Michael Stackpole has been making a series of posts concerning the e-book market to his blog in the last couple of weeks, and I only just noticed them the other day. Here’s a rundown of the first couple of them:
In “The Future of Digital Publishing,” Stackpole addresses an opinion he’s heard some writers express concerning their reluctance to jump into digital publishing: “I just have this feeling that somewhere out there, there is one more change, that none of us can foresee.”
Stackpole suggests that all the major players in the e-book industry have already invested enough time and effort that most format-related matters are pretty much settled. (Though he said this only about a week before the news about Amazon possibly adopting EPUB came out. Though it’s arguable how big a change this really represents for authors interested in e-publishing, since EPUB was pretty much the industry standard for everyone besides Amazon already.) He suggests that as much momentum as the market has collected so far, waiting any longer would be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
In “House Slaves vs. Spartacus,” Stackpole takes a look at some of the comments he’s been getting from some nameless “folks within publishing” who he thinks regard him as a bitter, “back-biting ingrate” since he’s started boosting self-publishing and predicting the demise of the traditional publishing industry.
Admitting that the comparison is sure to be incendiary, he nonetheless likens writers with full relationships with traditional publishers to Roman “house slaves” who are kept comfortable and well-fed, but will be in trouble when the barbarian horde arrives. Mixing metaphors with abandon, he suggests these house slaves “started their journey on the Titanic but are now in a lifeboat.”
One problem he sees with traditional publishing is that publishers generally only publish 1-2 books a year, due to limited shelf space in physical stores—but fast writers can finish 6 or more in that time. (And Stackpole is a particularly fast writer: the novelization of the upcoming Conan movie only took him 20 days to write.) And, of course, readers can read faster than the fastest writer can write, which means that authors with a following will be able to sell their books as fast as they can turn them out.
He sees a number of problems with traditional publishing: if a publisher decides to bump its numbers of a popular genre (such as urban fantasy) at the expense of others (such as military SF), it could leave high and dry authors who are good at doing the less-popular genres but not so much the popular one. And since a publisher’s job is to sell books, not promote fine literature, there’s no guarantee that a published book will be good—just that the publisher thought enough people would want to buy it to make it worth the risk. And e-publishing pays more and faster than traditional publishing with its cash-flow problems.
And he also addresses some common excuses writers give for not getting into e-publishing, such as not being comfortable with computers or fearing a publisher blacklist.
The battle here is not about which group is right, house slaves or the legions with Spartacus. It’s about the fact that we produce the content that others have made a living distributing. The contracts the publishers offer us have only changed to their benefit since the advent of publishing. Now that a new means of distribution has arisen, allowing us to sell to our audiences directly, and at a more economical price for them; the old distributors are fully invested in discrediting those who are getting out in front of the changes. They choose to do this instead of reforming how they do business and offering us deals on terms that are far more equitable for all parties concerned.
This post is getting pretty long, so I’ll wrap it up and cover the next couple of Stackpole posts in another one later. But I think it’s safe to say that, as a self-publishing firebrand and gadfly, Stackpole could give J.A. Konrath a run for his money.
It’s interesting contrasting Stackpole’s comment:
To Levin’s comment of a few days ago:
Is the publishing industry so murky that publishers believe they have a working formula for what books will sell… that is totally wrong? Or are all those self-help, celebrity tell-all, religious tomes, etc, actually making good sales, indicating maybe the publishers actually do know what sells?
In fact, the answer is almost pointless to pursue; I think what’s more significant is that the biz is so muddy that even insiders can’t agree on what’s really happening in there. And I have my doubts that you can have a stable, desirable business in an atmosphere like that.
Many authors who had been profitably writing and selling classic detective fiction for decades found themselves out of work and short of income in the 1960s, after the success of the James Bond stories, when publishers ‘decided’ that espionage was in and detection was out. As far as I can tell the only thing that prompted the decision was greed for more profits, rather than an attempt to assess what the public actually wanted. As a result many excellent books that could have been written — and sold — never were, and many more were buried and forgotten.
Anyone relying on a publisher’s judgement could easily find themselves doing endless knock-offs of today’s best-seller.