The Biggest Challenges

Back in my university days, I remember reading sources from ancient Babylon and Ur in which writers complained that children are becoming increasingly unruly, and that the downfall of society would certainly result therefrom. (Come to think of it, those cities did fall...)

My point is that people have been foretelling the downfall of society, industries, models, methods, and theories since the beginning of time. When I started in this business decades ago, I remember one of my mentors bewailing the state of the industry and how books were getting worse and and worse. (He would spin in his grave if he could see some of what's being vanity-published these days). Today, with the passing of Maurice Sendak (met him once - NOT a nice man, but that's a different story), he's being quoted for his stance on e-books: "shit," he decreed unapologetically.

I half-disagree with him, and thought I'd use today's installment of Mysterious Matters to talk about the issue in the larger context of the biggest challenges our industry faces. Some of these haven't changed in decades; others have cropped up only in the last few years.

1. THE LACK OF GOOD MANUSCRIPTS.  There's a reason why it's so hard to get published by a reputable publisher. Despite the fact that a lot of garbage does get published, most editors/publishers make significant investments (emotional and financial) in the books they buy. I remember my first job, way back when, and the feeling of excitement that I was about to read one fabulous manuscript after another. Reality set in very quickly - the truly good, the truly worthy of publication, was as difficult to find as a needle in a haystack, a pearl in an oyster, a diamond on a beach.

The same is true today. It is really, really difficult to find worthy manuscripts. Each day brings the hope that one will rise to the top; on 99% of days, that doesn't happen. Remember, I'm talking here about manuscripts that I can take to the editorial board and say, "This will sell - it's worth us investing our money in editing, publishing, and marketing it." And the hurdles are higher than ever.  Why is that? This brings me to the next two challenges.

2. TOO MANY BOOKS ARE PUBLISHED. By books, I mean "fiction," as that's the world I work in. This is true for the print world, and it's even more of a problem in the ebook world. Avid readers, occasional readers, and society in general just can't absorb the amount of fiction being put out there. And yet, we do work in a capitalist system, which means that good publishers will stay in business while bad publishers will go bankrupt eventually. In the meantime, books are printed and remaindered left and right. People are busier than ever before, with levels of sensory overload never-before-experienced in human history. How can we expect that typical business traveler to learn about, pick up, and read New Novelist A when the airport bookshop carries only Tried and True Novelists B, C, and D? What we need is a good, old-fashioned book shortage.  I'd try to engineer one, but then the Department of Justice would sue me.

3. OUR EGALITARIAN SOCIETY HAS LED THE AVERAGE PERSON TO THINK THAT S/HE HAS THE RIGHT TO HAVE A BOOK PUBLISHED. Oh, what a problem this is. Many people who work in this industry think the business is mostly a meritocracy, though I'm not naive enough to buy into that idea more than about 60-70% of the time. But society has changed over the decades. In general, people used to understand that to have a book published, they'd need to be at the top of their game. Now, just as the grammar schools make every child believe s/he deserves some sort of athletic trophy just for participation, every would-be writer thinks s/he has the right to be published. And here's where Amazon - along with Apple, one of the most opportunistic enterprises in modern history - hit paydirt. Their idea: "Let's let people publish their own work. It costs us absolutely nothing and, even if the book sells 10 copies to close friends and relatives, we get our cut with practically zero investment." The company's done a good job of fomenting discord with "traditional publishing" (you wouldn't believe the scorn with which that phrase is used on listservs and other Web forums), implying that we're all rip-off artists, scammers, and millionaires rolling in cash.

As for waiting - well, our have-it-now, instant-gratification society is filled with people who mistakenly think their work is so good, so perfect, that it must be published NOW so that it can sell millions of copies. Again, enter Amazon to play into this fantasy and make a few bucks while doing it.

4. VANITY PUBLISHING CLOGS THE DISCOURSE AND INTERFERES WITH THE MESSAGE. It's hard enough to get the word out about good books. People seem to be afraid to say this in public, and if this blog weren't anonymous I think I might also think twice for fear of hurting conceited people's feelings, but 98% of self-published ebooks are garbage. And yet, many of their authors are working conventions, setting up Facebook pages, and in general acting as if their books have the legitimacy of the books published by the oft-maligned "Big Six." Sorry, but they don't. Yes, I'll admit that about 1% of ebooks-only are decent, good, or even excellent - but that's not much of a hit rate given the sheer volume. I would imagine that someone with good taste could have a great deal of fun setting up a Kirkus-like review site that provides reviews - REAL reviews - of self-published books. Of course, no one would waste their time on such a pointless endeavor; how many ways can you find to say "self-indulgent," "tripe," "awful," "badly written," and "execrable"?

The term "vanity publishing" has gone away and yet that's exactly what it is, which is why I use the term without apology. I really would love to see a greater acknowledgment of the fact that vanity publishing taps into the same self-centeredness and desire for popularity/idolatry that Facebook, American Idol, Twitter, and all these other so-called "social media" tap into. That's what cell phones and all these other things are about - popularity, stardom, and worship: NOT communication. We used to assume that people had to WORK hard to get published, and the hard truth was that people could try to get published all their lives and never succeed. But that's gone away, and it is leading to what I see as our industry's #1 challenge, which is...

5. BOOKS ARE NOW PERCEIVED AS INTERCHANGEABLE COMMODITIES, AS PLENTIFUL AS WATER AND NOT WORTH SPENDING A LOT OF MONEY ON. Of course, this sweeping generalization isn't true of the many devoted readers who spend a lot of their disposable income on books (and we thank you for that). But how can anything possibly be perceived as having value if it's given away for free, or sold for 99 cents, on Amazon? Sadly, the overall goals of publishers and many writers just are not in alignment here, and it's a problem. Publishers are corporations that seek a profit - We need a return on our investment, and we need to pay our vendors and staff. Many writers, it seems, care only about having an adoring reading public. If that means they have to pay their own money to get published, and then give their work away in the hopes that by some miracle they'll end up on the best-seller list, then so be it. Some of these folks are very, very vocal - and what works me up is their complete ignorance regarding the way predatory corporations like Amazon (and to a certain extent Apple) are using propaganda to make Joe Bad Novelist think he can self-publish his own crap and get rich. This is one of the great mass delusions of our age; I can't believe more people don't see it and talk about it, but hey - that's what Mysterious Matters is for.

Meanwhile, the Kindle/Nook/iPad walk the interesting line between wondrous marvels and thought-control devices. Wondrous marvels in that many people love to read books on them. Personally, I don't; the only one I find at all aesthetically appealing is the iPad, but I have such a problem with Apple's business practices that I won't buy one. But a lot of people love their e-readers. So, to come full circle, I wouldn't agree with Sendak's blanket dismissal of e-books as "shit" -- many of those books are quite, quite good, and the devices help get books to people in the format in which they want them. But the existence of ebooks (and now these new "ebook publishers," which are basically versions of Kindle Digital Publishing that allow the deluded to think they are with a "real publisher") has allowed so much junk into an already crowded stream...and I am so tired of hearing the vanity-published act as though we traditional publishers have been the enemy that has conspired to keep their crap from getting published.

Well played, Amazon - while demonizing an industry that is your bread and better (ever hear of biting the hand the feeds you?), you have succeeded in crafting the American mind to align with your pursuit of profit. And while I say this with proud rancor, I also say it with the bitter realization that we let it happen instead of fighting back from the beginning.

Comments

[Lance C.]

Perhaps you're going to address this in a future post, but: what would you have traditional publishing do to fight back? What are you, as a publisher, doing right now or planning to do to address the problems you've outlined?

I can think of a few of things Trad Pub can consider:

1) If you're going to be the standard of writing talent, start with your author selection: Trad Pub could walk away from the insta-celebrities, talentless ideologues and manufactured personalities on whom it now showers huge advances and big chunks of marketing budget. The rule should be, if you can't write your own book, don't bother us (unless your co-author won a Pulitzer somewhere along the way). It's silly to complain about the talentless hacks who self-pub while promoting the talentless hacks in your author lineup.

2) If you're going to talk quality, be quality: Actually edit and proofread the books that you put out. I'm amazed at the typos and misused words I find in recently published Big 6 products (and newspapers, but that's another rant).

3) Speed up the production cycle: The insta-celebrity books come out in two months, so why does it take 1.5-2 years for a fiction title to land on the shelves? Clearly Trad Pub can move the product quickly when it wants to. This isn't a contradiction of #2 above; the process that exists now has lots of room for more efficiency.

4) Embrace POD: The print-and-remainder business model is something everyone -- including publishers -- complain about constantly. Just as the movie studios helped finance the transition to video projection in theaters, perhaps the Big 6 need to get together to settle on a POD standard and help finance the installation of the appropriate equipment in bookstores. People like Amazon and Apple because they can get pretty much any book they want pretty much instantly. Help the bookstores compete by enabling them to print pretty much any book pretty much instantly -- and the customer can get coffee while she's waiting.

These are some of my naive outsider's ideas -- I'm sure you have more and better ones of your own.

I like bookstores, and I'm still trying to get a Trad Pub deal for my work, so I'd like to see you (and them) succeed. But Trad Pub can't adopt the record industry's strategy (hide and complain) and hope it turns out okay.

[Maxine]

I agree with your points. I find the concept of "indie authors" particularly irksome - they are not "inde" they are self (or as you write vanity) published. An "independent" author in my view is one who has been chosen to be published by an independent publisher!

As a keen reader - yes there are too many books and yes the self-pub revolution has made it far too hard to find anything good so I just don't bother, I rely on reviews/recommendations from the few people whose opinion I trust.

The value issue - we in scientific publishing have been facing this for years as people incorrectly assume that publishing a paper online is somehow free because it does not have print distribution costs. over time, the web costs are much higher given the archiving, added web services, continual updates when a technology goes obsolete to maintain your website, etc etc etc. But people confuse ease of looking at something with ease of producing it. The two are very different - to take but one example, rendering of complex equations and special symbols on the web, not to mention scientific figures. (I'm not talking about PDFs here, of course).

[Chris]

Well said, Agatho. I started writing mainly to see if I could write a good book, meaning have it be considered good enough by an "expert" to publish. That means a traditional publisher, because I don't consider self-publishing a valid means of evaluating my talent. So I'll stick with the query-agent-editor-publishing house route for now.

If, after years of trying, I've decided that traditional publishers have destroyed themselves, or if a way to self-publish becomes available that also validates a certain level of professional talent, I'll consider that.

The pride of authorship only comes from a legitimate money making business investing enough money in oneself to say,"this author has written a quality book that the general public deserves to read." Making an appreciable amount of money after that is icing on the cake.

[Alan Orloff]

I so agree.

[Pepper Smith]

I do agree.

I do, however, cringe a bit when I see the thought of ebook publishers being equated with vanity publishing--some of them were around years before the KDP craze, and actually work on pretty much the same model as traditional publishers. Query, submit manuscript, wait while it goes through editorial readings to see if it's worth the publisher's time and money, and only afterwards a contract if they decide it is. Rounds of editing and proofreading before the book is ready for publication. Most don't offer an advance, but many small print publishers don't, either.

Many authors point at the lack of an advance and claim the advance is proof that the publisher thinks your book is worth publishing, but miss entirely that the publisher spends a lot of money out of their own pocket for editing, proofreading, cover art, all the things authors never know about that publishers pay for, and getting the work into the sales channels. My publisher has been in business going on 10 years. Epubs that don't choose quality work and make good business decisions are usually out of business within a year or two.

I chose e-publishing for a very specific reason--my stories were long novellas, something that works well in e-publishing, but won't get you anywhere through the traditional route. (They're book length now, at the urging of my first editor.) If you want to make the argument that I'm not good enough for traditional publishing because I had to e-publish, please read something of mine first--I have two shorter pieces available free on the "Shorts" page on my website. Then there will be room for discussion.

We've had to work hard over the years to distinguish ourselves from the vanity-published. Out of 500 manuscripts, my publisher might select one or two for publication. They don't charge for publication and take maybe one percent of what they're offered. We're e-published, not self-published. Please be careful about lumping us all in together.

[David Afsharirad]

While I agree with lots of what you've said (especially on a philosophical level), I also think that publishers need to find a way to adapt to the new environment (as Lance C. suggested). I am not of the mind that the ebook revolution is going to make publishers obsolete, however, it WILL make certain publishers obsolete, those that can't adapt.

I own a Kindle but rarely use it. I just don't care for it. But I am going to be in the minority soon. Ereaders (or tablets or smartphones) are undoubtedly the way that most books will be read in the future (sorry to say). Publishers can either lament this fact or they can deal with it. All right, I guess they can both lament and deal with, that's understandable.

I completely agree that the 99 cent model is lousy, and that it has led to a devaluing in the public's mind of books. But continuing to charge $15 plus (even if this is a fair price) for an ebook is just not going to work in the future. No one will pay that. Publishers are going to have to find a way to lower that price. Again, Lance C. made some suggestions on how this might be accomplished, and I've heard others from various blogs, articles, etc.

P.S. Been a long-time reader of your blog and always found it interesting and insightful.

[Ziv Wities]

3,4, and even 5 confuse me to a certain extent.

I'm only a hobbyist, but I share your frustration with the largely-baseless excitement and self-righteousness of the self-e-publishing trend. But even so, I'd think that the entire point is that self-pubbed ebooks don't actually attract *real* attention. Each author is plenty excited about his own self-published work, but not that many people are excited about anybody else's (if they were, the worth of self-publishing would be justified).

So I'm not seeing quite how (crappy) authors feeling entitled hurts publishers, or how a glut of (crappy) ebooks confined to uncharted Amazonian backwaters hurts publishers. The question is, are *readers* really buying into the crap? Or are the crappy authors just unloading their crap harmlessly, and then making a lot of noise about it?

---

The point here which I do agree with you on is that ebooks devalue books. But it's important to recognize that reader expectations for ebook prices take into account the MANY ways that ebooks are far inferior to physical books. I don't think it's unreasonable for a reader to value an ebook as being less valuable than a paperback, but that's not how they're being priced.

If the industry isn't capable of supporting the ebook format at a price that buyers will find reasonable, then IMHO that's a MUCH bigger issue (and challenge, while we're at it!) than the precise strategy some particular companies are pursing at this specific point in time.

[Kathleen M.]

Hope all is well with you, Agatho. Perhaps you have decided to post less frequently, maybe monthly?