… or I won’t be when the thirty days for contract expiration run out.
First of all, because dropping one’s agent in publishing is a lot like a Hollywood divorce, particularly when you’ve been together for eight years, as Lucienne and I have, I’d like to say it’s not her; it’s also not me; it’s the field and the way it’s changing (and how fast.) Lucienne was the best agent I ever had and is also a talented YA writer whom I can tell you without reservations to check out. (And now it’s not a conflict of interest.)
Part of me wants to sit around in a robe all day eating rocky road ice cream. (Inadvisable, since I need to finish Darkship Renegades and also because I’m not allowed marshmallows on this diet.) I haven’t been unagented since ’97 and every time I dropped an agent before I secured one first. This time I chose not to do so because I think an agent won’t help. I could be wrong, in which case I’ll shop for an agent sometime in the future. However for now I’m alone, working without a net.
For the last year I’ve had a growing sense that something was wrong. Part of it was the response to two novels I sent out. The responses were slow and often rude, not just to me but to my agent. I’ve been a writer with no status or hope before and never got responses like that, because the publishers respected my agent. Now publishers don’t seem to care. Mostly they’re publishing bestsellers. It’s the only way they think they can survive the next two or three years.
Why do I think only the next two or three years?
Because agencies themselves are betting that’s all they’ll last.
The agencies are still selling – and well – the books of bestsellers, because that’s what the houses want right now. This is misguided as I think the bulk of their income is still from midlisters. It’s akin to the restaurant that decides that they make the most money off deserts, they in fact lose a little money off ribs, which brings in most of the customers. So they’re going to take out ribs and serve only appetizers and deserts. (And then they are shocked when the bottom line crashes.)
While it’s misguided for publishers, it will take a while for the financial effect to be felt. But it’s being felt by agencies. Us midlisters are by and large a low-work lot, who get our own contracts and keep on going. So we were a good “bulk” money maker for an agent. But now the big houses don’t want no stinking ribs.
Agencies are feeling the pinch from this, and in response they’re doing something which the agency Lucienne works for just did.
Yep, they’ve started their own digital publisher.
I know I’ve said here in the past that this was the logical next step in digital publishing. Agencies already sift through slush. They already promote their writers, to greater or lesser extent. So, why not transition?
Like you, I’m a currently agentless published novelist. Recently I decided to go the e-book route into self-publishing, initially as a means of waiting out the revolution in the traditional industry. Somehow it has become my new normal.
At bottom I genuinely feel in my gut that within the next five years or so books will be almost entirely digital, in much the same way that streaming music has replaced both vinyl and CDs. I both regret that and embrace the future with open arms. Writers are at an exciting juncture in this transitional age.
However, Epublishing presents challenges of its own, as I have discovered. It’s a financially barren universe where advances against royalties for writers don’t exist and every nickel earned has to derive from actual sales. You can hire an independent publicist to help with this, but are expected to hand over thousands of dollars out of your own pocket, a prohibitively expensive proposition for most people (including yours truly). Otherwise you must spend hours networking via the new social media in order to spread the word about your work. Indeed, promoting your most recent novel very easily can become a full-time job in itself.
Happily, though, independently published books do have one advantage in that regard, that of the slow burn; because they’re digital, they never go out of print. This gives authors the opportunity to push their work over the long haul without fear that they’ll disappear from the literary radar. Unlike the lifespan of a traditionally published book, here time really is on your side.
But by far the biggest disadvantage is the stigma of the vanity press that still clings to “self-publishing” in the public mind, and not without good reason.
In the world of the independents, there are no editorial standards whatever, no gatekeepers to ensure that the reading public will have exclusive access to professional grade writers rather than rank amateurs who only do what they do because they want to be the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. The doors have been flung open and it’s tally-ho for anyone with a keyboard, including those who lack both the talent and a willingness to learn the craft of writing.
Almost all of the indie publishers offer samples of their writers’ wares, and more often than not that glimpse reveals a proliferation of bad books ineptly written. In such an environment it’s hard to be taken seriously when all are lumped together, the accomplished and the incompetent alike. And there literally are thousands of books competing for readers’ attentions.
It’s quite likely that the market itself will take care of that in the long run and excellence will come to dominate. Meantime, though, it’s like the Wild West out there in bookland.
This is an accurate appraisal of the publishing world at the moment, but it might be too static for the intermediate term. The first obstacle that occurs to me is: When the current blockbuster authors — the Stephen Kings of the world — retire or die, how will their successors emerge? Indeed, will they have successors?
The second is that publishers, despite the opprobrium many aspirants (including me) have heaped on them, have been critical to building up a “brand” with recognized characteristics and a trustworthy quality level. Baen, which you mentioned, is a good example of a niche publisher whose readers trust its offerings and know what to expect from them. But to establish such a brand from a standing start, as the giants of the publishing world would have to do, is exceedingly difficult for a house with a long backlist and a long history. It requires the cultivation of special contacts, a great deal of legwork, and even more effort at establishing your firm as one that genuinely loves the niche it’s trying to make its own.
The third consideration that comes to mind is the paucity of niches. There are a handful of recognized “top level” genres, each of which has a few subgenres(three or four in the usual case). That’s not a rich field for the publishing world to exploit for niches. Bookstores can do it because they serve localized clienteles. Publishers must market nationally — perhaps internationally — for their businesses to be viable.
The field is unquestionably going to change radically in the next few years. But I don’t think we have enough information about emergent reader preferences and trends in marketing to be at all certain about its future shape — and when it comes to pecuniary success, there could well continue to be king- (and prince-, and count-) makers, whether we call them agents, publishers, or Fred.
I thought Kris needed a link, her writing on this subject is excellent.
http://kriswrites.com/
Welcome, welcome to the dark side! I think you’ll do just fine. :>) For authors who have a good grasp of writing and the process–and understand the need for editing, I think a lot is possible. For someone like you who already has had something published–you can do great things. People will automatically associate you with quality, because you’ve already been accepted into the fold–assuming you don’t put out your first self-published effort with lame formatting and spelling errors.
There really is little need to go through an agency unless you have no head for business and are unable to procure your own editor and artwork. The process is no longer all that difficult and readers, above all, seem to want value for their money. Hard to blame them.
Maria
Please let me stress Maria’s statement “and understand the need for editing”
I recently bought an eBook from an author that is experimenting in low cost. The book was $1.99 and I didn’t get any worth from it. After a few pages the spelling errors added up to making it unreadable to me. I can be in reading mode or proofreading mode but not both simultaneously.
His later eBooks may be better, but I’ll never know.
“…independently published books do have one advantage in that regard, that of the slow burn …This gives authors the opportunity to push their work over the long haul without fear that they’ll disappear from the literary radar. Unlike the lifespan of a traditionally published book, here time really is on your side.”
That is what I was told early on by some long-established indy and boutique-press writers. Having it out there, as an ebook and in POD format means, it’s never out of print, and as long as the writer is doing the grunt-work of building their brand and finding fans. I know one indy-writer, Janet Elaine Smith who has been at it for something like twenty years – she does light romance/mystery/adventure – and has a back-list of about twenty books out there (she markets like no ones business!) and she has fans everwhere. Every time someone discovers one of her books and likes it — well, there they go, looking for all her other books.
My own first indy POD novel “To Truckee’s Trail” came out four years ago, and I hardly do any specific marketing for it … but it sells steadily, because I have an established ‘brand’ as a writer of regional historical fiction – and I am fairly sure that every time a reader finds one of my books and likes it, they will go looking for the others.
I’ve often thought (and so do many of the other indy writers I know) think that Big Publishing kind of went like Big Hollywood: absolutely having to have a guaranteed blockbuster every time out, and disinclined to take a chance on anything judged to have initial limited/niche appeal. So — a procession of blockbuster movies and mega-best-sellers in books that are just about like the last twenty or thirty blockbusters and mega-best-sellers.
You want something niche, quirky, original, fresh? Go indy and small-press. And check the look-inside feature and the writer’s website. That will tell you a lot … like, if you want to read more. YMMV, though.
<resigned sigh>
Okay. Where do I pre-order?
Perhaps there might be a niche market for independent editors?
There absolutely is a growing industry of editors, proofreaders and cover artists.
I am just getting into book publishing at apparently just the wrong time.
I have one book, written under a writer for hire contract in pre-publication. This is a textbook on packaging machinery published by the Institute of Packaging Professionals.
I just published another, a collection of 40+ articles and columns from Food & Beverage Packaging Magazine. I self-published this on Kindle and via Amazon’s CreateSpace subsidiary (Machinery Matters: John Henry on Packaging, Machinery, Troubleshooting”, for anyone interested.)
And today I put in the mail a more traditional contract with a major niche publisher for another technical book.
The day they sent me the initial contract was also the day Borders announced its closing.
I don’t have an agent, I am not sure I need one for the type of books I publish.
I also have an idea for a non-fiction book that my son and I are going to write that will be aimed at a much more general audience. If it works, I think the concept will work for at least 2-3 additional books.
I have no idea how I will handle this. I like the self-publishing route but need help with marketing. I’d be willing to pay for help with this if I knew where to look for it.
So, interesting times, interesting times.
John Henry
John Henry — check out the Independent Author’s Guild website at http://www.independentauthorsguild.com. It started as a discussion group on Amazon about three years ago, and we migrated to Yahoo, and set up a website. Just about all the early members were either indy authors, or had books by tiny regional presses, and some of them had been at it for years, or burned out from big publishing. There’s a lot of accumulated wisdom about where to go, and how to go about doing it — everything from formatting, to setting up as a boutique publisher, to cover design, scrounging for reviews, and pricing for ebooks.
Good luck!
It is so depressing to read this! We spent a small fortune last summer to send our talented daughter to a well known Publishing Institute. Upon completion, she returned to school for her Masters degree, which she just finished up. She is interviewing next week in New York at a major publishing house. Something tells me she is making a very bad bet on her future.
Things will work out. Her traditional-publishing knowledge will be applicable to whatever comes next, one way or the other. As long as she doesn’t expect things to stay the same, she is in a good spot–a front-row seat to the changing landscape of publishing will provide lots of insight and options.
As I said in a post above–there is a market for independent editors or people with experience in the industry. No experience is wasted!!!
Spelling: “Dessert” (food), not “desert” (sand).
I told them this was going to happen at Seybold in 1994. Spent over a decade pounding that drum…and nobody listened.
Short version, for those in the publishing industry who haven’t figured it out yet? Big publishing houses are dead in their current form. Self-publishing, or variants thereto, with content aggregators, are where things are headed. Books are going to wind up following an iTunes-ish model.
Thanks Sgt Mom.
Going over there now.
John Henry
Glad to see you, John — join the group, look at the archives for members, and on the website, and then step in and introduce yourself!
I’m not a writer, I am a reader, mainly paperback sci-fi, you know, one of your customers. I love buying books, and I mean real paperback books, not ebooks. And prices have gone up a lot, but I can live with that, as long as I get decent value for my money. I would continue to buy more books but can’t now because:
1. All the regular book stores are closing. I now have to go to a used book store to get new books, that he sells on the side.
2. The new paperback books I can find are crap quality. The bindings fall apart before I can finish the 1st reading. Books I bought 10 yrs ago would last through over 5 repeat readings before falling apart, but now they wont last through one.
3. If publishers want to bo broke, they are well on the way, because of no availability, and crap quality.
I couldnt agree with you more
I couldn’t agree with you more…