Open Letter From The Author’s Guild, Part II, Response

Reading on the Nook

The Author’s Guild, the premiere organization that represents writers’ interests, has engaged in noble battles with Google, Apple and Amazon and others when they feel professional writers are being gamed by these new, extremely powerful forces in the publishing world.  I believe they are right to be concerned.  From an individual writer’s perspective, we know that the battle of the Gods, which includes the aforementioned digital content giants, affects us immensely.  At the same time, there are now only five major U.S. Book publishers:  Hatchette Group, Harper Collins, MacMillan, Penguin-Random House and Simon & Schuster.  They too, giants all of them, are engaged in the rumble. These few still dominate the market place — that is they still determine who gets published and who doesn’t. However, it seems that everyone involved in book publishing is upset.

What caused the current turmoil are the seismic changes in technology that alter nearly every aspect of said industry.  The culprit is the e-book and its almost inevitable, eventual domination of the book world and all who play a role in it.  As romantic as we might wish to be about books on paper, we have to look at the cold, hard facts before we or the marketplace can recreate a lively, culturally rich profitable (or sustainable if you like), model for a thriving book market.  First, nearly everyone under 40 and many well over 40 have a hand-held digital device or two to connect them to everything they want to be connected to. That includes books. Second, e-books are relatively inexpensive to produce and nearly free to distribute. There are no returns. Thus the cost to purchase can and probably should be considerably less than the hard back.  This means the existing publisher will have to adjust their business accordingly, with writers in a just world taking a much larger percentage of a significantly lower retail price on e-books.  Writers may, in the end, be the least affected. On the other hand the writer’s burden is the only one that hasn’t been lightened or, sadly in some cases, eliminated.  Writing an e-book is no different — certainly not easier — than writing a regular book.  (I might add that the potentially interactive nature allowed by e-books may change the writer’s role in the near future.)

Independent bookshops will have a tougher time.  While many-mid-list writers were ditched by their publishers during the rise of the mega-bookstores*, many bookstores found a way to stay alive. Some innovative, independent stores survived the kind of thing that regularly happens in a capitalistic society, in this case the brutal onslaught of Borders and Barnes & Noble only, when the attack abruptly ended when big-box bookstores went down in flames, to come face to face with Amazon in the digital age. I have no doubt that paper & ink books will continue for a while and that many bookstores will find ways to survive, but the business itself is in deep trouble just as DVD rental places are turning off the lights, so too will bookstores if they can’t learn to think differently. Lawsuits filed against Amazon and Apple aren’t going to change our direction.  I’m not sure fighting the advance of e-books is anything other than an energy-draining, futile strategy. And so far, the Big Five sit like bumps on a log.  What are they waiting for?

Reading on the Kindle

As writers, I’m convinced we must find a way to embrace these changes, adapt to them, and take advantage of them.  That advice, I should suggest with more humility I suspect, applies to everyone involved:  Publishers, marketers, bookstores, and distributors. However the only one that has the potential to be all these things at once are writers.  It’s called self-publishing.  And while it has lost a little of its slimy “vanity press” reputation, in publishing and certainly literary circles, it is still the lowest of the low. And while writers hold the key because they control, or provide, the content, the problem is that it’s not likely that the writer is good at all aspects of the business. But even if they were, would they have any time left to write? The other thing that’s missing in self-publishing and especially e-book publishing is “the vetter.” We cannot review our own books.   Book buyers are (or were) often guided by reviewers.  With zillions of books being published each year, how are readers going to find us? In my genre, The New York Times reviews six to eight books most weeks.  A good percentage of those go to books by bestselling writers who produce at least one book a year. Few slots are left for introductions or surprising discoveries. There are very few reviews of paperbacks, or e-books, certainly not self-published books, e or otherwise. I don’t blame them.  Keeping track of the myriad unvetted books in the marketplace is an impossible task.  And we’ve learned not to trust the seemingly democratic reader reviews on Amazon and elsewhere, since they can be bought by the bushel. The entire reviewing process needs an overhaul or makeover, to put it in more contemporary terms.  It has all changed.  That person boarding the train to go from DC to NYC has 300 books in his breast pocket. And if he sees something even more compelling on a blog, he can download it in the time it takes him to get comfortable in his seat.  That is now.  He doesn’t have to wait for now.

Reading on the iPad

So what do we do?  How do we ”embrace” this new world?  If I knew the answer, I’d be rich.  And I’m not. And I’m not that bright or connected. However, I’d like to challenge the Author’s Guild to find ways to take advantage of what is inevitable in publishing rather than trying to stop it or slow it down.  Certainly, the deep pockets and experience of the five surviving mega publishers could be used to better advantage. An anecdote. Frustrated by my early books going out of print and not available electronically, coupled with my love of novellas (even though major publishers hold them in disdain), I set up an aka publishing company —Life Death And Fog Books— to address both of my frustrations.  But without a company like Amazon to help me set up at minimal expense, I’d be dead in the water. I self-published the first four in the Shanahan series and my first novella.  Later I sold a novella to what appeared to be a creative venture of a very highly respected traditional publisher.  They published it in a revived hard-boiled imprint with other novellas from new and established authors in the genre. They did a fantastic editing job. But from what I could see, after they created a logo and set up a small web site that amounted to little more than a billboard out in the Internet’s back-country, they did nothing. (I can do nothing quite well) No advertising. No reviews.  No marketing that I could find and I not only read blogs and web sites on the subject, I receive all sorts of announcements and promotions from and about e-book writers.  The first novella I published (excuse me,) self-published through my own company, Mascara, Death in the Tenderloin, outsold Death in the Haight, which was the novella published by the Big Five publisher as part of a brief e-book imprint launch.  There was a lot of criticism of B&N and Borders and their Wall Street CEOs for not seeing the e-book tsunami coming?  What about the Big Five? Shouldn’t they have figured this out even sooner and shouldn’t they do more than put their collective toes in the water?

My point is that instead of blaming an avaricious Amazon, perhaps the best support for writers might be convening a book congress determined to maximize its writer/members access to the marketplace in whatever format readers want through companies like Amazon or Hatchette or through new, not yet invented means. Bring in the pioneers from Silicon Valley. Introduce them to the suits at the stodgy publishing houses. Have a constitutional convention to reconfigure a stagnant system or develop dozens of new approaches to connect writers with readers. Perhaps only an organization like the Author’s Guild can find ways to adjust to a mammoth technological and cultural change as profitably and as painlessly as possible.

The Author’s Guild deals with many issues — copyrights, contracts, royalties, etc. — vital to writers.   While I urge them to help shape the future of publishing by making sure we are not petrified by and in the past, I am proud to be a member and urge other writers to join.  Click here for an application.

*This isn’t the first major shift in the publishing industry.  Not that long ago, the big box bookstore craze not only wiped out many independent bookstores, it inadvertently killed the careers of many midlist writers. Huge chains, like borders, ordered large quantities of books for each store only to return unsold copies. Publishers would up the print run of a book to meet the demand, but end up eating the excess.  Writers, who could and did survive with a book that sold five or six thousand copies, was still an asset to the publisher until publishers had to print 25 or 30 thousand to meet bookstore demands and have more than half returned.

Opinion — Amazon, Apple, Authors And Traditional Publishers

Leaving the high moral ground issues and marketing matters aside for a moment, the book battle between Amazon and several major publishers is initially about the use of different business models, especially as it relates to the burgeoning e-book phenomenon.  Amazon embraces what we have come to know as a wholesale model.  That is, the bookseller pays so much for each book and they may sell it for whatever they want — even use it as a loss leader if they choose.  Most major publishing houses wanted what’s called the agency model — that is they set the cost to the bookseller and also set the price for the purchase.  In other words if the publisher wants the book sold at $12.99, booksellers must do that.  Of course, in both cases, the publishers and booksellers would make a profit, but in the agency model, there wouldn’t be any pricing flexibility for the retailers. No special sales or discounts, unless the publisher approves it.

Legally, the publishing houses might very well have won the day when the dispute went to the court because, while it may not afford the public or in some cases the writer the best possible deal, agency pricing is not illegal. Many companies in many businesses that have strong brand recognition and customer loyalty can and do demand that of their retailers.  But there was something else that the judge didn’t like about the situation.  The publishers, it is alleged, got together with each other and with Apple to set prices and policies.  If it's true, it is collusion and that is illegal.

As of today, three of the world’s largest publishers have settled with the U.S. District Judge, agreeing to end their current agency agreements — for the time being.  MacMillan and Penguin plan to fight the suit with the continued support of the highly respected Authors Guild, an association of published writers, and the American Booksellers Association, whose noble cause it is to support independent bookstores.   They have a counter accusation. They believe that Amazon is guilty of predatory pricing.  And certainly a case may be made for that. Nonetheless most folks, whether they liked the judge’s decision or not, seem to think Amazon won this round big time.

This is generally regarded as a win for readers who will likely benefit from lower prices on reading material.  But there is an argument that it will hurt the quality of the work in the long run because publishers won’t nurture and support their writers if they can’t ask for higher prices on e-books.  And there is also an argument that if Amazon (and perhaps Barnes & Noble) has this advantage, the result will further damage independent bookstores because of these lower prices.

As a writer, surviving as such by the skin of his teeth, I have divided loyalties.  As an older human, a veteran of the print media in many of its forms, a devoted library fan and a more than frequent visitor to bookstores, where I buy books on paper, I want very much to see the sacredness of the book in its traditional form be eternal.

Amazon CEO and Founder Jeff Bezo

As a midlist writer, likely approaching the end of his career, there is a flicker of hope that e-books and booksellers like Amazon will be entirely more friendly to my aspirations than traditional publishers have been.  Publishers, despite arguments to the contrary, are and probably must be dismissive of writers who haven’t achieved a brand name level of recognition. Unless a writer is a big name or can become one quickly, you are not a product that publishers can promote or big booksellers can sell, save Amazon or-late-to-the-game Barnes & Noble. I say this as a member of the Guild, as a writer recently published by Penguin and, again, as a person who buys his books from independent bookstores.  And I say that as someone who has never read a complete book — other than my own during the editing process — on anything battery operated.

However, I like to think of myself as a realist.  While the specific direction of publishing and all its possibilities cannot be foretold, the general direction is clear.  What we are witnessing is an adjustment in keeping with all the adjustments we humans are making in all areas in an increasingly inter-connected world.  Just as third world countries jumped from having no telephones to suddenly having smart ones, just as we are now downloading movies on Wi-Fi, getting our news on i-pads, covering wars with twitter and getting our maps without unfolding that giant piece of paper over the steering wheel, we will eventually get most of our books on a device or on multiple devices.   The transition may not be absolutely total, but it is inevitable.

The battle that we are witnessing has nothing to do with serving you the reader or, frankly me, the writer.  The battle is about who owns the business.  It’s a battle waged by CEOs and boards of directors, shareholders and public relations firms.  It was truly difficult to feel the pain of Borders as a corporation in a capitalist society when they ran aground, when only a short time earlier they cleverly and coldly defeated their competition. They were responsible for shuttering the doors of who knows how many small book businesses, just as Starbucks brought an end to a zillion mom and pop corner coffee shops. 

But consumers embraced the huge bookstores for awhile.  Read a book, have a scone, pick up a date.  Some writers thrived, especially the best selling ones.  On the other hand, many of us, writers with a modest but loyal following, suffered from brand-name dominance the big box bookstores provided. Many of us, successful in the previous book world populated by independent bookstores and libraries, where we could get some attention, were tossed out of our comfy nest by the success of Borders and its big box cousins who lusted after the best selling brands.*

Scott Turow, President, Authors Guild

Then Amazon happened. Live by the sword, die by it.  The big stores were victims of changing times, new technology and, apparently, smarter competition. When the e-book revolution began, Amazon led it.  Now Amazon is threatening to blow the lid off the publishing establishment, not just in the pricing of e-books, but as publishers themselves.  What we are witnessing with these lawsuits is the ugly grappling among corporations, all of them — Apple, Amazon, and half a dozen conglomerate publishers not to mention other vested interests — all larger than you and I — as they play king of the hill.  

As an old-fashioned consumer and a writer in need of occasional inspiration, I am not happy about this.  I love walking into bookstores.  It’s inspiring in a way that searching the pages on Amazon’s web site isn’t.  But as a writer, who likes to write and wants to be read, I have to either give up the idea of being published — or adapt.  And there are some advantages to the average writer when some of the old-fashioned limitations are lifted.  One of them is that we don’t have to sell 100,000 copies to succeed.

In the end, I think, we all have to understand, there are fewer and fewer video stores, very few public telephones, almost no yellow pages and fewer and fewer watches.  The time, like everything else, is on the smart phone.  When travelers pack for a long trip, they don’t have to have an extra bag for their books.  When they drive, they can have their device read to them.  If they are in a strange place with nothing to read and no place to buy a book, they can download one, instantly and for less.  What do we think is going to happen?

I repeat, the battle isn’t about you and me.  It’s about who owns the business.  There is the old guard and the new one.  And as it is in any other business, there might very well be some bright exceptions to the trends — maybe some exciting niche publishers.  Maybe there will be new ways writers can (successfully) get into the marketplace on their own — and it is far more difficult that some would lead you to believe.  But I’m not sure the future of publishing is in the court system or in trying to circumvent the future.  It will come through smart ideas, through innovation.

The times, someone once said, they are a changin’.

  

*Post script:  Nothing wrong with best selling authors.  I am a fan and regular reader of several of them.  My point is only that when big box bookstores ruled, many midlist writers were dropped because of economies of purchase and difficulties of distribution.  The rise of Amazon, while it doesn’t diminish the sales of the great brand names, allows greater potential for writers with smaller followings to publish as well and continue to gain notice if the work warrants it.

On Writing — View From the Bottom and Outside, Part II

On Monday, Amazon was highlighted here for the revolution it started in the book business. Barnes & Noble saw the threat, quite late in the game it seems. Nonetheless it developed its own on-line bookstore where you could pick a book and have it in your mailbox in 48 hours without leaving your home.  We asked what else could the book lover want?

It turns out, a whole lot more.  The best, in terms of options, was yet to come.  Amazon, who might have done a few victory laps as they rose to the top of the international bookseller business, was doing nothing of the kind.  They were busy developing a little device about the size of an early cellphone. Readers could pick out a book from the vast array Amazon offered from their on-line bookshop and have it instantaneously on their Kindle. They found a book, pushed a button and in seconds, the product was in the customer’s hands.  Literally.  They didn’t have to have a café in their bookstore, they could have the bookstore in their café.  And in many cases, the cost of the e-book was significantly less than the discounts the Big Boxes and Amazon’s hard copy bookshelves offered.  While hardback fiction bestsellers were going for just under $30 and would take two days to receive, you could have the just released bestseller for $12.99 or less instantaneously through the Internet.  What’s more, while the bookstores had to worry about space and the shelf life of the book, Amazon had no such worries with electronic data.  Many, including the major players in the publishing and bookselling business, pooh-poohed the notion of the electronic book and, I suspect, saw it in the same way they saw audio books — something for a small, specialized market — supplemental but not mainstream. They couldn’t have been more wrong

No one, except Amazon apparently, saw it coming.  Where were the high-paid executives at Borders?  Did the board of directors of the huge publishing houses think their business wouldn’t be affected by the digital revolution?  Maybe they thought they had more time.  Even Apple’s stylishly clever folks, who harnessed the music business, couldn’t and still, to some extent, can’t figure out what’s going on when it comes to books.  What we do know is that all these businesses who depend on books or want a piece of the book publishing market, however, they might be configured, are scrambling to catch up.

The results so far have lawsuits and injunctions flying around. Apple, a company that should have been at the forefront of the e-book wave, is playing catch up. What it has done is attempt to partner with the largest book publishers to work out some sort of an arrangement that would put them back in the game.  Unfortunately, the Feds think there’s something a little funny about that. A couple of publishers have paid fines based on this kind of business practice.  Apple and a couple of the major publishers are willing to have their day in court.  Win or lose, Apple’s emersion in the book publishing business has to be like swimming through mud.

While Borders crumpled, Barnes & Noble did two things that kept them afloat.  They too were playing catch-up; but they did two very smart things.  One is they developed their own on-line purchasing system and two, they created the “Nook,” an e-reader, a better-late-than-never alternative to the Kindle. Even so, B&N closed many of its stores and has now has a new best friend, Microsoft, in an effort to compete with the mystical and perhaps mythical strength of Apple and the vast head start the pioneer, Amazon, had in the book business.

But so far, none of Amazon’s competitors have shown they understand publishing from all the essential angles. Barnes & Noble, Apple and Amazon all have e-book platforms.  Barnes & Noble had made it pretty easy for anyone to publish and order from their platform.  Apple has done the same, but absolutely counter to their reputation, could not or would not make it user friendly.  Nor do they have as much product directly available through their respective devices.  The advantage that Apple still has is that the i-Pad and i-Phone are multi-taskers and infinitely more popular. Even so, the clear winner here is Amazon.  Even Apple product users are downloading a Kindle app.

Another reason for Amazon’s dominance in this particular product line is, I believe, that Amazon has decided to be all things to all readers — and writers, for that matter.  That’s not always a winning strategy, but it seems to be working for Amazon. If you are a writer, Amazon, for a remarkably low fee can publish your next novel for you.  If you want more control over your product, they can support that approach as well. (I’ve reissued my own early books in the Shanahan series as Life Death and Fog Books, essentially using Amazon).

Just as Amazon did to compete with brick-and-mortar bookstores, it makes small business publishing possible by taking out much of the backroom expense.  If you are just publishing e-books, there’s very little cost and little to do.  If you want to offer a book on paper, print on demand (POD) is doing nicely these days and the process is in line with the trend away from hard backs and mass paperbacks toward quality trade paperbacks. The print quality of POD has improved dramatically.  In addition to Amazon eliminating the need to have a distributor, they simplify the accounting.  They handle the charges, returns and provide detailed reports along with a check or a direct deposit for your royalties.  Their take is pretty low.  I found Barnes & Noble easy to work with as well, making it easy to make e-books available on their site with equal back-room capability.  Apple, not so much.

But Amazon is never done innovating.  Not only do they have appeal for the self-publishing writer and the small publisher, they have become a major publisher themselves.  While talented editors at the big publishing houses are trying to determine whether or not they are on the Titanic, Amazon is offering a life raft.  Come work for them.  Amazon’s new publishing imprints are courting popular and talented writers themselves. Amazon has its own imprints for various categories, including crime fiction.  

Tomorrow’s news could turn all of this on its head (I would never count Apple out), but to me, Amazon appears to be several strides ahead and while their competitors are still trying to figure out who or what they are and how they will adjust, Amazon is still innovating.  They have recently announced they will publish Kindle Singles, short works of fiction and non-fiction.  These are inexpensive e-books that are longer than short stories or magazine articles, but far shorter (less than 30,000 words) than the 600,000-word thriller.  Amazon, I think correctly, is looking at fiction or nonfiction that can be devoured while aboard a commuter train coming into the city or a jet ride from LAX to O’Hare.  Good news for those of us who are most comfortable writing and reading novellas, a form most major publishers ignore.  It is Amazon’s willingness to be unconventional that might keep it ahead of the others.

Then there is Google. They are doing something with books that is making a whole bunch of people nervous. I can’t figure out exactly what that is. I suspect that they are secretly scanning the DNA of every human on the planet and will announce a new marketing plan that will produce completely personalized books for its customers that you will read on the inside of your skull. I may be kidding; but seriously, is that inconceivable?

Now all of that is exciting, but where is publishing going?  Which of these teams has the right mix?  Amazon?  Apple plus traditional publishers? Barnes & Noble plus Microsoft?  Google and its Android OS?  As writers, we are trying to figure it all out not because we have tons of money to invest in stock, but because our royalties, reputation, artistic control, quality control and exposure in the marketplace are all mixed up in this mess.   

How important is the traditional publisher to the writer?  The support system — of distribution, marketing, reviews etc. — is still tied to the old world. If we publish ourselves and can we get beyond the vanity press stigma, how do we get our work noticed without becoming full-time promoters?  (Personally, I love the idea of working with artists and designers; but I hate the technological interface to get books in the appropriate format. And I am extremely uncomfortable promoting my own work.) How does an individual writer or a small publisher get noticed?  And for that matter, will a competitive company like Amazon continue to serve its writers and small publishers once they become big-time publishers themselves? Will they still be concerned with a writer who sells 3,000 copies when they can focus on books that sell in the millions?

Thinking about what’s happening, wonderful old words like topsy-turvy, willy-nilly and tizzy come to mind.  And worse, if there is intelligent advice on how to proceed in this environment, you can bet something has occurred or soon will that makes or will make this advice obsolete.

Here are three other views on the subject:  The Financial Times, The New York Times and, by way of Ed Gorman, author Libby Fischer Hellmann’s blog, Say The Word.