Category Archives: Writing

Wagging the backlist

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Jeff Jarvis, a couple of days ago, offered some ideas to publishers about how to make money from their long tail — i.e., their backlists. The basic idea is to offset the cost of storing all those books by charging a premium for them–while simultaneously offering a discount on electronic/PDF versions.

Must be in the air, because Booksquare has forayed into the same territory, while raising an option (in the comments) that Jarvis omitted: POD — specifically, the capability to produce one-off print copies of backlist titles.

Booksquare thinks that’s what’s coming — it’s just not quite there today.

POD technology isn’y geared toward mass production yet. It’s getting there. Until then, it’s not cost effective to print very small runs of books to meet demand . . . there might a reluctance to use this technology due to pricing as well — a POD book will likely be at a higher price point than the original version. As I think about it, pricing POD books in general might be something that publishers are just now starting to think about seriously.

Amazon’s acquisition of BookSurge will certainly change the dynamics of POD (and I think that Amazon is the dark horse in the book digitization race for this very reason), and as they develop their market there, you’ll likely be seeing more publishers embracing POD as a way to regain control of their backlist. Of course, as I noted in my article, you’re also going to see authors who realize they can simply go it alone. BookSurge’s product is produced much faster than other POD suppliers and is excellent quality (I have a sample on my desk).

Okay, if I were running a publishing company from my armchair, I’d be obsessed with POD. I’d be chewing on it 24/7.

I’d be looking for partners who might be able to do it more cheaply than I could.

I’d be thinking about offering my backlist at a loss if it meant I could establish relationships with prospective customers. Why not offer an author’s backlist titles as incentives to get people to purchase his/her latest book, for example? It wouldn’t even have to be by author — you could use your backlist to get people reading other authors, too, or to get them to explore other, related lines of books.

There’s no reason publishers couldn’t add public domain books to their POD offerings as well. Anything to get people collecting books and to expose them to other portions of a list.

I’d also be asking how price-sensitive people are when it comes to backlist books. Anyone who has shopped for an out-of-print book online knows their prices can soar pretty high. So, identify out-of-print books as just that. “Xxx by yyy is out of print. However, we can create a printed, bound copy from our electronic files if you’d like. Here’s the price . . .”

I’m just sayin . . .

RELATED: I’ve also posted about the long tail here and here, and also about “Resurrection Publishing.”

Should you promote an unpubbed novel?

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Now there’s a question . . .

I think the answer is “depends.”

Depends on how you do it and what your expectations are.

I stuck my toe in, today, with a little teaser on my bio page. Here it is:

[I] am now querying agents for my latest completed book, WHEN LIBBY MET THE FAIRIES AND HER WHOLE LIFE WENT FEY. It’s about a biologist who’s trying to start an organic vegetable farm, only one evening as she’s crossing one of her fields a two-foot tall man steps out of the shadows and greets her by name.

It’s hard enough for Libby to believe that little folk exist, let alone that they’ll help her farm succeed. Then word of her sightings leaks onto the Internet and pretty soon her property is swarming with strangers who want to see the fairies, too . . .

There’s also a romance. I love books with romances :-)

I wouldn’t want to put anything more out right now. For example, there are some plot twists I hope will be fun for readers. I wouldn’t want to give them away. And how much of a hint is too much? I confess, that’s a question that makes me nervous.

There’s also the matter of my dignity. I am terribly excited about this book. I think it’s good. Hell, some days I think it’s very good. But I thought my last novel was very good, too, until I tried to find an agent for it. Come to find out, it wasn’t nearly the novel I believed it was.

Nothing like real world feedback to open one’s eyes ;-)

So I don’t want to overhype WHEN LIBBY even within the confines of my modest little blog, because even here it’s a long way down from that high horse saddle . . .

Editors’ noses knowses

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POD-DY Mouth sponsored a contest this week: she posted excerpts from 24 novels. Some were from commercially published books; some were from POD books.

The object of the contest was to figure out which was which.

I tried it and got half of them right. Nobody scored more than 80 percent.

But here’s what’s most telling, from her post-contest post:

The statistics are interesting, though–far more on point that I would’ve imagined. Here are the average scores broken down by group:

Average Score, Editors: 63% (19 exams)
Average Score, Agents: 60% (26 exams)
Average Score, Authors: 53% (72 exams)
Average Score, Other: 46% (550 exams +/-)

So it turns out editors and agents have a keener eye than I’d guessed. I suppose it makes sense that unpublished works go from author to agent to editor. Looks like we’re not turning the publishing industry on its ear anytime soon.

Yeah. And if you want someone’s advice on whether your WIP is publishable, you’re better off trusting an agent’s rejection letter than a lay person’s high praise.

But we already knew that, didn’t we ;-)

(Btw, POD-DY Mouth doesn’t support permalinks, so if you’ve come across this post after 7/28/06, you’ll need to scroll down to the entry from the 27th to find the post from which I’ve quoted.)

From Renaissance Lit to Neuroscience

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Read a review (no longer online, sorry) of The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius by Nancy C. Andreasen. She was a Renaissance Lit professor who went on to study neuroscience. How’s that for a sweet jump?

The book is about the neuroscience of creativity.

The reviewer, Nigel Leary, offers a caveat to the assertions in Andreasen’s book: while they are backed by studies, much research remains to be done. Nonetheless, it seems likely that creativity is marked by its own, unique neural processes, some sort of momentary disorganization — free association — that while “remarkably similar” to “psychotic states of mania, depression, or schizophrenia” yields not misery but scientific and artistic epiphanies.

More long tail tales

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While some journalists are busy lamenting the horrors of the Internet economy’s “long tail” effect on the arts, Lee Gomes, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, asked today if Anderson’s data really adds up.

The article is online here (subscription required).

Anderson responds here.

I find Anderson’s refutations of the column plausible. It will be interesting to see if Gomes takes up the subject again.

My dog in the fight, of course, is the fate of writers who have the chops to please a sizeable readership, but for whatever reason fail to hit a bestseller list. Solid midlisters have done okay, income-wise, in the past. Will that be true in the future?

Hopefully, someday, someone will tackle that issue without succumbing to the “end of the good ol’ days” hand-wringing that has characterized the attempts so far.

It’s extreme, all right

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Via Booksquare, Marc Porter Zasada has an article in the LA Times about “extreme copyright.”

In extreme copyright, you try to push the limits of what intellectual property can be owned and controlled — or you try to penalize those who seem to have pushed the envelope a little too far. For example, not long ago, the family of Martin Luther King Jr. took CBS to court when the network used a tape it had made of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in a documentary (the family prevailed). And a government-authorized publisher tried to copyright official court opinions by arguing that it had introduced “original pagination” to the otherwise completely public documents — which must be cited every day by judges and lawyers.

On the trademark side, people try to register phrases such as “fair and balanced” or protect a single word, such as “Spike.” Marvel and DC Comics may sue you if you misuse the word “superhero,” which they — yes — trademarked in 1979.

These days, if you’re a Hollywood filmmaker and you shoot a passionate love scene in an art gallery and pan past a sculptural assemblage of tuna cans, you’d better get the permission of the artist, and probably StarKist (sorry, make that StarKist®) as well. Big studios employ whole teams to make sure such accidents don’t happen.

Meanwhile, journalists hunger to find derived language in the work of budding novelists. Scandal websites expose lifted phrases in the work of journalists. Computers search pop music for recycled phrases. And people who write little-known books sue when their ideas enter the culture in more popular books.

There’s a backlash as well: anti-copyright activists who believe copyright “is being used less and less to encourage creative work and more and more as a means to discourage it.” [Emphasis Zasada’s.]

I dunno. I can’t see an artist thinking, “Let some movie studio do a pan shot of my art? No! That’s too creative. Gotta force them to do shoot something bland instead.”

I think it’s more personal. For an artist or writer, it often comes down to wringing those extra pennies out of your work — and whether the additional exposure you get from someone’s “excerpt” (I use that term loosely here) will generate more pennies than what you’d get if you charge for the excerpt.

Or it may be wanting the pride of public attribution. I know that’s true of me, and my blog posts. I’d be most vexed if someone lifted my posts and reprinted them without attributing their authorship to me. (I also love to give attribution to others — I see the blogosphere as a self-organizing collection of information where attribution is key, like a hypertexted Wiki entry — you have to be able to trace the pieces back to their origin or you erode the integrity of the entire collection.)

Or it comes down to whether you believe people are trying to cheat you, and if so do you want to crusade against it.

For people who want to out plagiarists, it’s also personal: it’s the rush of proving moral superiority by exposing a scoundrel.

But here’s the thing. Our traditional notions of copyright are derived from our notions of ownership of physical property. We’re in the process, now, of figuring out whether we can apply guidelines based on the ownership of physical objects to stuff that isn’t physical at all, like someone’s name.

Digital technology serves to up the tension because digitized stuff shares more attributes with ideas, and fewer with physical property.

And of course the more a created work drifts toward the realm of ideas, the less plausible the notion of copyright. So just because you have an idea for a movie about a pirate ship — even if you’ve documented that idea — doesn’t mean you’ve been ripped off my Disney. OTOH, if a paragraph has been published in a printed book for all to see & touch, it’s obviously someone’s property . . .

Oh, well. Somewhere in this mess there’s a line that, once articulated, would put everyone at ease. But as long as there are lawyers willing to scuff the line away and ask for a new one, we’ll be wasting more time & energy on copyright battles . . .

It’s all in the margins

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For unpubbed writers, it sometimes seems that the “standards” held by agents and publishers are, at best, too stringent; at worst harsh, opaque, even perverse or malicious.

I don’t subscribe to that view. I think the actions of both agents and publishers are completely understandable when you consider the margins in the print publishing business. According to this New York Times article, for instance,

Publishers generally receive a wholesale price for new books that is about half of the retail cover price, or $13 for a hardcover book with a $26 jacket price. Thirty percent of the publisher’s share, or 15 percent of the cover price, goes to the author as royalties, and another 40 percent of the publisher’s take goes for the production, distribution, marketing and publicity costs of the book.

That leaves about $3 to $4 a book for the publisher, before accounting for the cost of corporate overhead or the books that will be returned — on which the publisher earns nothing.

For paperbacks, authors generally earn only 7.5 percent of the cover price as a royalty. But the lower price also means publishers earn far less, about $1 to $2 a book, before returns.

If you look at these numbers, it’s obvious that publishers can’t make too many bad acquisitions or they’d be bankrupt in a matter of months, if not weeks. Large publishers, in particular, can’t survive if they acquire books that only sell a few hundred copies. They need books that appeal to a wide audience, generate buzz, and inspire word-of-mouth.

It’s not their job to do me, the novelist wanna be, favors. I need to write a book that will meet their criteria. If I want them to publish it.

The decline of the imperative

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Writing in Slate, Ben Yagoda muses on the displacement of the imperative by the construction “need to.” It’s become increasing rare to tell or be told, directly, to do something. Instead, we tell people they “need to” do this or that, or we’re told something “needs to be done.”

The ascendance of need to dovetails perfectly with the long and sad decline of the traditional imperative mood. Sad, because it’s a great mood. Without it, the Ten Commandments would be the Ten Suggestions. In our society, where giving offense is always feared, the imperative is rarely heard. So, instead of the pleasingly direct “No Smoking,” we have the presumptuous “Thank You for Not Smoking” or the loopily existential “There Is No Smoking.” The last remaining preserves of the imperative are the military, traffic signs (“Stop” has an estimable eloquence), innocuous adieus like, “Have a good one,” “Take care now,” and “You be good,” and, intriguingly, the titles of works of art. The biggest trove is pop songs, from “Come On Do the Jerk” through “Love the One You’re With,” all the way up to “Say My Name.” Command titles form a large subcategory of Beatles songs, including “Come Together,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “Get Back,” “Help,” “Let It Be,” “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” and “Think for Yourself.”

Yagoda traces this to the Abraham Maslow paper “Hierarchy of Human Needs,” and from there to “a Maslow epigone named Thomas Gordon, founder of “P.E.T.” (Parent Effectiveness Training)” — the fellow who told us that rather than order people around, we should express our needs using “I” constructions:

His copyrighted “Credo for My Relationship With Others” includes the classic sentence: “At those times when your behavior interferes with what I must do to get my own needs met, I will tell you openly and honestly how your behavior affects me, trusting that you respect my needs and feelings enough to try to change the behavior that is unacceptable to me.”

But here’s my question. If your spouse, for instance, says to you, “I feel neglected when you go out with your friends, and now that you know, I trust you’ll stay home every night,” does that really make the exchange more tolerable than, “please don’t spend so much time with your friends”?

Either way, the emotional subtext is loaded; either way, both the neglected and the neglectee are bound to feel uncomfortable, hurt, undervalued, alternately controlled and controlling.

All we’ve done is to render our language more baroque and less direct; we’re imposing an elaborate code of manners that while fascinating is, ultimately, only so much clutter.

What do you think? Is our language becoming more baroque?

Related: A speechwriter notes that our spoken language is also becoming increasingly vague.

Beginning a new book

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It’s the balm, they say, that soothes the query-monitoring itch.

I’m excited about it–the new book–but it’s scary too, vertigo-like to start to peer into the widening crack that’s now opened into yet another world and realize I have no choice, if I’m going to capture it for the telling, but to squeeze through the opening, close my eyes, and let go . . .

When writers are in the driver’s seat

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Jessica Faust at BookEnds has a post up on her blog that discusses an important turning point in a writer’s search for an agent. When you receive an offer for representation, she writes, you are suddenly in the driver’s seat:

This is your opportunity to contact all the agents reviewing your work, and, if more than one offers, interviewing them to find the one agent you feel is best for you and your work. The one who shares your vision and enthusiasm and the one that you feel you can work the best with.

Do click through and read the whole post. Jessica relays a story of an author who didn’t do this–and quite probably wrecked her chances to sell her book as a result.