This bubble will burst

For all I know I've written about this before but I simply can't be bothered going back through the archives - so no doubt you can't either. Which means I can write about something I've possibly written about before and no one will notice, right?

These days I'm only adding to this blog if (a) there's a question sent to me or (b) I have the time, and there's been less and less of that lately. Keeping up with what's going on takes a lot more time than it used to, and meanwhile there seem to be more and more submissions to read despite being told more and more people are self-publishing ebooks. And there's a reason for this.

We - you, me, the industry, readers - are aware that there are a lot more self-published books around now than ever before, as there are increasing numbers of writers who (can sometimes) believe that evil publishers/agents are the only thing preventing them from being The Next JKRowling release their creations into the wild. This is worrying, for several reasons:

1) Readers are already overwhelmed by choice.

2) There is no solid way for these readers to choose between this plethora of titles.

3) Publishers are possibly going to lose established big-name authors to the world of self-publishing, even for a short period of time, and if certain authors do that then a big hole will appear in the publisher's revenue, and into this hole will fall several years' worth of unpublished debut novelists (yes, Matthew Reilly, Di Morrissey et al are, to an extent, subsidising emerging authors on established lists - so if you are an aspiring-to-be-published Australian author, the next time you're tempted to say, 'Ew, I would never read that', please think twice).

However, the fact that we're all seeing a lot of submissions - even from writers who have self-published ebooks - suggests that writers still yearn for a 'traditional' publishing experience, or at least a publishing experience that means they don't have to do everything for themselves. This is a clue that what we're in now is a big bubble that will eventually burst, because this level of self-publishing can't be sustained, for the following reasons:

i) Readers will eventually turn away from self-published ebooks, even in the high-churn genres like romance, because if you read ten books a week, you don't want to spend that amount of time again trying to work out which ten books you should read - you want to choose quickly and get reading. This applies even if you're reading one book a week or less.

ii) Those authors who have self-published the novel they've been working on for ten years will soon realise how much work goes into getting people's attention so that they buy it/read it, and also - if they've followed proper processes - how important editing is* and how much it costs. They'll also realise that, in order to sustain any readership they have created, they need to write another novel fairly quickly - they can't take ten years, or even three years, as they'll lose the attention of the readers they've worked so hard to gain. And if they don't actually build much of a readership with that first self-published release, they'll be tempted to not try it again but, instead, to attempt to find a publisher who can do that work for them despite the fact that they haven't sold in large numbers and haven't investigated why.

iii) Most ebook vendors will draw the line at a certain point - if only because they'll have to buy a lot more servers to store the gazillions of ebooks - so they'll cap the number of titles they're prepared to sell. At that point they'll start to curate their selection, like any good bookseller does.

iv) Publishers will go to certain lengths to stop certain key authors from abandoning them and self-publishing - these lengths may not necessarily involve paying them more money but may involve thinking differently about the publisher-author relationship.


Of course, you may say that, as an agent, I have a vested interest in authors not self-publishing. Perhaps - although I believe that traditional (or legacy) publishing is going to continue to exist, for the reasons mentioned above. But my main interest in all of this is as a reader. I am overwhelmed by choice. I would like someone to tell me what to read, which is why I take my local bookseller's recommendations even for ebooks. But I'm lucky: I have a local bookseller. Many, many people do not. They don't even have a local library. And for those people, this giant ebook wading pool is going to get too crowded - it may already be too crowded.

It's very difficult to tell an author to not self-publish an ebook when they feel that they've been thwarted by the publishing system. Just as it's very difficult for me to tell authors, when I reject them, that they're not going to make it. But as someone who reads a lot of submissions, I can assure you that there's a reason why many writers aren't going to make it: they shouldn't. What happens when those people who really shouldn't be published choose to self-publish is that a whole lot of not-so-good ebooks swim around with all of the other, very good, ebooks and then a reader wades in and chooses one, thinking that all the ebooks in this wading pool are the same, and then wants to throw it back straightaway. That reader may or may not decide to pick up another ebook - if they do, and the second one isn't that wonderful either, how long do you think they'll actually stay in that wading pool before they decide that the water is stagnant?

At that point some readers may abandon books altogether - or they may start to seek out more distinct avenues of discoverability. This is where online booksellers with distinct identities and curated stock, and libraries who can reach out to readers beyond their local area, should come to the fore. Publishers also need to do their bit - agents too. If we can find the time, obviously. Because right at the moment we're busy propping up the falling sky.

I'll go out on a limb and put a time limit on how long this self-publishing bubble is going to last and say between another year and two years. Those authors who are in the first flush of doing it now - the ones realising how much time, work and sometimes expense it takes for not many readers - will make their decision as to whether or not they'll take another tilt at it within that time frame. My guess is that most of them will not go again. Because writing is hard enough - and publishing is hard too. Put them together and that may be too much hard work for most self-published writers to sustain.

There will be exceptions - some spectacular. Some of those exceptions will be authors who then switch to traditional publishing as it will be more appealing. Out of this whole bubble we will, hopefully, bring a lot more talented writers to the fore - and that's where ebook self-publishing will prove to be most valuable: the fittest will survive, and therefore be given the best chance to thrive. If we can just keep readers with us for long enough, they will be the ultimate beneficiaries.


*I was lucky that an editor volunteered to look over this post before it was published. She made some small, but incredibly valuable, changes. Never, ever underestimate the value a good editor can bring to your work.

You're not all going to make it

At one point in 'The Gift', episode 100 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy turns to Spike and says, 'We're not all going to make it.' What she means by that is that some of her friends may die that night as they try to fend off an apocalypse. While those circumstances are dramatic, the line sometimes seems appropriate when I think about the legions of hopeful writers out there in the world.


So here's the blunt truth: you're not all going to make it. (And by 'make it' I mean 'get published', but you knew that.) The numbers alone suggest that, because there are arguably more writers than there are book-buyers in every single market around the world. And most book-buyers don't buy lots of books each year.


Does that mean you shouldn't try? Of course not. The trying is the thing. The trying is what makes you a better writer. In the great ever-shifting ratio of talent:application that is the difference between getting published and not, application is the more influential component. There are lots of talented writers out there. The ones who 'make it' are usually the ones who keep trying and learning as they go. But not everyone will. And nor should everyone expect to.


My example, for comparative purposes, is this: not all musicians expect to get a record deal, so why do all writers expect to get a publishing deal? I am yet to come across a writer who says they're doing it for their own enjoyment - they all seem to want to get published - but there are lots of musicians who do it just for the love of music (I'm speaking from personal experience). It could just be the circles I run in. But those circles are crowded with people who are constantly disappointed because they haven't been published. Some of those people - many, perhaps - will now self-publish a digital book. What's going to happen if they don't turn out to be self-publishing superstars? Statistically, most won't. So then there will be more disappointment. And this disappointment is completely preventable, because the sole cause of disappointment is expectation.

So here’s what I’d tell you if you were my friend and I was your bossy agenty friend:

Write without expectations.
Write because you love it.
Write because you have a story to tell.
Write because it makes you feel alive.
Write because that's where you're most present, in the moment, in the flow.
Don't write because you want to get published.
Don't write and then focus all of your energies on getting published. Just use some of your energies, if that’s what you want to do, and keep writing with the rest of your energies.


Getting published is a separate enterprise - it's a different undertaking altogether to writing. There are some authors who will get published because that's just where their writing falls: in the publishable stream. It doesn't make it better or worse than the writing that doesn't get published. Quite often it's just about the planets aligning for that writer at that time. When I take on an author, I have to love the writing, yes, but I also have to think hard about whether or not I can get the author published. I've rejected a lot of manuscripts that I loved, just because I didn't think I could get them published. In my ideal World of Me, where all the writing I love gets published, things would be different. But they're not. I have to live in this world. And, as Buffy also once said, this world is 'hard, and bright, and violent'.


Now, in the words of Dan Savage, 'I'm gonna get so many caaaallllls ...'

This question is very long and it is about ebooks

I'm reading in various places lately the advice that authors who aren't sure about electronic self-publishing can (even should, according to some) bet both ways, by self-publishing some stuff and seeking professional representation for other stuff. I'm thinking about self-publishing some spec fic under a pseudonym, and continuing to seek an agent for other works in a different genre under my own name. My question is, if I acknowledge the pseudonym openly (wishing more to use it for branding purposes, not to pretend that a subset of my work isn't really mine), does this self-publishing turn off (specifically Australian) agents and publishers as it once might have, given that a) self-published books seem to be more accepted by many readers than they used to be, and b) I would be seeking representation for a different type of work, written for sale under a different brand?

I'm curious also about the idea that large sales of self-published ebooks would (at some fuzzy value of 'large') become an advantage in seeking representation and publication (for, let's say, other as-yet-unpublished works) in spite of any remaining self-pub stigma, since it would imply a platform and a potential financial win for a conventional paper publisher. Do you have any thoughts about what kinds of values of 'large' an author would need to be in possession of for this to be the case? If an author could claim to have sold, say, 2000 mainstream fiction ebooks, would that make you think they were a commercial proposition? Or would you only start to notice if it were more like 20,000, or more than that? Or is there still some quality-driven (or snobbery-driven, even) stigma that overrules the idea completely? I think these are questions requiring new answers, now that it's clear that self-publishers are not limited in the number of copies they can physically distribute and sell. I've seen a lot of opinions on this from leading self-published authors, but not so much explicitly from publishers or agents.

I guess I'm asking whether you think there has been much change in the risk of shutting yourself out of the publishing industry by going down the self-publishing route, especially in light of new attitudes (at least on the part of some authors and readers) to self-published ebooks and this currently-fashionable advice about having a bet both ways.

I've read your question a few times and it's still slightly doing my head in. And that's because you're basically asking me to predict how publishing will 'end up' overall. And that topic makes my head hurt because it's just everywhere, all around, at the moment and I often feel like I can't get my actual agenty work done because I have to spend all this time thinking about change and how to manage change and how it may affect authors and publishers - and agents.

I've already written some posts about what's changing in publishing and my potentially crackpot theories about what may happen - they're here if you're interested - so I've possibly already addressed some of what you want to know.

Generally speaking, though, I have this to say: we don't know what is going to happen. I can't, with any certainty or real authority, tell you that this or that is going to happen and, thus, what you should do. What is going on now is unprecedented since the printing press was invented because, well, we're dealing with the invention of a new type of printing press. So I can only offer more crackpot theories. Pay attention to them at your peril.

First I'm going to address the question about what will constitute 'large' sales. Currently sales figures have to be taken in the context of their territory - the figures that make a bestseller in Australia barely raise an eyebrow in the US, for example. That is probably about to change in the English-language market in relation to certain types of books. There will be a day, probably not too far off, when I believe certain types of genre fiction by certain authors - even those published by large multinational publishers - will be published as digital only. At that time the worldwide rights holder will probably not think there is much reason to sell rights to other English-language territories when they could release the English-language ebook into world territory all at once. That way they get to keep all the royalties and they don't have to worry about getting files to other publishers, etc. If that happens, how, then, do we measure 'large' sales? If there is only one territory, what is the benchmark for a bestseller? These are questions I cannot yet answer. And accordingly I can't answer your question because it depends on what's going to happen in future.

Now let's look at the self-publishing 'stigma' - true, it's not what it once was - for certain types of books. Again, what's changing in publishing is probably going to change at different times in different ways depending on the types of stories and content involved. If you are self-publishing a children's picture book at this point in time, you'll probably still find there's resistance to that; if you are self-publishing an urban fantasy ebook, not so much.

So now to your question about whether or not you should self-publish some material and not others - I've written before about how authors can think about categorising their content. If we combine that with what was said in the paragraph above, there is certainly an argument for self-publishing some types of stories and not others. Will this prevent you from getting an agent or publisher for the 'others'? I really don't know. Publishers and agents may decide that protecting their brands is more important than anything and, thus, anyone who has published other stories/content that don't fit with their brands isn't welcome. Maybe that's how they'll sort through the increasingly large amount of submissions that we'll all see. But that's a hypothesis.

Something else to consider: if you are writing enough material that you can publish in two or more streams - and keep up the pace - I'd say go for it. But that's a lot of writing. At this point in time, when authors are actually in a very good position to start making decisions about how, when and where they're to be published, I'd advise a bit of patience. Keep writing, stockpile some stories and see what happens over the next few months. And it's probably only a few months we're talking about. The pace of change that's happening now is such that everything is going to look different for certain types of books within the next year or two.

And if you really want to keep track of what's going on, as it happens, I cannot recommend The Shatzkin Files highly enough.

What to give away for free, what to keep etc

Just a simple question: is there any reason why I should not post a chapter except of my novel onto my blog? I'm printing out copies of the complete manuscript for my friends to evaluate, and I want to give them an idea of what to expect before they sign up for the read. I've heard of publishers/agents getting quite touchy about manuscripts that have had an online existence, whether in forums or blogs, in excerpt or complete format. Indeed, is it wise to simply keep all of my work offline for the sake of future publication consideration?

I'll start my answer to this question by referring you to an earlier post in which I expound, in a mildly bossy fashion, about what I think authors should give away for free and what they should retain for Potential Future Book Publication.

Actually, most of my answer to your question is in that post, so please go and read it. I'll also say this: I can say 'do this, do that', a published novelist may say something else, a publisher may say something completely different. Ultimately the decision rests with you. You should do what you want to do. I'm also a big fan of working from instinct. If you *feel* you want to publish a chapter of your novel online, who am I to say that that feeling is wrong? We're all just guessing about what's going to happen - about what is happening. It's your novel and your intellectual property.

The Shatzkin Files

'All publishers are global now. All book retailers are global now. The publishers and retailers who embrace that reality soonest will have the best chance to be around the longest.'

So says Mike Shatzkin in his latest edition of 'The Shatzkin Files'. If you are interested in what's changing in the publishing industry and you do not yet know of his blog/e-newsletter, click immediately on this link and sign up (there's a 'subscribe' box on the left-hand nav):

http://www.idealog.com/blog/

Random thoughts about the future of publishing

Rather than attempting a narrative, I'm just going to jot down what's in my brain about digital publishing and the future of the publishing industry. (These are just my opinions - I have not made a scientific study.)

1 - E-books and e-readers

In the thinking and talking about how to price e-books and why people may want e-readers instead of or in addition to print books, there are a couple more things to take into consideration. Namely, that there are some of us who love, love, love print books who are also concerned about the dead-trees aspect of print books and look on e-books as a tree-friendly alternative. Also, when you buy a print book that's the total cost of that print book. When you buy an e-reader the initial cost per e-book is high because it's measured against the cost of your e-reader - if you buy a Kindle for $189 and your first e-book is $20, you're essentially paying $209 to buy that e-book. Obviously the cost of the e-reader is amortised over time. But those who are setting the prices should realise that part of the squawking about the cost of e-books is to do with the fact that readers are paying for e-readers and they don't then want to pay a lot for e-books on top of that.

2 - Authors and covers

Once all the publishers' backlists are digitised and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of e-books available, will covers for each individual book matter any more? Perhaps not. Rather, the author's brand may have more significance as a visual cue. Just like the old wax seal on an envelope, the author's personal brand will identify their e-books as a product of their (electronic) pen, so if you're an author you may wish to think about developing a visual brand - a logo or something like that. This brand can be applied to your e-book covers or could be used as a template that can be modified slightly for each e-book, thus providing an instant visual identification for your e-books. Or maybe I'm just trying to create work for graphic designers.

3 - The future is now

I often feel like there are quite a few folks in publishing who are collectively like a person who's been told the winning Lotto numbers and failed to submit an entry in time, and is about to complain long and loudly about their loss. We've had years to watch the music industry go through this; we can't say we weren't warned. Radiohead's little experiment with In Rainbows should be noted - and noted hard - as an example of what a big-selling author may decide to do some day soon. If blockbuster authors go it alone there will possibly be a period of calibration during which new authors won't even get a look-in at publishing companies, because there just won't be the money around to invest in them, but eventually we'll all need new stories from new people. If for no other reason than, to be blunt, people die (and I'm thinking of the industry in twenty years' time, not necessarily next month or next year).

4 - We have failed our teenage readers

There are so many excellent books for young adults - there have been for years. If the publishing industry (that includes me, by the way - I am not standing on the outside looking in) had looked at teenagers purely as customers and thought about how to retain them, I wonder how differently we'd have done things. I don't actually think we publish books that carry our teenage readers through to their thirties and forties and beyond (given that many non-genre novels are published for those latter age groups) but I'd be happy for someone to give me evidence that I'm wrong. It just seems that once YA readers are in their twenties they're on their own, and many of them stop reading - the rapture of their teenage years has gone. It's no wonder speculative fiction captures so many young readers - because it provides the rapture - but in the general fiction world I'm struggling to think of a concerted effort to publish stories for young people once they're over the age of eighteen. These are the very people whose worlds are now mostly digital - these are not people who are going to want print books in ten years' time. And as Clay Shirky said, 'No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.' Today's 15-year-olds will be 25 in a decade. Think about the teenagers you know and how they interact with culture - it's mostly digital, isn't it? That's what's coming; these are the readers we need to be thinking about and planning for right now.

5 - And finally

This is an interesting read: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-why-online-retailers-will-squeeze-out-publishers-in-the-book-business/

Books after Amazon, and an Amazon alternative

This is a fascinating article from the Boston Review, written by Onnesha Roychoudhuri:

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.6/roychoudhuri.php

It is well worth your time if you are interested in a concise, cogent account of Amazon's role in and influence on the current and future publishing industries.

As a side note: for those of you who use Amazon and also like to engage in charitable giving, visit Better World Books at www.betterworldbooks.com. They donate a portion of sales to literacy causes, have free shipping in the US and reasonably priced shipping outside of the US. Well worth a look if you don't know about them already. I order books from them that are not available in Australia and never will be (mainly genre fiction).

Of course, there is Book Depository in the UK but I'm not linking to them for the simple reason that they appear to be inflicting more damage on independent booksellers in a year than Amazon has since they started. And we need our indies - they break all the good authors! (This Book Depository decision is a personal one, it is not a comment on their business or on anyone who buys from them.)

The future of publishing

This is a very interesting interview with John Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century. The link is also here:

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/11/express/is-publishing-doomed-john-b-thompson-with-williams-cole

I find his last answer interesting - Thompson talks about books not going away because people are 'love the ideas that are expressed in books; they love the stories that are told through books and all of it'.

Yes, well, ideas and stories aren't peculiar to the artefact that is books: they can exist in the digital and ebook space just as readily. So, again, there's a confounding of 'book' with 'story' or 'content' and they're actually different things. Stories/content aren't going anywhere, but books may well be. Not now; not in five years' time. But once today's ten-year-olds have hit their peak culture-absorbing age, we'll be seeing a lot more digital and a lot less print.

My earlier posts on this topic:

The emperor has no clothes

The author, the book and the new frontier

The author, the book and the new frontier

(This is not really 'part two', but does flow from yesterday's post about digital publishing.)

I've recently started giving authors some advice about how they may use their stories/content in future to best effect. The advice is pretty simple, and goes like this:

1. What are you prepared to give away for free?
2. What do you want to make available digitally for a small price?
3. What do you want to make available digitally for a less-small price?
4. What are you want to keep for a book?

Many authors are writing blogs, tweeting and so on, and this is all giving away content for free. This is a good idea, but only if it's content that you're prepared to give away for free. As tempting as it is to give away parts of your novel for free - or for feedback - think first about whether or not you want someone to eventually give you money for that story. If you've already trained readers to expect to get that particular story for free, they may not pay money for it later on. This has been the great folly of newspapers around the world - they started giving it away for free years ago and now no one wants to pay for it, and they're acting surprised.

(Actually, I think people would pay for it - they just don't want to have to login or feel that there's some sort of impediment to accessing the content they want. If someone can work out a way to charge everything back to our ISPs each time we click, we'd probably be prepared to pay 1 or 2 cents a page - and that would add up over time.)

It's also important for authors who may make short stories, novellas, novels and non-fiction fragments or stories available exclusively for sale digitally to still keep the book in mind. Books aren't going to disappear. If anything, they're going to become more valuable - but only if authors and publishers treat them as such.

Those of us who work in publishing all love books. They are quasi-fetishised objects for a lot of us. We collect them, we drool over them, we stroke their covers. I believe that books will become even more objects-of-adoration than they are now. If we start to value the book more highly - if we treat a book like a precious object - then it will be worth having. And that depends on us learning to classify content differently, and the author - as the originator of the content - making that differentiation first.

The same reader can behave very differently towards literary novels, non-fiction and genre fiction. That one reader may be happy to dispose of her romance novels - and thus happy to buy them for $2.99 a pop as e-books - but wants to keep her illustrated cookbooks forever. So those forever books need to be gorgeous, but the disposable stories don't even need to (and won't) look like books. She'll happily buy an elaborate enhanced e-book of a children's picture book but would rather pay per chapter or page or even paragraph to access non-fiction content. These are classifications that publishers need to get their heads around, and authors too. In fact, it's the authors who probably have to drive this change on the publishing side, because it's change that has already happened on the reader side.

So, as with yesterday's post, I have identified that there is increasing control and influence for authors. And isn't that as it should be?

The emperor has no clothes

I've been thinking about writing this post for a while. It's not going to contain anything I don't say to other people in the industry but quite often I'm shy about saying 'yes, this is the way things are' because, well, who am I to say? But, emboldened by Mike Shatzkin, Richard Nash and others, I'm just going to say what I've been thinking about digital publishing - what's happening now, what I think may happen. These are theories and observations - I'm not saying I'm right. And I'm interested in your thoughts on the matter.

First, let me say that I believe that what's changing in the industry is going to be very good for authors, as a whole, and obviously better for some authors than others. It will be great for authors who understand that they need to connect to their readers, whether they do it through social media, live readings, open dialogue. This is, in a way, a return to the original forms of storytelling: in a cave, perhaps, or around a fire, with your audience right there in front of you. It's going to suit some authors very well, and others not so much. But it was ever thus.

Second, a lot of the intra-industry thinking (and I'm only talking about the Australian industry, because that's what I know best) about how to wrestle with the changing digital landscape is, I believe, wrongly framed. Publishers are still focusing on books, but we're so far past that now. Books contain stories and content. Stories and content are what we all work in, not books. Yet the production processes and supply chain are all about books. So I can understand why there's a reluctance to think differently - once we're no longer talking about books, all those processes have to change. But it's better to make the change than have the change forced upon you, which is what's happening right now.

When all we focus on is books-as-objects, a very important element of the whole process is overlooked: the author. If sales reps are selling books, they mainly need to focus on the book. If they have no book to sell - if you take away that object - they're left with stories/content created by the author. An author is quite a different sales proposition to a book. An author is a person, for one thing, and comes loaded with all the person complications - like a personality. A book is easier. A book is less messy. Sometimes it's easy to forget that the book came from an author originally. But it did. The author is not a necessary evil; the author is the reason the story exists.

We also need to realise that bookshops as we know them are disappearing and will continue to disappear, particularly if the independents can't get access to e-books (this is a separate and involved issue that I'm not qualified to properly explicate). So there will no longer be the same number of channels for books to be distributed to consumers, and publishers will be forced to become business-to-consumer operations, not business-to-business operations. That also requires a big adjustment in their thinking. So that makes two fundamental changes for publishers.

The other fundamental change is the adjustment to producing content for screens. Screens have been around for a while - the first e-books were read on computers - but until recently no one's really had to think about how you make a novel look pretty - or even functional - on a screen. We don't do screens, see - we do books. The music industry didn't have to make such a radical adjustment - an iPod is an outgrowth of a Walkman, and buying single songs on iTunes is not a radically different concept to buying a 45" single. The movie and TV industry have always been in the business of screens, and that won't change. But those of us who are in the 'book business' don't know about screens. Well, now we have to.

There are several people in the local industry who have already thought about these things, and there are some who have wanted to think about them but have been hamstrung by having to wait for the trickle-down from the head offices overseas. But there's really no time left, now. This is cultural change of an extraordinary kind, and it has to happen or there's going to be a mess. Correction: there already is a mess. Booksellers are increasingly concerned about what's going on and wondering how they can simply maintain their businesses, let alone thrive. For some publishing companies the change will come too late. So I do think times will be gloomy for some.

But not for authors. I do not think many authors need to make the same changes in their thinking because I've found that many of them are highly adaptable. The driver for many of them is getting their stories out into the great beyond, and if that takes the form of a no-advance, profit-sharing, digital-only publisher who can provide editorial and marketing/publicity support, they'll seriously consider it. I've actually been surprised by how many authors I've spoken to who have not really batted even one eyelash at the prospect of one day not having a book with their name on it printed. The story is everything, you see - the story is what they want to see released into the wild. And, really, that's the position we all need to come to if this publishing thing is going to survive.

Authonomy me, Authonomy you

How much value is there in websites such as HarperCollins’ Authonomy, where authors post their work for critiquing by other amateurs? Works are promoted by the number of comments and recommendations they receive and HarperCollins promise to review the top five each month with a view to publication. Sounds good, but in practice it degenerates into a kind of black market, where authors trade kudos without even bothering to read the work in some cases.

WHAT?!? The internets degenerating into a rogue trading arena with scant regard for ethics and high regard for devalued content? Colour me shocked. (For those non-Australian, non-Canadian readers, that was sarcasm. Yes, it's the lowest form of wit. I've never claimed to aspire to higher forms of wit, because I'm incapable of producing them.)

Authonomy has had its doubters from the start, so I suggest you regard it as you would regard any other online community: engage in it if you want the experience, but don't expect that it will change your life. And then add this on top: it's a marketing exercise for HarperCollins, and a perfectly legitimate one that was kinda smart at the time it was launched. It's also a fabulous way for them to get free content (as it would be for any publisher who had this kind of website).

I don't know how successful Authonomy has been for the authors who have taken part i.e. if it's really translated into book publication and books that have reached a wider audience. I don't know because, actually, I haven't been interested. I'm too busy trying to keep up with my own submissions. I recall wondering what HarperCollins' publishing department would have thought of it, though - it just meant more work for them, reading yet more submissions when they didn't have time to read the submissions they receive via old-fashioned methods. And, probably, Authonomy's effectiveness is limited by this lack of time/resources to properly service it. Still, it gets a lot of eyeballs on a HarperCollins website (and in the future eyeballs will probably be a legitimate unit of measurement) so, from a commercial point of view, the site is there to benefit HarperCollins - they own the domain name. It's nice if it benefits authors as well, but there are plenty of online communities for writers. I'm not sure how this one would more beneficial than another, even if it is run by a publisher.

Of course, the publishing, bookselling and book-reading industry is changing so rapidly - more than many people who are working in it realise - that this is all going to be moot shortly. It's entirely possible that we are watching the dying days of empires, waiting to see which phoenix emerges. Somehow I don't think Authonomy has wings.

'The Golden Years . . . The Florida Legislature, ’70s and ’80s'

The above is the title of merely one of the hundreds of thousands of books now being self-published each year. The Internets have made self-publishing possible - and possibly respectable - in a manner not before seen.

The most recent New York Times Magazine has an interesting (and conveniently short) article on this topic - I encourage you all to read it before it goes into their archive and behind a payment wall:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02FOB-medium-t.html?ref=magazine

The commonwealth of stories

As the Australian publishing industry is still trying to get its head around this digital thing - and still somewhat acting as if the internet will go away if we just close our eyes for long enough - it occurs to me that part of the confusion and resistance could be caused by the fact that the internet is simply not a medium many of them are comfortable with, particularly in terms of their work. They use the web for email, to find out information, perhaps to order groceries. But they don't think about the pages they read in terms of content - thus, it's hard to perceive how a book may also be considered content, or content source.

There could be something else behind the resistance, too. A lot of us in the industry were library nerds or, at the very least, bookish children and teenagers. We formed our identities around the idea that we loved to read. Reading was our refuge from the harsh world; it gave us our own commonwealth, even if we were all so introverted that we rarely interacted with other bookish people. And our love of reading let us tell ourselves that we were smart, and apart from others. I read, I don't play sport, I don't watch television. Sport and television are for people who don't like reading and my reading makes me somehow superior.

I'm speaking from personal experience - I was a horrible reading snob. But it didn't mean I was smarter than everyone else. It just meant I was a horrible reading snob.

Now take a horrible reading snob and plonk them down in front of the idea that e-books just may reach people who play sport and watch television. E-books - because of ease of research and purchase - may reach people who didn't read books as children, not because they didn't want to, but because they couldn't. I mean people with dyslexia, for example, who want to read but for whom reading is torture - so much so that they'll never go into a bookshop because they don't know what they want to read and they don't want to have to explain that to the horrible reading snob behind the counter. But e-books mean they can take their time trying to find something they may like and they can, if they want, read it on their phone so no one can see. E-books - digital publishing - open up the world of stories, both fiction and non-fiction, to many, many more people. And inherent in that is a threat to the safe world order of the horrible reading snob who believes that stories belong to readers alone.

But they don't. Our first storytellers did not write their stories down - they told them out loud. When all storytelling was oral, the stories belonged to everyone. The advent of the printing press changed the dynamics of storytelling and oral storytelling now takes place on - wait for it - the television. And the cinema, radio and theatre.

However, that doesn't mean that the stories contained in books should belong to only those who can read them. Stories belong to everyone - to every single person who speaks the language they're told in. The stories that are contained in books do not belong only to the horrible reading snobs. They belong to the people who can't read so happily; they belong to the blind; they also belong to the illiterate. While e-books won't appeal or be accessible to everyone, I do think they will open up more stories to more people once the devices are more affordable and access to e-books is more widespread. At this point in time it's just my personal theory - I have no proof of it. But my safe, protected, printed-book, horrible-reading-snob world is coming to an end, and I think it's exciting.

E-books into print books

I have one e-book published, and the editor spent a lot of time making suggestions, many of which were incorporated in the final manuscript. I feel an obligation towards her, as well as gratitude for taking me on board. Sales are very small: I gather it is mainly to do with self-promotion, and I seriously don't have spare time (I often don't even have time to write, hence am very frustrated!). I also don't have much expertise in this area, and even with the internet it takes a long time to research.

The other manuscripts I have floating around out there being 'considered' by other publishers/agents are ... just floating. The e-book I consider to be their equal or better, according to one's personal taste. Would it be really rude to send it out for consideration as a print publication, on the grounds that it has been a finalist for an e-book award, despite poor sales? (If perchance it was successful, I think the e-publisher should get some of the profits, whatever they turned out to be.) I'm sorry if this sounds like a weird question, I'm just trying to think laterally, but would hate to hurt anyone professionally or personally.

There are a few issues to consider here.

First is the fact that you no longer have e-book rights to sell along with your print book rights, and this may be a dealbreaker for some publishers (even if a lot of them aren't quite sure what to do with e-book rights yet). Some, not all. Just so you know.

Second, the question of 'gratitude'. It's nice to be grateful. Some of my authors make decisions out of gratitude and I always ask them to not do this, because publishing companies aren't charities. They don't publish your book because they feel sorry for you. They publish your book because they like it and think they can make money out of it - not necessarily in that order. While it's good to not burn bridges, don't let gratitude overly colour your business decisions. So, no, it wouldn't be rude. The e-book publisher is not offering you print publication. Why should you then not seek it out separately? And the e-book publisher will make money from the e-book sales that would probably increase if you have a print publication too.

Third, e-book sales will be small for most e-book titles for a while until everyone gets the hang of digital publishing. Don't worry about it, just do your best with the time you have for promotion/marketing, learn what you can when you can and that's all you can do. Writers very rarely have the luxury of just writing. Most of them have other jobs, children, husbands or wives, other family members to care for, friends, pets and sometimes farms. You do what you can. Don't give yourself guilt when it's not necessary. That's what major religions are for.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Do you think the role of the literary agent is set to change in a major way? I was reading Mike Shatzkin’s blog article about literary agents and the changing world of trade publishing:
http://www.idealog.com/blog/literary-agents-and-the-changing-world-of-trade-publishing

He explores some really interesting issues about new business models and the digital revolution, and offered some views on how literary agents will need to respond to this ‘brave new world’.

Do you see big changes ahead for agents – in particular as the way authors earn their money (click per view, profit splits, self-publishing, etc) shifts? And on the flip side, what does it all mean in terms of what an author might expect from their agent – and in turn, their publisher?

Yes, I think the role of the agent will change, the same way I think the role of the author and the publisher will change. I think everything is going to change - most importantly, the way we tell stories is changing and will change, and that will affect everything else. We just don't know exactly how, which makes it hard for me to predict how my own job will change. The frustrating thing for me, at the moment, is that the Australian publishing industry is mostly lagging on the digital front. There's the odd publisher who's on top of it but the rest are way, way, way behind the US. I am trying to force some change now, when I do new deals. I ask questions about e-books, I try to get e-book publication dates. But digital publishing is still not being treated as important by any save that handful I mentioned. My biggest fear is that the sticking-head-in-sand-ness of it all is going to mean the demise of the Australian publishing industry just as much as the PIR changes would have.

So what's my changing role? Right now, it's to try to effect the change that is already under way overseas. In the future, yes, quite possibly, it's advising authors on self-publishing in the digital realm - but under the current agenting rules I'm not allowed to take commission for that, so it's not really worth my while to do it. Profit-sharing models aren't being taken up in the US and they're not even a glimmer in anyone's eyes at the moment. And, frankly, I'm so exhausted at this point of the year - after a year that has felt like a constant banging of my head against brick walls - that the prospect of keeping on top of all this change makes me want to revert to the job I'm actually qualified for, which involved five years of university study that I have not, to date, used. In order for me to properly be on top of these changes I need to hire someone to do the job I do now, so that I can spend time managing change. But there's no money for that. And that will be the challenge for Australian agencies in particular - we simply don't have the same income as UK and US agencies so we actually can't spare the time. I guess we will have to, though. I know we will have to. I just wonder when we will sleep.

E-books, iPhones and the great digital unknown

The whole eBook thing is in itself exciting (love my iPhone & would love room on the bookshelf), but it’d be nice to know that it’s being introduced in a way that doesn’t completely disembowel our local industry. Risks & opportunities.... Maybe writers’ remuneration needs to be calculated in a different way, like pay per view/click through, or as an extra licence fee through something akin to APRA for the music industry. That would be collected from the distributors like Barnes & Noble rather than from the consumers direct, if B&N is offering consumers the opportunity to share their books with friends for “free”.

If the electronic revolution does bring down the publishers’ production & distribution costs (although remembering most people will stay on paper), maybe there’s some argument that there could be more in it for those at the bottom of the food chain? I wonder why they haven’t fitted these eBook readers with earplugs & an audiobook option for those who’d prefer to listen than read during a long commute, or for kids, or the vision-impaired. Maybe they have, but they haven’t marketed this. Then I could see that this technology could actually bring in more ‘readers’/consumers than currently purchase hard books. Maybe writers will have to be more business minded & consider Merch opportunities when writing and film/tv spin offs. Just putting words on paper isn’t going to pay the bills if the push for ‘cheaper’ continues.

Whoa ... there's a thesis worth of answers for all of this. I'm not sure I can do your query justice, but I'll try.

1. The cost of things - The creation of the book involves more than the cost of paper and distribution. A lot of the cost goes into paying the salaries of the publisher, editor, publicist and sales reps, not to mention the higher-ups. Yes, it's a factor, but it's not enough of a factor for a publisher to slash their prices by, say, half. If you want to test this theory, try self-publishing an e-book and then try editing, distributing, promoting and selling it yourself.

2. More moolah to the creator - The idea of profit-sharing between writer and publisher is afloat but, unsurprisingly, is not being taken up by publishers. That's because it's a new idea and changing the publishing industry is like turning around a rusting Soviet tanker when it's heading for Stalingrad. It may catch on in time. But it will mean that the writers concerned have to be willing to be businesspeople, because it will be quite a different relationship to the current co-dependent, mutually fractious creative liaison.

3. E-books into audiobooks: Digital (e-book) rights are different to audio rights. Amazon stepped into a world of woe when they tried to use software to convert their Kindle books to audio, because the publishers (rightly) said that they didn't have the audio rights and thus weren't allowed to do what they planned. No doubt in the near future there will be cases when these rights go together, specifically so the e-book can convert into an audiobook or vice versa, but it's not really happening now. And trying to explain rights would take me a few hours. (It's taken me several years to get my head around it.)

My own nebulous theory about e-books and the digital future is that e-books may well attract a completely new readership - people who didn't read print books, for whatever reason, who are at home in the digital environment and prefer to read their content that way. Cultural artefacts are consumed or not consumed for a variety of reasons: 'I want to look smart'/'I don't want people to think I'm dumb' are high on the list. I think a lot of young - and older - men don't buy books because they're not sure what they want to read and they don't want to walk into a bookshop (or library) and say that, because it's never been made easy for them to do so. The internet makes it easy. The internet does not say, 'Dummy, why can't you spell?' The internet understands that you can be unable to spell perfectly or read for two hours without a break and still want to read books. Someone very dear to me fits into this category. I hope that access to digital copies of books will mean that he doesn't ever feel like he's 'too dumb' to read again.