and coming assistant (who I understand is doing very well in her own right now.) Again, we hit it off right away. However, nothing I sent her ever got sent out. Part of this was her fault, part mine. I was badly put off my stride by agent #2. It’s not that I don’t take criticism well (I do. Sometimes too well.) It’s that I don’t rewrite to formula well. Actually, back then I had clue zero how to rewrite. I’ve explained before it’s an art in itself and it takes forever to learn. To put it mildly, I sucked at it. Doing the type of rewrite he wanted me to do was beyond my powers and guaranteed to turn out an awful book. (In fact the book I did this too, the second of the Shakespeare series, has the lowest sell-through of any of my books ever. Yes, even the one with the awful cover.) So I was off my stride and not writing as much as I could. But eventually I was offered a contract with Baen and agent #3 told me it was her or Baen. Well, children… One of them was offering to pay me and I had a mortgage.

This is when I hired Lucienne. It was also the first time I behaved like a real professional and submitted to ten people, then picked among the four that offered representation. And it paid off.

Lucienne and I not only hit it off personally (though not really at first. I was trying to maintain distance, given my experiences) but we also hit it off professionally. In the first year I was working with her we sent off something like sixteen proposals and sold seven (?) of those almost immediately. And I’ve kept busy ever since.

But for the last year I’ve had a growing sense that something was wrong. Part of it was the response to two novels I sent out. I’m not going to detail the response, but it wasn’t just that they were rejected but that the way they were rejected indicated answering cold submissions was no longer part of an editor’s primary job. If I had to guess, I’d say that the same thing is going on with this as went on with slush two decades ago. In this case it is due to shrinking lists and problems with distribution. Publishing houses are either sticking with their stable (Probably 90% of the new authors you see are old pros with new names) poaching bestsellers from each other, or hiring on the basis of “she’s a friend of, who has done well for us.” (This btw makes them absolutely the same as the rest of the hiring field. Yeah, you can still get a job from applying cold, but it’s fairly rare.)

The other part of it is that I’ve been looking at where things are going, how the market is changing and a lot of the things I’d like to try are things I’ll either have to invent (yes, I’m still working out how a subscription would work), things that I’ll have to learn and my agent knows no more about than I do (minor subgenres with obscure presses), things in which no agent can help (publishing through a co-op micro press or publishing myself) and other things that agents (well, understand, with the closing of the publishing field to just a few houses they had to be loyal to publishers, no matter how much they tried to stick up for agents) will simply NOT let you do like absolutely closed names that even the publishers don’t know about. (No, it’s not ethically wrong. Golden Age authors did it. The book is the book is the book.)

I’m not writing off big publishers. I’ll continue working for Baen. However, my relationship with them is of the sort we never needed an agent. (First, I give the publisher Port, then we negotiate – evil grin.) And I’ve got a few novels I’ll be submitting to a couple of houses for highly targeted type marketing that I’m fairly confident of placing, at least if the houses are still there, and if there’s a market for traditionally published books.

And that brings me to the next step. You see, I believe there will be a market. I believe some (though not all) of the large houses will adapt and survive this. However – and this I can’t emphasize enough – the agencies don’t think publishing is going to be with us much longer or that you can make a living off it.

I think part of this is that the agencies are still selling – and well – the books of bestsellers, because that’s what the houses want right now. This is misguided as I think the bulk of their income is still from midlisters. It’s akin to the restaurant that decides that they make the most money off deserts, they in fact lose money off ribs, which brings in most of the customers. So they’re going to take out ribs and serve only appetizers and deserts. (And then are shocked when the bottom line crashes.)

While it’s misguided for publishers, it will take a while for the financial effect to be felt. But it’s being felt by agencies. Us midlisters are by and large a low-work lot, who get our own contracts and keep on going. So we were a good “bulk” money maker for an agent. But now the big houses don’t want no stinking ribs.

Agencies are feeling the pinch from this, and in response they’re doing something which the agency Lucienne works for just did. (To quote my husband who is the sweet side of this association “Well, they’ve got to make a living, somehow. What would you have them do?”) And while I understand it, I want no part of it.

Yep, they’ve started their own digital publisher.

I know I’ve said here in the past that this was the logical next step in digital publishing. Agencies already sift through slush. They already promote their writers, to greater or lesser extent. So, why not transition?

Well, two problems. First, they’re not transitioning. They’re remaining agents and charging you for the privilege of selling things to themselves. (Kris Rusch has written extensively on the conflict of interest present, but it should be obvious to everyone, too.) Second, they are loading the deals with up front costs. (Perfectly understandable, if you’re in a bid to survive, but it makes them much inferior to most micro publishers out there, who will get you cover, proofread and put up your manuscript for a percentage of your earnings which comes out at the same time your earnings do. I.e. you’ll start earning from the first dollar, not after 1k or so is paid back to the “publishing agency.”)

So, agencies who publish you are making a desperate bid to survive and they’re not necessarily the best deal for epublishing. But why do I say this means they don’t think the big houses will survive?

First, because if they thought this was just a trough in sales, they’ve gone through those before without changing their model and they would do so again. Second, because of the conflict of interest. They wouldn’t risk the appearance of competing with the big publishing houses if they didn’t know, in their heart of hearts that the big giants as such are over.

Heck, the big giants think the game is over. Why do I say that? Because they’re not completely stupid. (Individual editors may vary.) They know – they have to know – that if all they keep in their stable are bestsellers, in a year or two the bestsellers will decide that they can make more money self-publishing or from a micro press. They can. And they have the name, so… why not? Publishers have to see this as clearly as I do. So, why go to that model? Unless your whole intent is as a stop gap measure “to keep us afloat just another two years.”

Do I agree with them? Not necessarily. I think some of the big houses will pull back from the abyss. They can still offer value, or at least some of their imprints can, if they uncouple from the conglomerate and develop highly individualized selections and a community that’s loyal to them – say, like Baen. Then they can put their imprimatur on newbies and offer beginners a ready-made public they’d not otherwise have.

So you could say I’m unagented because the agency my agent works for no longer believes the old model is viable, and I don’t agree with their concept of the new model.

Of course, the usual caveats apply. Making predictions is hard, particularly about the future. I could be completely wrong. If I am, I might yet be shopping for an agent. But that will probably be in two years or so when everyone is done making desperate moves to “see us through the next two years.”

Until then, like any good super hero, I’ll work alone. And now excuse me, I need to get out of this bathrobe, take a shower and work.

Maybe it’s my being an Heinleinian (reformed but unredeemable) but while there’s doom and gloom all around, from where I’m standing, the future is so bright, I got to wear shades.

Update:  See the post on July 29 about Lucienne Diver’s letter.  It is entirely possible their letter gave me the wrong idea — though I’d like to note that other agents who became publishers also don’t take submissions, etc. I’d be QUITE glad to post the letter that gave me the wrong idea — it wouldn’t be the first time, or the last I misread something.

I’d like to point out even if Knight is doing what Lucienne says they are and shouldering the cost of the covers, etc it’s a little strange to take a 15% fee — who are they selling it to?  And how?  Why not just take a flat fee to help people with this?  However, that’s nit picking.  For my part I will re-instate that the 15% fee and all sails too close to the good ol’ conflict of interest for my taste and as for me and my own judgement, I’ll have none of it.

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club and Classical Values*