‘There’s Never Been a Better Time To Be A Writer’
You’ve read that line, of course, we all have. Sometimes here at Writer Unboxed.
I’ve seen this mantra frequently over the past few years in blog posts, conference reports and news items. And I don’t disagree there’s been a lot to celebrate.
This is the author Roz Morris, based in London. She teaches courses in writing and editing for The Guardian, as well as in Zurich, later this month in Venice.
But from what I see right now, this time is also tougher for authors than ever.
Wait, what?
Indie authors feel it in their book sales. Hands up, who is in a forum where the chief discussion is “what can I do about my dwindling sales?” “Anybody else had a dismal month?” “Should I drop my book’s price, put it on Kindle Unlimited, write something more popular, send out more emails, spend $$$ on a marketing course?”
Morris is not just talking about independent writers, either:
The traditionally published authors I know are faring little better, with shrinking advances, ill-supported launches – even the authors who have awards to prove their worth.
I used a bit of this material from Morris as we announced this week an all-new, issues-oriented conference for writers in London: Author Day from The Bookseller and The FutureBook is on the 30th of November and we’re programming it for both traditionally published and independent writers as well as industry players. We want that mix.
One reason that the amalgam of voices is so important to us as we put together Author Day—and as we talk about writers’ and their business every day—is that a strong current of promotion runs through almost any position someone takes these days on the question of publishing and authors.
This is not anyone’s fault.
[pullquote]The market for ebooks has pretty much gone flat. And so we have a problem here…. There’s a glut of high-quality, low-cost books, more books than readers will ever possibly be able to read. —Mark Coker[/pullquote]We are deeply commercialized cultures now. We are programmed to produce and promulgate hype. We get it early. A few decades ago, that lemonade stand you and your siblings threw together just said “Lemonade” on it, right? This summer’s lemonade stands proclaimed they offered “The World’s Best Lemonade.” I saw this in a small town on Long Island. Cute kids. Scary branding.
And as we move around the Internet, our communications prairie, we’re pretty much forced to engage in self-branding. Once the province only of marketing mavens, now simply to be effective on Twitter, you need a practical bio, not a joke; a good picture, not a greasy-faced party shot; a professional handle, not that silly thing you did in college. Particularly as the various social media become key vehicles of author branding, you have to think about messaging.
- Are you on-message?
- Do you even know your message?
- Have you targeted the right audience with it?
- Have you reached that audience with it? Is that audience listening?
And soon, so soon…hype.
Merriam-Webster describes “hype” as “promotional publicity of an extravagant or contrived kind.”
That’s pretty useful for my provocation for you today. But I’d like to hype that description itself, blow some more colored smoke up an asterisk right beside it, soft-shoe my way around some late-summer garden maze with you to a place safe enough—is there such a place anymore?—for us quietly, secretly to concede that the way we talk about pathways to publication nowadays?—are thorny with hype.
The Drive to Persuade
Somehow, it has become all but impossible for us to declare an affinity for anything without feeling that we must back the car over all disagreement.
Morris’ column is a case in point on this because she, in her own commentary, doesn’t demand that others align themselves with her opinion.
In fact, what she reveals are cracks in the frequent boosterism (hype) we hear in favor of self-publishing. She writes:
Last week I was having an email conversation with a wise author friend. As we confided our worries and frustrations, I felt we were describing the state of the author 2015, and were probably echoing many other conversations going on behind closed doors.
So I thought I would open those doors. Come in. Come and see how authors are thinking about their careers right now. And see why, in spite of the rotten state of the book market, we keep the faith and stay true to our standards.
See what she’s doing there? She’s offering us something a bit less bombastic than “The World’s Best Lemonade,” isn’t she? She’s saying that all is not happy in the state of independent publishing (and how could it be? this is still life on Earth) and she’s not giving up her regard for the effort and the concept.
This is far more valuable than happy-talk group-think, an especially cruel and misleading form of hype.
Not Oscar Wilde
Morris engages in a conversation with a fellow author she refers to as “Oscar.” At my request, she has revealed to me who this writer is, and I can verify for you that this is an author of whom I’m aware. I went through that bit of arcane journo-gymnastics only because the use of an “unnamed source” is not what one wants in most instances, and the journalist’s compunction in such occasions is to be sure that he or she can verify for you that a real person stands behind the faux name.
“Oscar” shows wonderfully honest signs, with Morris, of doubt. And how noble is that? Rich, sensible, understandable doubt. Like this:
I’m beginning to think the biggest part of the indie movement is to smack the big machines [traditional publishing] into better behaviour. They have the money and power to do what we cannot do…I have an agent friend. In 2014 he was flying high, making sales, getting high-profile assignments, negotiating foreign rights. He said all of that is over now. It’s hard to sell *anything* to a trad house because we’ve lost our attention span for long form. Everybody is on Twitter. No one has the time to read…I check in on Kindleboards now and again. Yesterday I saw an author who started out making $13,000 a month on four poorly written books say she’s now ghosting for other indies to make ends meet. Another author posted about the publication of his new ‘novel’, which is 117 pages long with lots of white space (probably 15K words) and selling for $2.99. Everyone was fawning over him and his swift production…As for craft and quality, in one forum I saw people asking others to stop putting out junk. The remarks degraded, as they always do, to people defending the ‘raw’ writing their fans demanded. Many admitted to using no editors at all, claiming it took the edge off.
Together, Morris and “Oscar” find their way to an agreement that authors (especially in literary work, sorely tested by the digital dynamic) need to accept that a slower fate is theirs. They may have to wear down the barriers to their success over time, like water working up a good canyon.
‘A Horribly Tough Time for Me’
Below the post, though, you see comments coming in that don’t replicate the hype of self-publishing at all. Morris and “Oscar” have triggered a release of sorts, and you hear real pain in some of these notes left by their readers. I’ll just excerpt a few phrases here.
It has been a horribly tough time for me. Two years ago, I thought I was possibly going to *make it*. Now I am afraid I may go under…No, I won’t be tossing off a series in a genre that sells…It’s incredibly hard to get noticed because there are [an] incredible number of new books coming out every month…I find that when I’m not on social media, I make no sales. It’s as simple as that. However, it doesn’t really matter what I post. It can be a blog that has taken me hours to write, an interview that has taken 7 hours to respond to, or a cat photo…To date, selling paperbacks has cost me dearly. Now that my ebook sales have plummetted by 80%, I really have to address the fact that I have made an average loss of £5 on every book….I ‘try’ not to, but can’t help feeling depressed at the lack of sales. I suppose there are just too many new books coming out all the time…One of the fundamental problems we have as writers is our reluctance to allocate a time and means to promote and market our writings…
It would be wrong to think from the selections I’ve made here that everything said in the comments on Morris’ column are about failure, fear of it, experience of it. In fact, in several cases, Morris and her author-readers discuss various ideas for approaching marketing, and the exercise has a spirit much more about earnest sharing than about gloom and doom.
[pullquote]I’m beginning to think the biggest part of the indie movement is to smack the big machines into better behaviour. They have the money and power to do what we cannot do. —”Oscar”[/pullquote]Nevertheless, the gift here is that it is not something scored to The Battle Hymn of the Republic. It’s not Indie, Right or Wrong! It’s not particularly friendly to traditional publishing, God knows. But it’s also not pompoms and lettered sweatshirts, the Big I of Indie!, the frequently heard verbiage about “so many authors making a good living today on their self-published writing.” We never hear how many of those well-off indie writers there are, do we? Just “so many.” And because so many don’t use ISBNs, we can’t count them, either, which might be seen either as convenient or unfortunate, depending on your viewpoint.
Traditionally published authors are surely having their trials, Morris is absolutely right. There’s no need to minimize that, either, is there? What good does it do to act as if it’s all cakes and candlelight at the Big Five?
So densely packed a market under the relentless buzzing competition of so many other media means there may be fewer contracts; books headed into badly challenged bookstores (and one steadily declining bookstore chain). And certainly advances aren’t what they were, while the contractual bases on which authors work with publishers are under serious criticism, just as P&L statements allow less budget for marketing, and getting your rights back on something classified as “out of print” appears to be getting harder, not easier in many cases.
The Overwhelm of Titles: The Just and the Unjust
The sheer volume of content is a challenge the industry has yet to face well. Maybe there is no authentic response. After all, this is strictly, historically unprecedented.
And this impacts both the traditional side and the indie. No less vested a figure than Mark Coker, the founding CEO of Smashwords, tells Joanna Penn this week:
The market for ebooks has pretty much gone flat. And so we have a problem here…. There’s a glut of high-quality, low-cost books, more books than readers will ever possibly be able to read.
That’s something, coming from a man who says his company is:
Publishing 360,000 books working with over a hundred thousand authors in small independent presses around the world.
That, by the way, he contrasts to 2010, when he says Smashwords was “doing about 5,000 books…maybe 10,000 at that time.” That’s the glut we’re talking about. Hype-sters wish we’d not talk about it. I think it’s good that Coker speaks of it, we all should.
Our exercise at The Bookseller this summer (about the time of that lemonade stand, I was working on it in the Hamptons) gave us a high end of 600,000 as the number of self-published titles the States may be producing in 2015. Lower estimates tended to come in at around 400,000, one as low as 300,000. Our exercise focused more on valuation than on title counts, but one guess went as high as 700,000 titles. I want to stress these are estimates. No one, and I mean no one, has the actual numbers. Certain offices in Seattle could come closest because they have sales figures the rest of us don’t have. But no one has a way to track much if not most of the material independently produced today. So we don’t know. The experts we polled, when taken together, came in at something around half-a-million indie titles per year.
[pullquote]The traditionally published authors I know are faring little better, with shrinking advances, ill-supported launches – even the authors who have awards to prove their worth. —Roz Morris[/pullquote]The truth behind those closed doors Morris mentions, then, cannot possibly be all inspi-vational (I made it up) cheers and podcast-y enthusiasm. The truth must be more nuanced than the hype. And the truth is what we need to hear.
Publishing a book was never a contest. Presenting one path or another as a cause or a movement has never panned out as anything but…hype. The real goal, by whatever means you pursue it, is to get your work in front of the right audience and, we must hope, find some decent remuneration for all you’ve gone through to do that.
And as we approach the autumn’s discussions about writers and their lives, I hope that we can all get a bit closer to the tone set by Morris and her associates this week. We need this willingness to just be frank. Many, many things are not working for many, many people in this industry at this point. And to say so, honestly, is not to demean the effort. You’re no traitor to the ideal of a publishing success if you speak candidly about the struggle. We all need to hear this much more than we need to see great phalanxes of grinning indies, sunglasses flashing as they pull down those “good livings” off their books.
The lemonade was awful, by the way. Hype didn’t save those kids from the truth, either.
How frequently do you think authors feel they can share their experiences honestly? Do you feel the pressure to make it seem you’re doing better than you are? If you tend to sugarcoat your own experience for others, do you find that it’s helping your sales? —or your outlook?
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About Porter Anderson
@Porter_Anderson is the 2019 recipient of London Book Fair's International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair New York. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and indie authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Anderson previously was The Bookseller's Associate Editor for The FutureBook in London. Priors: CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, the Dallas Times Herald, and other media including Thought Catalog's #MusicForWriters series. More:PorterAndersonMedia.com | Google+
This article is truly refreshing, Porter. Makes me wish you’d write one about the reality of our US political scene now, too…
Hi, Mia,
Apologies for the late reply! Deadlines are heavy in conference-launching season. But many thanks for your kind note and be VERY careful what you ask for, LOL.
(I recently told Joe Konrath — who says he has no desire to run for office — that he should run for the GOP, the Dems, AND the Author Guild. Such entertainment that would be, lol.)
Thanks again!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter,
Wonderful article. Chock-full of realism. Although I’m not there quite yet, I always want the skinny, straight up. No sugar-coating, because when I do get there, I’ll have decisions to make and I want the facts. I’m a pretty straight-forward person and I like my colleagues that way, too. Thanks for all this.
Oh, and down here, I sell Artisan Lemonade.
Mike, I sell ORGANIC Lemonade.
Literal laugh out loud! Ha!
LOL! Well, I sell hand-crafted, locally-sourced, organic, gluten-free, vegan lemonade. So there! ;)
Grace, you could wipe the floor with those kids in the Hamptons, and I hope you’ll open the stand next door next summer. :)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Don’t forget “world’s best,” Amy. World’s Best Organic Lemonade. And the exclamation point. ! :)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I’m missing all the lemonade jokes! Thanks much, Mike, and sorry for the slow response, just dropping in for a sec — wall to wall deadlines today, so will come back and respond to folks in the cool of the evening. Best of luck with that artisan lemonade, I could hook you up with a stand in Westhampton Beach that needs it, lol.
I feel you are merely skating over the surface of many problems.I am getting approached by 2 or 3 self published authors who phone and want me to stock their book. I cannot filter 600,000 titles to decide what to stock. I need the equivalent of publishers gatekeepers to sort the wheat from the chaff. Authors who have to find their own way to market will have to invent some new paradigms or else the book trade will not be able to help and nurture them.
Peter,
Great of you to read me here at Writer Unboxed — we need more good booksellers like you in our mix, so glad to have you.
Can you tell me the time frame in which you’re talking, in terms of the approach at Bartons from two or three authors you describe? Is this two or three of them weekly? Monthly? And I assume not the same authors. I’ve found it almost embarrassing at times to see authors apparently assuming that they should be able to walk into a bookshop and find a ready, eager staff jumping at the chance to display their work in the front window, sight unseen. The reason this can occur as much as it does is that a lot of authors are completely unfamiliar with how books typically get into a bookstore, and of the pressures on a bookshop owner and staff. I think it’s rarely a willful gaffe. That doesn’t mean that it should be happening, however, especially so many years into the wider independent effort, when guidance on how to approach bookstores is available. (For anyone interested, I’d recommend the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) campaign started by Debbie Young and Piers Alexander on #Authors4Bookstores.)
As I’ll take up in the next installment on this topic (at Thought Catalog), one of the most peculiar bits of short-sightedness we see in the author corps is the inability to understand that if the “gatekeepers” turn you down, it doesn’t mean that the system of gatekeeping is evil. Instead, it means that some extremely experienced people have misgivings about how your work will perform in the marketplace. The gatekeepers want each author to be good, not bad, just as you, as a bookshop owner, really need good authors, not bad ones. Authors forget that. You and others they see as “gatekeepers” want to open the gates to them. While I can’t think that the industry has been very good at communicating this, it’s something worth remembering. I’d like to think it’s a reason that a strong author would want to offer his or her work to agents and editors, for example, if it were better understood that those folks look at queries hoping to read something terrific than bad. Their decisions, though, are financial. They’re in the business of finding things that might sell, just as booksellers like yourself are. This, too, isn’t always as well understood by writers as I wish it were.
But what you’re saying as a bookshop proprietor is the practitioner’s proper and rightful assertion: in any profession, any profession, there is the need for appraisal, evaluation, judgment — and these are all features of gatekeeping, whether the case of actors auditioning, doctors interning, or attorneys sitting for bar exams. Of course you can’t parse the estimated 600,000 (some say as low a figure as something closer to 400,000) US selfpub titles that our group of experts seemed to think might be produced annually, nor the number produced in the UK.
And authors may need to consider starting where you do: What does the bookseller need in order to help promote a powerful, successful author corps?
The alarming element of what’s missing in the author community these days (and authors are quietly confirming this to me) is this question: “Is it possible, our good friend, that your work is not good enough to be published?” The rightfully supportive community of creative people seems unwilling at too many junctures to entertain the idea that there’s a reason to reject 99 percent of the work in any human endeavor. The best is hard. It’s rare. It’s difficult. This is something that in decades of theater criticism I found almost impossible to explain to many: good art is the exception, not the rule. And a world inundated by unfiltered content is drowning in mediocrity.
Thank you again for reading and for writing. I know we’ll continue to run into eac other in and around my work with The Bookseller in London, an in other settings. Your input is valuable and gracious and important for us to hear. Thanks for it!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I think the goal for most authors who publish books, is to get their book sold, and read, and to do that they will have to do whatever is called for to get their books sold.That I find is a lot of consistence work pursuing that objective.
Thanks for your input, Ken.
I’m unsure I follow your phrase “consistence work,” but yes, I agree that being sold is a great motivator for the majority of writers. It’s sometimes mentioned that some folks write for the pleasure of doing so, and this is true. But I think that the overwhelming number of people willing to do what it takes to create a true book are doing it with the hope of having a remunerative readership.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
The “are you good enough” question is the 1000-page doorstopper in the room. When it and the accompanying points about gatekeepers come up, the conversation typically frequently runs off the rails and bursts into flames.
Reading Peter’s comment, I thought, “Hey, business idea: a bookstore for self-published books! Wouldn’t that be great?” But, as he asks, how do you filter all those books without turning into part of the vilified gatekeeper class? And, more important than that, how do you make money at it? And that’s the point a lot of people also forget (which is kind of funny, considering a lot of the discussion is about why authors aren’t making money): a business needs to make money. Whatever higher mission the business owner/corporate entity might have, if it doesn’t make money, it can’t do business.
Hmm, I feel like I’ve run a bit off the rails myself–is there a bucket handy, just in case?
Actually, you’re right on track, not off the rails at all.
One of the most predictable effects of the enabling power of digital is that it brings people into the industry who have no experience of it as a business. Many might have been great readers all their lives but they have understood books, as such, to be beloved works of art and craft, not as products of a complex and seriously challenged industry.
When you look at publishing through such inexperienced, non-professional (or maybe pre-professional) eyes, you realize how easy it is for many to assume that the rejections of industry gatekeepers are somehow unkind, mean-spirited, dismissals. And I think it’s very true that the industry has done too little to explain itself in this regard, which has led a lot more hostility and misunderstanding than was necessary.
As you’re saying—and as Peter Snell is saying—the classic gatekeeper’s role in publishing is tied to the market. While it’s perfectly possible to make the wrong call, absolutely, the gatekeeper’s job is to try to gauge what is likeliest to be salable.
That’s the criterion: is it salable?
As the pressures of a glutted market and a readership bombarded by other entertainments increase, you’re right that everyone—from Peter Snell at Baron’s Bookshop to the harried reader with 90 seconds to make a decision on a new ebook—is going to need gatekeeping of some kind.
The more we speak of this honestly and sensibly, with enmity toward no one, just clear heads and eyes, the better we’ll do.
Thanks, as ever, for reading and commenting!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter, this is the most honest piece about publishing from a writer’s perspective I have read in a long time. Thank you. I’ve been self-publishing for five years and can attest to how much things have changed. And not for the better. Even with two months of book tours, ads everywhere, and giveaways, my most recent release hasn’t sold anywhere near the previous two. The go-to ads, like Ereader News Today, don’t work as well anymore, and BookBub is next to impossible to score.
After such failure, of course I’ve sugar coated the experience with my readers and the public. But I’m done with that. It’s not just me (the book has a 4.5-star rating, all from legit reviewers), it’s also the industry. The glut you wrote about is real, and I’m sure eventually people will drop out of the race. I might be one of them.
For now, I’m flexing my journalistic muscles again after writing fiction exclusively for a few years, and shopping a new manuscript I wrote last year. I do not want to self-publish anymore. It takes too much out of me for too little return. This isn’t a hobby. This is my livelihood. There used to be a time when one could eke out a decent living as a writer. I’m afraid unless you are the top 1%, it is over.
Karen,
I can quickly return the compliment here and tell you that this is one of the bravest notes I’ve seen on this topic. As with the decision from Roz Morris and some others to begin talking about what’s happening on the ground, I think your experience will resonate with many, and that they’ll be grateful to you for speaking out. It’s so easy, after all, to think that it’s just happening to you, that something must be wrong with your work or approach, when all you hear around you is happy talk. That’s one reason the hype is so insidious.
The glut is definitely real, and it’s a mistake for anyone to pretend that it’s not. For one thing, it might mean that there’s nothing you could do to create better sales for yourself, and at least understanding that the entire industry is facing a problem.
For example, in the UK, there are 503 hardbacks already announced to be released on what’s called “Super Thursday” there this year, the 8th of October. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a marketing device to help call attention to new titles for Christmas shopping, But you have to ask yourself what the reading public can possibly make of 503 titles coming out in a single week. Some 250 may be expected in an average week there. Even that is a fairly boggling number. Mind you, all this is spread across all genres and types, and if you’re not a cookbook person, then whatever part of that is cookbooks won’t be in your way. All good. But even so, the sheer arrival of 250 or 500 new books every week — on the traditional side alone — has to give you a pause. And when authors worry that they’re not getting the marketing support they’d like, you also have to wonder how publishers could possibly hope to provide adequate marketing support to so much content. And it becomes a lot clearer why the standard process is to go very heavy on a launch and then drop a book and move to the next one. I don’t mean to excuse a publisher for “launch and run”-style tactics in marketing, but we do have to realize, I think, that the entire apparatus seems geared to very large numbers of titles, a highly scattershot approach, and this is one reason we see such a glut, along with the sudden arrival of so much self-published content. As one person has said it to me after I wrote this column yesterday, it’s like publishing of all kinds is putting itself right out of business, choking its own marketplace.
I also understand very well your decision to look for traditional publishing for your next manuscript. Again, you are not alone. I have one very fine writer friend who has published extensively with Big Five houses. She was able to get a lot of her rights back so she could self-publish them, herself, as ebooks. She found it so difficult and time-consuming that she, like you, feels it took far too much out of her and — although she did a beautiful job, I can attest to that, personally — she feels the return on all the work and investment has been nowhere near adequate.
Eventually, I think we may understand — I’m guessing, mind you — that self-publishing is a far less approachable thing for many than we think. As I keep saying, it’s not that you can’t self-publish. You can, although it’s harder than many concede and it takes a lot from any author to do it. But the real struggle is trying to self-sell. Success in this realm is a matter of a temperament that can handle both the rigors of professional book production and the high, high demands of marketing, a sophisticated set of skills that don’t come easily to many writers.
I was struck by this when the biggest Kindle Million Club bestseller, Barbara Freethy — wonderful person, I always enjoy her, and with close to 40 titles on the market — told me first that her (grown) daughter was, in fact, who was handling all the marketing for this terrific success Barbara has made with her self-publishing venture. And get this — her daughter was then hired by a publisher, a big one, because she’d done such a grand job. So here again is one of these cases of a terrific “indie bestseller” success we all applaud. And as you look closer you see that the story has been enabled, in part, by a formidably good job in a supportive family. Which is super. And…does every author have such a daughter? If not, then how do things look then?
In sum, what has been presented to us as a sort of everyman / everywoman approach — Just self-publish! Keep all the profits! It’s easy! — is, in truth, not easy and may in fact produce far fewer profits, if any at all, than such rhetoric suggests.
Time will tell, of course. But if more authors can find it possible to speak out as you’re doing, we’ll surely have a better, clearer, more compassionate understanding of what Mark Coker in a comment below is describing as the “desperation” he is seeing now in many authors. I’m seeing this, too, and I think it’s probably why we’re able to start having this dialogue at last.
We can only be better for it.
Thanks again and all the best to you with it.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter, this whole discussion has hung over today’s writing like a black cloud. I’ve held off, checking back to see if you had any more slack in your day and then said, FI.
Here’s my belly talking.
Can’t stop. Won’t stop. When they do whatever with what’s left, who gives a crap.
OTH, foreskins are involved in the following. If you are flooding the world with anything less than your blood, sweat and tears, I curse you and all your get.
Mind you this is a crazy horseperson yapping.
And while we are talking toxic waste, here comes some more.
A curse upon your house if you are preying upon anyone who writes out of love. And you are legion!
Porter, it’s a good, good thing we aren’t in the same space because I’d probably be PITA gawping at your brain.
Be at peace, Morgyn.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Thank you. I found the article enlightening.
Thank you, Amy, great of you to read it and leave note!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
This may be my favorite Porter post in the history of Porter posts.
I see a lot of hard publishing truths and even more frustration in closed groups but little on public forums. Why? Probably because complaining isn’t a likable trait, and we’re told to be likable in order to sell books. For those who are traditionally published, add a layer of political correctness to everything. When the Writer Inboxed newsletter was in production, we had a column dedicated to insider truths, and they were anonymous stories. ‘Oscar’ is ‘Oscar’ for a reason.
Hey, Therese,
Thanks so much for your kind words and support on this. You’re right that a lot of people think that complaining is incorrect. I’m no fan of a lot of complaint, myself.
I think the problem is perceiving truth-telling about the difficulty of getting anywhere in the business to be complaining. I don’t think it is. Or, at least, I don’t think it has to be.
Granted, if an author whines continually about poor sales (and I do know of one in the UK who is widely derided for this), then yes, that’s inappropriate behavior and likely won’t lead to any changes or improvement for that author or for others.
But if, instead, authors are more forthright about their sales experiences and struggles—taking out the emotion, the poor-me tone, and simply sharing what’s happening so that others can feel able to say something, too—then, I think, we’re into the realm of constructive honesty. Folks can start exchanging notes and realistically appraising whether their own experiences are reflected in others’ or not.
We have a great example of what I’m talking about in Karen Berner’s comment that’s several up above this one. I don’t get any complaining tone there at all. I get a straightforward assessment that, in Karen’s own case (she’s not speaking for anyone else), the experience of self-publishing for five years has left her looking for a traditional contract. For her, self-publishing has produced inadequate returns and has taken too much from her. This is actually refreshing. It’s not happy news, God knows, but it’s a great step in the right, honest, serious, earnest direction we need to help authors feel they can move toward starting to share their actual experiences.
Needless to say, some authors (we have to hope!) have much happier experiences to report. Those are important, too. But it’s the range of experience that’s been missing.
And, as usual, it’s great to have Writer Unboxed as a forum in which we can say that this is something that needs looking at, debate it, compare notes, as always with respect and civil language. You’ve nurtured this kind of platform for thoughful exchange here and that, alone, is a huge accomplishment.
Plus you keep me in Campari. That, of course, is your best success of all. :)
Cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Nobody likes a whiny artist. Unfortunately, candid ones aren’t terribly popular either. Porter touches on something here I find discussed far too infrequently: what of he quality of the books that are available? When poorly written books sell millions, it takes character to commit to excellence, not just success.
So well said, David,
A commitment to quality takes character and a kind of courage, I think. And — this may be a personal bias — I think it also takes a willingness to stand and work alone.
This is where I’m not sure that community helps us. Community isn’t good at promoting and protecting truth. It tends to favor widely held tropes and feel-good aphorisms. I wonder at times if the rush to community by so many writers and other artists — as digital gave them the twin capabilities of publication and communication — hasn’t encouraged the fabricated life, a designed construct, not an authentically felt one.
Thanks for this note, greatly appreciated.
-p.
On Twitter: @PorterAnderson
So glad I will be at the Novelist Inc. conference and able to continue this honest conversation in person. I had thought / hoped with e-publishing, that readers would become the new gatekeepers and good books would stand out. How can that possible happen with 600,000 new books a year? I was naïve…but am still writing. After fifteen years of “being out there,” both traditionally and indie published, it’s hard to stop. What would I do with the stories in my notebook waiting to be fleshed out? I can afford to continue because I’ve always held a day job. That might be an answer for those whose income has been so diminished lately but who want to keep writing.
Just sign me…practical Linda.
Hi, Linda, and thanks for your comment.
It’s said that the majority of writers do have some other work, and I think this has to be true. Without independent wealth or another form of revenue, it seems that most writers can’t expect to make a living from their writing.
And yes, exactly. With so many self-published books (the low estimate we’ve heard this summer is 350,000 per year, the high end is 700,000) — let alone a deep reef of traditional work being published all the time — the idea of “the readers are our gatekeepers” pretty much falls apart. It’s always possible to say that “the market will decide.” But if that’s the case, then the market is deciding, as Smashwords’ Mark Coker is telling us in his comment, that it’s a thumbs-down for most books and authors. Coker is right that most authors sell poorly (regardless of path to publication). That being the case, we might think of an overwhelmed readership as the harshest gatekeeper of all. And, in general, I think the average reader — unconcerned about the prospects of the industry or its struggle with digital or its politics and factions and hype — is likely to accept or dismiss work without a thought.
Practicality is a wonderful guide, hang on to it. See you at NINC.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Behind closed doors, a writer friend and I have often discussed these same issues. I’ve been a published writer for 35 years, and the changes in The Industry have been amazing. But I’ve felt a bit like the little boy gaping at the royal parade and saying, “But the emperor has no clothes on.” So it’s good to know I’m not the only one pondering the parade. Thank you for this post. I always enjoy your honesty and insight.
Thanks for your kind words, Karyn, and for this frank note.
We need more folks like you—with genuine, long-term skin in the game—to step forward and say (as Roz Morris is doing), “This is what we’re really saying to each other, this is what we talk about behind those closed doors, this is the reality.”
You are by no means the only one pondering the parade, no. The floats and confetti and bad marching band routines are wearing thin, aren’t they?
All the best,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
How sweet of you to buy the lemonade! I, mother to two darling boys and so should have some empathy, always go right past. I don’t buy Boy Scout popcorn, either. I’ve always wondered what that says about me as a human being. I do buy Girl Scout cookies. I can’t turn down thin mints.
A quick warning – this comment is going to be kind of stream-of-thought. I’ll try to keep it coherent, but I’m tired, so I make no guarantees.
Like the others above, I’d like to thank you for sharing both Roz’s post and bringing to light that all is not as well as people would like it to seem in Publishingland. And here I thought it was just me! Now I feel really good I actually sold 4-5 books in August. I felt good before, just because my average is one every month or so. Taking your article into perspective, I had a veritable tsunami of sales in August! Interestingly, none of them were on Amazon.
There is a fear, I think, of writers to talk about how their book doesn’t or isn’t selling. To admit that puts some kind of judgement over you, because everyone knows that “great books sell no matter what”, and so your book must be really awful. Or, if you’re self-publishing, it’s a double nail in the coffin that your book wasn’t good enough because trad publishing didn’t want it, and neither did the masses. Or maybe that’s just my own fear.
Regarding Marketing… For me, I haven’t actively marketed my book in over a year, maybe. Following the “you must do these things to be a success” wasn’t working, the return on investment wasn’t worth it, and quite honestly, I find that kind of marketing annoying (both as a writer and as a reader.) One thing I have done all along is try to be “outward facing” like you had talked about so long ago. When I’m on social media, it’s to interact with people who I like and who are like me. It makes social media a lot more enjoyable. I should release book two in the next six months and so I have things I’m trying that is marketing without marketing, like writing short-stories related to my book series interactively (they pick the details and I write the story) with readers and putting them on Wattpad , where they liked my book when it was there. I’m trying to use Pinterest more, and post to Facebook once a week. The only one that I find harder to do is post to Facebook. All of this is off the seat of my pants. I stopped reading “how to market” when I finally decided that obviously the lightening strike wasn’t going to happen for me. Accepting that was very freeing.
So, that leads me to my thoughts related to this quote by Roz:
“And see why, in spite of the rotten state of the book market, we keep the faith and stay true to our standards.”
I have two thoughts, actually. The first is my personal answer to why I still write and am planning to self-publish another book, even though I will most likely never earn back what it costs to publish it. I like writing. I want to see what happens with Book 2. And if things aren’t all sunshine and light, and the day comes that it’s just not fiscally responsible for me to self-publish, then I’ll write and publish to Wattpad. I guess because I am not successfully selling books, it gives me greater lee-way. I don’t count on the income. I imagine it’s not so easy when you’ve been living off your writing.
My second thought is that sooner or later, people will start to drop out. I read a quote the other day about sticking to something when it’s hard is what leads to success, basically because you’re the last one standing. Maybe this is the season in publishing where people have to just continue through, and might be rewarded for their perseverance later. Who knows. It is “still life on earth,” after all!
Look at that! I wrote you a book! I’m also buying you a glass of Campari because you were nice to those little girls and drank their icky lemonade. :)
I second your thoughts on the “people will start to drop out.” It’s true. I know a few people who realized they could cash in on the eBook craze. They knew they were writing crap, and didn’t care, they just wanted to produce and cash in. Now that it’s drying up, they’re out of there. And the truth is, they never loved to write in the first place. They didn’t NEED to write. I would venture that most of us here on WU love and need to write, regardless of how difficult it is.
Right, Grace,
While we still haven’t seen the kind of exodus from the field we’ve expected for a long time, I do think the level of saturation occurring in the market now is going to become more compelling to the people who thought that ebooks were going to be a fast way to turn a buck.
I don’t think these are writers, either. Whether the criterion is need, as you put it, I think that writing is the output of a certain type of personality whose linguistic nature and creative development makes working in words the right outlet. Good work is hard even for those who are naturals. What digital has done is put publishing within reach of a lot of people for whom verbal expression just isn’t really a good option. In short, they have no business in this business. And I hope you’re right that we’ll see a lot of them pack it in.
It will help if more writers speak up, as some are doing in these comments, and share the truth about their own less-than storybook experiences.
Thanks,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
“My second thought is that sooner or later, people will start to drop out. I read a quote the other day about sticking to something when it’s hard is what leads to success, basically because you’re the last one standing.”
Reminds me of a Yogi Berra line: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
Thanks, Ray,
Love the Yogi Berra line. Pretty much the opposite of Sam Goldwyn’s immortal (and probably all too relevant to this no-sales situation) “They stayed away in droves.”
Cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Another Goldwyn-ism: “An oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”
First, Lara,
Keep passing the lemonade stands and head right for the Camparino. My turn to buy you one, and many thanks, cin-cin! :)
I think it’s great that you’re saying, “I thought it was just me.” I think many, maybe most, writers are in exactly the same boat as you — moving one copy a month (if that much) and thinking that everyone else is sailing by with super sales. Who wouldn’t think that, when the inspi-vational podcasters are banging away all day and night about “so many” authors making “good money” in self-publishing and/or traditional publishing?
What’s happened is fairly easy to understand, too.
When self-publishing became a reality for so many — not vanity publishing but actually doing it yourself — the main response was emotional: Now I can get my books out, after all. That’s different from a non-emotional evaluation of, “But wait a minute: if my books have been rejected by the industry that sells books, what makes me think they’ll sell as self-published offerings?” Not a fun question to ask, and when the self-publishing “movement” developed its narrative of “so many” writers making “good money” and never a word about “why was your book rejected in the first place?” it became easy to think that diving right in was the answer.
This is not, by the way, to say that industry rejection is always correct OR that self-publishing is, by any means, incorrect.
It is, though, a matter of needing cool, almost icy analysis of what chances your work might have in history’s most difficult and overstocked market. And I think a lot of our writers don’t have the capacity to make such an analysis of any book, let alone their own. This is an incredibly difficult ask of anyone. As we know, we can’t even see our own typos well. To imagine that we can genuinely evaluate our work’s potential in such a conflicted and jammed marketplace — and to think that homemade marketing tactics (lots of tweets!) can parallel the marketing machines that professional publishing houses have — is anything but sensible, really. But hope tugs so many along. There are all these joyous voices chanting that indie is the way (and not telling you how many books they’re selling, either).
Your comments about the fear of admitting you’re not selling are very relevant, easily understood by anybody looking at this problem. My heart goes out to folks who are looking at dismal or zero sales, what a crushing, lonely thing. (Makes you understand why they cluster in communities and smile as if they’re selling well.) And I’m sure your marketing patterns are woefully common, too. When books aren’t moving despite your doing “what everybody says you have to do,” eventually you stop doing it. And then you have books out there just…coasting.
I think your reasons for writing are great, they’re your own reasons and doing things on Wattpad is very smart, fit it to your temperament. The idea of people dropping out is something we’ve watched for, for a long time. It hasn’t really happened yet and that’s been surprising to some of us who thought we’d see half the herd give up years ago. Busloads of newcomers seem to keep arriving. But as the glut in the marketplace becomes more palpable—and you sense now that people are really starting to get it—then it’s going to become harder for the lightweights to stick it out. I won’t be sorry to watch the dilettantes hike out of here, personally.
And I’ll be really glad if more folks like you start speaking up and sharing the truth of what they’re experiencing.
There’s a nightmarishly funny Onion piece from 2011, “Author Promoting Book Gives It Her All Whether It’s Just 3 People Or A Crowd Of 9 People,” do you know it? http://onion.com/1LiPoWI
I think the actual worry about that satire is that it’s from more than four years ago. It takes us a long time to come to grips with some of these realities, doesn’t it?
Thanks again, both for the candid commentary and the Campari (lots of alliteration there).
Cheers!
-p.
Porter, I’m delighted my post struck a chord. It’s been building in my head for some time and that conversation with ‘Oscar’ tipped me over.
I hesitated before I wrote it. I worried I might lose authority, look less credible, torpedo my reputation. As Therese says, there are certain things that aren’t talked about.
Fortunately, my desire to write books I’m proud of is stronger than any discouragement I feel. And I still believe in self-publishing. Without it I could not have found an audience at all – or at least, not without compromising my integrity and several rules of common sense. But it’s good to tell the truth and to get such honesty in response. Thank you, guys.
Well, Roz,
Of course you HAVE now lost all authority, you’ve totally discredited yourself, and your reputation is permanently torpedoed.
JUST KIDDING. Couldn’t resist. I’m awful.
But as you and Therese are rightly saying, a kind of culture of the unspoken has risen around writing as the digital dynamic enabled so many more people to give it a go. There was a Reagan-era line that one should “never speak ill of a fellow Republican.” And many authors have been operating on this kind of code-of-silence premise that is completely unhelpful and, in many cases, outright damaging.
A few comments down, you’ll see Mark Coker, Smashwords’ CEO, noting that most authors — trad or self — “will sell poorly.” Full stop. He’s right. This is truth.
We almost need to get that out each day on loudspeakers to remind ourselves, the whole community, that gainful sales are the exception, not the rule — both to be truthful and to help some folks stop beating up on themselves for failing to turn a penny.
In the wider picture, we need to get a better understanding of just how hard this whole thing is, not least from the standpoint of market performance. Too many writers have been afraid too long to say that they’re just not selling, that a 10-book week was the big one, that their Amazon ranking is in the 800th sub-basement of the system.
And what I really like about your own approach — just as you demonstrate again in this comment — is that you know that truth doesn’t mean giving up writing, doesn’t mean being some kind of traitor to self-publishing, and certainly doesn’t mean you’re some kind of heretic. It means you know that the business and art of writing will benefit far more from truth than from magical thinking and relentless infusions of motivational podcasts.
If anything, I think the rah-rah people have a lot to answer for. I think we should hold them accountable for their cruel sweetness-and-light depictions of what authors can accomplish in what is, in fact, a more challenging market than humankind has ever seen. None of this is something that authors “went through before and did fine.” The digital age is new, unprecedented, there are no maps, no charts, no knowledgeable guides. Every time a motivational hustler yells, “We’re all going to be great! Follow me!” I want to see the authors running very fast the other way. :)
So thanks again, good to have you among the Great Unboxed and to get so many noises of recognition chiming in with that all-important “me too” reaction of understanding, compassion, and truth.
It means a better dialogue has begun.
Cheers!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Wow…a lot of food for thought so early in the morning. As I’ve previously written (probably in over a dozen different comments now) I’m still working on my first novel. I started writing fiction about three years ago and inspired by the likes of Hugh Howey and Coleen Hoover, had my sights set on self-publishing. I don’t have a literary background, and never grew up thinking I’d ever be a “published author” so traditional publishing didn’t hold the cachet for me that it did to many of my writer friends. I fully believed that a well written, professionally edited indie-published work could hold its own, and I was determined to carve my own path doing it.
But…creating my masterpiece has taken a lot longer than my naive mind ever thought it would, and during that time I’ve watched as the self-publishing landscape has undergone (in my eyes) a seismic shift. Now, the things that drew me to self-publishing seem less solid, less firm, and now I’m forced to consider a new, more hybrid path.
I’m still a way off from being ready, but this post, and an awful lot of what I’ve been reading lately, has been leading me to understand that writers have to be at the forefront of shaping the future of what it looks like to be a published author. It will involve invention and reinvention, crazy ideas, a marriage of the old and the new, social media re-imagined in a way that we’re not renting or borrowing space on the web from Facebook or Twitter, Amazon or Kobo, but inviting guests into our own homes – our websites. I believe that those of us who are poised to enter the industry for the first time are in a unique position to marry the traditional and indie worlds in ways that hasn’t been done before. It’s scary as hell, but a tremendous opportunity.
Hi again, Grace,
And thanks for this and your other comment.
Your concept of “marrying the traditional and indie worlds” is bound to produce more generous results than a hardening of opposing camps. In the long run, though, it’s hardly a bad thing that you write about the creation of your work taking longer than expected. Many smart authors I know are waiting and watching. It’s pretty stormy weather, after all, in which to be launching a first boat.
As you write, a good way forward may not be something we can even see right now. And in the long run, it may not be as revolutionary as you envision; or it might be even more so.
My friend and colleague (and a fellow contributor here) Jane Friedman took some push-back when she suggested that so many authors she meets are in such a hurry to be published. So much impatience. Jane wasn’t wrong, she was right. And in time, even the industry! the industry! will become more stable. Its new contours won’t please everybody but its energies will be less volatile. And that’s when thoughtful new voices might be able to make their moves in somewhat calmer seas.
Just this morning at The FutureBook, I’ve published one of our series of #FutureBook15 manifestos from an independent publisher who is challenging her colleagues to re-think their workflows and procedures for a faster trip to market, to benefit authors. http://bit.ly/1UQIlo0
Change will be the reality now for a long time, I think, but as we become more conscious of what’s occurring, we’ll learn to navigate and leverage that change better for ourselves.
Don’t rush yourself, and keep looking for those chances at unity instead of confrontation, you’re on the right track.
Cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Hi Porter, thanks for the shout outs. When we consider the multiple converging forces that have conspired to create amazing opportunities for authors (the rise of ebooks, the rise of ebook self-publishing, the democratization of global ebook retailing where ever indie can get distribution), YES, there’s never been a better time to be a writer. Millions of potential readers are just a couple clicks away from every book. The opportunity to reach a worldwide audience instantly, for free, and the freedom to be judged directly by readers without intervening gatekeepers – it’s all nothing short of amazing. But the real truth is that that vast majority of authors will sell poorly, whether indie published or traditionally published. At Smashwords, we’ve always actively promoted this truth to our authors in our FAQ, in my books, my blog and in our workshops. It’s really important that all of us in the business of serving authors must wear two hats – that of the cheerleader who gives writers encouragement to believe in themselves and reach for the brass ring, but also of the realist to give them the knowledge, tools and philosophy that will prepare them for the tough road ahead.
The slower growth environment is leading to a rising desperation among some writers. This means writers are susceptible to making poor decisions in the search for magic bullets. As they teach in fairy tales, magic comes at a price. I’d argue that KDP Select is one such poor decision for the long term, and overspending on marketing is another such poor decision. There are no short cuts. The successful authors will be those who plan for the long term.
Writers who are feeling overwhelmed might enjoy this post I did in November where I talk about how things will get more difficult from here but also how they can plot for greater success in this slower growth environment http://blog.smashwords.com/2014/11/ebook-publishing-gets-more-difficult.html
Hi, Mark!
So good to have you join us here at Writer Unboxed, thanks!
I’ve always appreciated the way you’ve tried to provide honest insights into what was happening, especially in your blog writings at Smashwords and, most recently, in the podcast with Joanna Penn, as well. I was glad in that instance, for example, that you took on the question of the remaining stigma about self-published work, and spoke of the ‘torrent” of books (well-chosen word) released by the enabling capabilities of digital self-publishing, all in line with that candid stance. For that matter, your explication of the situation with Flipkart is very helpful for that reason, too. Not only does that show us the kind of sheer technical demands involved right now in some of these major platform entities but also the impact of Amazon KDP Select on other outfits: Flipkart unable to de-list ebooks fast enough, Smashwords therefore having to decouple from Flipkart.
In your comment here, I like this line:
“The real truth is that that vast majority of authors will sell poorly, whether indie published or traditionally published. At Smashwords, we’ve always actively promoted this truth to our authors in our FAQ, in my books, my blog and in our workshops.”
Exactly. And there aren’t a lot of folks saying these things to our writers, unfortunately, whether they’re going into a traditional publishing contract or a selfpub effort. It’s hard above the boosterism (as Roz Morris has demonstrated) to hear the voices saying, “But we’re not selling, we can’t find an audience, no readership is gathering for us, we’re in trouble.”
I believe, as I know you do, too, that we need to hear those voices along with the ones telling us that “so many” authors are making “good money” from their writings. Surely, some authors are. Just as surely, far, far, far, far more authors are not.
Here’s the tricky part, as you aptly put it in your comment:
“It’s really important that all of us in the business of serving authors must wear two hats – that of the cheerleader who gives writers encouragement to believe in themselves and reach for the brass ring, but also of the realist to give them the knowledge, tools and philosophy that will prepare them for the tough road ahead.”
Maybe because of a persona aversion to pompoms :) the cheerleading element of the thing is, to my mind, the one we have covered. Don’t misunderstand, I get your clarity on the twofold nature of the issue. And I recognize that you’re in a situation in which you can’t just yell, “Run away!” at every newly arriving writer at Smashwords for the sake of reality’s bite, lol.
But I do think that we’ve probably seen a lot better job done of the happy talk, overall, than of the serious-caveat side. You don’t have to agree with this for a minute, of course, but my own perception from watching so many writers and organizations and companies around them operate for so long is that we just don’t get enough warnings, enough qualifiers, enough clarifications, enough “your mileage will probably vary and may be vastly, vastly different.”
I guess that’s what we journos are here to do, huh? You drive the pompoms, I’ll come by right behind you with the wet blanket. What a team. :)
I do see that desperation you’re perceiving in many writers, too. I think it’s safe to say with such a deep level of output now—the glut—it’s finally becoming clear to many that there just isn’t any fast rocket to stardom here.
You’re right: There are no short cuts.
And I think that the relative ease of digital publishing has misled many writers to think that there is a quick way, a fast way, the beloved “E-Z” way to get published! get read! get famous! get a movie!…actually, no.
These next few years of a more mature independent answer to the traditional industry will be pivotal for many. I think we agree that truthful input is the most important thing to offer our creative workers.
And thanks again for coming by Writer Unboxed. Seriously, please check in often if you can, love to have your input whenever you feel inclined.
Best from here,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I belong to another writing community (Blueboards) where the conversation about writing and publishing is honest. You can’t make a living even from 6-figure advances spread out over 3 yrs after the agent takes his cut. Do the math. A midlist writer like me depends on her husband. But he vowed to love and cherish me (and he does). And I have a whole another full time job, which is far more important, and that’s raising my children. Even they will not go for the lemonade stand :)
But reading your article made me realize I need more cat pictures on my blog. Once in a while I check stats and the most views are on pets, religion, family life. Not writing. Go figure.
Hey, Vijaya,
Love those stats on your site. Doesn’t that just say it all?
Cat pictures.
What were we thinking? :)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I read both Roz Morris’ post and this one with great interest: they are encouraging in their discouragement. What a relief to hear such honesty because I think some writers may fear that poor sales are completely their fault. Or, worse, writers may feel that setting high standards for their work is pointless and passe if no one has the time or attention span to care about craftsmanship anymore. And if that happens… The comments to these posts are also helpful in that it seems some people are beginning to look for alternate ways to promote beyond the relentless push for author “branding.” I’ve never liked that word.
Thanks very much for your comment.
I’m glad you find “encouragement in the discouragement,” lol, that’s the right way to understand and look at this point in things.
And you’re right that one of the most difficult parts of the hype-masters’ relentless happy talk is that it causes writers who aren’t selling well (and that is probably most writers, as Mark Coker says in comments above) to think that they’re alone in that experience. Not so. And the more we get some truth into the mix to temper the motivational-inspirational podcast machines, the better our authors can appraise what’s going on for them and for their colleagues.
Cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter, what an excellent post. And love your lines: “blow some more colored smoke up an asterisk right beside it, soft-shoe my way around some late-summer garden maze with you to a place safe enough…”
Your post comes at a time when I’m ready to send my much revised second novel to an editor before I self-publish. I’ve been struggling with my decision to self-publish again, as I’m fully aware of the challenges in the marketplace and how much it’s changed.
I’m not surprised that traditionally published writers are having a tough go as well.
I was on a B.C. (British Columbia) ferry a few days ago and checked out the book section in its gift shop. I was surprised to see many low-priced paperbacks by bestselling authors, published by the Big Five. The books were smaller and not as handsome as the kind they had published a few years back. With a rush to compete with the downward pricing of Amazon, etc. the Big Five have come up with this alternative to what went before. I find it sad that they’ve lowered their standards. It also means I’m sure less money for the writer. When a paperback costs $10.95 and that’s Canadian, how much (after the publisher and agent take their cut) does the author get?
My debut novel (self-published) has had modest sales, even though my reviews have been consistently stellar. I do not crack out stories without a lot of thought and work. I revise and revise until my fingers go numb. And I employed both a substantive and copy editor to ensure I put my best foot forward. I’m still waiting to recoup all my costs.
If I was twenty or even thirty, I’d go the traditional route without hesitation. But since I’m not, and know of authors who wait three to four years before their books are published, I go back and forth about what is in my best interests.
So you see, I’m still thinking.
Hi, Diana,
Many thanks for this thoughtful comment. I feel for you, the quandary of how to handle really carefully created work is a weighty one these days.
I think that one thing the traditional industry is getting much clearer about is the need to get to market much faster than in the past. We see this, for example, in the pre-FutureBook 2015 manifesto I’ve published today at The FutureBook in London. http://bit.ly/1UQIlo0 There, an independent publisher, Hanna MacDonald of September Publishing is writing:
“We’ve adapted to some things fast since the digital revolution began and reacted defensively to others. But now is the moment for each stage, process and document to be examined—always asking the same question. Does this develop and support the author to produce their best possible draft and how does it actively finding them new, engaged readers?”
The fact that this kind of conversation among publishers is going on—even as the sort of frank exchanges we’re seeing in these comments at Writer Unboxed—is good news. I wouldn’t assume that three- or four-year waits to be published are, or will be, the norm. And, in fact, it should be possible to work with an agent who will work to get a stipulation on this point. Don’t be afraid to research it—that always beats assumptions that might short-change you in the long run.
Really, all the best with it. At least, as you can tell here, you’re in good company.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Thanks yet again, Porter. You are our Harry Truman: “If you can’t stand the heat [read: numbers], get out of the [reality] kitchen.”
After reading your piece, here’s what occurs to me. Until some means of curating (used to be jurying) indie work is developed–and made public–only those who are master pitchmen and women will have a chance of success. People like Hugh Howey who has turned his own life into an unfolding video narrative more interesting–in my view–than his novels. Self-marketing with a vengeance.
People are forever talking about algorithms, equations, etc. In an age dominated by sophisticated formulae, why hasn’t someone developed a series of programs to evaluate narrative content? The program’s criteria would be made clear, and writers invited to subscribe for a fee. If sample work got a positive numerical score, the writer would be eligible to be grouped and marketed with other writers whose work had also been subjected to this process. You could have programs for separate genres. The criteria would be derived from, say, a hundred of the most successful books in that genre, scanned and analyzed, etc.
I hear the baying already, the shouting–who’s to judge the hundred best books in my genre? How can such a process be fair? Well, it wouldn’t be completely fair, but it could impose accepted standards on, say, a submission by a writer of 1500 words from her novel.
Failing some such approach, it stops making much sense for anyone without huge sums to throw at advertising to bother at all. Or who has movie-actor gifts, and an assistant with a video camera.
I don’t think any writer actually tells the whole truth about their earnings because that would deflate the bubble. I hear a lot of “I’ve been earning enough to quit my full time job”. That doesn’t mean to say they don’t have a part time job and write on the side.
As for marketing, the problem is, whoever makes a big splash doing something one week, 7 million people try to do that very same thing the following week — whether it’s ads for BookBub, Twitter campaings, blog tours, etc. Problem is, people get sick of seeing ads and campaigns and just tune them out. Word of mouth is the only thing I rely on for selling books.
I don’t tend to discuss my sales with anyone because I’m afraid I’ll jinx myself. When I first started publishing (2011) a group of us would chat about our sales ups and downs (Even though we published in different genres) trying to gauge if we were “making it” or not. Every single time I even mentioned that I was doing well, my sales would drop. Every single time. I’d stop talking about it, they’d go back up. So now I say nothing. However, I can tell you that four years in a row, August has been the ugliest month — whether due to back to school or last minute vacations. And January is the banner month due to Christmas gift cards filling stockings.
Reading this has cheered me up no end ! Sorry if that sounds perverse, but I’m delighted to see such honesty.
It’s hard work publishing and marketing a book. I started and ran my own translation company before I wrote novels, so I had commercial experience. I knew that if you broke even after five years, you were doing well.
At the Historical Novel Society conference in Denver in June, I chaired a panel called The Brass Tacks of Self-Publishing and watched the audience faces turn from enthusiastic and joyous to disappointed and anxious as we outlined the work before them. We didn’t intend to be so pessimistic but hopefully we introduced a reality check.
But we were besieged with questions for the remainder of the weekend, so perhaps we didn’t dampen enthusiasm entirely!
No apology necessary, Alison,
I know exactly what you mean. It’s just been too long, this enforced gaity about the alleged prosperity and ease of digital-era authorhood. I’m glad to hear that you’ve worked in settings like the Historical Novel Society confab to lay things out honestly.
Your mention of translation rings a bell for me as I prepare various programs this fall for conferences on independent authors and the international potential — and, of course, the message we have to carry in to these events is that there’s no easy way, no push-button solution to the difficulties still inherent in “going global,” as some like to call it.
None of us wants or needs to sound pessimistic. But all of us must work for honesty with each other and not worry, I think, about dampening enthusiasm. An artist’s enthusiasm must come from the work and his or her relationship to it, not from outer conditions of market realities or industry politics.
Thanks again for your good comment, great to have you along.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I really appreciated this post and the comments are as rich, if not richer. I am in a unique role as a reviewer (possibly a gatekeeper, if only there was a gate I could close).
Like many reviewers, my focus is narrowed to a specific genre, in this case storybook apps. Much of this new media (interactive digital content) for kids is self-published. I began my site, digital-storytime.com in 2010. The content explosion since 2012 alone was so great I began telling anyone submitting that I’d get to their review with a timeline of 6 months to never. By 2013 I stopped responding to requests, they were so overwhelming.
There is no way anyone can possibly read, let alone review/gatekeep the volume of content the new ‘industry’ is producing. I don’t know what the solution for the industry is, but the solution for me personally is to get out. The ability to sustain my website is simply too costly in both time, money & energy to justify continuing.
Digital content is often also pulled by the distributer (made entirely unavailable for future downloads), making older reviews on my site irrelevant. The world of eBooks is very precarious, changing faster than we can find new analogies from old tech to help us understand it.
Thank you for your strong and thoughtful voice on these issues. And to the commenters, for their articulate and brave revelations. The authors I talk to behind the scenes are in desperate need of this type of post. They seem almost as grateful for a review as for my comments that they’re not alone if sales are slim.
Everyone, even the big players in children’s books, are reeling. If anything, I wish these authors could stop feeling like “it’s just me”. That alone would be a big win in my book.
Hi, Carisa,
And what a brave and compelling comment of your own. Thank you for adding to what I agree is the richness of the discussion here.
I’m sorry to learn that your only decent recourse is to bail, but I’m not surprised, of course, nor can I blame you for a minute.
I’m reminded of a very difficult corporate setting I was in once. We had people who couldn’t make it two weeks and people who had handled it for years. A very wise person there told me, “We each leave when we hit our limit — and it’s different for each of us.”
I think that as the overwhelm continues in publishing (as we know, it’s not officially well acknowledged by a long shot yet), we’ll see a pattern of people who might be able to withstand its pressures as long as you’ve done — and we’ll see others who can’t do much more than make a U-turn and exit.
I agree with you that while we want our most talented people to thrive — and we want to support them in this — we also need to get across to the big majority that they’re not alone and that their inability to sell is not their own problem but systemic to what has happened.
None of us knows that solution, you’re right. I think we’ll see it when it materializes as much as a result as barrier to what’s going on now. For the moment, the intensity is building fast, as you’ve experienced and as I think so many of these good comments indicate.
Thank you again, and all the best,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Hi Porter, I am a 26 year old not-yet-published author. Still working on the best course for me.
I really like posts like these, because they bring people back to reality. I’ve seen a few posts on Kboards from authors who made (or say they made) the big time, and they offer their ‘advice’ as if one-size-fits-all. Or, we get glowing reports from indie bestsellers who make it sound like it’s never been easier to make at least a few thousand a year. As a young guy and someone who writes for passion, I really get annoyed seeing these success stories not so much inform but brag about their accomplishments, especially when they say they cut corners and still made it. I have always viewed writing more as a business, rather than under any real guise that I can just upload a few books to the web and watch the big bucks roll into the bank account.
At least now, having read your post, I don’t feel pressured to sell so much as I feel humble to write because I love to write, and not worry that if I am not raking in the big $ like the Kindle Million Club members. It’s not necessarily because my work stinks, but largely in part because of the hard economic realities of selling books in a market glutted with entertainment options.