Mysterious Matters: Mystery Publishing Demystified

So, What's Right with Mystery Publishing Today?

Last week (or thereabouts), I opined regarding my impressions of what the industry is doing wrong. This week, I want to talk about what we are doing right.

1. The quality of submissions has gone up. In general, I would say that the quality of what I'm seeing is higher than it was, say, ten years ago. A lot of writers have become much more savvy and informed about not only the basics of manuscript preparation, but also the art of the query letter. A lot of the credit, I think, goes to groups like Sisters in Crime and writers' support/critique groups, as well as the Internet, which makes more networking possible.  

2. Writers are more savvy about what it takes to get published. This is an extension of number 1 above. The best query letters talk about the writer's ability to get media coverage, reviews, and attention for the book, and I'm seeing more and more of this in the queries I receive. A lot of writers are also comparing their work to X or Y best-selling author as a way of establishing who the market is, not by saying that their books are better than X's or Y's (a wise move). A writer who understands the challenges of bringing a book to the public's attention is an editor's dream.

3. eBooks are helping us deliver our materials in formats desired by the reading public.  Even though I'm a traditionalist and love the printed book, I know that a growing number of consumers like the convenience of ebooks. From the publisher's side of the equation, it can be cost-effective to do e-versions of books - lower printing/inventory costs allow for lower cost to the consumer. The concern, and a huge one at that, is the almost unbelievable amount of piracy that occurs the second a book gets into digital format. A friend of mine is the editor for a much-beloved science fiction author, and he tells me that within a week of publication thousands of illegal ebooks have been downloaded from "File Sharing" sites that should more properly be thought of as "File Stealing" sites. 

It's never been cost-effective to make physical copies of a novel - at 10 cents a page, a 300-page paperback would cost $30, much more than the price of a new book. But these eBooks make piracy as simple as a couple of clicks. It's a major, major problem that we need to address.

The dark side of eBooks, of course, is the ability for anyone to upload their work and sell it via credible sites like Amazon and even Barnes & Noble. I can't fault either company; they see an opportunity for profit, and that's what businesses are there to do. The airwaves are getting jammed by people trying to get attention for eBooks that haven't been edited, proofread, or undergone any sort of quality control. And all those 99 cent books are adding to the already distressing perception that books have limited or almost no value, which translates into a consumer's desire to get all intellectual property for free. All of us are watching this with great interest; the next decade or so will be one to watch as new business models come into play. When people are unwilling to pay more for a book than they will for a beer, a cup of coffee, a diet Coke, or a grapefruit, we get to a place where books are interchangeable commodities, with any single title having no value greater than any other one of a million books. And I think we can all say that a book by Minette Walters (for example) has a great deal more value than one "published" electronically by a teenager.

4. We can still launch blockbusters. Though it doesn't happen as often as we'd like, we can still launch new writers who are immediately embraced by the public. A good example is Louise Penny, who seems to get more and more fans with each book; others might include Lisa Unger and Stephanie Pintoff. If these authors keep going the way they're going, the revenue they bring in will allow us to take chances on other unknowns and give them a shot at hitting the big time.

5. People still love to read, and they still turn to publishers to provide education, entertainment, and excitement.  I know, there are dire prognostications about young people not reading, adults spending all their time on the Internet, and so on. I think these observations are overblown. A lot can be made of the closing of Borders and the troubles at Barnes & Noble, but remember that these are/were retail businesses, not publishers. My sense of the problem with these physical bookstores was their inability to use their space effectively. At a gargantuan B&N near my house, nearly half the place is empty. It could be used for writers' groups, musical performances, lectures and talks; instead it sits empty. Borders always had an awful selection - my wife calls it the "Mary Higgins Clark - James Patterson" store. In short, booksellers aren't merchandising the way other retailers are. In contrast, Amazon markets to me every single day, and I don't hate it because they've pegged me well and often send me announcements about books and other things that I am indeed interested in. 

6. We're still reaching libraries. With the aid of wonderful publications like Library Journal, traditional publishers are still able to get the attention of librarians, who are opinion leaders as well as book purchasers. I see libraries and librarians walking both sides of the line with panache, balancing the traditional with the desire to meet the wants and needs of a technological generation. I think B&N and Borders needs to get a bunch of librarians on their boards of directors - they could then sit back and watch things get better.

7. We still have devoted staff.  People in publishing don't usually do it for the money - because the big money just isn't there. There is a certain joy in spending one's days around people who love reading, manuscripts, the printed word, the book cover. I for one am simply delighted that I don't have to wear a suit and tie every day of my life, even if it means we live in the smallest house in the neighborhood. Good editors and publicists care about the work the acquire and represent; we're not selling widgets or brokering deals that cost people their jobs and livelihoods. I do wonder, though, where the young people - those who attend the NYU publishing institute and other training grounds for future editors - will end up in the next decade or so. I suspect many publishing companies are going to become more "virtual," giving up costly office space in trendy locations and allowing workers to work at home while working out distribution arrangements that minimize inventory carrying costs. Time will tell...

 

So, What's Wrong with Mystery Publishing Today?

It seems that listservs and online conversations have been taken over by writers who do a lot of complaining about the publishing industry and everything that's wrong with it. As many readers of Mysterious Matters know, one of the reasons I started this blog was to counter a lot of the misinformation out there, as well as provide the publisher's perspective. We supposedly have an advocacy group, the AAP, that is supposed to disseminate information on what we do and how we do it, but honestly I think the organization is useless, and I so rarely see editors or publishers get to stick up for themselves. 

Typical criticisms:

• We publishers are greedy.
• Our practices "hurt" authors.
• We're unwilling to take chances.
• We don't do enough to support the books we publish.
• Our contracts are too "restrictive."
• We're outdated, outmoded, and bordering on useless in an age of e-publishing. (Take that, you lousy publishers!)

Frankly, I don't get the witch hunt. I'm not quite sure why this industry - which exists to entertain, enlighten, and educate (noble goals, I daresay) - comes in for such brutal criticism. From the online conversations, you'd think we are the equivalent of the fraudulent banks who cost taxpayers billions, or deeply in bed with the oil interests, which are posting record profits in the billions. 

Don't get me wrong. Like all industries, we have our problems. So, if anyone is interested in one editor's take on these problems  - from the publisher's perspective - please read on.

1. There are simply too many books being published.  I'll have to confine my thoughts to the mystery world here, to keep length under control. Mystery is one of the most popular genres, and because the genre has so many readers it also has many aspiring writers. (Note: I don't use the term "author" until someone other than the "writer" him/herself has decided the work is worth investing in.) The market simply cannot absorb all the books that are being published. Writers get their big break with a major house (or even a smaller one), and then complain that they're not selling millions. And we're not happy about that either, folks. Every book is signed with the hope, the expectation, that it will be a hit. We're not manufacturing Coke syrup, here; there's no recipe or process to follow, and each work is a unique product that requires attention rather than a template or assembly line. The current onslaught of authors getting back rights to work that have long been out of print, and then actively promoting old books online and elsewhere as ebooks, clogs up the discourse and makes it even harder to get attention for someone new. The floodgates have opened and we're at a point where the information overload is too intense for most people to deal with.

I know, I'm going to have a lot of writers screaming at me that they deserve the rights to their books back once they go out of print, and I wouldn't argue with that. But what a lot of people don't realize is that books go out of print for a reason: Demand for them is either weak or nonexistent. So many of the people I see hawking their books relentlessly were never household names to begin with, and honestly I doubt that all the hawking in the world will turn them into bestsellers now. They have a right to do this, of course, as we live in a country of free speech. But know that all of this is making the difficult task of breaking new authors even more difficult.

2. Most mysteries are simply too long.  As you can imagine, I read a lot of them, both in manuscript and in printed form. One of my early mentors was a merciless cutter of useless dreck in manuscripts, self-indulgent passages, useless exposiiton, and so forth. I have followed in his footsteps, and I know that the books that I publish tend to come in shorter than the norm (in word count). But so many books that I've read in the last five years are just too long, which makes the pace sag. But then we get into the issue of having to charge a certain price for a book just to break even or make a tiny profit; and readers expect a certain number of pages for that book - which puts us into the bind we are in. The solution is nice large type, more leading (space between lines), and larger margins, which will allow us to have the "required" number of pages while charging the price we need to charge. And then we get reviews on Amazon saying how we've padded the book, how the savvy reader has seen through our ruse, etc., ad nauseam. 

But I think a book that's too long has a strong (if unconscious) effect on the reader. It doesn't make the reader want to pick up more by that writer. Again, people are going to scream at me that they need space to build characters, set the scene, etc., but you don't need pages for that - you need skill. 

3. Too many series contracts are offered before a book/series has proven itself. A contract for multiple books is the brass ring for writers and agents. I almost never give them and think we'd be better off making sure that Book #1 is a hit before publishing Books #2 and #3. Additional series books by people whose freshman debut hasn't burned up the charts only add to the logjam of too many books. 

But Agatho, you scream, publishers need to be supporting writers! You publishers need to nurture and care for them. Books 1-7 might not sell anything, but Book 8 could become a bestseller!  Yes, it's true - I know Sue Grafton has said no one paid any attention to her until Book 7 or 8. But tell me, aspiring writers: Do you think it's OK that your manuscript isn't picked up so that we can continue to publish a writer whose books are limping along? Or is it better to say, "You've had your chance, now give someone else a shot at it?" 

4. The agent/contact system has gotten way out of control. I'm not here to diss agents. I've known some great ones (usually former editors), some mediocre ones, and some downright frauds. But this whole "getting published on the basis of connections or affiliations" has got to stop. The quality of the publishing has gone down. I have read precious few books in the last few years that make any sort of contribution (Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross is one of them, Burial of the Dead by Michael Hogan is another). My workload is heavy, but I look at all the queries that pass my desk (and we accept unagented submissions, so I get a lot). I really believe that I, and other editors, should be making our own decisions regarding what's good and what's marketable, as opposed to having agents do it for us. It is such a bizarre system - Agents are supposed to somehow "channel" us based on what is usually a very surface relationship, to let us know the manuscripts we will "like."  Huh?  Hey, I've had many a free lunch and plenty of martinis on agents, so that's fun, but I really think it's gone too far. Having the agent in there adds to the price, adds to the cost (typical for any middleman), and just makes things a lot more difficult for everyone.

I suspect that my colleagues at the larger houses, who have roomfuls of unrequested manuscripts thrown onto the floor, would disagree with me. They'd say that agents serve the purpose of separating the wheat from the chaff so that we don't have to. And I suppose they are right to a certain extent. For instance, an agent would never have sent me the "Adolf Hitler as a teenage detective" proposal I got a number of years ago. But I want to be making the decisions, and I'm willing to do it without agents sending me a lot of stuff that is frequently no better than the unagented stuff that comes in over the transom. This is one of the pleasures of working for an independent publisher, I must say.

5. Writer expectations are simply unrealistic.   Everyone, and I do mean everyone, who gets a book published wants to see it become a best-seller. And yet the truth is, due to the massive overload of books being published each year (see #1 above), very few people accomplish that. Much debut fiction sells under 3,000 copies, and a lot of books might top out at 1,000 copies. Writers envision themselves sitting in their delightful farmhouse in New Hampshire (which they have purchased with advance/royalty money), and tapping out those best-sellers in between cups of coffee and walking the dogs. It's a dream scenario, much like the kids who think they can make a living playing professional basketball/baseball/ football [insert other sport here], or young musicians who think they will be the next Madonna. The odds are tiny, tiny, tiny. And a lack of success is often met with an intense bitterness and anger directed at publisher, or agent, who somehow becomes "responsible" for the writer not achieving his/her dream lifestyle. The Bitter and Enraged take to the Web, bad-mouthing us in every forum and vowing that they'll make that million by doing an ePub, selling it for 99 cents, and showing us corporate assholes how wrong we were. I get your frustration, I really do - but might you remember that WE took a chance on YOU - paid to have your book edited, designed, printed, warehoused, and distributed - and that not a penny came out of your pocket? That's because professionals believed in your work and put their jobs on the line to support you. When you get your rights back and sell the work, you are profiting from our work and investment - and we get nothing.

6. Unending self-promotion by relative unknowns builds resentment. When I wrote a critique of the DorothyL listserv (mystery literature e-conference) a few years ago, I was amazed by the number of readers who wrote to me saying how sick and tired they were of seeing writers use it as a publicity device. I wrote back to a number of them asking if they ever posted a review; many responded by saying that the presence of so many writers is intimidating, and they felt they could not offer an honest opinion of what they'd read. Hmmm. Is this how we want readers to feel? Do we want to ram books down their throats, or do we want them to come begging for the books?  As writers and editors, we put ourselves out there each time we publish something, and criticism is inevitable. A book I published a few months ago just got a vicious 1-star review on Amazon.  Yuck. That hurt, but it's part of the game. I don't think that quenching any attempt at serious conversation has a positive effect. In fact, it has the opposite effect of sending our most important constituency - readers - underground. 

But Agatho, you say through clenched teeth, our publishers aren't doing anything for us, so we have to do it for ourselves!  Yes, you are right. But see #1 above.

7. The media refuse to give books the attention they deserve. As a culture, we're so obsessed with movie stars and athletes that all forms of media - especially TV - really don't give a rat's rear end about books, unless they are "written" by movie stars or athletes (ha!). The NYT Book Review is an exercise in sheer snobbery, turning its nose up at anything that aims to be popular. Newspapers don't want to carry stories about local authors anymore; magazines are happy with a blurb about the latest Mary Higgins Clark or Janet Evanovich. This is our own fault, as an industry. We should be advocating for more, better, and more interesting coverage of books beyond "phenomenon" books like Twilight, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Harry Potter. 

Agatho's Grammar Tips

I never thought I'd be blogging about grammar (I think of Mysterious Matters more as a "big picture" blog), but I suggested that someday I might, and I got a number of emails asking me to do so.  As an editor, it is my job to give the people what they want, so here goes.

Some of these are probably not so much grammar tips as they are style tips. Remember: Your editor may have a different opinion.

1. Using semicolons sparingly. The semicolon is probably the most misunderstood piece of punctuation in the language. Many voracious readers couldn't even explain what it does. A semicolon usually leads to a sentence that's much longer than it needs to be. 

2. Avoid "There is / There are."  This is an old one - rather than saying "There were three cows in the field, it's better to say "Three cows stood in the field, chewing their cuds."

3. Use interrogative verbs in interrogative dialogue.  I can't tell you how many times I see the following construction:

"How did you know the murderer had a tattoo on his left butt cheek?" she said.

That drives me nuts! Aren't these better:

"How did you know the murderer had a tattoo on his left butt cheek?" she asked.

"How did you know the murderer had a tattoo on his left butt cheek?" she wondered.

4. Never use the same adjective or adverb more than once in a paragraph. Using the same descriptive words too many times looks lazy.

5. Vary paragraph length. I recently finished a book that I could swear was composed of nothing but three-sentence paragraphs. Not a very good book for a lot of reasons, and the programmed approach to the paragraph didn't help matters. We're not writing haikus here, folks!

6. It is perfectly all right to end a sentence with a preposition, if doing otherwise would hurt the ear or cause the head to cock.

7. Beware of hidden plural subjects - look for the word and, which is usually the clue to plural.

NO: Your love and honor sustains me.

YES: Your love and honor sustain me. 

 

8. Set your ellipses correctly, with a space before and after. There's a shortcut on most keyboards to create an ellipsis. On the Mac, it's Option + semicolon.

9. Let's say you are writing dialogue, and one character is speaking for several paragraphs. Use open quotes at the beginning of each paragraph in which dialogue continues from a previous paragraph, but use closed quotes ONLY at the end of that person's multi-paragraph dialogue.

10. Research which words go in italics (book titles, movie titles, names of sailing vessels, etc.) and italicize accordingly. If you don't know the rules, a copy editor can fix these problems, but it's better if you know the rules.

(And 11... proofread your work, something I occasionally forget to do on this blog. Thank you to Pepper.)

 

Is a Spoiler a Wonderful Thing?

Here, on the eve of Labor Day, I am going to let someone else do the writing for me. From The Week, September 2, 2011:

Mysteries without Mystery

Have you ever been tempted to flip to the end of a mystery novel? Go ahead: Suspense, a new study has found, is irrelevant to our enjoyment of a story. In fact, say researchers at the University of California at San Diego, most people like stories more if they know in advance how the story will end--even with plots than hinge on a mystery or a twist. The researchers set up different versions of 12 short stories written by authors such as Agatha Christie, Raymond Carver, and Anton Chekhov. One came with an introduction that spoiled the ending; one had a spoiler embedded in the middle of the text; and a third appeared just as its author had written it. Suprisingly, readers who learned the endings of their stories up front reported liking them much more on a scale of one to 10 than did readers of the other two versions. Why? The pleasure readers get from a good story, Jonathan Leavitt tells BBCNews.com, has far more to do with the quality of the writing and the character development than with a nail-biting plot. Once a reader knows how a story will turn out, he or she "can focus on a deeper understanding of the story."

Anyone care to weigh in on this? I think we've all seen books where the author tells us up front what happened, and then lets the story unfold - and these can be effective. But a steady diet of revealing the truth upfront so that we can "enjoy" the book more? I have my doubts.