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.

On Publishing & Writing — A View From The Bottom And From The Outside, Part I

Someone in an office in Kansas can now put a hit on someone leaving a restaurant in Islamabad. Drones.  It is possible for someone in Switzerland to halt all electronic currency transactions in Iran to crush their economy or for someone in Israel to send a digital disease to rogue governments to disable their nuclear programs.

People — police, your boss, criminals, your spouse, your political opponent — might know where you are now and could look at your email, Twitter and Face Book.  Corporations can and do track your purchases and set up a profile of your interests for marketing purposes.  They will know if you have a special weakness for Prada or Hagen Daz Pistachio. And if your prescriptions suggest the onslaught of dementia, you might be receiving a phone call saying that you inherited a considerable sum of money.  “All you have to do is provide me with your credit card number.”

I mentioned in an earlier post that there are companies that will reduce your credit standing, no matter how good it is, simply by noting that you have shopped where, statistically speaking, people with bad credit ratings shop. Nothing personal. Just crunching the numbers. Could some authority (Homeland Security, Patriot Act) commit an error in surveillance that could result in you being plucked from the world as you know it, face indefinite imprisonment and possibly torture?

No this isn’t Chicken Little talking.  I carry no signs saying we are approaching the end of the world.  But I might carry one that says technology is changing at a speed never before experienced. Of course I’d try to make it a little catchier. But we are rushing into technology faster than we can develop the ethics to manage it, faster than the average human can comprehend its impact.

There has always been change. But how long did it take us to get from the quill to the Selectric?  Now, how quickly have we come from sending a report by mail with a quick 24 to 48-hour turnaround to bouncing information off satellites in nanoseconds?  These changes not only alter the way we work, find information, but how we deal with time. Smart phones enable us to connect with everything instantly.  The Yellow Pages are nearly nonexistent.  Maps? No need to unfold that mile-wide map while you’re looking up a street address.  A voice will give us step-by-step instructions.  We can announce anything at anytime to those in our circle of friends or acquaintances. We have games to play if we’re stuck in a traffic jam, even movies to watch. There’s an app for everything you consider important in your life and some you would never have imagined had they not become available.

Among the most interesting aspects of the change that technology is bringing about is that something as absolutely trivial as Twitter can be absolutely earth shaking.  Oppressive governments are being brought down by the sudden emergence of the cell phone and a 140-word tweet — that silly, little app that allows you to keep track of what Lady Gaga had for lunch. 

These changes are affecting every aspect of our lives.  How much longer will there be movie theatres?  With 46-inch HDTV screens largely affordable to a good portion of the world, why would we pay $20 for a ticket and $15 for a box of popcorn? How do we get our news?  How do we do our banking? How do we stay in touch with friends and relatives?  How do we buy a house? There is a map of all the homes in any given city with its estimated market value just a click away. What’s happening in medicine? A scan of my body can reveal serious problems long before they might become apparent, before I can feel pain or discomfort, or a doctor can figure it out in a standard physical.  This is incredible. Security?  Face recognition. The technology is there for more invasive tactics that can keep you safe or prevent you from dropping out. You cannot leave.  You cannot escape.  Ever.

 

In that sense, it is surprising that books are still important. Let's go from a wide-angle lens to one that focuses on the details of merely one, relatively benign aspect of our culture — books.  I suspect everyone involved in it is confused.  We are confused because technology not only changes the way books are produced and sold, but for the first time how they are read.

For many years, even centuries, the book business remained essentially the same. There were bookstores. For the most part, people who wanted a book went to the bookstore. If you were in a big city you went to a big bookstore.  I you lived in a small town, you went to a smaller one, or perhaps an area of the local department store that sold books and magazines.

Things began to change some during the malling of America.  Urban flight happened.  People fled downtowns and near-downtown neighborhoods to live in the suburbs and malls grew up overnight to serve them. Lots of light and parking and security. Being able to buy books in substantial quantities, often these mall stores did more aggressive marketing and offered a steeper discount on cost to the customer.  Little bookstores began to feel the pinch of well-branded chain bookstores like B. Dalton and Walden Books. These new chains did fine along side other chain stores offering other mass-produced products.  It was the way the majority of consumers consumed.

After only a few years, the population shifted again. While the suburbs aged, recently graduated young professionals returned to work and or live in an urban environment.  Young singles and young marrieds not only wanted a place to buy a book, but they wanted a place to pick up a cup of coffee, a bagel and possibly a date.  They wanted the biggest possible choice of reading material (and music). The birth of the book superstore emerged.  The breadth of selection, the comfort, the coffee shop and the steep discounts, as developed by Borders and Barnes & Noble, not only continued the onslaught of big business over independent bookstores, they devoured the mall model as well.  Walden Books and B. Daltons, already owned by Borders and Barnes & Noble, went away.  Only the most spirited or most innovative independent stores stayed afloat during this speedy evolutionary process.

With Walden Books and B. Daltons dead or dying, and many of the independent bookstores, large and small, fading fast, the Super Bookstore reigned. But even that reign turned out to be minor and short-lived. Previously the book business saw movement in bookstore size and in book size — packaging. Essentially, the business process remained the same. 

As the big bookstore box chains found out, the Internet introduced capabilities none had apparently imagined and those capabilities would expand exponentially.  First it was fairly simple.  On-line book sales were merely a variation on the mail-order model.  However, there were other business trends happening.  Just-in-time inventories were becoming popular among retailers. 

Amazon, taking advantage of what the Internet offered as well as such business innovations as just-in-time inventories — that is not having more inventory on hand than you need on a day to day basis — decided to set warehouses around the country, where a single, low-cost building on cheap land could supply a big chunk of geography.  When a single Borders store ordered 200 copies of the latest Stephen King book, some of which they’d keep in the back room, and some they might have to return, the store was using expensive space and far more intensive labor. There would have to be physical inventories, shipping and receiving and sometimes shipping again, as well as complex accounting at each store.  Amazon, on the other hand, could order books as they needed them. As they sold them they could ship direct to the customer, a task that can be handled in assembly-line fashion.  Shipping labels, shipping fees, accounting were done by computers.

Because they didn’t have the overhead of the big-boxes, Amazon could offer even steeper discounts on books.  The customer didn’t even have to leave home. They could browse the stacks (so to speak) on the computer and validate their choices by seeing how the book was reviewed not just by The New York Times, but also by readers like them.  Book lovers could communicate with each other on the Amazon site, find lists, participate in book discussions, while Amazon passed along reading recommendations based on each reader’s very particular reading interests. What else could the book lover want?

Part II On Wednesday

On Writing — They Call It "Submission," Don't They?

I could be flatteringly described as a “mid-list” writer. I am pretty sure it’s below middle.  I am also of a “certain age,” about which I have mixed feelings. The downside is: I’m too old to be considered promising. The upside t is: I need no longer worry about mid-life crisis.

Recently, after a dozen or so years safely and lazily in the arms of a good UK publisher who regularly publishes my mysteries, I found myself back in the market place with a manuscript they didn’t want. They liked the book — said it was the best of the three — but the numbers for books in this series didn’t add up for them. It was understandable but disappointing news

What I’ve been doing lately is what I haven’t had to do in long time — jumping from web site to web site, searching for possible homes for a new manuscript — Death on the Great Highway. I’m not asking for pity, or even compassion, just emphasizing that’s it has been awhile since I’ve had to deal with the real world and I’m a little rusty. To make matters more interesting, I’m back out there looking for a way to get published during this, the biggest change in the book business since the invention of the printing press. What do I do?

One of the first warnings I encountered was the “We only accept manuscripts from licensed literary agencies.  I thought maybe this was a good idea.  Wouldn’t I need an experienced guide, someone who knew more about the “business” than I did. A friend suggested I check out a high quality agency out here on the West Coast.

According to the web site, this agency represented some highly regarded authors.  I picked out an agent in the group who specialized in mysteries and who wasn’t the agency’s principle owner, thinking that the owner might be too busy for a lesser light like me.  There was a complicated, yet precise format for submission before the applicant (supplicant) could earn consideration a potential client.  I followed the procedure. After getting everything all properly formatted, I pushed the send button.  I did notice that there was this little phrase:  “If you haven’t heard back from us after six weeks…” it wasn’t likely I would.  And I didn’t.

Perhaps I gave up on agents too early. But how many six-week periods, stretched end-to-end, could I endure?  Having to wait for agents and then wait still longer while the agents worked with publishers seemed like a poor use of limited time. I call your attention to the actuarial tables.

When I went back to the Google search, I decided to go directly in search of a publisher.  What I found was that the Internet is full of publishers “not accepting submissions at this time.” I understand.  Given the dramatic changes in the publishing field, it’s likely that I’m not the only one going through reevaluation. At least I didn’t have to jump through hoops and wait six weeks to get the message. After a few moments cursing them, I end up blessing them for not wasting my time. 

There were still publishers who appeared to entertain submissions, even those directly from a writer. Most of them have their own set of standards.  No serial killers, for example, was one admonition.  Books focused on car chases and improbable heroics are no-nos on another.  One publisher warned that they wouldn’t accept any books written in the present tense.  Interesting. Maybe even a little strange; but I completely understand. Publishers who are still in business know what they do well. I wouldn’t expect a vegetarian restaurant to serve lamb shank.  It is also helpful for the writer to know what’s what up front.  Why bother a bunch of nervous, probably overworked professionals in the clearly discombobulated publishing industry with something they clearly don’t want?

Yet, there are standards and rules that strike me as more than a little foolish.  One is that after a cover letter, a sample chapter and a synopsis, and a history of previously published books, the publisher wants a detailed outline of the book.  I maybe tripping over excessive, unearned hubris here, but I don’t do outlines.  There are no outlines for my books.  I have the book.  To make matters worse, some publishers want outlines of different lengths — some prefer a three-page outline, others a five-page outline, some a chapter by chapter outline.  I have the book!  Right here, the whole damned thing. If you liked the writing and the story, why not read a little more.  You can stop anytime you get bored.

However, the one rule that I truly find off-putting is that adding to the cover letter, sample chapter(s), synopses, outlines, publishing history (including reviews), there are publishers who then say,  “Please attach your marketing plan.”  What?  That’s why I’m going to a publisher.  I can do the rest myself if I have to. Sure I want the talented editor.  Sure I want the great book design and sure, I want the legitimacy bestowed upon a book marketed by some respected publisher, but a marketing plan? Would you like me to vacuum your office?  And my question to publishers who want a marketing plan is: what do you do?  I fear that is the problem.  They don’t know anymore.  Who does?

Obviously, I’m not making friends with the traditional publishing community with these complaints.  It is particularly foolish for me to be talking like this when I’m trying to get books published.  No doubt, touchy writers are the reason some publishers demand their authors have an agent.  They don’t want to talk to us.  In this case, I just want to say that in this changing market place, it’s the marketing and sales resources I need.  In the case of printed books, distribution is an important role best filled by a reputable publishing house as well.  If publishers don’t do these things, what do they do?  And if I do all that, when do I write?

Perhaps there is a reason on both agents’ and publishers’ websites, there is a button called “submission.”