Crash-course preamble: before Apple announced the iPad, it spoke to many publishers about providing content for its new device, which it hoped could be used as an e-reader. Perhaps hoping that the iPad could somehow do for books what the iPod did for music, many publishers–including the six largest corporate publishers, who include companies like Harper Collins and Penguin–made arrangements to distribute content via the new device at a price point of $14.99, 30% of which Apple retained. This seemed a coup for publishers, and flush with excitement over the deal, Macmillan decided it was going to use its new leveraging power to re-negotiate terms with Amazon and its Kindle, where e-books tended to run $9.99 when published by the big six. Why, Macmillan figured, should it accept $9.99 when it could charge $14.99 (nevermind that $14.99 is, at this point, mythical, given that the iPad right now only exists on Steve Jobs desk. So far as I know, we can’t even pre-order it yet)?
Amazon held firm to its price, and then a couple of old white guys fought like only the knew how, by digging in their heels and refusing to budge. If John Sargent and Macmillan were going to refuse their pricing scheme, Jeff Bezos and Amazon decided, well, they no longer needed to sell Macmillan books. Which included a lot of imprints, like TOR, Forge, ROC, and myriad others.
And readers, who tend not to care so much who publishes their favorite authors so long as they can buy the books, got hurt. Collateral damage.
Writers? Hurt too. Because most authors have no control over those sorts of things. Certainly not over how much their books cost.
The resulting mess and its Twitstorm highlighted the bigger issue, which is digital distribution, pricing, and information. The appropriate cost of an e-book is endlessly debated because the market is still nascent and nothing has yet emerged as the “right” price point. When Apple’s iPod came out, it established price points: 99 cents per song, $9.99 for most albums, with some bargains thrown in.
Apple came late to the e-book party because Steve Jobs didn’t want to admit he was wrong when he declared “Nobody reads anymore” several years ago. Also because, of course, he wanted to get it perfectly right. That’s what Apple tends to aim for (whether the iPad manages the feat is still anyone’s guess. My thought is close, but not yet). Amazon got to set a price–$9.99–that was widely but not universally adopted. I didn’t hear much about publishers grumbling over the price; all I really heard then, mostly, was publishers hoping to be saved by the Kindle.
For my money, I think even $9.99 is too high. I tend to think e-books’ price should fall around the price we’ve always paid for mass market paperbacks: ~$7.99 or so. Over here, Jeff Vandermeer notes why he thinks the mass market paperback analogy doesn’t work, but I’m not convinced by his argument, if only for the fact that he bases his argument on the mass market paperback business model–i.e., that a book needs to sell a lot of hardcover copies to justify the bulk order of paperbacks–which for me doesn’t make sense because why are we talking about printing books?
I understand why the publishing industry feels the need to justify its own existence. I’m just not sure it can. Read the rest of this entry »
Those of you who’ve read my “The Trouble with Blogging post know that this is something I’ve been thinking about. Hell, it’s part of the reason I’m doing an MBA.
Right now, I’m teaching my students about structure and plot using Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone as a demonstration of a Hero’s Journey plot archetype. Reading it, I’m rediscovering just how excellently Rowling hits every plot point and necessary element note for note, from the Call to Adventure to the Crossing of the First Threshold etc. Harry Potter is really an excellent example of someone who becomes a hero; he certainly doesn’t start out that way. Yesterday, while teaching, I was asking my students what makes people heroes. What do we look for as a demonstration of heroism?
Not a book deal. Yet. Hopefully soon there. Querying and such.
Sitting there in Miami airport, which currently has free Google wifi that doesn’t actually work, or didn’t on my iPhone. My phone goes off with a number I don’t have stored in my contacts. Usually I let such calls go straight to voicemail. Usually it’s a creditor or something. I’m a writer, so payment due dates are like deadlines, both of which I love for the whooshing sound they make as they shoot past.
I’m glad I didn’t. It was the chair of the English department at the college where I’m currently teaching composition. Or was teaching composition last semester. There’s been a lot of alteration to my schedule; when they asked me onboard, they offered me two classes, but they only had one for me by the time the semester started. I took it anyway. This semester around, they’ve switched me out of not one but two classes. I get it, of course; there are a lot of other faculty members who have been there for ages, so seniority gets dibs. I’m still a new guy, only having been there for a semester, and it’s not like I’m tenured or anything. Technically, in fact, I’m still an adjunct instructor, and not a professor, even though they still call me a professor.
The chair told me there was good news and bad news. The bad was that they had shuffled me out of the composition class. I was disappointed by this; they had begun me in one only to shuffle me into the second-half of my first semester class, which I was actually looking forward to as a challenge; I’ve never taught a two-semester course. Never had any student for more than one semester.
The good news, though, was that they had a prose fiction course offered. Which is, like the composition course, a part of the core curriculum, but which is an actual literature course.
This is ludicrously exciting for me. Then again, I’m a giant geek, so of course it is.
I’m leaving in a moment to discuss the syllabus and book choice with the chair. So far I’m hoping to use a few stories by Poe, one by Hawthorne, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Stephen King’s Night Shift and Different Seasons collection (for my money, the finest collections ever published, in any language), and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I think this will work. I know Gatsby will fly, and I saw a few other syllabi include both A Thousand Splendid Suns and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, both of which are rather contemporary and the former of which is decidedly popular (if not exactly genre), but I have a good feeling.
I have a great feeling, in fact. This is gonna be fun.
Edit to add: All books approved. Also given a big book of short stories I can select from. So there’s my week/end.
Just read a post by Jane over at dearauthor.com: “Books as a Business”. It’s a mostly good article with some interesting analysis, though I would change the title, at least; books are what we read, while publishing is a business.
Which aligns with my previous couple of posts, staying on the theme of writing as creative endeavor and publishing as business endeavor. The other day, I was chided on Twitter by dietpopstar for using the word “monetizing” with regard to writing, and who told me I’d “lost my way” as I’m supposed to be “a fucking artist,” and such considerations were “vulgar.” She’s arguably right about my using the word “monetize,” I admit; I probably should have chosen a different word or phrase, like maybe “I gotsta get myself paid, too, yo.” Which, at least, is funnier.
And that’s the trouble with blogging. Not the funnier part. The part about having to get paid.
In the spirit of continuing discussion begun yesterday, as I had planned to, today I found this article at Publishing Perspectives, which muses about whether famous authors should even bother with traditional publishers anymore. It cites as examples authors including Steven Covey, of whom I’ve not yet heard and will research more shortly, as well as Timothy Ferris (The Four-Hour Workweek) and Seth Godin. I’m very familiar with Godin; I’ve read a lot of his blog, and he’s primarily a businessman concerned with marketing and branding but also has myriad interesting thoughts about how to harness the power of social networking and tribes.
All three seem to be businessmen of some nature, and all three seem to make their income primarily through speaking engagements and presentations. Their books are extensions of their content, and not vice versa, which I think is an extraordinary distinction to make.
I think this is precisely the sort of practice that may help us rethink publishing. Let’s face it: in the age of the Internet and at the advent of a new paradigm of digital distribution and consumption, the model as has been used since the Great Depression no longer seems appropriate. Does it make sense, in nearly 2010, to use a content distribution model that has existed since before television?
In taking business classes to earn my MBA in international business and strategic marketing, I have had to come up with a lot of plans. Plans for businesses, plans for marketing, plans for management teams. My latest course required a leadership profile; I had to analyze my three major leadership traits (I chose service, participation, and charisma), as well as create an action plan to not only maintain but also enhance those traits. Those traits weren’t difficult to choose: all my life, I’ve pursued leadership, mainly because I tend to think that leading can often be the best way of serving (which is why service was my first and primary trait). The plans–especially the marketing and business plans–required a lot of research into specific industries we had to choose for ourselves.
Now, I’m pursuing an MBA as an extension of my master’s degree in writing, which I earned in 2008 from USC. Among my most valuable classes (and in some ways my most difficult) were courses with Shelly Lowenkopf and Paula Brancato; I studied the Literary Marketplace with the former and the Business of the Business with the latter. In that former, I learned lots about the differences between book formats, genres, and etc., while in the latter I had to write my first business plan. I struggled there with Paula, because I used the novel I was writing as my thesis, The Prodigal Hour, as my example for marketing and promotions, which was difficult both because I was still writing the damned thing as well as because it’s a difficult piece to sell/market/promote (it’s main plot device is a time machine, but it’s not really a science fiction novel). After graduating from USC, I realized that I was a good writer but still had a lot to learn about the business side of things, so I set about figuring out how to learn what I still needed to know. Given living situations and the state of the economoy, I also wanted to put off student loans, so I enrolled at Regis.
You should totally read the book before you go see it, and if you can get your hands on the audio version: listen to it. Gaiman reads it himself, and it’s brilliantly creepy and hauntingly charming in all the best ways.
I can’t imagine it’s a secret that, if pressed to name a favorite writer, I’d cite Neil Gaiman, and I only say “if pressed” because let’s be honest: why play favorites, right? Still, I’m a big fan of his books, particularly Anansi Boys and Stardust; he’s always seemed to me to have a very instinctual grasp of story. He just gets them.
So, last year, I’d planned to send my book out to a bunch of people, but life, as it so often does, got in the way, and in the end I only managed to send out a couple of copies. One went to Neil. I’d just kind of hoped he’d enjoy it. I’m not sure if I really expected to hear much back from him. I mean, the man’s always seemed busy enough to fill several people’s schedules. For the next, like, five years, at least.
But not long ago, I got the following in the mail:
Neil Gaiman says I rock?
Neil Gaiman says I rock!
I’ll be framing that bad boy, of course.
Incidentally and by the by, Henry Selick’s adaptation of Neil’s Coraline is coming out in the next month or so. It may well be, so far, the first movie of 2009 I’m excited about. The movie’s website is here.
When I first researched graduate school, what seems like all those years ago, one of the first things I did was order books from faculty members at every institution that caught my interest. Some great programs, like Johns Hopkins and Iowa, I had dismissed early because they hadn’t seemed to jibe with my direction, which left places like North Carolina and somewhere in Arizona. I don’t remember all the institutions, and only a few of the authors.
I didn’t have to do that this time around. This time around, NYU came to me with the same certainty as USC; all that’s left is getting in.
Which meant I felt I should familiarize myself with some of the work of some of the faculty members, the stand-outs of whom include E.L. Doctorow and Jonathan Safran Foer. Neither of whom I’ve ever read. Nothing against them, just never seemed like my thing; I’d rather read Neil Gaiman and Harry Potter and Joe Hill, most of the time. For me, the novels whose scope doesn’t stretch much beyond characters coping with ordinary lives have never really excited me so much. I’ve tried reading guys like Tom Wolfe and John Updike, and I generally feel decidedly meh about them. I hate to call it “serious” fiction, if only because it seems to imply that people like Gaiman and Rowling aren’t serious about writing and stories, and I think that’s foolhardy. I’d hate, too, though, to attempt to claim it’s all about marketing, because it’s really not.
Before this becomes a discussion of genre in fiction, though, let’s move on to the reading. Because the first book I picked up was Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Now that the holidays are behind and most people in most places are actually back at their desks, I’ve been giving a lot of thoughts to stuff that needs accomplishing. I decided a while ago that, just like with LA and then again with Denver, regardless of whether I managed to get into NYU, I still wanted to return to Manhattan. In the meantime, however, I of course need to make some coin, and so I’ve been looking into temporary but long-term assignments, including subbing again.
In the meantime, though, there are other things that need doin’.
Like querying. Now that the holidays are over and I’m a little less frantic than I was during the autumn, and now, too, that The Prodigal Hour is well-polished (I thought I had to give it another go-over, and so I did, and oddly, there wasn’t anything I thought I had to change. Which is pretty amazing). Today I gathered a list of agents to continue querying; the last go-round had a few requests for partials but never got beyond that (this is, of course, excluding agents who never responded to queries. There were several, from agents who surprised me. And, I mean, I know it takes time, but we’re talking several months out, now), so now it’s time for a new round. With a new query/synopsis.
And I turned my hat backward, which of course means I mean business. Like whoa.
So there’s that happening.
Admittedly, however, the idea of querying right now is daunting. Always conflicting reports about publishing; seems like every publishing company in the nation is downsizing, laying people off, and closing their doors to considering new writers and their manuscripts, but news of high advances keep filtering down the pike. Tina Fey is reportedly getting $5 million, which sort of makes sense, considering the ‘08 she had, and Laura Bush apparently got high six if not low seven figures (reports vary), which also makes sense given that that novel about her the other year made a lot of coin, but I have to admit, I can’t understand Sarah Silverman’s $2.5 million advance for whatever she’s working on. I mean, the most interesting thing about her was her “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” video, wasn’t it? Is her show even still on? I haven’t read anything about it (or her, for that matter) in ages.
Still, the thing about publishing is that it’s a longer term investment even than the stock market. A novel picked up right now, even if fast-tracked, probably wouldn’t be published until the middle of next year, at least, and that would be fairly speedy.
And hopefully by then the economy will be somewhat better.
In the meantime, though, that’s what I’ll be doing. And, of course, working on new stuff.
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