According To Hoyt

I’ve talked a lot about what publishers are doing wrong in the analysis of the current transformation of book marketing and publishing.

Let me talk about some things one of my publishers is doing very right.

First, let me admit to some built-in bias. For those who haven’t heard the sob story at cons or panels, my first book came out a month after 9/11. This was back when people – even I – still went to bookstores on a regular basis. Only at that time we didn’t. We sat at home and watched the news, and waited for the other shoe to drop. (Well, I did. While writing the third book of the series.)

Because of this, many of the copies weren’t even unpacked at the various bookstores; never made it to the shelves. The sell through was terrible, the laydown on the next book was lower and on the third lower still (according to the iron law of book death spins.)

After that, no one would touch me – yes, this was the year of the seventeen proposals. I could have been Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Robert A. Heinlein rolled into one, and NO ONE would have considered publishing me. Except… Baen did. Through a concatenation of events too long to recount, Dave Drake recommended me to then-publisher Jim Baen, who a few months later bought Draw One In The Dark, the first shifter novel (for now available only in e-format from the Baen website. Good price and no DRM.)

I don’t know if there was a connection, but once Baen had dipped its toe in, other houses bought me too. So, if you like my recent works, remember they wouldn’t exist if Baen hadn’t taken that chance back in… 03?

This is the sort of thing that can’t be paid back. I’ve said before and will continue to say: Baen can publish me as long as they wish to. I would agree to terms from them that I wouldn’t agree on from anyone else. (Not that they offer me worse deals than other houses, mind, but they could, if they needed to. [I can see Baen’s current publisher – Toni Weisskopf – who once told me NEVER to tell anyone I’d write anything for free scowling at me through the computer. I assume she’d tell me never to tell a publisher I’d sell something cheap. Sorry, Toni. It’s still true.])

However, there is a rational reason for my wishing to continue selling to Baen, beyond my gratitude to them.

Baen does a lot of things right. Not everything by any means. I’m a writer. I reserve the right to bitch about covers, grouse about copy editing and moan about distribution. BUT – but, Baen does do some things very right.

One of the things, started by Jim Baen, was the website, with an attached “bar” where the “barflies” gather. Early on I was given my own conference in the bar. The diner is quieter these days, in competition with sites such as facebook and twitter, but it is still a place where I know I can find die-hard fans when I need them. And sometimes I need their psychological support more than anything else.

The other thing Jim did was make stories available in non-DRM format, not treating his customers like dishonest people a-priori. It paid off. I’m not saying Baen is not pirated, but it’s not dying from piracy.

Another thing – and in this Toni is as good as Jim was – is the strong “personality” of the books published by Baen. A lot of people think Baen is only one political color. This is wrong. Regardless of the beliefs of the editors, Baen covers a gamut of beliefs among its writers. In fact, we could start our own UN complete with internal wars and backstabbing. We don’t, but we could. If we weren’t so busy writing.

But Baen books do have a certain – for lack of a better word – flavor. In a literary world in which SF/F is trying to buy a place at the academic table by flaunting pretty words and ignoring plot (not always, but it seems like that’s the preferred mode) Baen goes for story every time.

As a result, they’ve built a strong following that looks for the PUBLISHER’S brand, as well as the writer. If I had a dime for each new-acquired fan who tells me, “I didn’t think this would be my kind of thing, but it’s a Baen book, so I tried it,” I’d have a big pile of dimes.

This, as we go into a time when writers ask “what have you done for me lately?” and “Why shouldn’t I just publish myself?” is the type of thing that adds value and that makes writers think the publishers are earning their money. Brand building, which allows a not-so-well-known writer to find an audience is just the sort of thing e-publishers of the future WILL have to develop.

For now – and reverting to my lol-cat-persona – I’d have to say Baen, u iz doing it right.

Crossposted at Classical Values

UPDATE: thanks to Instapundit for the link! Here I was, cleaning the litter boxes and organizing my research materials in preparation for a weekend of writing and suddenly all these comments hit my inbox! Welcome instapundit readers. Do poke around. I’m sometimes amusing and often outrageous. :)

UPDATE II: Since you’re here and I can’t really serve you tea and cookies, you might as well have some free stuff to download and read. I have some free short stories here: http://cornerbooth.sarahahoyt.com/blueplate.html those links to your right. You can read them online, or you can download them. Sweet Alice is set in the world of Draw One In The Dark and Glentleman Takes A Chance. High Stakes and Neptune’s Orphans are in the world of Darkship Thieves (space opera) a few centuries earlier. (I’m trying to build my future history through shorts as well as novels.) For my historical writing, try The Private Wound, a collection of some (mostly Elizabethan) shorts.

To download — free, though they ask for a donation. It’s free, you do not have to give a donation — my first collection of short stories Crawling Between Heaven And Earth (Dark Regions press 2001) go here and look for my name. These stories were written between fifteen and ten years ago, and some are space opera, but others are fantasy or horror.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only, it’s not like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*crossposted at Classical Values*

In a post a couple of weeks back, Kate talked about “practice pieces.” Pieces you write and feel free to be as out of it, or as in it as you wish because no one will ever ever ever see it. She also said if you don’t have a practice piece going, you should try to get it.

Now, those of you who know of my strong and indelible aversion to writing only for myself are probably thinking “Ah, bet you Sarah doesn’t have a practice piece.”

You would of course be wrong. Sarahs are that way. This particular Sarah has several practice pieces, ranging from snippets that will never go anywhere to fully developed short stories, to partial novels. I don’t have a finished novel, but I have novels I could finish given a couple of days.

Practice pieces – that are started knowing they will never see the light of day or at least never see the light of day in their present form – are things that I’m not sure I can pull off; I’m sure I can pull off but sure I can’t sell; sure I can pull off AND sell but don’t want associated with me, even at the remove of a pen name (or two.)

They are the equivalent of doodling pieces done by artists, which are never going to interest anyone unless you happen to be Leonardo DaVinci.

So, you’re wondering what is the difference between these pieces and stuff you begin and never finish, the never ending bits and pieces that all of us have in file cabinets, on our desks, or in our drive?

Well, practice pieces are sort of part of a pact with yourself. You save them to a special place, perhaps. The fact you know no one will ever see them but you allows you to try things without your friends/editors/fans thinking you’re stupid or not competent or sick or… I often use my practice pieces to experiment with extreme situations and see how far I can push things before I break a character, for instance. Also to feel the power in that sort of situation and figure out how to harness it for others.

Now, mind you, some of my stories do move from the private file – particularly the ones that are fine, but don’t have a market. Markets change. But at that point they must be stories I’m no longer working on, so I don’t feel like I violated my own trust. (Be still. It’s weird in here. If it’s not weird behind your eyes, you’re not a writer.) At that point it is the equivalent of taking a sketch and fleshing it out into a painting.

But most of my stories in the practice file will remain in there forever, safely locked up.

So, do you have a practice file? What do you keep in it? (General, not violating your own privacy.) Do you find it useful? Would you consider having one?

*Mothers Of Boys – a distinct and separate reality

10 – That when the kids were elementary school age and I took them with me everywhere, when they needed to use the bathroom I’d be stuck outside it, hovering like a perv, and yelling at the closed door, “Are you all right in there?” or, sometimes, reduced to asking total strangers – who might be pervs – to see if my kid was still alive in there.

9 – That our culture TRULY had gone off the deep end. Or that any playground monitor in her right mind would try to refer to the police – for sexual harassment – a nine year old kid who – by happenstance – touched a female classmate on the behind while trying to get attention. And that same playground monitor would refuse to believe the kid had no clue there was anything sexual about the behind. (We owned no TV and he was not very “aware” in that way.)

8 – That, as they got older, sometimes the conversation at the table would make absolutely no sense to me. The boys and their father would be ostensibly speaking English and I don’t think it was on highly technical subjects, but I had no idea what they were talking about.

7 – That sometimes I’d function as an interpreter to them, when they interact with the female world of teachers, secretaries and even female friends, “No, honey, what they really mean is…”

6 – That my kids would consider themselves highly traumatized by the times I dragged them to the fabric shop (we never left them with babysitters much) to the point that – nowadays – when we’re off on errands they say “Oh, don’t tell me we’re stopping at the horrible place. I have bad memories…”

5 – That sometime around their early teens boys become interested in cooking, and, if you don’t start teaching them, highly creative. “What do you mean you used all of my jumbo pack of dehydrated onion in an omelet? And you ate it? Ew!” – creative. Or “chocolate, peanut butter, onion and garlic salad dressing” creative.

4 – That it would give me a whole new insight on males. I don’t know how to explain this, except, having been a girl, and having watched the boys and their friends grow up, that boys seem curiously unprotected in the face of the world. It’s like girls have fewer illusions and more technique when dealing with reality. I think I write male characters better because of this, because while it’s hard to encapsulate, it’s impossible to ignore.

3 – That some words would cause everyone in the house but me to crack up at the same time when I’m not trying to be funny – yeah, I know they can be euphemisms, but for heaven’s sake, my hobby IS working with wood. And I DO use tools for that. (All the male readers: STOP GIGGLING. JUST STOP.)

2 – That – Awesome – my clothes never get “borrowed” without permission. Well, save for Halloween three years ago when my white, ruffled blouse became a pirate shirt for one exciting evening. (I hope it enjoyed itself!)

1 – That – Even more Awesome – I’d always have playmates to relive my tomboy days with. The current manifestation of this is that everyone in the house has his own nerf sword, and that it’s not unusual for one of us (not always the boys!) to jump into the hallway bellowing a challenge (my favorite, of course, being “To me, musketeers!” or “En guarde!”) and for the entire hallway to become a scene of mayhem as the other three people in the house join in and the cats try to “help.”

– And the top thing I didn’t know about raising boys: That as they become young adults, I miss having little troublemakers underfoot and wish I could do it all again.

Some stuff to amuse you while I’m working on A Fatal Stain (under pen name Elise Hyatt.)

High Stakes

Click.

The question is always how far you’re willing to go to get what you want. Kill or be killed? Betray or be betrayed? Win or lose? At each step, you place your bets; you take the result. You don’t cry about it. There’s no one to cry to.

Click.

If there were anyone to cry to, the world wouldn’t be in the mess it was in. Every place would be prosperous and free, and everyone would be happy. And some of us wouldn’t have to fight like hell to get out of the holes we’d been born in and some place where we were left alone to live our own way. We wouldn’t have to be ready to kill or be killed…

Click.

The cheap lock to the tiny room I occupied – high up on the North tower of Babylon Seacity – clicked again. This time the sound was graver and resonated, as if a deep cord had been struck in the hollow metal shell anchored to hollow ceramite. My first impulse was to sit up, throwing off both sheets and blankets.

For the rest go here — High Stakes

page down past the story, to the links to download it, download and enjoy.

The young man walked along the streets of Goldport, Colorado, his collar turned up against the November wind, his mind in turmoil. The day before Thanksgiving, and the lights of the shop windows and neon signs puddled like curdled milk on the patches of ice that dotted the sidewalk.

Rafiel Trall might look like a California surfer, with his slightly-too-long blond hair, his seemingly built-in tan, but he had been born and raised in Goldport. He knew of the customary Thanksgiving blizzard, and avoided the ice on the sidewalk without even thinking about it; just like he avoided broad splashes of slush thrown by passing cars.

He’d walked from his parents’ home, a mile and a half away, in the older part of downtown where dignified Victorians set on broad lawns had resisted the various waves of devaluation and now gentrification that had submerged the surrounding areas.

His feet had brought him, as they so often had when he was much younger, to the shabby splendor of Fairfax Avenue, which ran – in a straight line – the length of Goldport and where used bookstores competed for attention with diners, with headshops, with used CD stores, with craft shops. As a young boy, he had frequented the comic book store he was now passing. Later on, his interest had moved to the specialty mystery book store down the street. And he – his entire class, really – had gathered at the Athens down the street for milkshakes and burgers and conversation.

Go here: Sweet Alice page down past the text, download and enjoy.

“The Private Wound”

And THIS is a collection of some of my Elizabethan short stories. As many of you know, I spend so much time in Elizabethan England I probably should pay taxes there. This is (I think) four short stories, two (The Private Wound and Young Fortinbras which kind of is not Elizabethan but sorta is) which have never been published anywhere else.

Elizabeth first heard Robin’s voice in the choir, after compline.

It was the twenty-fifth of January 1558 in England — 1559 on the continent where years were counted from January, instead of March — the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, the day the scales had fallen from the apostle’s eyes.

Elizabeth was the last one to leave the choir, at the end of the line of grey sisters of the tertiary order of Saint Francis.

A thin young woman, her pale face looked out of the dark headdress, its perfect features seeming rather to belong to an ancient idol lovingly carved in ivory.

She lingered and dawdled at the end of the line.

If pressed, she might confess that she wanted nothing more than a respite from the company of the other nuns; like her, cloistered prisoners of this inglorious convent. A respite from company and a moment alone.

Even into the cloister walls, news from London had slipped. Queen Mary had died and the crown of England was tossed, like a child’s glittering toy, between many contenders.

And in this convent, in a distant province, Great Henry’s other daughter walked apace at the end of a line of quiet women while disordered thoughts ran through her head like masterless horses.

The private wound

You know the drill. I promise new stuff soon.

How much reality is too much?

For those who don’t know, while recovering from whatever it was that laid me flat during the holidays and whose coming – I think – caused my exhaustion and decision to go on vacation, I spent a lot of time reading romances. In fact, I’m still reading the stragglers, during my exercise in the morning (it’s funny that I can listen to audio books while walking outside, but walking on the treadmill [have you seen the weather in Colorado?] I need to read a book. I think it’s because outside I’m looking around. Inside, it’s not so interesting.)

Yesterday was the turn of Scarlet Angel by Elizabeth Thornton. It’s a regency, and I thought I knew what regencies were all about, but this one surprised me. It starts with an absolutely riveting scene – the prison massacre during the French revolution.

I was halfway through the book before I realized my exercise time was over, I was done with breakfast, and had just plunked down at the breakfast table and read for an hour.

The book is riveting. What it isn’t is a classical regency romance. I confess the interludes where it lapses into “classic regency mode” including the kiss that is like no kiss didn’t bother me. First, they didn’t bother me because I’ve been reading a lot of regencies, and it was expected. It would be like getting mad because there are drawings in comics. Second, they didn’t bother me because in this particular book she gives a very good reason for the characters to react to each other the way they do: the female is unusually inexperienced (at being a girl, at all), the male is singularly guarded. So their meeting would be devastating.

But once I was done reading the book, it occurred to me to wonder how well it did with romance readers. I wouldn’t have liked it even a week ago when I was sicker and expecting pat, silly regencies. You see, the book, with a little editing to make it lean that way, could have made a very good, scary-good historical.

It wasn’t just the graphic description of the massacre, though that was part of it. One rarely finds anything that graphic, unless the book is either horror or a thriller. It was well done, with a light hand, but still graphic enough to induce sort of a “blow to the head” state.

But what set the book apart from the other romances I’ve read lately, was the realistic scars that both the characters suffer from having come through the French revolution (sort of on different sides. It’s complicated.)

That sort of societal and governmental upheaval leaves scars of course. And yet societies heal after it. Of course. And yet those – both the upheaval and the healing – are devilishly difficult to capture. Most people trying to do it pick one side and make it… facile. Thornton doesn’t. The characters and the situation remain, to the end, complex and complicated and difficult and though there is a Happily Ever After it’s a realistic one. You know this couple will have to deal with their scars – some of them mutually inflicted – for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps the book hit me so hard because right now my current pursuit in my writing is “not flinching away from the real.”

Real in stories doesn’t mean real in the real world. I don’t mean I’m giving up fiction. I mean fiction has a sort of internal logic and internal narrative need which, if ignored, will make the story less than satisfying. Say you read a story where they sacrifice babies, and there’s the woman walking forward, holding a baby, towards the idol. Would you be satisfied if she explains in this case it’s just a blessing-ceremony and she’s not afraid at all? I wouldn’t. The baby can escape but, no matter how repugnant that scene is to write, you must try it… For the sake of keeping it real.

I think Darkship Thieves was the first novel in which I went there. I mean, really went there. It’s certainly the first novel in which I became aware of “flinching” from such moments. The moments I flinch from are weird. I don’t mind hurting characters. Jumped that hurdle LONG ago. But I DO mind my characters – particularly male characters – appearing weak. So when Kit keeps getting wounded, my inner self kept flinching and wanting a less hurtful plot, one in which he wasn’t shown as having any weaknesses. As you can tell, if you read the book, I conquered that impulse.

Now, again, I don’t know if Thornton would have sold better with that book if it had been the “expected” like glancing regency, instead of a “real” book. I know I wouldn’t have liked it half as much. And one must, of course, admire the… chutzpah of mixing something as shocking and as in your face raw as the worst excesses of the sans coulottes with the mannered and expected regency romances. It doesn’t matter how close they were in time, in narrative they’re eons apart.

And I don’t know if my fans want me to or would appreciate it, but I hope I can manage to continue writing “real” stories, for whatever the internal reality dictated by the story is. Real stories aren’t boring. They rip the veil of illusory reality and show us the world – and our mind – as it really is.

So, ebooks throw the publishing field wide, but have some drawbacks.

The first drawback is giving readers a way to weed out the truly awful. Not that readers can’t weed out the truly awful themselves. Of course they can. I weed out bad books by the score any day of the week. I read two pages and put them down. Or download the preview from Amazon, then erase it.

The problem is even getting to the point you know the book exists – the equivalent of browsing your favorite brick-and-mortar bookshelf and finding new books. Amazon “people who bought this also bought” does that, if you make it a regular practice of browsing those – I do – and of downloading the free samples for the kindle. I think – it’s been a few weeks since I bought from them, and the holidays and my anniversary happened in between, so it feels like years – fiction wise allows you to download free samples as well. However the “people also bought” is limited.

What we need in that respect are the equivalent of the books they used to publish, called “what do I read next”. I understand the kindle boards do some of this. That’s a beginning to the solution.

Of course the other part of the solution is for writers to do extensive self-promotion and perhaps there some sort of co-op or banding together (I’m suspicious of co-ops on an instinctive level. They take extraordinary organization to work) to cross promote. I’ve been the recipient of recommendations from my fellow authors – notably Larry Correia, who is an excellent writer, himself (well, my sons think he’s better than I :) ) and Dave Freer, ditto and Ilona Andrews, also ditto – and given the same sort of help when I can. Something like that on a greater scale can help.

Also perhaps websites that hold an “eternal sf convention” where panels are posted on you tube? Or mystery convention, for that matter? Surely there are some of you fans out there who aren’t devoting every minute of your lives to promoting authors! My question to you is “why not?” and my advice is “get to it!”

The problem of gatekeepers and what I’ll call for lack of a better word “recommenders” is more of a problem.

You see, publishing houses have fulfilled two very important roles traditionally. Recently they’ve fulfilled one middling well and the other in general (with exceptions that vary depending on the field) very badly.

The one they’ve done very well is the one of weeding out the sheer unreadable stuff. If you think they haven’t done such a good job at that, you haven’t looked at what they’re culling from. If they err there – and of course, they’re human and they do – it is in using their power to “improve” the readers, which biases them in favor of the less-readable-but-more-moral (for their definition of moral, of course.) Which results in very few Yas with male protagonists, say (because boys SHOULD read about women. Never mind that they don’t as a rule.) It also results in passing up “readable and entertaining but fluff” because they’re looking for the worthy. But in general, if it’s between the covers of a major house, it’s not raw slush. (Oh, there’s one or two, but not usually.)

The function at which most houses today fail spectacularly is that of creating a ‘brand’ and ‘feel’ for their output. In fact, in science fiction, I can think of only one house with a distinctive output – Baen. And that was because Jim Baen molded it to his personal tastes. It’s something that large corporations have trouble doing – no reflection on individual editors.

I don’t need to explain to anyone why the gatekeeper function is important. Well, maybe I do to some of you but that is ONLY because you’ve never read slush. TRUST me on this, ninety percent of it makes your eyeballs boil in their sockets.

Yes, there are side-evils to gatekeepers, particularly if they’re all concentrated in one geographical location and all attend the same parties, etc. Particularly if the job doesn’t pay much. The problem is that greed is one of the cleanest motives human beings can have. Greed and attempting to get sex. Yes, I know that’s heresy, but it’s true nonetheless. If you deny the search for those, you become embroiled in things like power games and prestige which twist the human mind much more than the craving for material goods or satisfaction can.

So we need widely distributed gatekeepers, from various geographical locations and points of view – as varied as the readers would be great, thanks – who have some claim to knowing what they’re doing (there can be many claims) and who can make a living from this. Ideally, these gate keepers would have some means of self-promotion and of promoting their authors – and also of introducing authors to each other and allowing them to form impromptu alliances, which is very needed because writers are often solitary people.

For my money, the most apt institutions to step into this role would be literary agencies. Over the last few years they’ve done pretty much all of the manuscript selection, anyway. More and more they’re scattered all over the country and if they’re not catering JUST specifically to NYC there will be even more of them. And the best and largest ones already have in house publicists. IF I were head of a literary agency right now, or even a successful literary agent in an agency, I’d be looking very hard at transitioning to e-publisher. Perhaps dip my toe in with a few books/stories that I think are wonderful but which won’t fit the very tight market currently.

Publishers could do it too, of course – and here is a great opportunity for medium to small publishers to grow very large, just now. Here I must mention that Baen Books were pioneers in e-publishing and would be the logical house to transition to a bigger part of its inventory online. (OTOH I’m not the publisher, I don’t know all the details, and, no, Toni, I’m not telling you how to run your business! This is just my view from the outside.)

Then there is the function of “recommenders” – less is needed for this, because one presumes someone else has selected the book, had it cleaned up and published (even if self-published.) This would just be a person who recommends certain sorts of books according to his or her taste and creates a “brand” which makes it easier for people to find books they’re likely to enjoy.

This doesn’t require an institution or a reading staff. It requires a fairly devoted and fast reader, with strong opinions and tastes.

Honestly, given time and money and starting right now, there is an opportunity for common citizens, and even mildly-successful writers to do this right now, either by establishing a small publisher or by simply starting some sort of “imprimatur” business, where they give books they approve of a way to put “selected by xyz” button or label on their ebooks. Probably would have to do it for free initially, but a judiciously managed “brand” could be a valuable commodity in two or three years. People probably would pay to get evaluated to maybe get it, since it would add to their ability to sell. Kind of like the “good reading seal of approval”. There would have to be several caveats, of course, like having a set and equal fee for everyone wishing to be read and considered, and I’m assuming a smart evaluator wouldn’t JUST be bribed, which would dilute the brand.

(So, Sarah, why don’t you do it? – you ask. It’s a valid question. Mostly because I don’t have time. I’m too busy writing my own books. Which is why I’m only a silent partner in a micro publisher – because I don’t have time or emotional space to deal with the nitty gritty of day to day work. Also because it’s a long-term, work-towards-the-future job, and I already have one of those.)

This would, needless to say, be easier for someone who already has an online presence, or whose judgement people already value. Someone who has a review blog, say. But he or she would have to be willing to read a lot and put in the work day in day out – oh, and convince the authors to first accept the “brand” for free, and then to pay some amount for it – an amount I expect would increase with the fame of the recommender.

And finally – and this distresses me, because though I belong to two group blogs, I really don’t tend to ingratiate myself with groups of my colleagues (I suspect it’s the too opinionated by half feature of my personality) – there are formal or informal alliances of writers. For instance, I – if/when I put out full novels on my own (I simply haven’t had the time to do it) – would be more than glad to give “back of book preview” space to Dave Freer or Larry Correia, or half a dozen other authors I enjoy.

As for the idea that there is no money in publishing – or there won’t be if there’s so much competition… nonsense. The best ten percent will still be the best ten percent. People will still pay to see more of those writers. And then there is the sheer differential (because of production costs) between writers’ income per volume. If I made, say, $2 per book, I would only need ten thousand people to buy each book (given that writing two books a year is easy) to make a passable income. Right now, to make that income, one needs more like fifty thousand readers. Now, making money in the millions of dollars might be harder. However, even that I’m not sure of, and I suspect time will prove wrong.

However, the “scrum” at the bottom might get bigger and noisier. That’s okay. To an extent maybe the field will become more of a meritocracy. We’ll never eliminate the luck-factor completely, but maybe we can reduce it to something less than all powerful.

In other words, I see an open future of more competition and of potentially far greater rewards for a lot more people. Whether it will happen fast enough that I benefit from it is something else again. I am already benefitting as a reader, though, by being given a far more ample choice.

I am open, btw, to other comments and questions about what can be done to facilitate the transition and better match writers and readers. If some of it interests me enough, I might even do a couple more posts on this.

Okay, so – as a commenter told me yesterday – why do writers still need publishers? What is the point? Why can’t writers self-publish on the web and be done with it?

Let’s dispose of the silly stuff, first. I have had people tell me they could never self-publish because they need “editors” by which they invariably mean copy-editors, btw; or because they need a cover; or even because they need to format it.

These are ridiculous objections because there are free-lance copy-editors. If you can’t afford that, find a friend who will do it for a dinner. If what you need is a REAL editor, you can hire those too. Ask friends or look through the adds in writers’ publications. Ditto for covers. Believe it or not most artists are not that expensive when it comes to using their illustration for a cover. Look over at deviant art or another place where artists post their work, hoping to be noticed. As for formatting, you can usually find instructions on line. (It has occurred to me that if I were unemployed right now and were marginally more tech inclined than I am, I’d start a business formatting books for writers, and arranging them to fit the various publishers/services.)

Now, the real objections – the first one, forgive me, I’m going to sound like a curmudgeon and I’m not. There is a point in any artistic pursuit when you think you are much better than you actually are. It’s in the nature of the beast. You have managed to put something of the picture that’s in your head on paper, in some format. When you look at it, you see what your original idea was.

I’m currently going through this with my drawing/painting. This is why writers groups are so important. A good one, will tell you about the stuff you left in your head. (I’m just not sure I want to take the trouble to get an artists group, since it’s a only something I use to focus the writing and for some publicity. Of course, if I got much better, I could possibly eventually maybe do covers. Um.) But even writers groups can get used to your flaws and blind to them.

I’m not going to say the current publication-process is flawless. I know for a fact that many, many people who are publishable and perhaps even marketable (not the same thing) are simply not getting in. For one, must publishers these days don’t have a reading/slush department and it goes through agents. Which means overworked agents have to find the time to read. I could write several posts on the flaws in that process, alone. Things that slip through, things that the system isn’t designed to do, etc. I won’t. There’s very little point. Suffice it to say it is difficult to get published and while there is an element of meritocracy in it, it’s not absolute.

However, what the element of meritocracy does do is weed out 99.9% of the absolutely unreadable dreck. Even more importantly it weeds out 75% or so of the “nearly there, but not able to keep anyone’s attention but the author’s” which is a subtler distinction. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are the VERY fortunate avoider of slush piles. Anyone who has struggled through a slush pile knows how absolutely horrible the dreck can be and also that a lot of what should be technically perfect keeps “popping the reader out” every two paragraphs. (I’ve learned, if I actually analyze those I find fairly large technical mistakes, like bouncing around between the heads of characters in one paragraph. Or contradicting your scene setting in two sentences, or… But on the grammatical and superficial level these stories look passable. Only, they’re not. They simply wouldn’t hold up.)

Now it is a perverse thing I’ve noted that at that stage of near-publishable most writers are more confident than publishable writers. It could be because people are funny… Or it could be because that too is part of the stage of learning any art or craft. When you’re at near the top, you see fewer flaws than after you study a bit and become even more proficient. Also, some people are naturally hard on themselves, which doesn’t mean they’re bad, and some people are naturally brimful of self confidence, which doesn’t mean they’re good.

I’ve found that amid self-published writers, confidence often outstrips the ability. Not always, mind you, but often enough that even though self-published is no longer a bad word, I like to read a bit of the book before I buy it – even at 1.99 on Amazon. When I disregard this rule, I often get into trouble. And I don’t think I’m the only one. Because self-published is anyone from the raw newby (and I’ve for my sins bought a couple of books that turned out to be just that) who hasn’t read a novel, but by gum hasn’t written one, to the near-readable writer who is often more frustrating, and who has decided he’s “good enough.” Yes, there are also pros bringing out long-lost books. There are people bringing out the one-off book the publisher rejected. And there are first time writers who are flawless.

The problem is distinguishing the gems from the muck. When – to quote Pratchett – gold and muck come out of the same shaft, how do you tell one from the other? Surely you know you’re not going to read EVERYTHING that’s self published.

This is not a problem for bestsellers. I’ll be painted purple if I understand why bestseller authors don’t just go “I’ll publish myself, now.” Unless it is because they want the advance in regular, scheduled payments. Or because a substantial number of their sales are paper. (Yes, you can contract with POD services, but I don’t think those are quite where the price makes them viable for small or one off print runs.)

Even for established mid-listers, the choice is fairly easy. Oh, you’re not going to get as many sales electronic as you would on paper. Yet. But that ratio is changing every month – perhaps every week. And for the occasional extra book or odd novellette, it’s fine. And people know what they’re getting with you.

For a relatively-recent, low-name-recognition mid-lister like myself, things are a little more dicey. If I started JUST publishing myself regularly, I probably could, in time, build an audience. Mind you, it MIGHT take me five to ten years, but I could probably make it. At any rate, it’s worth it enough that I’m starting to dip my toe in that particular ocean.

But what about beginners? How can a beginner writer start off the gate and establish himself? Someone earlier said that perhaps people couldn’t live form writing anymore. I don’t think this is true. Writing, like any craft, will always have a much larger number of hobbyists than professionals, but there will always be money for the exceptionally good. A writer – even I – can only write so much, and if you want him/her to continue writing, you’ll pay. Judging by the near-threatening letters I get (Mostly for the Musketeers Mysteries, but also the Shifter Series) demanding MORE books, I think there are at least some people willing to pay to ensure I continue writing.

The problem as I see it is some sort of imprimatur – some sort of label that distinguishes books that have gone through SOME form of gatekeeping, not nearly like what we have today (couldn’t be anyway, to the extent that it will be a lot harder to control distribution.) Just something that assures the public that someone other than the author has read this book and thought it marketable.

It could range from basically a publisher (I am in fact working with a micro-e-publisher right now, or perhaps I should say involved with it, since it’s in the nature of a cabal of friends) who does the proof reading/editing/cover/coding and at least a modicum of publicizing and who, for its pains takes, say 50% of the profit (which is far more equitable than what we get from established publishers, royalties running around 8%) to simply some form of “certification system” – the literary equivalent of the labels on port wine bottles that say “purveyor of Port to her majesty the Queen since…”

I have some ideas on how this could be accomplished, which I will write about tomorrow.

Continuing my view of the coming of ebooks, I’d like to go into the good things brought by ebooks first.

This is important. There’s a feeling of doom and gloom in the air. Publishers tell us daily they’re on the verge of collapse *because* of ebooks. (This is not exactly true, in my opinion. Look both at yesterday’s post here and at my Mad Genius Club Post on 1/5 for reasons that are pushing the collapse of publishing, reasons that are ushering in ebooks.)

This makes both readers and writers feel odd and insecure. We have people vowing never to read in electronic format, never, never, never, and others reading in electronic format only. We have strange movements in the used-book-sales field. We have people debating anew concepts of copyright and fair use.

For writers it is still more anxiety-making. Our publishers are convinced ebooks are bankrupting them, which has turned their publishing routines upside down and made our careers very precarious.

So, it’s good to remind oneself the coming change has many good features. Perhaps the most important is letting an author take charge of his/her career.

Here, I’d like to talk about Lloyd Biggle Jr’s book, The Still Small Voice of Trumpets. Why would I like to talk about it? You’ll see.

Biggle’s book was one of my favorites as a teen. It is a standard adventure science fiction with a shadowy “federation of planets” type setup. For a new world to be admitted to this federation, it must have a democratic government. However, Earth’s agents are forbidden from imposing democracy from outside. (In the seventies, I was greatly impressed by the motto “democracy imposed from the outside is the greatest of tyrannies.” This runs counter the history of Japan, for instance, but at the same age, I was also impressed by the sudden realization that we’re all naked under our clothes. There are miles and miles of twerpitude on the way to being a grown up – as Pratchett might say.)

The world that our main character – a member of Earth’s secret service, trying to bring about a revolution in this newly discovered planet – is sent to infiltrate is inhabited by a human breed that is absolutely enamored of beauty. In fact, the book starts with a peasant woman risking her life to keep something beautiful.

The mission goes wrong from the beginning, in ways I won’t detail. This post requires me to give away the ending, but even if you know that, the book is a pretty good read, full of fun and resonance.

The main problem the character faces is how to bring about a revolution from within – how to spur the natives, themselves, to revolution. Though the world is ruled by an absolute king, the public is pretty satisfied with his rule. He finally finds the way to make people aware of how tyrannical the king is.

You see, the king can – and does – send anyone who displeases him (or just happens to be in his vicinity when he has a toothache or whatever) to a village of the exiles. This is done by cutting off one of their arms, first. Now, most people sent to these villages are unknowns – the king’s chefs, physicians, servants and probably the occasional minister.

But one category sent there are musicians. The main instrument in this world is a sort of harp. (IIRC) You need both hands to play it. The king, as passionate about beauty as his subjects, loves art and has musicians play before him often. Which means, he has one of their arms cut off fairly often too.

These musicians are known and revered and have followings. But once their arm is cut off, they can no longer play, they go to these villages – they disappear. Their public forgets them.

The main character hits upon the idea of creating trumpets that the exiled ones can play, then has the musicians parade back into civilization playing their trumpets, reclaiming their public – thereby fomenting a coup.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the current state of affairs in publishing has anything to do with tyrannical anything. I mean, bookstores and distributors often seem tyrannical to readers, but I’m sure it’s simply because we don’t understand the imperatives of THEIR business.

We are, however, in the middle of a revolution, and one of the things the e-book tech revolution is doing (amid all the confusion and fear) is giving those writers who were consigned to exile through no fault of their own an instrument they can play, and a road back into civilization.

Writers whose fans forgot they existed; writers who spent years honing their craft only to disappear from view forever, will now be publishing again.

Even better, the books have the potential to be available forever, at no cost to the publisher and/or the writer. This means there is a chance for books that went relatively unnoticed but which deserve notice, to acquire it.

This is – to me, perhaps because I am a writer – the best part of this “revolution”. It gives us instruments we can play. It allows us to come down the road, our capes fluttering, playing our trumpets, allowing people to look at us.

There are many other points pro and con what is happening – many shoals on our way to a happy ending we might or might not read. The most important of these is how the reader will find us – and I do have ideas on how to do that. I’ll be covering those in daily posts probably for a week. But for now, think of the series that were interrupted that you’d like to see finished. Right off the top of my head, I can tell you I WANT to read more of the Lord Meren Egyptian Mysteries (written by Lynda Robinson.) I’m sure you can think of some yourself.

Stop and think – won’t it be lovely to hear again the still, small voice of vanished writers?

Crossposted at Classical Values. Related post at Mad Genius Club

I promised sometime ago to do a series on my views on ebooks – where I think all this is going, and what it means for the future.

First, though, I need to set up the stage – as it were – and explain what, from my perspective, is wrong with the current system of publishing and distributing books. Not my point of view as a writer, so much, though some of the “features” of the current system make any writer except the lucky top 1% want to scream with rage at times.

The thing about being a writer is that you can’t evaluate your own work. You just can’t. It’s entirely possible my work – for instance – gets kicked around by the current model because in some way – quality, thrust, execution – it deserves it. I’m not going to – cannot – dispute that. It is what it is.

However, as a reader, I can complain about the deficiencies I see in connecting with the books I would love, if only I knew they existed. As a consumer, I can complain about the inefficiency of the supply system.

And, because I’m a writer, and know some of the processes behind the scenes, I can hazard some guesses as to why the system is falling short.

Now, like a foot soldier in a corner of the battle field, it’s unlikely I’ll see everything. It’s also likely much of what I see will be inaccurate. I’m not averse to being told I’m full of it. I can only be sure of the results and guess at the causes.

Before I start I want to stress something very strongly: First, this is not the fault of any INDIVIDUAL in this system. The system itself has grown dysfunctional through a series of incremental changes that just piled error on error.

What we hear is that there is no money in publishing, which makes me want to go all LOLcat and say “Capitalism, u iz doing it wrong.”

What I know is that there is plenty of frustration of publishing and it hits at every level. As much as I sometimes want to SCREAM at the system, I’m sure so do my publishers, my agent, and even bookstore managers, regional managers, and possibly – I know very little about those – distributors and publicists.

So, first, from my POV as a consumer – if you count YAs read in elementary school (well, Enid Blyton. It’s like an illness. You’re born in Europe, you cut your teeth on Enid Blyton.) – I’ve been reading as my primary form of entertainment for about forty years.

For much of this time – except when the kids were really young – I read four or five books a day. While the kids were young, I cut back to one a week or so, and I’m now getting up speed again and not counting research read maybe two/three a day. I read while cooking. I read while cleaning. I listen to books on audio while exercising. If someone makes books to read in the shower, I’m sold.

I do not play computer games, save Mah Jong when I’m ill. I do not watch television. I watch maybe a movie a month. Reading is what I do.

When you read at the volume I do and are not very wealthy, you don’t buy every book new. In fact, you either borrow from the library or you buy them in thrift shops, used book stores and – when you’re young and really broke – grab them from the free bins in front of used bookstores.

For many years, I read in bulk, from various sources, used. BUT when I found an author I liked, I ran out and bought him new. Usually his whole work at a fell swop. And from then on, I bought them as they came out. It was worth it. Discovering that one author in ten or twenty that really was memorable and I linked to, was a guarantee of a life-long relationship. I’d anticipate their books coming out. I’d look forward to the next one as to a visit from an old friend.

About… fifteen years ago, I started noticing a funny pattern. I’d find two/three books by an author I REALLY liked that had been published maybe two/three years ago. I’d get excited and try to find his/her other books. And there would be nothing. Just a long silence. I thought “odd. People now a days don’t have stamina. They just want to write one or two books. I guess it’s more of an hobbyist’s world. Maybe Alvin Toffler was right about prosumers.”

I confess after a while this meant my ratio of re-reading increased and my rate of trying to find new authors decreased. You see, it was like a series of first dates, where the other person never called back. You get emotionally tired. What’s the point of finding someone really great, you really, really click with, only to never hear from them again?

It wasn’t till I was a writer myself that I realized what was happening. Those writers hadn’t stopped writing. Or at least, most of them hadn’t intended to stop writing. Any number of them continued publishing under other names. It’s just that the way the system was rigged they could no longer publish under their own names.

From my perspective as a reader, this is a huge, massive problem. If a writer I already know I’ll love is still out there, still publishing, I want to know about it.

Then I noticed another problem. Fifteen or so years ago, when the kids were little, we used to have these “movie date” nights. You know how it goes, you ABSOLUTELY have to get out of the house and away from the kids for an evening.

So, after we put the kids to bed, our friend Charles would come over and watch TV or read to keep an eye on things, and my husband and I would go off to the movies. Because we went to the cheap movie theater, sometimes we had to wait an hour or two for the movie to begin. And sometimes I forgot to take a book with me. So we’d go to the Barnes and Noble across the street from the theater and grab paperbacks.
Only… I started not finding anything I even remotely wanted to buy.

Look, I’m not hard to amuse. Yeah, the books that hit me just so and are memorable and change my life are few and far between. BUT the books I will read serially, as popcorn, are a vast amount. I read science fiction, fantasy and mystery and – though only in the last couple years – even romance. I read history and nonfiction. In a pinch and when absolutely deprived, I’ll read poetry. Heck, I’ve read old textbooks.

That said, there has to be something to the book that seems interesting or amusing – either because it’s new, or because it’s a perfect example of its kind.

Now, publishing has always been a cyclical field of sorts. A way to think about it is that if something hits big, everyone wants some of it. So there were always distinct trends. Like, say quest fantasy (sigh) in the eighties. Or dystopian-end-of-world-sf in the seventies. Or cozies in the early nineties.

However, for all that, there would be variation within the trends and also outside the trends. Yeah, in the eighties (I actually think late seventies. Some of my memory of timing is distorted, because for some of that period I was in Portugal, where trends were different) quests were king. But there were some very nice coming-of-age fantasies and even the beginning of urban fantasy. So, if I didn’t care for or was burned out on the current trend, I could grab one of the also-rans.

Then, sometime in the mid nineties, all of a sudden it was “bookstore of the clones.” All you could find was one kind of book. To me this was incredibly frustrating and it was the reason – as a consumer – I embraced Amazon the minute it started. (Okay, within the month.)

I know brick and mortars think Amazon ate/is eating their lunch because of lower prices. Trust me, that’s not it. I like bookstores. I like browsing in a bookstore and walking home with a bag of books, anticipating the joy of reading them. And because I treat books like candy bars (guilty!) I like finding a book and consuming it that day. The book fits the mood. So, for me to switch to delayed gratification (in the early days Amazon could take a week to get the book to me) was a huge step. But worth it, because I had access to books that never made it to my local bookstore.

The reason for this, I THINK – it’s hard to know, since I’ve never been a bookstore manager – is bulk-buying and treating books like cans of beans. Not, mostly, by bookstore managers, but by regional managers for chains.

It’s like this. It used to be that books were sold by people who loved books. But the advent of chain bookstores and efficiencies and… all that stuff, means that books are stocked for a chain by a tri-state-manager. Those regional managers are very busy people and not necessarily readers. They look at numbers on their computers and predict how the book will sell in three states and what books to stock. Part of this is how much push the publisher puts behind it. Part of it is how much that author has sold in the past. And part is whether the subject appeals to the regional manager – which can depend on whether he read a comic in the same vein, or just saw a movie about it.

Some of the problems with this approach are that three states (which is the normal territory) is a heck of a broad territory. Heck, here in Colorado alone I’d bet the markets for books in Colorado Springs, in Boulder and in Denver is completely different – to the point of being three different markets. Let alone, say, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. Look, when I go to the same grocery chain I shop at, across town, they’ll stock slightly different stuff. In a well-to-do-suburb, the store will stock more organic produce for instance than in a neighborhood with a bunch of retirees, where it will stock more otc medicines. If that’s true for groceries, how can the book market be the same, uniformly, in a whole state, or three states. (The demise of the independent bookstores is something else again, that I don’t have room for in this space. Though a lot of it has to do with competitive pricing. Not all. But I don’t have room to even hazard guesses on those.)

Then there is the fact that not every book is alike, even if they are by the same author. For instance, I LOVE Heinlein. This is not a secret. But there are at least three books of his I can take or leave and it don’t make much nevermind to me. Books that, frankly, if I had read the first five pages in the bookstore and weren’t a completist collector, I probably wouldn’t have bought. This does not predict the next book. Or the next. It just predicts THAT book. His name has not stopped being a good brand. I just don’t care for THAT book.

This is even worse if the writer writes in more than one field. For instance, suppose a writer is primarily a romance writer, but writes a one-off science fiction. Romance has a lay down (number of books that go on shelves in stores) tens of times the numbers for Science Fiction. So, using the same name for both, even though it makes the reader find you more easily, makes the manager consulting his computer decide you’re not viable in romance.

And then, finally, there’s the fact that readers like me – which they now say, in reference to ebooks form the core of the book business – don’t want to read all one kind of book or the same book over and over again. It would be like a glutton forced to eat only cream-center chocolates. Even the most devoted cream-center lover would give up on them. So, we appreciate that casual-readers can be much struck by the latest TV series and want to have a lot of books like that in their store. And these will sell to the casual-readers. Occasionally one or two will sell spectacularly to casual readers. But the hard-core readers like me will read five of them and – unless the trend hits our particular hobby horse, and of course, most won’t – we’ll go “yeah, that was good. Now, for something completely different.”

So, right about now you’re saying “but that’s the bookstores, Sarah. You’ve already said you buy from Amazon. So, you can get more books you love, right?”

Right. To some extent. Except now you hit the other side of the issue. Publishers.

Some say this all started with the ability of stores to return books with no penalty back during WWII, which effectively means any book on the bookstore shelves is a unit on consignment and therefore the risk is COMPLETELY on the publisher. I don’t know. I think that’s part of the trouble, but not all.

Some say the problem were all the publishing house mergers of the eighties, that ended with most publishers under “mega publishers” which are in turn part of giant media conglomerates and often – we suspect – the tax-deduction part of it.

Some say that it was the federal law about inventory being counted like tools (I’m sorry, I’ve heard it referenced, but don’t remember the number) which means any books in warehouses on the first of the year are considered stock publishers have to pay tax on and treated exactly like a warehouse full of widgets or tools.

I know for a fact that print-on-demand, which is the system most publishers now use (with just-in-time delivery) has worsened the problem.

But the problem ultimately is that the publishing houses, themselves, are not invested in 90% of the authors/books they publish. In fact, most of the books being published today, even by major publishers, don’t get a fighting chance. Or any chance. They never make it to the shelves in the stores and any sales they have are word of mouth or Amazon. And even those happen only for a very short period of time because they are put out on micro-print-runs.

The publishing process, simplified to the point of inanity, goes something like this.

Ms. Thistlewhile, the editor, finds a book she wishes to publish. (These days this is done mostly through agents, which is a whole other matter.) She takes it to “meeting” with the other departments of the publishing house.

To “sell” it to the other departments, she must come up with numbers of projected sales, from which she’ll deduce the advance to minimize risks of massive losses, etc. These numbers are based on the type of book it is/how it’s sold in the past; the author’s other numbers; the publicity-push the house will put behind it and, finally, a hunch.

Let’s say this is a first book and Ms. T. offers the standard first book advance – somewhere between 3k and 5k. This dictates the “push” the book gets – i.e. how much pressure the publisher will put on bookstores to actually put it on the shelves. With an advance like that, unless the writer went to school with Ms. T and/or becomes a celebrity between selling the book and having it published, that book will earn exactly that advance. Which means, the book will have a print run of maybe 2.5k. Which means if it gets on the shelves at all it will be less than a book per bookstore in the US.

Now, visualize your normal chain bookstore. Visualize ONE book in that store. Keep in mind the book might be lost/misshelved/never unpacked. (Whenever I do drive by signings, I find half of my books mishelved, not always by the store staff, but by customers who pick them up, carry them around and abandon them somewhere else. Or put them elsewhere, because they intend to return and buy them.)

The manager in his tri-state command room then looks at the figures for that book and decides that for book 2 of the series, they’ll stock only half that amount… You see, shelf space is precious, and that author didn’t sel that well. Which in turn means the publisher puts even less effort into that book. Round and round it goes. Most authors’ names are “dead” to publishing after two/three books. If the author wants to publish again, he or she must use a pen name. Which means any fans that he/she acquired, despite everything, will now be lost and – except in rare instances – never be able to find the author. Who will start again, as a new author. At 3 to 5k advance. Most books have only one printing and that’s it. Even when the used books are being sold at insane prices, the chances of being able to get them on bookstore shelves again are almost nothing and it doesn’t pay for the house to reprint. Unless the writer becomes a celebrity in some other way.

Now, it’s entirely possible if you write a great book, a book SO spectacular everyone can see how great it is, that the house will push despite themselves and that everyone will buy it. I don’t know. Again, I’m a writer – I can’t judge my own work. It seems to me I can’t possibly write only 0.000000001% as well as J. K. Rowling. But perhaps I do.

I do know, though, as a reader, that I can’t buy a book I don’t know exists. And I know, as a reader, that I often find series I would have loved – even now that I buy a lot of books new – too late. By the time I find book one, a year or two after publication, the series has died never to return.

I also know, from listening in when old hands in the field talk, that a 50k print run used to be considered too small to sustain a career, in the great, wonderful days of … the seventies. Nowadays this would be enough to make you a bestseller in most genres. The AVERAGE lay down nowadays is less than five thousand books.

And yeah, there’s lots of “reasons” why – like TV, movies, video games. But the thing about entertainment is that it doesn’t really supersede other entertainment. Radio is still around. Movies are still around. TV is still around. Heck, point and click computer games are still around.

People who prefer reading will still read and look for books. And I’m sure there’s more than fifty thousand people out there who would like to read any given book. If they knew it existed. If it were on shelves. If they could find it.

So – what I’m saying is that the book publishing and distributing business has got in a horrible mess through a lot of factors. And if it seems like I’m dissing the free market… sort of. The free market is a terrible system for linking suppliers and consumers – except for every other system.

There are many factors contributing to make this a mess, and some of them are imposed from outside. Others, simply relate to the fact that society has changed at such a galloping pace in the last fifty years, say. Which means that the system misadapted and moved too-fast/too-slow in ways that made it sclerotic.

The one thing we cannot question is that at this point the system is less than ideal. In fact, it might be so much less than ideal that it’s reached that point when it’s so inefficient that almost anything else would do better.

When this happens in politics, revolutions occur. When this happens in commerce, new ways of fulfilling the consumers’ needs appear. Amazon was one of these. But Amazon was not enough and therefore the development of a radically new way to read – ebook readers – became practical, possible and profitable.

And so we stand, in the dawn after the revolution, blinking into the grey light of morn, wondering where all this is going to lead, and what it will look like when it settles down. And will we have to go through Terror and the guillotine to get to another form of stability?

*Crossposted at Classical Values*