This would all be just a little more believable if the last decade or so hadn't seen conventional publishers presiding over the slow decline and eventual death of the mid-list, that wonderful, huge, fertile, centre ground of publishing, encompassing everything from well written genre fiction to literary novels, with all kinds of fascinating stuff in between. And for a very long time, they have managed to con mid-list writers into thinking that it was all our fault. This centre ground used to be the seed bed from which the occasional (usually unexpected, almost always unpredictable) blockbuster success would spring. Sometimes - if the publisher got lucky - it might be an author's first or second book - but much more frequently it would be their fifth or sixth or seventh book. The others would have reasonable, albeit not massive sales, but would have been growing a staunch readership. And if a book did become a bestseller, some of those profits would be ploughed back into nurturing the other seedlings in the mid-list.
Then, slowly but relentlessly, everything changed. No matter what big publishers may say in their own justification, (and I exempt the small, frequently more caring independents here) the experience of most writers - even those with agents - is that editors are now almost wholly ruled and overruled by their marketing departments, and those marketing departments are looking for instant gratification in the shape of a quick and easy bestseller.
They find those quick and easy bestsellers in ghost written sleb memoirs or autobiographies of sportsmen and television chefs. And cookery books. Lots of those.
It ill behoves them, therefore, to wring their hands and weep crocodile tears over the death of the book, when they have effectively spent a decade or more kicking it in the teeth. Just about every writer of my acquaintance - and I know a lot of them - would tell of deeply frustrating rejection letters all essentially saying the same thing: 'I love this, I think it's wonderful and well written, but in the current climate, we can't publish it. Our marketing department doesn't know how to sell it.'
That being the case, how dare they scream blue murder when writers are empowered by the rise of the eBook and allowed to get the work out there themselves? To suggest 'regulating' this movement is to suggest putting power back into the hands of a set of gatekeepers who have proved themselves to be somewhat less scrupulous than St Peter. Moreover, to suggest that the rise of the eBook will stop people reading, flies in the face of all evidence to the contrary. People are reading more on their Kindles and IPads and Nooks than ever before. And to suggest that indie publishing will somehow limit the ability of writers to make a living from their work, is to display an astonishing ignorance of how most writers - even well published writers - find it almost impossible to scrape any kind of living at all from their craft.
A single example will serve to illustrate the advantages: eBook publishing often involves a 'slow burn' with sales taking off - for a variety of reasons, too complicated to go into here - some time after publication. By contrast, conventional publishing now demands the launch, the immediate and astronomical rise in sales and the ridiculously swift slide towards the remainder pile. Most writers - with a few lucky exceptions - will have been made to feel guilty about their inability to meet the wholly unrealistic targets set by their publishers - and this with well written, well reviewed and popular books - just not instantly popular enough.
So what if there is a lot of dross out there? In a virtual world, shelf space is unlimited and people are already hammering out ways of finding what they want. Besides, your dross might well be my good read, and who is qualified to make those judgements?
Speaking personally, I've had a long career which has involved a frustrating switchback. It's no surprise that many of indie publishing's most enthusiastic proponents are older writers with a good track record (and a big back list) who have encountered obstacle after obstacle - as opposed to youngsters who have not yet had time to become jaded with a decaying system.
Above all, eBook publishing gives writers the power to sell the products of their own talents, themselves. It would be far more helpful to 'beginning writers' to debate grown-up topics, as so many US authors do on their remarkably helpful blogs: the desirability of honing your craft and thinking about your readers, the importance of your cover image, the possibility of engaging professional editorial help in a businesslike way, the need to get your head down and keep writing, rather than resting on your laurels after one book - all these things are useful. Elitist hand-wringing is not.
But of course, that would mean treating the writer as an aspiring or seasoned professional, rather than a humble supplicant. All of which helps to explain why, for so many of us, the publishing industry has lost all credibility as the keeper of culture it still fondly imagines itself to be.
www.wordarts.co.uk
Comments
Very good post.
Last year at a writers' conference at which the buzz topic was e-publishing, particularly indie e-books, a young editor from a women's commercial fiction imprint was grilled by some experienced midlisters such as you describe. We asked her what a publisher had to offer those who were making more money as indies; who were coping with doing their own publicity; who were producing covers they actually liked; in short, those who were luxuriating in total artistic control. We asked, why should we sign a contract with you?
Clearly surprised & at a loss, the young lady laughed and said, "We're terribly nice people to work with!" She had nothing else to suggest and moved swiftly on.
So that's it. That's what they're offering to lure us away from being in control of our artistic destiny. Tempting prospect, isn't it?
I wonder if the coffee's good...
It almost goes without saying that I know many writers in the same boat - I'm one myself. I'm not going to trot out the story here; I seem to have to tell it all the time.
What we now need is to hammer away the media's current attitude to indie books - that it's nothing but a few upstarts uploading their driveling fan-fiction and can largely be ignored. We need to campaign for attention in the national press alongside the conventionally published books.
But that's not the interesting part - the interesting part is the opportunity self-epublishing gives to the midlist - prolific midlist authors will be the biggest relative "winners" in the shakedown by far, with the potential to sell regular smallish, medium priced quantities of multiple titles that it would be unthinkable for a publisher to support through advances or marketing budgets but which for an author can represent a modest but equal-to-the-good-old-days wage/supplement to a living. Those like me who write extremely niche material for a minute audience will be largely neutral - we rely on connecting with our readers on an almost individual basis and do so largely in ways unrelated to sales platforms like Amazon or Apple.
My comment to Ewan about bubbles:
The dot.com bubble is a classic example where there was no end-user inflation - the price increase was notional - it was about the perceived eventual return on an activity (in particular an increase in the ration of perceived eventual return:effort - generated by extrapolations from increased actual returns), albeit this was often concretised by IPOs and injections from venture capitalists. So anyone using lowered ebook prices as a counterargument has missed the point. The fact is that authors entering the market at certain point had initial 6 and 12 month returns on their effort increased compared to their predecessors. This was typically at a time when e-readership was growing faster than e-authorship. Authors entering later and putting in a similar effort had a lesser return in a 6 or 12 month period, but (which is where there's typical bubble psychology) nonetheless believed that increasing effort would see a return to the initial yield:effort ratio.
In other words, the optimism generated by authors hitting key milestones (a year, 6 months) was feeding into the expectations of authors entering the market. One of the reasons for this is, of course, the widely reported (just look at the sales figure reports on Kindleboards.com) phenomenon of sales growing by means of geometrical not arithmetic progression from initial tiny figures (which has the effect of stripping poor initial sales of their potential to dampen optimism). External (increasing initial promotions by mainsteream publishers) and internal (growing numbers of authors diluting the possibility of entering a recommendation-algorithm upward loop) factors mean that this model of growth is now not the predominant one, which is increasingly following the regualr market where strong initial sales are required to generate strong follow-on sales. But authors can't get beyond the evangelising-meme psychology of "I started out slow and built"
Lessons to be learned there.
Thank you for posting this Catherine - every publisher should be made to read it.
I think we have to grasp that Amazon is a technology company that decided to go into bookselling, rather than vice versa - and look to the way other technology products are sold - for example mobile games and apps, which I know a bit about. There, given that an app fulfils a certain minimal set of technical criteria, it's sent 'out there' and it's up to its creators, working with various online tools, to promote it and sell it. And believe me, just as much time and energy goes into its creation, as goes into a book. But it's sold at around the same price as an indie eBook. And it too can have a slow build, with various unexpected outside factors affecting sales. This is completely different from the big and very expensive launches which the huge multi million dollar games are given. Wonderful if you have a major success - disastrous if you don't, like Realtime Worlds, with a supertanker they couldn't possibly turn round in time.
The way that whole industry is evolving reminds me of the way eBook publishing seems to be going.
Latterly, publishers have done next to no promotions for any but a handful of stars - and we've no reason to think that they are going to be able to change.
We all have to start thinking outside the box. Personally, having had five agents in a long career to date, I would be very very VERY wary of signing with anyone else on the usual 'agent' terms. I might consult a lawyer, but I wouldn't go cap in hand to anyone again. eBooks have brought back the profound enjoyment I used to have as a young writer, thinking that anything was possible. The work itself has resumed its rightful place in the centre of my life - and I would be very reluctant to give up that feeling of being in control.
I should make it clear that I'm saying this as a huge self-epublishing enthusiast. My point is I think most people have missed the real strength of self-epublishing - resurrecting the midlist, and that by accepting that there is bubble behaviour going on fuelled by Konrath and Locke and others with very zealous "sell your way to success" blogs and books, and refocusing we can actually unearth a much rosier and more exciting (if not particularly sexy) story about dropped midlist authors getting their livings back. I guess ultimately it's a call for more nuance and less drawing up of battle lines - one thing we have as self-publishers is flexibility - we must make sure we never lose that.
It is so important - as you say Catherine - that writers make sure their own quality control is of the highest standard.
Thank you for raising the debate so important to us all. w.