Working on 12th and Greenwich puts me in the heart of the Village, and so, with a few hours off, I made my way just a bit north and east, to Barnes & Noble Union Square, which is even larger than the B&N at the Grove in Hollywood.

Going there made me think a lot about books. Not just because I was surrounded by them.

Used to be, if I went to a B&N, I couldn’t leave without an armful of books. Last week, I had no inclination to buy any at all, and not just due to lack of fundage. Lots of books getting some buzz: I know I need to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo relatively soon, but otherwise? I heard a lot about The Imperfectionists, but I browsed it and didn’t make it past the first half-dozen pages, after which I gave up out of boredom.

This troubles me.

I used to read a copious amount of books, read books the way some people chainsmoke, beginning a new one even before I’d finished the previous one, letting the last few pages of one blur into the first few of the next.

Lately, I haven’t been so interested.

I worry about this a lot, considering books and what’s out there. Seems like the ones that sell the most copies are rarely that good. I’ve come down hard on Stephenie Meyer, whose books I find deeply disturbing on a great lot of levels, but I find lots of other books and trends just as bad.

The mash-up genre for one. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a great punchline, but adding zombies to Austen’s classic just makes it a gimmick, and none of the other examples I’ve heard of prove exceptions to that. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? Android Karenina?

Who’s read Tolstoy, anyway? He’s always struck me as one of those writers who gets a great reputation as gratest novilist evar despite that nobody’s actually ever read anything he wrote. I’ve never met someone who managed through War and Peace.

I’m sure these books are making their publishers a lot of money, but I’m less certain they’re doing anything special for reading or writing or literature or culture. They’re basically fan-fiction, except not as original. Not that there’s anything wrong with fan-fiction, but at least it usually has the good grace to be more original than mash-ups.

Of course, with that I have to confess that Meets Girl is a mash-up. It’s a modern-day, meta-fictional retelling of Faust. It kind of does with fiction (and songs, and movies) what Girl Talk does with music (and if you haven’t heard Girl Talk yet, you must).

It strikes me that the current crop of mash-ups is basically 90s-era Puff Daddy records, one dude rapping (not very well) over Sting and Aerosmith.

It could be more, though.

For example, technically, Shakespeare was basically a mash-up writer. Off the top of my head, I know two of his greatest plays–The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and The Tragedie of Macbeth–were both retellings of then-popular tales. Basically, he took what everyone was already watching performed, added his own genius to it, and went with it. Which I guess goes back to the idea that there aren’t any new stories, only ways to tell them, and maybe I’d be more forgiving of the current mash-up crop if they were any better telling. Shakespeare, when he did it, took something old and made it new by making it something more than it had been; if there were sources for his plays, those sources are never as well known as the new plays themselves.

All the mash-up lit, though? It’s just derivative. Pride and Prejudice will forever stand on its own, with a footnote that some dude once added a few zombies to the original storyline.

***

Am I the only reader who feels like people think I’m stupid? That I can’t handle something new? That the only way to satisfy me is to give me more of the same as before, fill the shelves before me with endless variations on the same basic theme? Do we really need 30 James Patterson novels per year? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think the man’s a machine and I admire what he’s done, as a writer, but there comes a time when playing to public nerve stops being canny and starts being exploitative, doesn’t there?

I’m not against popular fiction; I think the argument can be made that Shakespeare was the most popular fiction writer of his time. His output is meager compared to Patterson or Dean Koontz or Stephen King, but then again how many times have they achieved what he managed pretty much every time out? I’ve taught King at the university level; some of his stuff–particularly his early novellas, but also some of the longer works–certainly achieved something a great deal more important than just “popular”. Koontz’s Intensity is as good a novel as I’ve ever read.

I miss those sorts of books and experiences. Duma Key was not nearly as good as King several years ago. I haven’t read any Koontz since False Memory. I’ve never made it through a Patterson novel.

I used to love browsing books. I used to relish turning pages and getting lost in a story, my only reminder of the outside world the crick in my neck I’d earned finding the novel.

***

This feels, unfortunately, like one of those “Back in my day, _____ was better.” “Back in my day they made some real music, not like the crap you hear on the radio nowadays.” “Back when I was young we had real movies, not 3D gimmickry they’re charging $30 a pop for.”

I don’t know how to change that.

Does there come an age where what is new no longer holds the same sense of wonder as when we were younger?

I’m not sure. I still hear new music I enjoy all the time. I loved Avatar, and many of my favorite movies have come out in the last decade. Truthfully, in fact, I’ve never been one to think that the best had come before; I never liked Hemingway or Steinbeck. I think the best thing Faulkner ever wrote was The Big Sleep‘s screenplay. I always thought, in fact, that fiction–novel-length fiction, at any rate–was young, new, still in its infancy. That the best was yet to come.

I just didn’t realize people were going to think the way to make novels better was to stick zombies in them.

I thought we’d have more fun than that, and be more interesting.

***

Am I the only one? What’re you reading right now? What’re you loving in books?

I’m not going to pretend I can make that interesting.

It was the first business plan I ever conceived, and I tried hard but had difficulty with the course overall, which translated to difficulty with the final project. I knew how to query; I got requests for partials and polite rejections all the time. I’m reasonably good at pitching when I’m not so nervous my heart flutters. When it came time to name competition, I had trouble; I’m a writer, and don’t tend to think in terms of competition. Are Meyer and Brown competition? Part of me hopes so, because I’m about a thousand times better than either, but sometimes the market seems not to care about quality.

That’s a digression.

Part of what was hard for me was thinking of my writing so specifically as a product. Comparing my books to others. For me, it doesn’t; I write them because nobody else did and I wanted to read them.

That’s not what a business plan wants to hear.

***

What a business plan wants to hear is how viable a model any given venture may be.

My first business plan concerned itself with Exciting Entertainment, which I envision as a sort of new media production company. It is whatever I make it. So far, I’ve made it two great novels, a well-received collection, and a somewhat sporadic Internet presence closely followed by those who do at all. I still envision it that way, to some degree, but my personal and professional goals have changed somewhat, I think. I’m quite certain my publishing goals have.

My second focused on Exciting Consulting, which is one-stop author services to which I bring all the experience I have as an editor, designer, and publisher. It’s been very rewarding helping people make their ideas real and tangible.

I couldn’t write those business plans without thinking more deeply about publishing and models, and thinking about it as a business really began to alter my perceptions of the industry as a whole. And eventually I started to realize it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Maybe it shouldn’t. Some of the rejections I’ve gotten have cited the “subjective” nature of the publishing industry, and I hear time and again agents reject manuscripts they “just didn’t fall in love with” for one reason or another. Oddly, these agents never say those things about stuff like Never Fall in Love at the Jersey Shore, but I guess it’s supposed to remain valid? Somebody had to fall in love with Snooki’s bump-it and The Situation’s abs, I guess, right? Someone had to really believe that the most pressing question publishing could possibly answer was how J-Woww and Ronnie gymmed-laundry-tanned their fist-pumping ways into our collective hearts.

Right?

Thing is, business isn’t for subjectivity. It’s like science; it’s meant to be a place for objectivity, data, facts, measurement, analysis. I suppose one could make the argument that publishing is a business that concerns itself with art, which is all well and good, except here again we run up against the problem of Meyer and The Jersey Shore. Which one might bypass altogether by claiming both as examples of “low art,” which is shit that everyone totally fucking loves and goes batshit over but which is vulgar and probably lewd.

Like, say, Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus and the like.

Business is about bottom lines and revenue. Which is where Meyer and The Jersey Shore actually make sense; the latter is, quite literally, beach reading. And lots of people go to the beach. For better or for worse.

So maybe it all actually does work on that level. But on several others besides, I think it’s less viable.

***

To explain what I mean, let me first address what publishing means. Going by Dictionary.com’s definition of “publish,” it means “to issue (printed or otherwise reproduced textual or graphic material, computer software, etc.) for sale or distribution to the public.” This explains why, a few years ago, agents and editors were all universally recommending authors never post writing on, say, a website; publishers want things like first American rights when they buy manuscripts, and posting something online basically uses those rights up.

Years ago, before the Internet, it wasn’t so possible for just anyone to issue printed or otherwise reproduced textual material, nor to sell or distribute it to the public. First, it was expensive; printing all that paper and making books costs money. Second, they take up room. Third, they’re not easy to distribute, and when you do, they’re not easy to sell. Which was where publishers helped. Corporate, New York publishers. They had editors who proofread and developed manuscripts, relationships with printers to print large quantities of books at a discount over printing fewer numbers, and relationships with bookstores, where the public went to buy books.

That part of it made sense.

Some of the rest, however, didn’t, or at least didn’t to me. The two big areas where it seemed to make less sense were concerning advances and returns. When purchasing a book, editors and their publishing houses offer authors an advance, generally in the $5000 to $10000 range (last time I looked at figures from surveys conducted by guys like John Scalzi and Tobias Buckell). Some are significantly less (down to $0) while some are significantly more; Sarah Palin received an $8 million advance for Going Rogue. Now, that advance is against royalties, which means that when, say, HarperCollins bought Going Rogue from Palin and her ghostwriter (you didn’t really think Palin wrote her own book, did you? She can’t even speak an intelligent sentence, much less write one), they must have believed they would sell a boatload of copies, ultimately more than $8 million dollars worth. After which they would pay Palin royalties (generally between 7% and 15% per book, depending on contract).

I think they were actually right. I think it’s sold something like 2 or 3 million copies. At $30 for a hardcover, that’s, what, between $60 and $90 million dollars?

Most don’t sell that many copies. This page has some stats about sales, and it was written by the president of this company, and some of it is pretty startling. Eye-opening.

***

The other aspect of the model that never made sense to me was returns. It is, apparently, a throwback to the time around the Great Depression. Basically, book publishers had to offer to buy back from booksellers any copies of any books the sellers couldn’t sell; otherwise, the seller couldn’t stock it. Cost too much, or something, I guess.

I don’t know how many books get returned. Nor how it works. I do know, though, that it figures into that whole advance/royalties thing. I know that publishers withhold some portion of royalties at some point based on credit returns, some of which haven’t actually yet been made.

It basically just seems to tie up money on everyone’s end.

Do other industries work like this? I’ve never heard of it. Do DVD distributors let Best Buy return unsold discs? Do music labels allow Target to return CDs? I ask because if they do, I’m not aware of it.

Maybe I’m just ignorant.

Of course, maybe it’s also why Tower and Virgin and all went under.

***

Thing is, if you never knew how corporate publishing worked, if you were a writer, right now, and you wanted to publish your stories, you might not even consider the idea of paper. Not at first, anyway. If publishing is distributing information, you’d have all the necessary tools right here, online. If you were a writer, just starting out, or just trying to, and you’d never heard the idea of someone with no advanced degree in either business or law who wanted to take your story to editors with the hope of selling it to them and then withholding 15%, I’m not sure the idea of getting an agent would seem so attractive.

If you were a writer, just starting out, who disliked everything about Rupert Murdoch and News Corp and Fox, would the thought of attempting to get a book deal from Harper Collins even cross your mind?

I’m not sure.

Sadly, I’m not a writer just starting out, and may not have been when it counted. By 2000, I’d already been writing for five or so years. I’d already found the Well and met Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who maintain Making Light and are editors at TOR. I’d already read a lot about publishing, interviews with King and Koontz and Grisham, and the thing about that, when you consider it, is I’d already been exposed to publishing’s idea of what publishing was.

I am, however, an author just starting out. I have that USC master’s, and nearly another, in business, from Regis.

As a businessman just starting out, it strikes me that all the tools are right here. It strikes me that lots of people still love actual, physical books, but that maybe they’re now more about legacy rather than information; so many people read, right here, right now . . . is paper even necessary? Maybe paper’s necessary when you’ve already read and loved something you just want to put on your bookcase, just want to crack open one night alongside a bottle of wine and a new playlist and have an old-fashioned kind of quiet evening.

Because otherwise information has changed. It’s no longer kept in books on shelves and produced only by academics and professionals; it’s interactive, housed in servers and accessed electronically by everyone in the world, who can create and edit and interact and participate with it as they wish, and that’s exciting.

It makes sense why it scares all those corporate publishers, of course. It makes sense why Viacomm wanted to sue YouTube back in the day.

But for writers? For authors and creators?

And most of all, for readers? How many books are readers missing a chance to decide, for themselves, are great because publishers are focused on Palin and The Jersey Shore? If taste is truly subjective, should we really leave the arbitration of it to people whose track record, especially lately, is dubious at best and outright detrimental at worst? Consider the ways corporatization has changed publishing; who, in corporate publishing houses, is really reading books? Overworked editors who have meetings and pitches and proposals and marketing to do, every day, or their assistants, their interns, the ones who’ve just finished their degrees in literature or are still working on it?

***

I’m a writer. All my life, I’ve only wanted to connect to readers to tell stories. When I was growing up, the only way to do so was to pitch ideas to agents, who might take them to editors, who might buy them for publishing houses, who might work with printers to distribute those stories to bookstores who might stick them on shelves for readers to buy.

That is no longer true.

Lately, with iPads and Kindles and nooks and the Internet and digital revolution, there’s been some talk of the death of publishing. Who will save it? How will we save publishing?

Truth is, we don’t need to. If publishing just means the dissemination of information, well, maybe it was folly to believe anyone was ever able to control it in the first place. People say publishing has changed, but publishing has always changed, and it will continue to, because publishing is change, and information is the most basic mechanism of it, truly one of the only things that ever has exacted change on the world.

When I took that course, it was small; by the end of the semester, I think there were only a few students still in it. Part of it was, I think, that the course had been structurally changed; rather than meeting once per week, on a weeknight, like most other courses in the MPW program, we had to truncate the schedule so that we met one Friday evening and all of one Saturday one weekend per month. Paula traveled back and forth to attend.

To back up just a bit, one of the main reasons I chose USC among scores of MFA programs I considered was that it wasn’t an MFA. While it offered fiction workshops for beginning and advanced writers alike, it also offered courses that concerned themselves with publishing as a business endeavor. Each workshop I took, at least to start, not only got us to produce two solid short stories during a brief summer semester but also required us to research markets and write query letters and submit letter and story to editors for publication. I’m sure a lot of my colleagues got their first sales that way.

I didn’t. My first sale was directly to readers.

During that first semester, when I took the introductory Survey of Professional Writing course, I studied non-fiction with Madelyn Cain-Inglese and fiction with Rachel Resnick, both of whom were formative for me in entirely different ways. When I queried publications that semester, I got discouraged, not because of the rejection but because of who was doing the rejection. When I got online to do my research, you see, to find appropriate publications to query that might run something I’d written, what I found were a whole lot of extraordinarily tiny so-called “literary” magazines who paid either in “exposure” or complimentary copies of the issues in which one was published. A few managed to offer $25 per page or even, at the outside, a couple hundred bucks, but the majority of them couldn’t. For reasons of overhead and maintenance; the majority of them were labors of love contributed to and distributed by people who weren’t so interested in payment.

Payment came from the biggies. Esquire and GQ, Playboy and The New Yorker. I’ll be honest, though; I’ve never actually read a Playboy (I’m not one of those people who claims to read it for the articles. Maybe I should), and I hesitate to admit The New Yorker is generally too highbrow for my tastes. I’ve submitted to them, of course; rejections from The New Yorker are probably among the first we get, because we have such high hopes for ourselves when just starting out and so rarely realize the reality of the landscape. As for Esquire and GQ, both seem to have changed their formats over the years, and lately they’ve felt less like magazines than like print versions of . . . well, I’m not sure, to be honest. But I feel like they’ve lost the cohesion they once had. Issues seem more fragmented than they used to. Maybe it’s a design thing.

That still stands. Those are still the biggies. Those are still the hardest to break into.

Don’t get me wrong; I still try. “For Cynthia” got an ink rejection from Mike Curtis at The Atlantic Monthly once upon a time. Said he liked it but, he was sorry to say, it wasn’t for them.

I was just glad he liked it. That was cool.

***

When I was querying for those classes, I ran up against that wall. It was frustrating. Not just to meet rejection but also not to be able to find a market, a venue.

Back then, I had a blog on MySpace that managed a decent readership. So, when I got done writing stories I was really proud of, after I realized the market was so dauntingly small and, well, weird (not to mention: subjective), I decided to take them to that readership. That was when I published my collection.

Doing so was liberating, but also daunting. Not just because of the stigma that was then associated with publishing independently, without corporate sponsorship.

There was so much to do. Writing and editing and proofreading. Layout and design. I’d been an editor for three years, so I knew something about all those things and had experience with them, but it’s so different editing something you’re getting paid to as opposed to putting together something you’re going to put your name on.

It took a while, but it was worth it. I remain happy with the result.

***

The result was not just the book; it was also my entrance into publishing.

I really think that, to really understand publishing (and the problems with it), you have to do it, and be in it. It wasn’t until I put my name on it and created Exciting Books that I understood the problems concerning market and limitations mentioned above were only just the start of it. They were mainly the barriers to entry, not the actual barriers of actually doing it. The actual barriers of actually doing it were very different, I started to realize.

Some, I think, came from publishing independently.

Others, I think, came from publishing at all.

They were things like marketing and promotions, reviews and revenue, cost and conception. Exposure and attention. Talking is great, but all the talking into the void in the world is still just talking into the void.

Which was why I took those classes, first The Literary Marketplace and then The Business of the Business. And after I graduated USC, why I looked around and thought, man, what I really needed was an MBA. I’d gotten a lot better at writing at USC, to the degree that I had to revise much of The Prodigal Hour after graduation solely because the second half, which I wrote while taking a fiction workshop with Janet Fitch, was substantially better than the first half.

It wasn’t difficult, though, to see that the business I had just gotten into, the industry I had just gotten a foot in the door of, had already changed substantially, and might be about to become utterly unrecognizable to those who had been doing it before. Even as I took the Literary Marketplace, even as I took the Business of the Business, I knew everything I was learning was going to soon become outmoded.

A lot of the Literary Marketplace, for example, focused on format. Mass-market and trade paperbacks, hardcovers . . . I’m not sure we even touched digital formats. The differences between ePub and Amazon’s proprietary formats and PDFs, all of which are ideas with which I think authors need now be familiar. Especially as Kindle and iPad and nook will probably ultimately supplant at least mass-market paperbacks, and perhaps even trade. Which is not to say books will ever cease to exist, but the analog versus digital/book versus screen debate always neglects people may want both. I, for one, would prefer to buy only books I’ve loved and wish to save, wish to keep on my bookshelf. I don’t need a room full of books I’ve been disappointed by; for those I’ll have an e-reader, and from it I will delete them entirely with no regret whatsoever.

Like changing the channels on a television or clicking away from a website. No remorse.

***

The most major problem with taking those courses and then doing an MBA, however, is that it changed everything. Because once I started to understand business, I started to realize how little sense publishing, as a business model and as an industry, seems to make.

But I think that’s the next post.

It’s full of the usual names of the young-ish literati. Jonathan Safran Foer, of course, as well as his wife, Nicole Krauss. Gary Shteyngart and Joshua Ferris. Lots of others.

Not really an interesting list. The mag might as well have said “Here’s a random list of forty young writers whose short stories we’ve published over the last decade, or whose books we’ve breathlessly reviewed. Now allow us to pat ourselves on the back for honoring the new literati.”

It’s kind of a sad list, if only because I can’t really see any surprises on it, nor any names the appearance of which would compel me to purchase a book. The mag claims, of course, “these twenty men and women dazzlingly represent the multiple strands of inventiveness and vitality that characterize the best fiction being written in this country today.”

And I just read those names and think: “Really?”

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. I just don’t get these sorts of writers on these sorts of lists. The Telegraph UK published their own list of writers they suggest may be Britain’s best novelists under forty, but sadly, I’ve only heard of two of the names on that list (Zadie Smith and China Mieville).

***

I try to read a lot of books. Even besides the fact that all writers should, I start writing because I loved reading. I tend to write books that I want to read, books I need to write because no one else has done so already and if I don’t, I’ll never get to read them. I’m not one of those writers who says things like “Writing is like breathing” or “I do it because I can’t not.” I don’t do it because I think it’s a calling. I do it because I love writing and I love stories.

I tend to not so much enjoy the books of most of the writers these lists name, and I guess I’m trying to figure out the disparity. I like to think I enjoy good writing. I know I enjoy good stories. Some of the books I love, though, go without much acclaim or mention. Lots of books by writers I think are terrific, who write fun, engaging books, but who will probably never be called “important” by The New Yorker. Or the Telegraph UK.

Or whomever.

And I don’t mean just Stephen King and J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman here. And not even just because none of them are eligible for reasons of age. I wonder if Gaiman would have been included were he younger; this past decade, from American Gods to The Graveyard Book certainly cemented him as a great novelist.

I’m thinking, too, of writers I know from The Nervous Breakdown. I mean, I don’t know the ages of everyone on the site, but I’m pretty sure its founder, Brad Listi, is under 40, and even besides the site arguably should be mentioned for Attention. Deficit. Disorder. alone. Regardless, I know there are a lot of young writers on the site (disclaimer: I’m one of them), all of whom are hungry.

***

I think it worries me because one of my primary concerns is knowing what people want to read, what makes a good book, and the fact that sometimes those two ideas don’t come together. Most of the time, in fact. I’m thinking about the sometimes huge division between books that sell a billion copies and books that receive critical acclaim.

Some of them I get. I still don’t really understand Twilight, but give me a book like The Da Vinci Code and I’ll tell you I can see how and why it worked; Dan Brown may have a lot to learn about writing, but the man’s a genius at structure and plotting and pacing. A little like Patterson, in fact. We’re not going to say their writing is subtle or clever, probably not that it’s any more than just “gets the job done,” but that’s okay, because we’re not reading their books for nuance and clever turns of phrase. We’re reading them for story and idea.

Maybe it’s the opposite for someone like Safran Foer or Ferris. I tried reading the latter’s Then We Came to the End, but I never made it past much of the beginning. I managed to finish Foer’s second book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I liked it but didn’t really love it. I thought it tried a little too hard to be clever.

I guess what gets me is that in neither of them did I notice a particular elevation of style I thought impressive, so far as writing goes.

Of course, I say this but must admit that my favorite writer is Jonathan Carroll, whose books have made my jaw drop on countless occasions. Not a very good storyteller, in terms of structures and plots–maybe a little too steeped in magical realism–but the man can devastate with writing.

***

I guess I just worry, hopefully more as a reader than as a writer. Because if that New Yorker list is true, if those listed really are producing the best of American literature right now . . . I’m not a huge fan of the best of American literature. I feel, in fact, like I’m losing a lot of love for books in general. Lately, while querying, knowing that the Sarahs and the Jersey Shore are getting book deals while I’m not has been frustrating, but I don’t know if that’s frustrating as a reader or as a writer.

Sure, I know it’s certainly partly the latter. But I’ve begun to realize there’s a lot of the former in it, too, because publishers in general seem to just keep publishing more and more, throwing more at the wall and hoping it sticks, and I browse the shelves (or, lately, read the blogs) and find nothing to be really excited about. I’m not excited about Safran Foer or Beck, Palin or Shteyngart, Silverman or Ferris. I’m not even excited about the new Stephen King books. Hell, I picked up the latest Bond novel, Devil May Care, and even that didn’t do it for me.

I know it’s partly my tastes have evolved. I used to love Koontz, for example, but haven’t read anything by him in ages. But it’s also that I can’t figure out what my tastes have evolved toward.

When the choices are Palin or Ferris, Brown or Safran Foer . . . no wonder so many people are writing and reading more online. At least there seems some hope of finding something good. It’s not ADD, not short-attention span theater; maybe it’s that we can’t find anything good enough to hold our attention very long anymore.

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.

***

With the iPad and the Kindle, it’s obvious that there is a market for e-reading and digital content. We want devices on which we can read, and smartphones don’t quite fulfill our needs the way we want them to; the screens are too small, for one. The iPad strikes me as the better option if only because it’s not just for books; it’s for all digital content, regardless of the medium, which strikes me as necessary in our time of convergence.

(The problem there, of course, being so-called ‘vooks’ and the like. I’m not saying we’re never going to want books enhanced by other media. But so far, the implementation has felt like a gimmick at best, and, like the idea of a platform, leaves writers with the mistaken idea that first priority should be more than just a good book.)

The underlying issue becomes one of tension. I’ll leave this point to Stewart Brand who said, at a 1984 hacker convention:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Inherent in that dichotomy is every issue publishing, publishers, distributors, electronics manufacturers, writers, and, most of all, readers face: information is our most valuable commodity but yet in our culture wants to be free. Our culture is based on information–language, music, movies, books, etc.–so of course it wants all the information it can have, which makes that information priceless. If food, water, clothing, and shelter are basic human needs (and that’s what I learned they were when I was in school), information is a basic cultural need.

This basic conflict is the root cause of all the problems publishers are trying to sort out. Piracy, distribution, returns, marketing, promotion, editing, platform . . . it all comes down to the fact that publishers used to model itself as a gatekeeper but can no longer propose to filter the torrent: there’s too much of it, and it’s too strong.

It’s certainly the basis of most piracy: people want music, movies, and now books, but it’s worth remembering that pirating media is not always a matter of free. There are a lot of other factors involved, including convenience and ownership, for two. I’d rather download a DRM-free PDF of a novel than be locked into a publishing format and platform I can’t get out of; over the years, I’ve owned music players from Sony, Koss, Denon, Sansa, and now Apple–who’s to say I’ll stay there? I’ve owned DVD players manufactured by Toshiba, Samsung, Sony, and Panasonic; I never had to re-buy my DVD collection when I bought a new laptop with a new DVD drive.

Publishers, of course, don’t like DRM. They’re scared we’ll copy the files, that we’ll get together as a cohort of twenty or a hundred or a thousand readers, appoint one representative to purchase the DRM-free PDF, and then we’ll all just share it, instantaneously, without remuneration or compensation to the publisher. And it’s possible we would (though I feel unlikely). Which is why, when Macmillan (again?) discussed piracy at a recent conference called Digital Book World, its policy basically came down to fighting it at all costs.

***

Fighting it doesn’t make sense; it is going to occur whether we want it to or not, based solely on the fact that information is so inherently important to our culture. In a recent post over at The Nervous Breakdown’s Feed, Shya Scanlon discussed some issues concerning copyright, and in the comments noted:

I’ve gotta admit I find it somehow more acceptable to download (steal) music and/or movies that have already entered the popular lexicon. It’s like, if as a culture we’re going to go around quoting the Godfather all the damn time, references turning up in everything from advertisements to popular music, I shouldn’t have to pay to see what everyone’s talking about. If I’m going to be necessarily infected by a cultural meme, aren’t I owed the right to experience it firsthand?

Is this what Jeff Vandermeer meant when he titled his aforementioned post about paperbacks and e-book pricing “E-Books and Issues of Entitlement?” He notes:

It’s especially ironic given that the book industry is usually dealing in unit sales of an individual book of under 20,000 copies, whereas other forms of entertainment like movies and music are dealing in unit sales of over 100,000 copies. In other words, there’s not much room for price discounts.

Without acknowledging the vastly different business models of each other industry. Last I knew, movie studios and music labels didn’t accept return of unsold product. Also, it’s worth noting that in each instance, the more major retailers you can think of–including Best Buy and Walmart, for two–sell that product at a steep loss as a way to attract customers to buy bigger ticket items. He notes there’s not much room for price discounts, but I’m sure there he means discounts for readers, considering the steep discounts publishers offer retailers like Barnes & Noble and Borders to stock their books. Well. Wait. I’m not sure of that, and wouldn’t presume to put words in his mouth. But that’s my educated guess, especially given the fact he’s making the case that readers shouldn’t expect any of the perks–including samples and discounts and return policies–publishers offer to retailers. Not that publishers don’t offer samples, mind you, but readers shouldn’t expect them, I’m guessing, because that’s what entitlement means, so far as I know.

Ditchwalk has posted a great response to the piracy issue, as well, with links to other participants in the debate. It makes the point that theft is theft and stealing is stealing but never addresses a pretty big point; namely, whether either is inherently wrong. He makes the point that sneaking into a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert is still taking part of a service for which one didn’t pay, but neglects to address whether it’s wrong. Twitter user and Dear Author contributor Jane L maintains that theft must require some deprivation; in other words, there must be something tangible, because one person has to use it such that another cannot.

That Ditchwalk post is mainly in response to Maria Schembari’s “A Gen Y Reaction to Macmillan’s Piracy Plan.” Which I think makes some good points, but that may be because I think I’m right there at the ass end of Gen X/beginning of Gen Y. That agreement comes down to her simple assessment:

I’m poor. I understand technology, and I guarantee I can find any book online, for free, in 10 minutes or less. You can delete and sue all you want, but at the end of the day the internet is a wide and limitless place, meaning it’s a waste of time, money and energy to fight it. Embrace the change and find another way to make money without a) annoying your audience, b) suing your audience, and c) losing your audience by wasting cash on completely ineffective “precautions”.

It seems that the people most outspoken about piracy–at least book piracy–are guys like Rupert Murdoch and John Sargent. Old white guys who control the entire company. Writers? Yes, some are worried, but how many writers get hurt by piracy, and how many get more hurt entering into bad contracts with their publishers? I’ve read people fear the loss of the possibility of writing full time, but that prompts to questions: who is able to, anyway (given the vast majority of publishing is of mid-list authors who maintain day jobs); and why would you want to? God, writing full time? And doing nothing else? I’d go nuts, I think. But then, I like teaching. I like interacting with others.

For example: why is this the publishers’ battle to fight? Why don’t writers have more of a stake? If paperback and hard cover rights are separated, why aren’t digital rights? Why do Harper Collins or Macmillan feel they own the digital rights to any given work solely because they bought the print rights? If Hollywood writers can strike against studios who are screwing them out of rights and better compensation, why mightn’t novelists do the same? (The SFWA should be more involved here, but they’re too busy enumerating all the possible problems with electronic publishing, rather than exploring how writers could, you know, maybe, use it.)

It’s a question I’m right now considering while querying a novel. I want a publisher to help bring it into print, and I know I need a publisher for retail distribution, because I want the novel to be available on bookshelves.

But digital? I don’t actually require a publisher to get on the iPad; not only does its iBooks store use the ePub format, but the device itself can display PDFs. Unprotected, DRM-free PDFs. I can make that myself. I can sell it myself, hosting it here, for readers to download. I don’t require a publisher to get on the Kindle, or to make an Android app for a book, or . . .

I think publishers are fighting so hard not for survival but for continued relevancy, and I think part of the reason for that is that the same conflict in cultural need for free but valuable information is at the heart of the conflict between publishers and writers, the latter of whom will probably, in years to come, no longer need the middle-man former without some major demonstration of why. Unfortunately, it’s also at the heart of the conflict that I’ve noted as the trouble with blogging, i.e., that same cultural need for information versus every creator’s need for compensation. Ideally, it could be a matter of either trusting that one is good enough compensation will ultimately occur so long as you work hard enough at it (not a good thing to trust, I don’t think) or the always-newly-popular exploring alternate revenue streams (like personalization and such), but that latter especially always struck me the same way vooks have: gimmickry.

I don’t think it is, though. I think there needs to come some resolution between culture and its creators. This may become more important as more of us realize we’re all creators at this point. Because valuable information may want to be free, but the process of coming to that information generally requires long and concerted, dedicated effort over a decent amount of time. On the other hand, it may also come as culture figures out its own way to compensate its creators. If Jurassic Park had no other lessons, it at least taught us that life finds a way, and chances are culture and information will, too. Chances are, in fact, that the solution is really something we haven’t even realized yet. That’s what will make it a solution.

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?

One mentioned worthwhile purpose, and intention.

Which is why I gave up blogging for most of last year. I had no more purpose or intention. My intentions were focused almost completely on other things: recovering from my experiences in Denver, building both better relationships with members of my family and furniture, moving up to New York, getting a decent job, and studying business. I’ve been studying branding and marketing (that’s my main focus, with some digressions elsewhere), but the blog I linked to at the beginning of this post helped me to figure out what’s been niggling at me, and why I’ve felt the need to do so.

Because it’s a totally valid point. It’s something many people don’t like to talk about, marketing and writing-as-product and et cetera; for some reason I can’t figure out, the idea of commodification is terrible for many of us. I think it’s related to the Stephen King/Jo Rowling v. Joyce Carol Oates/John Updike discussion that Miconian brought up in the post wherein I announced the news I’d gotten a job teaching fiction. There’s a certain dichotomy we perceive that something so popular–I’m thinking of the Harry Potter series and Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books, but also of Stephen King–can’t actually be fine. We make the excuse that we don’t mind people’s reading these books as long as it inspires them to read other stuff, too, as if simply sitting down and enjoying a book isn’t enough, really. And then we have guys like Updike, or perhaps Michael Chabon or Dave Eggers, who get to be critical darlings but sell a fraction of the books Jo Rowling does; did anyone line up to buy The Yiddish Policeman’s Union or What is the What?

I admit it’s part of the reason I fear genre categorization for my own books. I have a time-travel novel and a metafictional update of Faust, but I never really considered them science fiction or fantasy, respectively, as I wrote them. Then again, I wonder how much authorial intention has to do with it; I’m not sure Stephen King would say he set out to write The Tommyknockers as a sci-fi novel, or The Dark Tower as an epic fantasy series; I think, especially with the latter, he was just trying to tell the story of Roland Deschain.

I can only guess.

But that intention is, I think, important. Perhaps for nobody but the author.

The thing is, we’re all of us authors now. Perhaps it’s a function of having been active on MySpace and now being active on Twitter/Facebook, but a good percentage of the people I know blog/write/tweet/whathaveyou. Everyone has a content stream. Everyone is a writer and everyone is a publisher.

And very few of us manage to get paid for it.

Because we’ve found other things to return our investment. That spirited sense of community, a digital sense of kinship. Interaction and stimulation we sometimes don’t find elsewhere because in real life there are few places where people with such similar likes and so much in common congregate so closely and in such number. It’s easier online to talk to strangers and to open up to them.

A lot of people in the publishing industry fret about the future of it. These past few days, a group of media professionals and savvy individuals got together at the Digital Book World conference to discuss such things as e-books and piracy and the social marketing and all those sorts of things, and yesterday, while they were in it, the people who are really changing publishing–i.e., you and I–were doing other things. Me personally, here I am aiming at best-selling author, trying to get representation for my novels to sell to editors while studying marketing to better reach readers, and what was I following? The Apple announcement of the iPad. While publishing pros banded together to decide what reactive steps they might take, we published on Twitter and blogged and Tumbld.

Publishing isn’t dying. It’s changed. Corporate book packagers beholden to shareholders are trying to figure out how to continue to exist because while they were trying to react to some changes, more occurred, and now they’re playing a steady game of catch-up to yesterday’s news. Even Apple has now fallen victim to it; if the iPad were at all revolutionary, things would already be revolutionized because the device doesn’t actually do anything new. Everything it manages can pretty much already be fulfilled by a smartphone.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Jobs is right and the convergence is what we’re seeking without actually realizing it. Maybe everyone needs to carry an iPad in our messenger bags in addition to the smart phone in our pockets in addition to the laptop on our desks.

But one thing I noticed? The first app Jobs demonstrated on the device was Facebook.

If publishers are really going to take to using the iPad and doing so well, I’m not certain it’s going to be corporate publishers desperate for an adequate e-book platform to save a failing business model.

I have a feeling that the publishers who are going to make best use of all the new technologies and applications and devices that will be coming our way are you and I. Because that’s what we do. We buy the technologies companies think we want, and then we hack them and mod them and app them to make them what we actually need. Jailbreaking was the best thing that ever happened to the iPhone, and so much of the advancement of tech like Android and Firefox comes not from Google and Mozilla, respectively, not from their corporate overlords, but when we users get our hands on them to build extensions and themes that make them work right, faster, smarter, more efficiently.

A lot of people still refer to the publishing industry, and especially the agents and editors therein, as the gatekeepers of our culture. Except our culture has become a torrent of content you and I have created. It’s possible we’ll still need filters, but we seem to have figured it out okay so far, because it seems like everyone else in the world–politicians, pundits, and publishers alike–are struggling to keep up with us.

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.

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.

I started blogging on MySpace in 2005, and over less than two years the obscure popularity went to my head. I had lost my way then, caring as I did about subscribers and comments and kudos. But see, back then, agents and editors were just starting on their whole “You need a platform if you want a publishing contract” spiel, which I’d call a digression except it’s still prevalent today, which at least makes it an extraordinarily long and consistent digression, but a digression nonetheless. I mean, I know it’s saying that agents and editors require aspiring authors to have a platform in addition to having a great book for readers, but that phrase I just emphasized is never really mentioned, is it? I suppose most people who offer that advice hope that it is already understood, but I don’t think it is.

I admit I got distracted. I admit I got wrapped up and burnt out and it’s really extraordinarily silly to say both.

It was part of the reason for my taking a break from posting writing online for most of this past year.

The other part of the reason was compensation. I’m going to let the Joker make my point here. To wit:

I think that’s a very cogent thought. I still have mixed feelings about the movie, but I think he nailed that one.

For further support, here’s Harlan Ellison discussing the subject in Dreams With Sharp Teeth, in an excerpt that could easily be called “Fuck You, Pay Me”:

I can’t say I’ve spent twice as much setting up and maintaining this blog as I’ve made from it solely because I’ve made nothing at all from it. Most people don’t make any money from blogging. When they do, it’s usually from selling the blog as a book, or maybe from ads.

Now, I have no issue with ads. I used to work in advertising, and I still love great commercials, but this site’s traffic–which has gone to null after I basically left it for a year–is basically null, so I doubt there’s any real point to advertising.

Point is, it’s a lot of effort and work and writing to what is often little end.

Often.

Big word.

Because there are lots of ways to gets paid that gots little to do with money. The Nervous Breakdown is a good example of this; a great community of readers and writers coming together, and I’m not sure I’ve had a more rewarding experience online. Also, I got a drink at the reading in New York! So that’s worth it!

No, but really, my point is that blogging can be a major dilemma for a writer, and especially one just starting out. The writing is about creativity and stories and awesomeness, but publishing and distribution aren’t, and I confess I never started writing just to share the fun stories I was writing; I started writing to share the fun stories I was writing and become a best-selling author and get from it the sort of amount of money and fame that would make Solomon blush.

We see how well that’s turned out so far.

And I realize there’s no romanticism in admitting that. I realize that the idealization is that it’s writing! It’s a solitary pursuit committed by romantic souls who yearn to tell the stories in their hearts to millions of people.

But that’s never been what I’ve thought of it.

It’s a craft. I put as much careful thought and planning into the execution of a good, solid bookcase or bedframe or desk as into a story or novel. I don’t believe in a “muse”; I believe in words and putting them down. Oh, don’t get me wrong; I’ve always believed in sharing it with go-jillions of people–otherwise, why would I write anything down in the first place?

But the idea of writing as a “calling” or something? That it’s some pure pursuit in search of truth or something?

If I thought that idea had any credence whatsoever, I wouldn’t have gone to grad school to study things like craft and structure and story.

***

Then again, though, I also understand it’s no longer enough to just write good books. If it were, I wouldn’t be working on an MBA in business and marketing. If it were, a lot of writers a lot of people have never heard of would be making millions of dollars. And be more well known. And, you know, be read more widely.

There must be a synergistic relationship, but for a writer, or at least for me, it’s somewhat difficult to maintain a balance. How do you separate writing high quality essays and stories and books from writing stuff for a website? The Nervous Breakdown is great in that regard, because it’s high quality stuff for a website, but again, no payment, but again, well compensated. That community does create a totally brilliant experience for all involved.

But then again, I can’t give my creditors my heightened sense of community when they send me account balance statements.

Well. I mean. I suppose I could. But I’m not sure they’d know what to do with it, and besides that, have you ever tried to put a stamp on a heightened sense of community? Slippery little bugger.

Joking aside, part of the problem may be that the best way to market writing is more writing. Filmmakers create a trailer that hopefully gets you to buy their DVD. Musicians put up a few tracks you can stream free and then purchase for a buck or two. Writers–er. Write to get your attention for more writing. This is probably why book trailers have taken off like they have. Like the one for Greg Olear’s Totally Killer:

Which is totally awesome.

Maybe also why Henry Baum (North of Sunset), a writer and musician, is putting together a series of tracks to highlight chapters for his The American Book of the Dead.

Really interesting idea, I think.

***

I think part of the problem, at least for me, is seeing agents and editors make bold claims about platforms without much talk about great books. Then again, considering Going Rogue, Hooking Up with Tila Tequila, and the Twilight series, it’s pretty clear that great books aren’t what command huge advances, publishing contracts, or spots on the best-seller list, respectively.

Thing is, I chose those examples precisely because it gives a moment to talk about platforms. Tequila’s was, arguably, MySpace and VH1; does either audience strike you as likely to rush out to buy books, and hers, if I’m not mistaken, came and went pretty quickly. I really haven’t heard anyone else mention it. I only do because I used it as a case study, so I’m somewhat familiar with it, and because we had similar roots (though hers are darker, whoa!). Palin, on the other hand, had a very different platform of right-wing conservative people who were interested in politics and voted, the latter of which I think is key. No, they didn’t vote in enough number to get her into office, but she is a person who helped inspire people to take action; from a marketing standpoint, that’s one of the most difficult things to achieve.

Worth noting, too, as I learned via Ron Hogan’s Twitter feed, Palin didn’t need an agent, and didn’t have one; rather, she had enough interest from publishers she hired a lawyer to broker the deal. Obviously an enviable position to be in.

But I think the final example is the most interesting, at least from the viewpoint of writing and marketing. Because Stephenie Meyer never blogged and didn’t have Twitter or Facebook. Still doesn’t, so far as I can tell. Neither does Rowling, but neither existed when she started out. And Meyer has already broken beyond Twilight (with The Host).

But still I read agents often opine that they don’t really look at a website unless it’s getting upwards of 30,000 unique visits per month (or some such). About how important it is to build and maintain a platform.

Here’s my point: the most important thing on which writers can build a good platform is good writing, regardless of where it may be, and good writing is pretty much the best way to market more good writing. Also: no amount of site visits or Twitter followers is going to make bad writing good, but trying at either can distract from attention to craft (this is, alas, from experience. I wonder how much better a writer I might be if I hadn’t been so distracted by subscribers and numbers). Finally, and here’s a big one; for people who hope to make a living from writing, marketing and maintaining a website represents a challenge at finding balance if only because it’s sometimes difficult to figure out which writing you’re hoping to make money from, which you’re hoping to use to market, and which you’re just trying to share. Because those three aspects are often not mutually exclusive.

This is a dichotomy and dilemma I fear I will continue to struggle with.

Well. Until I have a go-jillion readers who each give me a dollar so I have a go-jillion dollars and then I can stick it in my ears and bathe in moolah and I won’t have to worry about it anymore.

Because that’ll be awesome.

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?

And the traditional model? Generally, it works like this: an author enlists an agent to represent a manuscript, which that agent brings to publishers. This is, in effect, a small-town sales model, basically the equivalent of knocking on doors, and one reason it’s so good to have an agent is because agents know which editors are buying what for how much, not to mention that many publishing houses flat-out refuse to even consider manuscripts that aren’t agented.

Agents can get higher advances-against-royalties for a book, which is one of the few aspects about a publication contract that is variable. Agents get industry-standard 15% of any revenue authors make; that’s 15% of the advance and of all royalties. Thing is, royalties don’t get paid until the advance is earned backed; authors who get, say, a $25,000 advance don’t see a penny of royalty money until that $25,000 is earned and then the publisher is earning profit, and then authors get some small percentage of that profit (usually something like 7.5% to 15%, and often tiered). Thing is, consider how long it takes a publisher, after discounts and returns, to earn a profit on even a $25 hardcover; even disregarding those sorts of factors, a publisher would need to sell 1000 copies of that hardcover to make $25,000.

And according to this post, roughly 90% of the 1.2 million titles tracked by BookScan sell fewer than 99 copies. Now, obviously, those numbers range widely, but it’s certainly true that even publishers who operate at a profit tend to on a razor-thin one. This is why so many publishers rely on big books by Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Stephenie Meyer; they are guaranteed sales and, by extension, profit.

Doesn’t something have to give?

Now there are endeavors like Harper’s Studio imprint, which does away with advances in return for offering authors a higher share in the profit. This makes a little more sense, I think. Because the question is not actually whether we authors “should bother” with publishers, nor even whether we need them anymore, but rather how and when we should use publishers.

It’s obvious we don’t need publishers for digital distribution; online content is often free and easily accessed. Yes, perhaps it’s true not everyone owns a PC, but not everyone goes to book stores, either. More and more phones are able to access the Internet from anywhere, and increasingly, there are apps (and maps) for anything you can think of, and e-readers and coming tablets are only going to increase that saturation. We don’t need dead trees and dry ink; sure, lots of people love books as physical objects, but those physical objects may work best as souvenirs of stories we’ve loved.

We do continue to need editors, but editors are not beholden to publishing companies; lots of freelance editors make a decent living on their own, and anyone who expects more than a decent living from the publishing industry probably doesn’t know much about publishing. I’m lucky I’ve found a terrific freelance editor, and I’ve also taken full advantage of the network I’ve built through USC and online; when I finish a manuscript, my beta-readers aren’t family and friends–they’re other writers who know their craft well and how to apply it. It’s a marvelous distinction.

The question shouldn’t be whether famous authors should bother with traditional publishers but rather how any authors can best use the tools available to get their stories into the most hands possible.

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.

Since then, I’ve written several business plans, using as examples both my writing in general and my writing projects in particular, and the more I write about it, the less sense the publishing industry begins to make. And for a new writer just starting out, still trying to sell his first novel, this is not only a daunting idea but a disempowering one as well. I’m not a writer who thinks that all my time should focus on the creation of more books and stories while I let some agent or editor handle the business and the numbers; that’s not enough for me. I want to be able to participate in–not, it’s worth noting, control–the entire process, from the germ of an idea to getting that finished story into readers’ hands. It’s important for me. And like I said, this doesn’t mean control; given my participative leadership trait, I like to let people do their jobs as best they can. I just tend to keep the overall vision in good mind, and I feel I should, given that my overall vision is my career, after all.

I think more writers need to do this. I’ve been reading a lot about digital content and how publishers are implementing e-book delays to discourage readers from picking up e-books in favor of substantially more expensive hardcovers. The debate rages, and publishers like Harper and respectable agents like Nat Sobel agree that there should be a delay, but I’ve read few writers and readers comment on it. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I’ve just missed them (I’ve after all been endeavoring to spend less time online lately, with other projects to work on).

But it strikes me this is a terrible balance, for writers and readers to sit back and let agents, editors, publishers, hardware manufacturers, and software designers argue amongst themselves while determining the best way to deliver writers’ stories to readers.

Because the thing about the argument is it seems like publishers don’t much care what readers want. They are floundering now, with newspapers and magazines doing pretty terribly while the book industry relies on Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer, and Sarah Palin for business and profit while deigning to grace other books with the published-seal-of-approval. Unfortunately, this makes sense, especially nowadays, when so much content is available online, for free–which may be another problem altogether–and the natural inclination of publishers is to increase the number of titles overall with the hope that one will stick. The joke was always that the average book has a shelf life shorter than a gallon milk, but now it may be more analogous to ground beef; a few hours out is all it takes before literally most books disappear from attention. I remember reading that one of every seven books sold this year was written by Stephenie Meyer, while something like 99% of all books sell fewer than 1000 copies.

A thousand copies isn’t much. To put that into perspective, my collection has been downloaded nearly twice that (it’s sold, meanwhile, about half it; people do like free, after all).

But the thing is, for a new writer (maybe any writer), what’s the motivation to wait around for publishers who pretty obviously don’t know what to do with digital content anyway? Digital rights are different from paperback rights, which are different from hardcover rights; as I understand it, when pubishers acquire books, they are basically purchasing for a set price (against royalties, in the case of an advance) the rights to copy and distribute the authors’ original work. Which makes a lot of sense in terms of printing, publication, and distribution.

But in terms of digital content? Why even license digital rights in the first place?

I am reasonably sure that publishers will refuse to enter into contracts with authors who don’t want to give up digital publication rights, but I can think of little other motivation for an author to do so.

Or perhaps, given that hardcover rights as well as paperback rights have to be sold (e.g., Double Day [I think it was Double Day] paid Stephen King’s hardcover Carrie publisher $400,000 for said novel’s paperback rights, of which King received half [well. Half, then less agent, less taxes, less you get the idea]) . . . well, I was going to say that digital rights could be handled similarly, but I can’t figure out how that might work. It’s not like a hardcover publisher is going to sell Amazon digital rights to a book for the Kindle, no matter how completely insane that would suddenly make an already confusing and wide-reaching debate.

But to my original point, the people who seem to get cut out of the debate are writers and, more importantly, readers. If my primary leadership trait is service, I am fully aware that I hope to ultimately serve readers great stories. The debate, however, seems to sink readers, and even the very act of reading, down to the bottom in terms of primary intention; much of it seems to focus on how to make more profit and sell more books, rarely how to attract new/more readers. If it were about how to attract more readers, I don’t think publishers would be trying to delay e-book release in the hope of squeezing a little more profit out of the transaction. The hope seems to be that more people will buy that $30 hardcover if there’s no other option, but I think the opposite is true; I think a $30 hardcover would only encourage people to wait until the digital version is available for the nook or Kindle or other e-reader of their choice. In fact, I would think a $10 e-copy will not compete with but rather enhance the sales of a $30 hardcover; me personally, I tend to buy hardcovers as souvenirs, a physical artifact of only the books I most enjoy, and even then I tend to get them for a penny from the Amazon Marketplace, and it’s worth noting here I’m a writer. This is what I do and ultimately hope to make some money from as a bonus for attracting a go-jillion readers, and even still I hesitate to drop $30 on some dead tree and dry ink. Even still chances are I’d rather buy a penny hardcover and spend the rest on a good bottle of wine.

Because it’s worth noting, so rarely are we buying a book; more so, we buy experiences. We seek from our books knowledge and entertainment but also the experience we get through reading them, be that experience new insight or a great story. I am not one of those hardcover fetishists who requires the look and feel and smell of a book; all I tend to care about is the transportation a book provides.

Until, of course, I love a book; when I love a book for its story, I desire it too for its physical presence. In other words, I only desire books for their feel and presence after they’ve already transported me. Lord knows people haven’t loved The Lost Symbol or Twilight for their shining examples as good writing of stories; they are transportation. Quite literally in the sense of Brown, around whom cottage travel industries have sprung up, while Meyer’s books seem to provide teenage girls a perfect heroine on which to project themselves and by which to live a dramatically volatile existence completely vicariously.

Readers who love books will purchase them, and we who are in publishing, whatever our part may be, should work to reward that love, to encourage it, to foster it. Not to delay it and put it off in the hope of making a few more bucks off it.