Writing Commercial Fiction?

Check this out! There’s a new kid in town, and this one is accepting unagented manuscripts. If you write genre fiction, such as mystery, romance, or science fiction, this is a chance to be discovered. They are called Musa Publishing, and they have a number of genre imprints, and also a speculative fiction eMag called Penumbra.

Of all the obstacles that face new authors, being without an agent is one of the most formidable. After all, you just want to submit your book, right? Why this two-step process, then, of finding an agent to represent you?

Agents have traditionally been the gatekeepers of the publishing industry, screening manuscripts to locate the ones most likely to succeed at a given publishing house. For an author, this means giving up perhaps 15% of a book’s revenue to the agent – a tough price to pay. Traditionally, authors have grudgingly paid their dues to gain access to a publisher.

So when a publisher comes along who will deal directly with an author, without the agent’s cut, it gets interesting. And this new publisher, Musa, posts the terms of their author contracts online. http://musapublishing.blogspot.com/p/royalties.html

Musa royalties are set up as the following:

• For trade paperback copies sold less returns: 15% percent (FIFTEEN) of the cover price received for each sale made directly on the Musa Press site.
• For trade paperback copies sold less returns: 15% percent (FIFTEEN) of the cover price for each sale made on third-party wholesalers, distributors, resellers, or vendors sites.
• For electronic edition copies sold: fifty percent (50%) of the cover price received for each sale made directly off the Musa Press site.
• For electronic edition copies sold: fifty percent (50%) of the NET amount received for each sale made directly from third-party wholesalers, distributors, resellers, or vendors.
• For electronic edition copies sold on sale: fifty percent (50%) of the sale price received for each sale made on the Musa Press site.

Here’s the interesting twist it took me a moment to understand: Musa starts all authors off with ebooks, and then, depending on their sales, goes to print. Their site states:

PRINT—Musa will select books for our print line based upon sales. If your sales reach a certain level, your book will go into print. At that time, for any book sold on our site you will receive 15% of the cover price and through a third party you receive 15% of the net.

Is this a good deal? That’s a matter of perspective. The unknown question, as with any publisher, is what will they do to market and promote your book. How many copies will be sold? If your book is accepted by a publisher who then lets it grow stale on the shelf, it’s never a good deal. If the book gains lots of exposure because the publisher does the job of marketing and promotion well – then that is the stuff of an author’s dreams come true.

Margaret Atwood On Stories, Books, And Changing Technology

Who knew that Canadian author Margaret Atwood was a stand up comedian, too? She appeared this year at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference to speak about "The Publishing Pie: An Author's View". Her humor and intelligence make this a wonderful presentation.

The author, Atwood says, is the original source – the one who generates the content that keeps the whole publishing world in motion. Yet authors are getting less of the pie. Ebooks, in particular, make it unsustainable to write as a career. Atwood explores new publishing models and the concerns of the changing marketplace.

Atwood discusses many ideas about the value of stories and books. And, for those of you who have been forced to read too many PowerPoints, she even drew cartoon illustrations for her slide show!

Lessons from a Self Publishing Author's Experience

“[I spent] six years sailing around the world. Three years writing about it,” says Larry Jacobson.

The result was a book, The Boy Behind the Gate, which Jacobson recently self published. He discussed his experiences in a recent post on The Book Designer Blog titled 8 Keys to Self Publishing Success. Jacobson’s book was intended for commercial distribution, but his observations are interesting for authors planning both commercial distribution and limited non-commercial distribution to family and friends.

The first, and in some respects most daunting, challenge he faced was planning and organizing the project. “Fortunately for me, I had been and continued keeping my ship’s logs and personal logs. I also had hundreds of emails back and forth with friends and family,” said Jacobson. “All of this documentation left with me nearly 2,000 pages to work from, and I was truly overwhelmed.” Developing a sound outline involved making decisions about the book’s intended audience, goals, illustrations, and format.

Once he had a draft of his manuscript, Jacobson had to make some critical decisions about how much help he would need to bring it to publication. The first regarded editing the draft. Jacobson said, “I have always enjoyed writing but knew I had limitations. Be smart enough to know what you don’t know. I hired a professional editor and we worked together for almost two years on three very intense edits/revises/re-writes.”

With a fully edited manuscript in hand Jacobson again decided he needed help, this time from a book designer. “I know how to use Word on the computer and I have iPhoto, so why couldn’t I just do the design and layout myself? (Laugh Out Loud),” he said. “Not a chance-I tried a couple of pages-and knew I needed a professional.”

Finally Jacobson explored his publishing options and decided on self publishing. “While I do know that publishers supposedly have the distribution down, in a world where distribution of books is no longer set in its ways,” he reasoned, “I decided to go alone and start my own publishing company. I didn’t have the time or patience to deal with a publishing house…even if they were interested.”

The lessons from Jacobson’s experience for anyone considering self publishing are clear. First, take the time to develop a clear plan for the book which will allow you to write a good draft. Second, decide where you need professional help in preparing the manuscript for publication. Finally, consider the options concerning the publisher or printer who can best meet your goals for the book.

Click here to read Larry Jacobson’s post.

New Books for Memoirists, Family Historians and Self Publishers

My bookshelf is stacking up. I have three books that I want to get to in the next few days. You may hear more about them when I do.

The first to arrive is Mark Levine’s The Fine Print of Self Publishing. Levine is the President of Published.com a division of the Hillcrest Publishing Group, Inc. He has researched self publishing options offered by 45 companies. The book’s goal is to help writers choose ethical self-publishing companies and avoid book publishing companies that are nothing more than dream-crushing scam artists.

Tim Bete, Director, Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop said of Levine’s book, "It would take years for an author to compile all the research that Mark Levine has and, even then, most authors wouldn't be able to analyze the self-publishing companies and their contracts the way Levine does. The Fine Print of Self-Publishing will save time and money with your next self-publishing project."

I am sure this will be a valuable tool to help us in advising clients. I’m sure you see some of that advice here in future posts.
Click here  for more on The Fine Print of Self Publishing

Next, I ran across Piers Steel’s, The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done at my local public library. After my most recent post, Write a Family History in 28 Days? Maybe!, not to mention my ever lengthening to-do list, and the diet and visits to the gym that I really will start tomorrow, I had to see what Steel, a professor at the University of Calgary, Steel is one of the world’s leading researchers and speakers on the science of motivation and procrastination, has to say.

Library Journal promises, “Why you ‘put off till tomorrow what you can do today’ forms the crux of Steel’s book, in which he not only answers that question but details specific techniques to reign in the impulse. . . . Offers good advice.”  

Let’s hope!

Click Here  for more on The Procrastination Equation

Finally, we’re always looking for examples of memoirs, biographies and family histories that use stories to bring their subjects to life. On a recent visit to the Redding Barnes & Noble (No, we’re not related. Too bad!) we ran across Stacy Schiff’s, Cleopatra - A Life

Schiff is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, Vera.

Margaret Flanagan, Booklist says of the book, “Demonstrating the same narrative flair that captivated readers of her Pulitzer Prize–winning Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (1999), provides a new interpretation of the life of one of history’s most enduringly intriguing women.”

It looks like exactly the kind of creative approach to using literary techniques we like to recommend to memoirists and family historians. Look for a review soon.

Click here for more on Cleopatra.

What are you reading? Post a comment.



Judging Books By Their Covers

If you love books, you might want to take a closer look at their covers.

“Sometimes the cover of a book is as memorable as the book itself,” says Erin Moriarty of CBS News as she launches a segment of CBS Sunday Morning which explores the art of book covers.

Jamie Rabb of Grand Central Publishing, told Moriarty, “Book covers are important. You go into a bookstore and what do you see? You see the covers. The book experience is about the design, the color, the shape, the feel. When you walk into a bookstore sure sometimes your overwhelmed, but aren’t you stimulated by the art?”

The cover has a critical function. “It’s a billboard,” said Peter Mendelsund, of Alfred Knopf who designed the cover for the Stieg Larsson novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels. “You hope yours shouts the loudest or entices the most intriguing way."

Originally intended simply to protect book, in the mid - 19^th century covers became ornamental. Today, covers have become an important part of the books value. Michael Inman, Curator of Rare Books for the New York Public Library offered first editions of The Great Gatsby as an example. A copy purchased without a dust jacket might go for $10,000, but with its dust jacket the price jumps to $80,000.

Says Chip Kidd, who designed the cover for Jurassic Park, “Covers are iconic because the books are iconic.”

Click here to view the CBS video Judging Books by Their Covers



Amazon: A Third Wave Rocks Publishers' Leaky Boat, Pt 3

In the two previous blog posts we have examined how developments in the business of book publishing and sales have affected publishers and booksellers. Today let’s look at what it has meant for authors and readers.

Amazon promises readers two things: access to more books than have ever been available to them, and personalized recommendations tailored to each individual.

On the first score Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, "We want to make every book available—the good, the bad and the ugly." With Bowker, the company charged with issuing ISBN numbers, estimating the now published annually at over one million there are plenty of all three.

But the sheer volume of choices available to Amazon buyers has had something of a perverse impact on book buying. As Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, explains, "When the choice set is larger, people tend to make worse choices. They choose on the basis of what's easiest to evaluate, rather than what's important to evaluate...the safe, highly marketed option usually comes out on top."

As Colin Robinson, publisher of OR Books, explains in an article in The Nation, one of the reasons is the result of the algorithm Amazon uses for its personalized recommendations. He cites a comment by ex-Amazon editor James Marcus who said, “Personalization strikes me as a mixed blessing. While it gives people what they want—or what they think they want—it also engineers spontaneity out of the picture. The happy accident, the freakish discovery, ceases to exist. And that's a problem."

Amazon’s algorithm doesn’t point readers toward that vast array of choices but toward a limited number of recommended choices. As Charlie Winton, CEO of Counterpoint Press says, "Shopping on Amazon is a directed experience—it works best when you know what you're looking for. But how does that help with, for instance, a first novel?”

The other element of the algorithm that most readers are unaware of is that recommended titles may be based on paid promotions not juts purchase data.

The impact of tactics at both big box retailers and Amazon are having an impact on authors as well. Consider a recent price war between Walmart and Amazon. They went head to head selling hardcover bestsellers by authors like Stephen King and John Grisham for $10. In the case of Kings thousand page plus Under the Dome that was a 75% discount off the publishers recommended price.

The American Booksellers Association requested that the Department of Justice look into possible “predatory pricing.” The New York Time’s reported that Grisham’s agent, David Gernet said, “If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over. If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s Ford County, for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25?” He might have noted that arbitrarily setting the price of ebooks at $9.99 might have a similar effect.

Authors of somewhat more literary novels face a different impact. Publishers are less inclined to publish books that aren’t likely to be blockbusters. . "Look at books like Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies or Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives," says Paul Yamazaki, chief buyer at City Lights in San Francisco. "These are serious, sophisticated books that began life with modest expectations, but after dedicated work by the publisher and independent booksellers, they went on to reach wider audiences. This sort of publishing is under threat today."

Finally, authors can expect smaller advances for books that are published. As Colin Robinson reported, “…a boss at Scribner, where I was a senior editor for two and a half years, announced at an editorial meeting that when it came to advances, ‘$50,000 is the new $100,000.’ Speaking with agents at this spring's London Book Fair, I found widespread corroboration that advances had indeed dropped precipitously.”

Should we be concerned? American Booksellers Association warned, "If left unchecked...predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public."

Click here to read Colin Robinson’s, “The Trouble with Amazon” in The Nation

Click here to read Onesha Rouchoudhuri’s, “Books After Amazon” in The Boston Review

Amazon: A Third Wave Rocks Publishers' Leaky Boat, Pt 2

In the first post in this series, we examined the trends in the business of publishing and selling books over the last 40 years including the consolidation of publishing houses by a handful of conglomerates, the arrival and dominance of big box retail chains Borders and Barnes & Noble, and finally the growing market control exerted by Amazon. The result has been the elimination of over 2/3 of independent booksellers and many small to mid-sized independent publishers.

Today, we’ll look at how the eBook and particularly Amazon’s dominance in the eBook market has accelerated those trends.

To establish a market for its Kindle eBook reader Amazon set the price for all of the eBooks it would sell at $9.99. “Amazon’s handling of e-book pricing – and publishers’ response – will have perhaps the most far reaching effects on the industry,” said Onnesha Roychoudhuri in a recent Boston Review article.

The price was set without consulting publishers. A large publishing house, selling a twenty-dollar hardcover book to a bookseller or Amazon at a 50% discount receives about $10. From that amount the publisher must pay about $3 in royalties to the author, printing costs of $2 or more, approximately $1.20 for distribution and $2 for marketing. That leaves the publisher $1.80 for the rest of its costs. “Ebooks reduce the cost of printing, binding and paper, but royalties tend to run higher and all other costs are largely unchanged,” reports Roychoudhuri. “Publishers account for these costs when they slap a cost on a book, so Amazon’s decision to set prices irrespective of them set off a wave of anxiety.

Amazon tried to allay the fears of publishers by paying them the price they would have received on for a printed book. In essence, Amazon made the decision to take a loss on the book to assure market dominance for its Kindle.

Publishers are concerned that Amazon’s willingness to pay the costs of its ebooks will not last forever. “There is no way they can continue to sell…at a loss,” says Johanna Vondeling, vice president of Berrett-Koehler, a san Francisco business book publisher. “Eventually they’re going to change their minds on this, and I think all publishers should be worried about what’s going to happen when they do. They are going to keep the ebook price where it is. They’re going to turn around and say to publishers, ‘Tough. All we’re going to pay you on is the split of $9.99.’”

Amazon hasn’t succeeded in maintaining ebook prices exclusively at $9.99.

John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, whose imprints include Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Henry Holt; Picador; and Times Books, attempted to negotiate a different ebook price, Amazon removed the buy button from all Macmillan titles. Sargent wrote a post on the Macmillian blog exposing Amazon’s tactics. Amazon backed down and announced that the publisher “has a monopoly over their own titles” and, therefore, could control pricing.

Smaller publishers don’t expect to have the same success. Johnny Temple of Akashic Books said, “If we had a room full of lawyers, maybe we would be working with them and thinking about future terms. But we’re just trying to stay in business.”

“The conceit is that the market demands the $9.99 price tag,” says Roychoudhuri. “But in the case of ebooks Amazon is the market.”

However, the market may be changing. The introduction of the Apple iPad was accompanied by an agreement between Apple and publishers that allowed publishers to set prices for their titles over a range beginning at $9.99.

Today, Google announced its entry into the ebook market. A post on the Google blog said that the Google eBooks Web Reader available from the Google eBookstore. The Google ebooks will run on laptops, netbooks, tablets, smartphones and e-readers including applications for Apple and Android devices. (But notably not the Kindle.) Books can be store in online accounts and accessed as one might log into a gmail account.

What the entry of these new players into the ebook market may mean remains to be seen.

In our next post we’ll look at how changes in book publishing and distribution have affected readers like you and me.

Click here to read Onnesha Roychoudhuri’s article “Books After Amazon” in the Boston Review.

Click here to read the Wall Street Journal’s article “Apple in Talks With Publishers”

Click here to read Google's blog post, "Discover more than 3 million Google eBooks from your choice of booksellers and devices"



Amazon: A Third Wave Rocks Publishers’ Leaky Boat Pt. 1

It’s no secret that book publishers have had a tough time keeping their ships afloat over the past three decades. A good way to look at why is the lens provided by a question in Onnesha Roychoudhuri’s recent article in The Boston Review. He asks, “What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors?”

Historically - or at least in the early 1970s – publishers looked for the best writers they could find, published their work, and left it to independent publishers to sell their books. The local bookstores knew their clientele and chose books for their local markets. Staff recommendations at bookstores often helped books find an audience.

The first wave of economic change to transform the industry hit in the 1970s-80s when traditional publishing houses were largely gobbled up by multinational conglomerates whose number one criteria for evaluating the publishers performance was their return on investment. Focus shifted to blockbuster books promoted to the hilt. New or mid-list books found it tougher to find a way into print.

The second wave – mega chain book retailers Barnes & Noble and Borders – washed over the industry in the late 80s. The result was the disappearance of independent bookstores. In the early 90s there were over 6,000. Today there are 2,200.

The big box bookstores grew by demanding and getting preferential pricing from publishers. Independent booksellers customarily bought at a 40% discount off the publisher’s price. Chains got a 48% “volume” discount. The independent bookseller’s trade group the American Bookseller’s Association filed two lawsuits against the discriminatory discounts. Both were settled out of court.

The big box retailers then went after the publishers with demands for co-operative advertising fees, usually referred to as co-op. These fees bought preferential store placement, provided special in-store discounts on selected titles, and amounted to 4% of publishers’ net revenues.

The retailers began to dictate content. Roychoudhuri reported that, “One editor at a major publishing house, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity for fear of employer sanctions, told me that agents of Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Target are frequent participants in meetings about potential books. Without their buy-in, the publisher is unlikely to go forward with a book.”

When the third wave became visible, in the form of Amazon.com in 1994, there seemed some cause for optimism. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said, "We want to make every book available—the good, the bad and the ugly."

However, Amazon has merely accelerated some trends that were initiated by the big boxes. It has pushed the discounts at which it purchases from publishers to 52-55%, while even the chains get only a 50% discount.

Publishers Weekly in 2004 reported that Amazon demanded that publishers pay higher co-op rates. If they didn’t they faced “…Amazon not selling their books at a discount and not having their titles ‘surface’ in various merchandizing and advertising programs.” When publishers resisted they found books “de-listed” meaning they could no longer be found on Amazon. Others found the “buy” button removed from their books’ listings. Charlie Winton, CEO of Counterpoint Press called it “a discount grab in the guise of getting co-op.”

Roychoudhuri reported that most publishers refused to speak on the record about Amazon’s strong arm tactics.

Jeffrey Lependorf, Executive Director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and of Small Press Distribution said: “I think even people at Amazon would say that it’s essentially a widget seller that happens to have begun by focusing on books. Many people, like me, will say you can’t sell a book the same way you sell a can of soup.”

In upcoming blog posts we’ll look at what the e-book, particularly Amazon’s Kindle, will do to the trends already in motion and what those trends may mean for readers like you and me.

Click here to read Onnesha Roychoudhuri’s article “Books After Amazon” in the November / December 2010 Boston Review.

Click here to read Colin Robinson’s article The Trouble with Amazon” in The Nation, August 2, 2010



What Do Readers Want?

Would you like to know how to make your book more appealing to readers? Would it help the revision and editing process if you knew which sections of the book readers found most interesting and which they skipped over?

Tools to answer questions like these may soon be available on Scribd, a social publishing website sometimes called the You Tube for documents. Visitors can browse millions of documents or “upload your PDF, Word, and Power Point docs to share with the world’s largest community of readers.”

Scribd CEO Trip Adler recently announced that the site would offer a free tool, Scribd Stats. The new statistics will provide, he said, “new data on reading that’s never been available before."

Jason Kincaid of Tech Crunch described some of types of data available with the new package including:

• Data on search queries that led people to your document
• Data on what people are searching for within your document
• Graphs that allow you to track your document’s popularity over time
• Data analyzing Scribd’s Read Cast feature which let’s readers share content they’ve just read on Facebook or Twitter

 “Perhaps the most interesting feature of the new Scribd Stats package is the heat maps that will run down the side of each document…,” said E.B. Boyd of Fast Company. [see image above] “The heat map represents the entire document. Red indicates pages that users spent the most amount of time on, blue the least. Clicking on a section of the heat map takes you to that particular page in the document.”

Ann Westpheling, Scribd’s new strategic partnership manager who recently joined the company after 11 years in publishing marketing, said…“If I create an excerpt with material from three romantic novels, I can now see which author drove the most traffic. Experimentation [with different marketing strategies] becomes more meaningful.”

The implications of the new data are potentially enormous.

Boyd said, ”The stats could provide insight into how long people read different kinds of material--leading, perhaps, to new optimal lengths for different genres of books--as well as how reading speeds vary by day of the week or by age of reader--which could also lead to changes in how authors write.”

Click here to read Jason Kincaid’s Tech Crunch article. 

Click here to read E.B. Boyd’s Fast Company article.

Click here to visite the Scribd website. 

Generosity Based Publishing

We have written a lot in this blog about new directions in publishing. “Now,” as they used to say on Monty Python, “for something completely different.”

The Concord Free Pressinvites readers to, "Be part of our revolutionary experiment in generosity-based publishing."

Concord’s business model is simple. “We publish great books and give them away. All we ask is that you make a voluntary donation to a charity or someone in need. Tell us about it. Then pass your book along so others can give. It’s a new kind of publishing, one based purely on generosity, and it’s changing the way people think about books.”

Concord has generated $155,000 in donations to a broad spectrum of individuals and causes with its first four titles.

The publisher is overseen by an advisory board which includes literary heavyweights Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Megan Abbott and Gregory Maguire.

Novelist Stona Fitch founded Concord. “Give + Take , my fourth novel, inspired the idea,” she said. “It’s about a jazz pianist who steals diamonds and BMWs and gives away the money – in short, a modern retelling of the Robin Hood fable. But it’s also about the limits of generosity and the slippery nature of value. When the book ran into classic delay at a major New York publishing house, I decided to start the Concord Free Press and give it away, asking only that readers give some money to a charity they believed in or someone in need.”

The Concord Free Press List currently includes five titles:

• IOU: New Writing on Money edited by Ron Slate
• The Next Queen of Heaven by Gregory Maguire
• Push Comes to Shove  by Wesley Brown
• Give and Take by Stona Fitch
• Rut by Scott Phillips

“I’m the Robin Hood of publishing,” Fitch laughs. “Or the Guy Fawkes of publishing. Or the death of publishing. The best phrase anyone has come up with to describe what we’re doing is ‘a grand experiment in subversive altruism’.

“Our approach is certainly unusual and against the grain. But noble? Let’s just say that I’d rather make trouble than money.”

Click here to visit the Concord Free Press website.

Click here to read more about Concord Free Press in the IrishTimes.com