Tuesday, September 13th

News For Today

So, Amazon is apparently preparing to add a Netflix-style e-book borrowing service for their Prime members. Some people are prophesying that whatever deal Amazon signs with participating publishers, authors will get hosed... I agree, but I think the problem here is that the publishers have the ability to make the deal in the first place. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating: authors need to hang on to their e-book rights. Whatever deal you make today might not measure up to tomorrow's marketplace. And it probably won't even measure up to today's.

Above all, authors need to be as fierce in pursuit of their rights as the movie studios or music companies are. Fiercer, even. A book isn't like a movie where a cast of thousands might come together along with whole teams of technicians and special effects people, and directors and writers and producers get to put their stamps on it. A book is (barring ones with co-authors) an individual effort. A publisher might arrange or perform certain one-time services, but in this day and age these services include nothing that an author can't get as work-for-hire. Therefore, authors should start with the radical proposition that they own 100% of their work and fight tooth and nail over any sliver of that they give up.

In the case of e-book rights, authors are effectively giving away a massive percentage of the value of their work to a company that agrees to act as an online shopping cart and/or broker that right to others. And they get it forever. And this whole deal is swallowed by authors because it's sold as a package with print rights, or even a bonus on top of it... with print publication always having been seen as the brass ring and e-books being touted as a growth market, if somebody says, "Not only will we print your book, we'll take care of the e-book publishing, too!", it probably sounds like a great deal.

But it's giving away a right. Big corporations never give up rights. They rarely even sell them if they can figure out a way to lease or license them. That's the way it needs to be for authors, too.

...

At a more immediate and close to home level, I've started negotiating to arrange that "work for hire" stuff to produce higher quality Tales of MU print books and e-books. Given my current financial situation, I'm basically shopping for prices and planning right now. If things don't pick up more than somewhere down the line there may be some Kickstarting or similar service, but I don't think the timing would be right for that right now.

State of the Me

Pretty okay. The time release melatonin is really a blessing right now. It's not something I would take all the time because it leaves me much groggier in the morning, but it seems to punch my insomnia episodes in the throat in a way that nothing else ever has.

Dreams From Last Night

...wish I'd started this post earlier, but in the time it took me to wake up they completely evaporated.

Plans For Today

First thing is finishing a chapter of Tales of MU. After that I'm going to do some miscellaneous writing, that might include taking a stab at starting the next one.

All publishing is vanity publishing.

I've said it before.

It's worth repeating.

All publishing is vanity publishing.

That is, all commercial publishing of fiction involves an author buying services from a publisher.

As an author, you own 100% of your work and you are entitled to 100% of the money it generates. The only way you lose that is by trading it away. Be careful about how much you're giving away, and in exchange for what.

Are you selling the majority of your income-generating potential away forever in exchange for a series of one-time services?

If so, why?

In the past you didn't have a lot of options. Now, you do, and publishers are increasingly relying on two things to justify you giving up rights and money to them. One is the cachet of Being An Actual Author Published By An Actual Publisher. Maybe they don't have to sell you on that idea because you've always felt that way.

But ask yourself this: if you need them to give you an Actual Author License, who gave them an Actual Publisher License? Who let them into the club? Who told them that they're allowed to be there? That they're the real deal?

If just writing a book doesn't make you an author, then just publishing a book doesn't make you a publisher. Right? That stands to reason.

The other... and this closely relates to the first... is the notion of gatekeepers. Without the publishers to act as a filter, the market would drown under a rising tide of irredeemable crap. Readers would suffer because we could never find anything we want to read. Authors of quality would suffer because nobody would be able to find them. And so on.

One of the implications here is that if you can't find a publisher to take you, then you're part of the ocean of crap... and if you have been published, well, then you're in. Why rock the boat and risk falling overboard?

Of course, I have the same rebuttal to this as I always do: reality. Reality is that we don't all spend every morning wading through one hundred random blogs of poorly written crap to get to the one we want to read. Reality is that no number of crappy MS Paint webcomics on free servers will ever interfere with the ability of a decent cartoonist to make a living in self-publishing.

Reality is that the ocean of crap is the same on either side of the trad pub fence; the fact that we can all see the slush pile on this side doesn't force us to wade through it. Good writers don't actually have to worry about competing with bad writers... if they did, they wouldn't be good writers.

Basically, the gatekeeper myth is saying that if you have a marathon that anyone can join, it's not fair to the faster racers because they will have to spend 42 kilometers with slowpokes in front of them.

Does that image make sense on any level?

(And yes, I know some races do filter participants through things such as qualifying events. But the idea behind the necessity of gatekeepers is that all races must have qualifiers, which raises the question of how one gets to try out in the first place.)

Now, these two factors have always been part of publishing, but it seems like with the rise in alternative forms of publishing they're becoming even more central to the trad pubs' marketing strategy.

By which I mean the strategy they use to market themselves to writers, not the strategy by which they market writers' books. By and large, they don't market writers' books. Not on a level that approaches or equals what the writers themselves do, which to me suggests that the writers should be getting paid more of the proceeds of any sales. They wrote the book and promoted it, and in many cases were responsible for polishing it.

With the changes in the publishing industry and the marketplace, authors are usually being paid less by publishers who are doing less for them. This situation is only possible because of the Gatekeeper Myth, because we're used to thinking that the invisible imprimatur of printing is itself the goal and that earning money for our work can only come about as a side-effect of that.

We chase the dream of Real Publishing and we hope money comes along with it... and when it doesn't, well, we're told that's the state of the industry. So many pages of tips for writers, so much advice out there is focused on chasing that shiny brass ring, and on making sure that newbie writers are pre-braced for the financial reality that comes with catching it.

And when we ask why we're chasing the ring, we're told that it makes us Real Authors. We're told we need Gatekeepers because the alternative is cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!

And the point of this is not "BOO PUBLISHERS". No. Not at all. I have friends who have been trad-pub'd by presses who from what I can tell provide them with wonderful services. They produce gorgeous books. They help connect authors to audiences. And of course, they take care of the little technical details that I know from personal experience can drive an author 'round the bend.

The bare minimum service a publisher provides is publishing a book, and I can tell you... again from experience... that is not a little thing!

But the reason I'm making this post and mostly reiterating things I've said before is that I just saw a small publisher touting the gatekeeper myth, and it blew my mind. Absolutely blew my mind.

Because that question I asked rhetorically up above: who gave them a license? That's got to be playing on small press publishers' minds. I have to imagine that anybody in the publishing business whose company's books don't show up on the shelves at your friendly local liquidator is going to grapple with the same Impostor Syndrome that authors do.

So to see them buying into the gatekeeper myth... no, scratch that... to see them selling the gatekeeper myth? It's disheartening.

Publishers: offer authors a good service at a good price. Or enter into a fair and equitable partnership with authors, if you prefer. Don't sell them on pie-in-the-sky and a secret decoder ring. If you're offering value, you shouldn't need to.

Under Construction: TOMU 2-31

9/12/2011
2:00-2:30 - ~600 (+400)
3:00-3:30 - ~950 (+350)
4:30-5:00 - ~1350 (+400)
5:30-6:00 - ~1600 (+250)
9/13/2011
5:00-5:30 - ~2000 (+400)
5:30-6:00 - ~2300 (+300)


( Spoilers )

The Seven Year Itch, or the Unknowns We Know

So, there's a publishing start-up I've been Twitter-following for a while (I think I saw someone replying to them or retweeting them) called Forbidden Fiction. I find them interesting and have thought about shopping some of my more fetishy material there, but there's something that stops me and it's kind of at the forefront of my brain right now.

It's this:

Authors retain copyright. ForbiddenFiction is contracting for exclusive publication rights both digital and print for a period of seven years.

Okay. Having a finite term is great. It's a step forward But seven years for digital publishing? Not a good deal for authors. Not a good deal at all. Seven years ago, there was no Kindle. Heck, four years ago there was no Kindle. Two years ago there was no iPad. There's no reason to think the market in four years won't look as different from today's market as today's market looks in comparison to the market four years ago and if you signed a seven year contract today, you'd only be halfway through it.

Or maybe there won't be any huge changes in the next few years. We don't know. The world of digital publishing as we know it is too new for us to have any realistic idea of what seven years looks like. Any time much longer than a year might as well be exty kazillion rells for all that anyone knows.

For some reason, it seems to be impossible to criticize or deconstruct anything on the internet without somebody rolling up to say "You're wrong, there's no malice here, quit thinking everybody is evil." so let me say very clearly: I don't think they're trying to pull a fast one on anybody. They're new. This is my point: we're all new. I imagine they're still feeling things out, and even the idea of a finite term is progress.

But a seven year contract for digital rights is more symbolic progress than actual.

(Now, given that Forbidden Fiction has as part of its mission to be a venue for the sorts of things that other platforms might reject... this could change the calculus a little, because it effectively puts them in a different market than everyone else. But I'd maintain that it's still too early to know how much impact that will actually have.)

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Note for Dreamwidth readers: forbiddenfics has responded here.