Mysterious Matters: Mystery Publishing Demystified

Rant to Department of Justice: Get a Life

OK, so let me get this straight.

The airlines just get bigger and bigger. Continental merges with United to create the world's largest airline. Ticket prices go up. Services goes down. WAY, WAY down.

Banks keep getting bigger and bigger, with colossi buying up independent state or regional banks. Fees go through the roof while interest rates on savings go through the floor.

Investment firms are declared "too big to fail" (as a result of merger after merger) while hard-working people lose their retirement funds.

Mrs. See's candies, those wonderful San Francisco chocolates, are now a part of Berkshire Hathaway.

Speculators continue to drive up the price of crude oil, making gasoline prices skyrocket. But that's OK.

In a nutshell: Huge, powerful companies are merging, acquiring, eliminating jobs left and right, sending work overseas, and the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division nods sagely and with delighted approval. No, the Antitrust Division has much bigger fish to fry. Why hold banks accountable for ruining people's lives when you can sue the publishing industry for price fixing?

For those of you who don't know, it is likely that the Department of Justice is going to sue Apple and the large publishers for attempting to fix prices, especially the new ebook model. What a great use of the taxpayers' money! Last time I checked, people don't take out mortgages to buy novels. The publishing industry doesn't foreclose on their homes or charge them $5 when they use an ATM outside their network. Our products sell in the $5 - $30 range and are completely discretionary purchases. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head saying, "Buy this book or I'll blow your fucking head off."

What are publishers doing, you may ask? We're simply trying to establish a model that does not devalue our products to the level of mass-produced Chinese garbage. We're trying to prevent Amazon from ITS predatory practices of using our products as loss leaders and its many other questionable (and borderline unethical) business decisions.

And what do we get for trying to protect intellectual property - and to protect the industry that is responsible for world literacy from going the way of the music business - and for our attempts to find a fair model that compensates authors and agents while not sending us into bankruptcy? A proposed lawsuit for "price fixing."

Department of Justice: I hereby declare you the biggest bunch of morons, imbeciles, and shitheads on the face of this planet.  Let's hope your government pensions remain intact when one bank runs the United States, gasoline costs $10 a gallon, and one mega-airline has swallowed up all others. Then you'll get to read your $2.99 paperback or .99 ebook on a flight to Chicago that has cost you $4,000.

John Grisham and the "Book Per Year"

I recently read an interview with John Grisham in the London Guardian. I'm not sure I'd include Grisham in my list of "mystery writers" - I think most would agree that he falls into the category of "thriller" writer. For me, the blockbuster mystery writers are Laura Lippman, Harlan Coben, Janet Evanovich, Patricia Cornwell, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell ....

In the article, Grisham discusses one of his secrets of success, a tip shared with him early in his career. An editor said to him, "The big guys come out every year." By that, he meant that Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, et al. published a book a year, thus keeping themselves in the public eye. And, looking at the mystery luminaries in the previous paragraph, I think we can see that many of them do at least one book a year, and sometimes more than that.

I'm not sure Grisham is giving himself enough credit, though. Clearly, he's hit on a formula that people like. I don't read much Grisham; I want as little to do with lawyers as possible. But I've read a couple, and they've been fast and entertaining, with good twists and turns.

And, on the other side of the coin, there are writers whose fans salivate for years waiting for the next book. The late great Sarah Caudwell was one of them; and I wish George Dawes Green would write more. In a completely separate genre, Jean Auel's fans followed her over the course of (I think) 7 books and 30 years.

A book per year is a lot to ask of a writer; but I can think of many writers who'd love nothing more than being able to do just that. And yet, in and of itself, a book a year isn't enough to get you to the top. I can think of two dozen writers off the top of my head who've published at least one book a year (the late Dell Shannon/Elizabeth Linington used to do three) who never get out of the 5-10K range in terms of sales per book. That's respectable and can pay some of the bills, though perhaps not both the mortgage AND the car payment.

The publicist/marketer in me understands the need to stay in the public eye. There's something annoyingly fickle about the American public. It's a machine that has to be fed. With so many people (read: musicians, novelists, journalists, actors) vying for attention and those precious few top slots, "if you snooze, you lose." Look at Lady Gaga. Say/think what you will about her (I'm mostly a fan, even if she occasionally becomes tiresome), she knows how to keep the public interested. That's no mean feat. If we think of books as commercial products - and I do - then it makes sense to stay in the public eye, to keep building your brand. Michael Crichton knew this; so does Stephen King. Both, I think, also had the vocations to be professional, full-time writers, which doesn't hurt.

The other side of the coin, of course, is the question: How good can a book be when a writer whips it out in three months? With some writers, it doesn't matter. For instance, I like or love almost everything Joyce Carol Oates writes, and they don't come more prolific than that. But others (who shall remain nameless)... oh Lord, have the recent books been total garbage. As an editor, I say: Get them out the door, bring in the revenue, pay the bills, reward the staff. As a reader, I think: If this manuscript came to me as a first submission by an unpublished writer, I'd get out my rubber REJECT stamp by page 10. It is another curious American phenomenon that word of mouth about a book can be so bad and yet people keep buying more books by the same writer. (Think, for example, of a book that 1,500 reviews on Amazon, of which 1,000 or more have 1-star ratings.) Reading those reviews, I think hope springs eternal; devoted fans are hoping for a return to form for a favorite writer (this rarely materializes). Also, to give these writers their due, they have succeeded in crafting a basis and a character that keeps readers wanting to know WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. That is no small feat.

I have an author on my list - one of my favorites of my career. S/he is always brimming with ideas. The manuscripts come to me pristine. I feel like less of an editor because s/he just "gets it" and needs so little input from me. I say, "Give me more books." S/he replies, "Agatho, give me more money so that I don't have to work for a living, and you'll get more books." Alas - the constant dilemma. Because author X might be able to give me two books a year under two different names, but that doesn't guarantee that we'll be able to sell scads of them.  But we try, oh how we try! 

 

A Question of Rights

Recent comments on the blog, and emails to me, have brought up questions of distribution. Specifically, why is it that (for example) Australians can't buy English books in Australia, or German readers can't buy U.S. books in Germany?  

The answer lies in the rights negotiated and granted in the original publishing contract.

Make no mistake: Publishers of all stripes have one thing in common. We want people buying and reading our books. At the end of the day, that's how we bring in money and pay the bills (including royalties to authors). We have no reason to ever knowingly or willfully prevent people from purchasing our products; doing so is against our self-interests.

Running up against our desire to sell books are two main impediments, however.

First, there is the issue of piracy, both domestic and international. As we have all discovered, it becomes next to impossible to control your intellectual property once it gets into digital format. Even with DRM (digital rights management), it's not hard for the tech-savvy to turn a purchased ebook into a file illegally uploaded to a fileshare site, while publishers watch almost helplessly as thousands of people illegally download the property, thus depriving us of revenue and our authors of money. For this reason, in the early days of ebooks, I was very much in favor of releasing ebooks only after a period of time had elapsed - the way we typically see a paperback come a while after the hardcover. The huge growth in fiction sales on Kindle, Nook, etc., has changed my mind somewhat; but make no mistake, the piracy issue is very much there and costs the industry billions of dollars per year in lost revenue.

Even with the printed book, there are certain international markets where printed piracy is the coin of the realm. These include China and India. A publisher may decide to do everything it is power to prevent printed books from reaching these markets, where copyright laws are laxly enforced. People will scan the book, then print it cheaply and sell it on the street; and I don't think we can be blamed for not wanting to support the black market. Of course, it's a losing battle because any pirate can go on eBay, get a copy of the book, and still sell illegal copies of it. So why would we spend all that time, money, paper, and distribution in getting books into areas where we'll lose our shirts? 

Second is the issue of negotiated rights. Nowadays there really is no such thing as "the publisher" of a work. Agents negotiate rights of different kinds to different publishers, going with the highest bidder. Rights can and do include: hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback, ebook, serialization, and so on. And then add to that geographic rights: You can have U.S.rights, North American (U.S. & Canada rights), European rights, world rights, and so forth.

In the case of books written in English, an agent might decide that the best publisher in the U.S. is not the best publisher in another country with a sizable English-speaking population, such as Australia or the UK.  Local/national publishers tend to be better with local marketing/publicity than the U.S. publisher, even though all the big houses have an international presence. We might be prevented from selling our book in Germany because the agent has a German publisher interested in bringing out both an English and a German version of the book simultaneously. And since the typical publishing contract is at its core an assignment of exclusive rights to sell the product, we may be prohibited from selling an eBook in markets to which we do not have the rights. This would explain why, for example, one of my books might not be available as an eBook in Australia.

Agents make their money by maximizing royalty revenue for authors, so they cannot be blamed for wanting to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of the granting of rights. But our industry is not predictable. The agent may not be able to sell any Australian rights at all; meanwhile, the U.S. publisher is prevented from selling books in Australia. Thus the Australian reader is left in the lurch. Unfortunately, there is nothing that publishers can do about this.

I have even heard stories recently about agents trying to sell print rights separately from ebook rights. Frankly, I think any editor who'd sign a contract like that should have his head examined. All of the work goes into the print product; why let some other publisher free-ride on the ebook sales? But, as I always say, we're in a new world with new technologies cropping up every day, and business models are changing, so we shall see what the future holds. At the end of the day, though, everyone needs to remember that publishing is a BUSINESS and publishers exist to make PROFIT.  We're not nonprofit organizations, and we have the right to run our businesses in ways that minimize our costs and maximize our revenues.

Seeking Panelists

Does anyone remember the forums in Harper's Magazine, that great feature in which a moderator and five or so panelists discuss a topic of current interest?

I'd like to do an online forum here on Mysterious Matters, and I'm seeking panelists.  I'm hoping this will be the first in a series.  If all goes well with the first, I'd like to do a few per year, each on a different topic.

For the first, I'd like to talk to writers who have at least one book published and who are trying to increase the awareness of their work.  The ideal candidates will:

• Be published by a small or independent press.  (Poisoned Pen is independent and therefore a part of the universe.)  I'm not saying I'll definitely discriminate against those published by larger houses, but everyone who reads Mysterious Matters knows that I'm an advocate for small presses, so my choices will most likely be guided by my prejudices.
• Have a Yahoo account with Yahoo messenger, by which I'll conduct the forum.  (The good news is, if you don't currently have an account, you can get one for free.)

I'd like to get a mix of writers in different sub-genres: police procedurals, cozy, etc.  

The topic of the first panel will be: ORIGINALITY.  I haven't come up with all the questions yet, but I'd like us to talk about unique or interesting plot ideas, narrative structures, characters, and situations.  I'd like to talk about some of the "greats" and "firsts," as well as ideas for how mysteries can resonate with the reading public by taking chances or doing something new and exciting.  

If you'd like to take part, please send me an email at agathomystery AT yahoo DOT com by January 30th. I'll choose the panelists by the first week in February, and we'll schedule the online chat for mid-February.  I'll try to schedule the chat on a Saturday or Sunday so that people don't have to do too much juggling with their work schedules.  I'll record the chat, then edit out the boring bits, and post it here on Mysterious Matters, along with a mini biography of each panelist and a book shot.

In your email, tell me a little about yourself, your work, and your publisher(s).  I'll buy a book by each writer chosen to participate, so getting chosen means a sale of at least one book, with the potential for more sales among the Mysterious Matters readership.

The volume of mail I get means that I'm not able to respond individually.   Hope to hear from you.

To those who blog, post, etc.: Please feel free to spread the word, share this link, or cut and paste this entry into whichever fora mystery writers and readers congregate.  Future topics will include, I hope, a readers' panel and an editors' panel.  

 

The Year in Review 2009

Well, 2009 is for all intents and purposes over.  And I have just two words about that:  Thank God.

It was a rough year for a lot of people.  Tempers ran short, bankbooks ran on empty, job security seemed to be at an all-time low.  Publishers large and small laid people off, consolidated operations and production groups.  Remaining staff felt overworked and underappreciated, more so than usual.  Book sales were down, because books are a discretionary purchase.  As I write this, things are looking up, fortunately - and I hope they continue to do so, because I don't think our collective national psyche can handle another year like 2008-2009.

I did see a number of trends this year; whether or not they become permanent is of course the question.

1. More agents are getting out of fiction markets.  This is a direct result of publishers' increasing unwillingness to pay large advances to unknowns.  More than 85% of writers don't earn out their advances, and publishers are frankly tired of it.  The economy allowed us to push back; and because agents follow the money (who can blame them? - they need to earn a living too), more and more of them stopped taking on new writers.  On the positive side, this will mean more opportunities for independent presses. On the negative side, writers of fiction now more than ever need to reconcile themselves to the vast certainty that writing novels won't pay the bills.

2. More commissioning is being done.  We've always commissioned books with authors we liked, but in 2009 I saw more of it being done than ever.  We call up an agent or author we like with our idea for a series and say, "Can you write me a mystery with this type of hobby and this type of heroine?"  We'll be seeing lots of pseudonyms in upcoming years as those lucky enough to have established themselves, or to have well-connected agents, find themselves writing commissioned work that they may or may not believe in.  Frankly this disturbs me a bit, as this could lead to a sort of Disneyfication of our industry, where corporate types make the decisions and the artists really don't matter much, as long as they look good and put out a saleable product.  But we shall see.

3. More reviewing is being done on the Web.  We did have the news of Kirkus closing down; and I think most of us viewed the decision with mixed feelings.  Very few of us haven't been burned by Kirkus reviews, which were infamous for being nasty.  Yet the journal was a reliable source of reviews, and getting a starred review there meant something.  The reviewers there were also professionals; and there is no substitute for a professional reviewer who understands the craft of reviewing.  The Web-based reviews are putting reviewing in the hands of the people, and while I have long been a fan of Amazon's willingness to allow readers to comment on books, I'm not sure that the closing of a reputable review engine is a good thing.

4. Careers have stalled.  This has been a major bummer for me and many colleagues.  Several of us had authors we felt were about to take off, people whose third or fourth book was poised to "hit."  And yet they didn't, as people fell back on the old reliables, the big names who can be counted on to provide a formulaic read that satisfies the itch more reliably than someone new or emerging.  We actually had a discussion in our office about releasing no new books in 2009, but we felt this would not be fair to authors or to our bottom line, since some sales are better than none.  Now we shall see if the writers can put their noses to the grindstone again, and do another book, and hope that 2010 sees the return to a more adventurous buying style.

We did see some highlights in 2009, so herewith my Cheers and Jeers for the year.

CHEERS to the Kindle.  This technology is helping to sell books while also giving people with limited space an option to buy and keep as many books as they want. We're having some adjustment issues here, but in the long run the much lower unit cost of a Kindle book is going to be good for publishers and authors.  I do have reservations about Amazon's market power, and how they are using it to squeeze more out of publishers, but we have to accept the reality of the marketplace, and many of us are finally coming to religion on this issue.

CHEERS to HarperCollins.  A large player, HarperCollins is launching a new imprint that pays no advances, allows no returns, and offers authors a cut of profit rather than a typical royalty structure.  Some authors (and, I'm sure, MWA) are up in arms about this; but the fact is that nobody forces anyone to sign a publishing contract, and those writers who think they can do better elsewhere have every right to go to another house to get their book published.  If publishing is to survive in our money-centric 21st century, we have to continue our emphasis on the bottom line.  And let's not forget how many people this industry employs--designers, artists, printers, warehouse folk, and so forth.  We have a responsibility to pay our bills on time; and with the work we do, we deserve to make a profit for our labors.  HC's new imprint seeks to fix the terrible inequities that we all know exist but which the current system perpetuates.  I will be watching this one closely.

CHEERS to Dan Brown.  The Lost Symbol did light up bookbuyers' eyes in 2009, though it did not seem quite as ineluctable as The DaVinci Code, which has reportedly sold more than 25 million copies to date.  I do find it quite interesting that the publishing phenomena these days belong to the children's and young adult market, what with Harry Potter and the Twilight series.  This is good news in that it shows us that young people are reading, and actively looking forward to books.  It's a bit sad, though, that those of us in adult trade haven't been able to galvanize the population with something really stellar.  Maybe we need more children's and YA editors moving into adult editorial.

JEERS to Al Roker.  I am a man of strong opinions, and I make no secret of the fact that I detest celebrity mystery novels.  Who knows whether Roker even wrote The Morning Show Murders?  Most likely not; the credit is probably due to Dick Lochte, who is credited as "co-author."  Many fine books will have been rejected so that Roker could get his large advance, and many a mystery reader will have been pulled in by celebrity to purchase this thing.  Yes, such books are good for the genre, and good for the publisher, and certainly good for the poor publicist, who can't get Joe Schmo a media appearance anywhere, ever, but will have CNBC and the New York Times banging down the door to get some of Roker's time.  And, of course, I would not be saying any of this if we were Roker's publisher--not that we could afford it.

JEERS to the Amazon Vine program.  It seemed like a good idea to some: Get in touch with the most active reviewers/readers on Amazon and offer them ARCs of coming books, to help them spread the word about new titles.  But the reviewers clearly were not vetted closely or at all, and the result is a system that gets the wrong books into the wrong hands on a regular basis, which flies in the face of all our publicists' wisdom that the key to a successful review program is making sure the right reviewers get the book, and the wrong ones don't.  I can't paint all the Vine reviewers with the same brush, as many do take the job seriously and do a fine job of pointing out the pros and cons of any particular title.  But there's also a rather large subset that has gone mad with power, that uses Vine as a platform on which to project their bitterness, anger, and "erudition."  There is clearly a glee they are taking in trashing books, now that their egos have been swollen.  Our publicist said she would quit if we took part in this program, and I am quite glad we made the decision we did.  

JEERS to Reviewing the Evidence.  Strangely enough, I have complimented this online review of crime fiction in the past.  And I do stand by the fact that the reviewing on RTE is of consistently high quality. However, it came to my attention this year that RTE follows a policy of reviewing only the books published by those on MWA's "approved" publishers list.  MWA makes no secret of its commitment to writers; and I likewise make no secret of my support for the rights of publishers. Any review engine that discriminates against independent presses and the authors published by them does not have my support.  Frankly, I'm a bit embarrassed that I didn't realize RTE's policy until very recently, when our publicist said to me, "Oh, didn't you know?  MWA is the master, and RTE is its bitch."

JEERS to DorothyL's moderator.  This has been the source of quite a lot of fun gossip in the office.  Our assistant forwards us emails of interest, and this year we saw a long line of nasty, high-handed postings by the moderator, who, it seems, plays favorites and likes to toss those who have annoyed him off the list.  This is a far cry from the early days of DangerMouse, who ran the list with a lighter touch in the days before it became a marketing tool.  I'm always amazed at the mail I get expressing frustration with DorothyL, at the number of people who say they read it more out of habit than for any other reason, and that they tend to blip past most of the entries as the equivalent of spam.  There is nothing to be done about this, and our publicist argues that DL has been invaluable for the writers who have made their presence known on it.  But it no longer seems like the hospitable place it was, and certainly the moderator plays a large role in that.  "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

On a more personal note, in December of this year, Mysterious Matters had its 100,000th hit.  Thank you to all who take the time to read my longwinded postings and occasional diatribes; and thank you as well to those who take the time to write.  I may not always write back - partially because I do need to stay focused on my work, and partially because I need to maintain perspective - but I always read everything you send, and many of your emails have formed the basis for my musings and postings.  

In 2010, my goal is to make Mysterious Matters a bit more interactive, to try to start more forums in which lovers of crime fiction can exchange ideas and "talk back" to publishers.  I have some ideas for doing this, which I hope to get off the ground in January or February.  In the meantime, all the best for a Happy New Year and a successful, stress-free (or at least reduced-stress) 2010.