You Thought Getting Used to the Kindle Was Hard? Try the Codex

I have posted a link to this clip elsewhere but it's so funny (and relevant) I had to do it again here. Yes, it's awful when you have to get used to some newfangled technology for reading. Imagine what it was like when you grew up with scrolls.





(The YouTube post of this clip doesn't cite the original source but I'm told it is the Norwegian TV show Øystein og jeg.)

Self-Publishing Is the Route to ( ) Success ( ) Failure [Check One]

The literary agent Nathan Bransford, who writes one of the shrewdest and most entertaining blogs about publishing, recently had an excellent post on a much misunderstood topic: just what publishers actually do for authors. (In brief: a lot.)  With the increasing ease of self-publishing in an e-book marketplace; prominent authors dropping their publishers to sell their work themselves, the question of whether and how publishers "add value" to an author's work certainly calls for discussion.

It's a big subject and I'll attempt to tackle it in future posts. But I encourage anyone interested in it to read Nathan's article, and also the comments thread. What particularly struck me there was reports from two different commenters about their diametrically opposed experiences of self-publishing. Author A writes:

Self-publishing is a difficult road to take. As an experiment, I uploaded two short works to Amazon and made them available in the Kindle store. I designed the covers, did the editing, and the layout design and html code juggling that needed to be done in order to get them looking right. And let me tell you, after all of that, the time you have to put in to promote your work is exhausting. And there aren't many ways to do it successfully. The grand total of copies sold thus far (after several months)? Somewhere around 14. Four of which were to relatives. 

A sobering tale. But scroll down a bit further and read this from Author B:

I was very fortunate. After being rejected (but almost making it!) by traditional publishing I let my book set on the hard drive a couple years. Then Kindle store came along and Bezos offered to e-publish my book for free. With nothing to lose I used the digital text platform interface (very easy) to upload my book. I created a cover from a beautiful photo taken by a friend. My book has sold over 5,000 copies, and continues to sell at a brisk pace. I've added more books, and I have a nice monthly income.

What this author said that really surprised me was this:

I don't have a blog, don't use Facebook, have never twittered. I don't even use my name on blogs (like this one). My books sell very well and I'm making more money than I ever imagined, thanks to 70% royalty on Amazon. Marketing is not necessary. 

Even though they report completely opposite results, both of these stories illustrate the same fact about self-publishing: as I have said elsewhere, the skills involved in writing a book are utterly different from the ones necessary to flog it to the buying public. A writer capable of creating a wonderful book may have no aptitude--or as author B's comment suggests, no interest--in networking with readers, flacking her product, etc. That's where publishers come in.

True, Author B is doing just fine without publishers, thank you very much. I take my hat off this to this person who has figured out how to write books that sell without marketing. I'm not sure what big conclusions you can draw from these starkly different stories, although I believe that the experiences of author A are probably more typical of self-publishing. But as I know all too well, many authors have had almost equally frustrating experiences with major publishing houses. And some books truly will sell without marketing, sometimes on the title or even a jacket image alone. Of course, I can't help wondering, if author B's book had come out from an established publisher, and had a creative, energetic marketing push behind it, might it have sold 50,000 copies, or 500,000 instead of 5000? Several titles come to mind that were successfully self-published, then were picked up by major houses and transformed into blockbusters. (For instance, the authors of The One Minute Manager sold 20,000 copies of their book themselves--pretty impressive. But after William Morrow took it over, it went on to sell 20 million.)

None of this is to say that self-publishing may not be viable and even preferable, for some authors, to the old-school method. But when it comes to reaching the largest possible audience, a HarperCollins or Random House, with its marketing expertise and massive distribution apparatus, still offers something pretty powerful.

Wylie vs Random: The Thrilla in Manila (Folders)

It's all too easy to complain about media coverage of the publishing business, but as my mother used to say, honestly.... It was surprising to see the wildly erratic spins that some outlets put on yesterday's news that Andrew Wylie had come to terms with Random House for the latter to publish e-books of several prominent backlist authors whose contracts predated the electronic era and made no provision for such editions. (Those contracts are typically tucked away in yellowing manila folders somewhere in the bowels of a publishing house. Consulting those documents, typed on old Royals and Underwoods, sometimes existing only as "carbons," feels like traveling back to the age of three-martini lunches.)  What made this newsworthy was that Wylie and Amazon.com had annouced with much fanfare that the agent was starting his own publishing house that would partner exclusively with Amazon to sell the work of some 20 authors.  Random, which has already asserted unilaterally that it alone may publish e-books of its backlist authors, regardless of contractual omissions, said it would boycott the Wylie agency over the issue. (Sarah Weinman gives a good summary of all this at Daily Finance.)


The press treated the original Odyssey announcement as a bombshell--the normally sober FT intoned, "many executives fear[ed] the showdown over e-book rights would lead to the death of the 500-year-old publishing business as it is known." Yikes! 


This was, ahem, an overstatement. The real issue regarding backlist e-book rights was not whether Random had a valid claim on them (they had some claim, but whether it would have prevailed in court was quite uncertain). It was simply (as I said at the time) that if Random did publish the e-books, they'd have to negotiate royalty rates, and the authors and agents involved would want higher royalties than the 25% of net that has been Random House's usual boilerplate. 


The matter has been resolved, apparently with Random agreeing to some kind of sliding royalty scale on e-books that goes as high as 40%, and Wylie conceding to Random control of e-editions for 13 of his 20 Odyssey authors.  This is a reasonable resolution that probably could have been arrived at with less heavy breathing all around. But press accounts of yesterday's agreement shot off in all directions. One headline said "Random House Wins Battle with Wylie," while the WSJ, apparently looking for its own angle, reported it as "Amazon Loses E-Book Deal."  Evidently "the death of the 500-year-old publishing business" has been averted.


However, whether you consider it a "loss" for Wylie or his clients depends on whether you view Odyssey editions as something he was really committed to, or a great negotiating tactic.  We may have a better sense of that when we see whether Wylie strikes deals with Penguin, Harcourt Houghton, and the other publishers of the remaining "Odyssey seven." 


It's a "win" for Random in that they are surely happy to keep the e-books of authors like Updike and Nabokov; but they are probably not thrilled to have their improved e-book royalties discussed in "the colyums." Especially if they have, as many houses do, "most favored nation" clauses in contracts with other authors. (As a precedent, it won't be cheered by other big publishers either.) 


As for Amazon, I'm sure they would have loved to have exclusive e-books (though just for two years) of Lolita or Invisible Man, so this is a setback for them. But they're still going to be able to sell all those e-books on any device that can access the Kindle store, so they can cry all the way to the bank. 

Moomsday Is Coming, or Kindle, Hardcovers, and Deep Blue

For some years in New York I was inexplicably amused by the broadcast ads for Einstein Moomjy, a local carpet retailer, who called their annual sale “Moomsday.” In portentous tones over rolling drums, the spot told us, for days before the event, “Moomsday is coming… Moomsday is coming,” and finally (thunderous drums), “Moomsday is HERE!!!”

I couldn’t help thinking of Moomsday when I read this week the equally portentous announcement from Amazon that Kindle books have outsold hardcovers over the last three months, apparently at a growing pace. The statement got a lot of press attention and inevitably spurred talk of a “tipping point” where e-books start to displace hardcovers as the dominant format. Equally inevitably, this breathless attention provoked a “not so fast” backlash, with commentators hastening to point out that a) not withstanding all these sales, e-books are still a tiny fraction of the overall market b) by some measures the growth of e-book sales has actually slowed since last year, c) Amazon’s figures are notoriously vague and uncheckable –and so on.
Some of this hard-nosed commentary reflects a healthy skepticism toward Amazon’s obviously self-serving publicity and credulous, tech-dazed media. Unfortunately, I suspect a lot of it, especially within the book business, reflects a less creditable willingness to ignore the reality that our business is about to be massively destabilized as print sales fall off, e-books soar, and bricks-and-mortar stores will be culled like baby harp seals. That’s a brutal way of putting it but I suspect the process will be about as shocking to our delicate sensibilities.
Like Moomsday, the day when e-books displace hardcovers , is coming…it’s coming… and one day it will be HERE, whether or not the moment is marked by Amazon’s arbitrary announcement. (Should we call it, e-oomsday?)

For the foreseeable future, e-book sales are only going to grow. And as Mike Shatzkin has been hollering from the rooftops, e-book sales don’t have to get even close to parity with hardcover sales to make the numbers of a lot of retail bookshops unsustainable. It’s a bleak fact that the margins of retail booksellers are not that large. If print book sales drop significantly, as they must, we will lose some indie stores and almost certainly see chains closing many locations—thereby decreasing retail exposure for printed books, depressing their sales and driving e-book adoption even faster.

Please note, I am not celebrating this trend. I love printed books and real bookstores. I’m simply trying to look dispassionately at what’s happening. The e-book vs. print contest reminds me also of the famous chess matches between world champion Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing computer. When Kasparov first played Deep Blue in 1996, he won, to cheers from those all over the world who wanted to believe in the superiority of man over machine. But a year later, an improved Deep Blue beat Kasparov. I would have loved to believe that human genius could go on outwitting ever brainier computers forever. Sentiment aside, though, I had to accept it was inevitable that massive computing power would at some point simply be able to flash through potential moves quickly enough to outmatch even a Kasparov, however inelegantly.

However much we love printed books, we have to accept that within a short time, they will no longer be the dominant format. I’m not prepared to guess what percentage of sales they’ll represent a few years from now, but I’m sure that the pie chart will look drastically different from how it does today—and that the follow-on consequences from that will be much greater than many of my colleagues are yet imagining. E-oomsday is right around the corner.

image of Garry Kasparov from thinkquest.org