In an article in The Guardian author Henry Porter bemoans the future of publishing. Here are two quotes of interest:
To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing publishers to an archipelago of editorial sweatshops and the writer to the little guy stitching trainers in an airless room. …
If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer’s share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent’s fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer. The fierce discounting in supermarkets means that writers are now even less likely to earn out their advances. At the same time advances are being cut and authors’ contracts are being summarily cancelled.
My gut reaction response is – “but now you have the power to self publish like never before!”.
Your book is only worth, and always has been, what the market will pay, just like other commodities.
I don’t feel bad for the author, they are irreplaceable, the publisher on the other hand, for basic fiction novels, it totally replaceable by a good freelance editor (or your own editing skills).
If someone pirates your book it’s because they don’t think it’s worth paying for, so you have not lost a sale, and the copy they took cost you nothing to make, so I don’t think piracy should enter into the economics of it at all.
I agree with the above comments. This author seems a bit “clueless” about his own potential. Hire an editor. Get Amazon to publish it. Take your 70% and go home and write something else. These authors appear to not be “thinking” for themselve. Rather, they leave things in the hands of others and wonder why they have problems. Come on. Start acting in your own best interests.
Could not agree more. Author’s need to learn to self publish. You don’t have to have a publisher to edit a book, there are other ways. Its publishers that are the enemy and they need to go to the wall.
I disagree the author’s perspective. The Internet (distribution channel), web services like Youtube, Twitter, and personal mobile gadgets like Smartphone, Kindle or iPod Touch have embraced more artists, no matter what type of field you are in, to innovate and express their work to public. People podcast in iTunes, make videos in Youtube, write software for iPhone, we are at a tipping point of whole new way of thinking of new economy. In Japan, there are people even write mobile fiction and distribute it on cell phone.
Henry Porter says:
“If [the intermediaries] are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand … disintermediation of a more radical sort.”
Well, and why not?
A commentator on the article says: “I think writers may have to adopt the Radiohead model … Publish your own work on a website, ask readers for a contribution. If it’s good, people will pay (like they did Radiohead).”
That’s exactly what I have done, and even now, in the infancy of e-reading, it’s beginning, slowly, to work.
The same commentator goes on, rather idiotically: “Anyhow, writers were never meant to be rich. That’s a new idea. No, writers are meant to be poor, and give up aspects of their lives to create something good. I’m old fashioned that way.”
No one remotely sensible imagines writing is a way to get rich quick, but I see nothing wrong with writers making a decent return from the labours that support much of the superstructure of the entertainment industry. Writing is a vocation; looking back at my life, I get the most satisfaction from those of my novels that have come near to realizing my original ambition for them. For the writer this is essentially a private matter, but if the reader benefits too that’s marvellous and a sign that the book is of more general interest. And if that interest is broad enough to make the book a commercial proposition, the writer has performed a valuable service and no one should begrudge him his due.
An unknown author’s novel that is self published will not be reviewed by any site or magazine that will give it legitimacy. It cannot enter contests that will give it legitimacy. The author will not be invited to bookstores, reader conventions, etc. to meet the public. The public will be disinterested, many readers scornful, and other writers contemptuous.
The self-published author will have to spend countless hours pimping his book online which will gain him more scorn and a few readers.
The average definition of “success” in a situation like this is to break even after all the expenses of publishing the book as well as the ongoing promotional expenses of the author domain, etc., etc.
Gosh, yes, sign me up immediately. I don’t have enough pain in my life as an author published more traditionally.
The only authors who have had success as either self-published or small press/epublisher authors are those who write consistently good novels of the same type at a rate of more than three a year, write in popular genre, and continue to bring new audience in with new books to sell the backlist.
The only other novelists who make a success already have a name in traditional press so they bring their audience with them.
I’m curious to know , from the ardent advocates of self-publishing, what percentage of your book purchases are from self-published authors and what percentage are from traditionally published authors (or authors that made their name through traditional publishing and then went self-published).
Until now, about 1 in 3 or 4 of the books I BUY is from an indie author. The percentage of books I READ from indie authors is much less, as my book appetite greatly exceeds my book budget and so each month I get more books from the local library than I buy. Unlike a lot of Kindle owners, I download one book at a time and read it and don’t have a bunch of “to be read” books on my Kindle. I have not purchased a physical book since getting my Kindle 2 years ago.
However, the whole MacMillan/Amazon thing is making me reconsider my buying. It’s true that finding good indie books takes quite a bit of looking and sampling, but I’m going to start putting in that time. The big pubs pretty much killed the ebook market 10 years ago (I had and loved a Rocket Ebook), and I really want them to fail this time.
As to Marilynn’s post, I agreed that there was no way for indies to get legitimacy until very recently. There is a thread on Amazon’s Kindle forum about indie authors in the top 1,000 on Amazon’s lists. One post mentioned a romance author who sold 14,000 copies of her 99 cent book in a month. While I have no way to verify the truth of those figures, assuming they are true, do the math. IMO just under $5,000 in royalties in a month provides more legitimacy than bunches of reviews and book signings. Heck, doing that well in a YEAR ought to have people sitting up and noticing.
Marilynn: the word you are missing is ‘yet.’ All of the things you talk about will happen eventually.
Also Marilynn, I think what you need is a marketer, not a publisher.
Although that leads to my feeling of what the publishing industry has to become, an umbrella of vetted editorial, permission, art, marketing etc. services available for hire by authors as needed. There will still be plenty of room for the model of an aquisitions editor to find a good manuscript and fund it’s development i.e. pay the author up front, but I think there will be a lot more cases of the author paying the “publisher” (which is what is what happens with self pub).