Here is the third ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon a few months ago. I’m a little embarrassed that it took this long for me to sit down and type it all up. The first part can be found here, and the second here.
Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar.
In this segment, we cover Stackpole’s “house slaves” comparison, whether traditional publishing is in trouble, and the importance of quality and self-promotion in self-publishing.
Me: In your recent blog posts, you draw a comparison between the world of publishing and–I believe you used the term "house slaves"?
Michael: Well, with house slaves I’m referring very specifically to those authors who have done well traditional publishing and basically are denigrating all self-publishers and taking the traditional publishers’ word for it that they don’t need to worry about digital publishing, they don’t need to worry about any of those things because the traditional publisher will take care of them.
And I find it very funny because these are the same guys who very quickly will end up telling you that, "Hey, you know, my publisher screws me over all the time, they’re always late with payments, they never listen this, working with my editor is really really tough," but when it comes to, "Hey, dude, stop bitching, do it yourself," "Oh, no no, I don’t need to, because sales are up enough, and I can’t do this, and I can’t do that," And it’s like, you know, fish or cut bait.
Unfortunately for those individuals, for the house slaves who are invested in traditional publishing, the publishing business is changing so fast, just unbelievably fast, that they’re going to be screwed. The last blog post that I did talking about the fact that publishers are shortening the window between hardback and paperback publication. That means that if you cannot deliver faster–the days of taking a year to do a novel, or five or six years to do a novel, are gone. If you can’t deliver on a steady basis, you’re toast.
Me: You know, Maxwell Grant, the author of the Shadow novels, he did two novels a month for like twenty, forty years–
Michael: Yeah, Walter Gibson, and Lester Dent who wrote most of the Doc Savage novels as Kenneth Robeson, he also did one or more novels a month, about 60,000 words. Which actually is not that hard to do.
And I really think, looking back at the pulps, I always used to think when I was growing up as a writer, I would love to have lived back in the days of the pulps because you could do tons of stuff then, there were that many markets. Now I am of the firm conviction that I think the authors who were writing in the days of the pulps would wish that they were writing now in the days of digital, because they would be so much better off.
Me: Do you think traditional publishing is in trouble now?
Michael: There’s no question about it. No question about it that it’s in trouble. It has lost the majority of its shelf space. I mean, that’s just gone. Barnes & Noble is beginning to market books more like magazines than they are like books. It’s forcing traditional publishers to change their model. They’re pricing their digital product too high because their overhead is too high. And they’re not making changes in that regard quickly enough.
Me: Borders basically just vanished.
Michael: Borders vanished, so there goes 10% of their market, probably 20% of their shelf space, but you look at Barnes & Noble, Barnes & Noble now they’ve got cafes, they’ve got their Nook boutique that’s eating up shelf space. They’ve got their flavor of the month, whatever their hit of the month is, shelf space. I had a novel come out last November, and it was out there for two, maybe three months, and then vanished. A year ago, two years ago, that never would have happened.
Me: And publishing is still stuck on that model where they take back and destroy a significant fraction of the books that they print.
Michael: Absolutely.
Me: And it’s amazing that nobody’s tried to do anything about that yet in this economy.
Michael: It’s because that’s just been the way it’s been done for so long, and because in some ways it’s being a slave to your drug dealer, you know, or to your customer. Bookstores won’t let them change and bookstores are their primary market.
Me: You know, the agency pricing thing that they implemented that basically Apple forced them to implement…
Michael: Right
Me: It’s kind of funny really because they were so afraid that Amazon might cut their revenues by insisting that they sell for cheaper that they went ahead and cut their own revenues from half of hardcover price to, what is it, 70% of e-book price.
Michael: But they wanted the ability to–their fear was that digital sales would cannibalize paper sales before they had a chance to shift their economy over.
Me: And that consumers would get used to thinking e-books were "supposed to be" cheap.
Michael: Right.
Me: Little too late for that.
Michael: They wanted the ability to control the price so that people would not be buying the cheaper e-books preferentially. They try all sorts of things. They’ve tried windowing, delaying the release of digital books.
It’s funny that we’re here at GenCon because the gaming industry for years and years had PDFs available. They don’t do any windowing. Or they release the electronic versions earlier and you can go down and talk to anybody, they’ll tell you that e-book sales do not cannibalize print sales. And people do buy souvenir copies of things.
Publishing, modern publishing, traditional publishing has never done a good job of market research. They don’t understand their market, they don’t understand what their readers want, what their demographic is, how their readers buy, and this has been a big problem for them. So they’re now reaping the fact that they haven’t paid attention to what’s going on.
Me: Is there anything that I haven’t covered that you think is important to mention about self-publishing these days?
Michael: I think the real trick is going to be this: that if you’re an author and you’re going to self-publish, make sure that that book is as good as possible. Get editors, get other people to look it over. Form writer co-ops to help each other get books up to publishable quality, because the worst thing you can do is put a product out there that is sub-standard, that isn’t good enough.
Even if you’re self-publishing digitally, it is always true: our books have to be better than the last guy’s book. And this cuts in two ways: One, the writing has got to be there, and two, you’ve got to make sure that your book design, the way the book goes together, looks really good, looks better than what traditional publishers are doing.
Me: Is there an answer to the "self-publishing slushpile" problem, wherein now that everybody’s self-publishing, any decent works will get buried under Sturgeon’s share?
Michael: That’s totally fallacious. There’s no sense to that. If you promote your work, if you make sure that one you have a website, two you give away samples, three you have contests, four you go out and you meet people, you build community, you do all the little things that you have to do to promote your work, you’ll draw attention to it and if it is of quality other people will go ahead and let you know and let their friends know.
When I brought out In Hero Years I’m Dead, I turned around and shot copies out to lots of writers I know, I shot copies out to blog writers I know, I shot copies out to podcasters I know, and I talked about doing interviews and what can we do to publicize this. I had to sit down and promote promote promote.
So now you’ve got to wear two hats. You have to be writing the material and that is job one, always be writing the material. But you also have to promote, and if you promote, that’s how you rise out of that sea. There are going to be tons of people that put books out there for 99 cents or three dollars or five dollars or ten dollars expecting the money just to roll in. They’re not going to roll up their sleeves, they’re not going to do any work.
When you look at Joe Konrath or you look at Amanda Hocking or you look at other people who are doing this successfully, they sit down and do the full job. They make it the best package and the best quality item to sell possible, then they let people know that it’s out there. And that’s the only thing that you can do.
That promotion side will make sure that it rises above that great morass, and as long as your book is good, you will find an audience. Science fiction and fantasy is one of the most forgivable genres ever. Because even if the book is horrible, if we like a character’s name or we like one line out of the thing, we’ll recommend it to other people. We are such soft touches! Well, once we do that, then that’s the word of mouth that will sell more stories. So make it really good and then let people know it’s out there. And that’s how you win at this game.
Me: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for your time.
Michael: You are more than welcome.
Me: I really appreciate the chance to talk with you.
