IMMORTALIZING THE BACKLIST
by Norman Spinrad
I’ve been writing about the ebook publishing revolution and experimenting with ebook publishing modes long enough now for that future to have arrived faster than I had predicted and in an even more complex form than I had imagined.
There are now many ebook readers competing with each other for hardware dominance, and while none of them are quite yet the universal ebook reader capable of dealing with all ebook formats, they’ve arrived at the point where the technology and cost is no longer an obstacle. And with one enormous exception, ePub is emerging as a universal ebook format.
But that enormous exception is Amazon’s proprietary mobi format and Amazon utterly dominates ebook sales. This is bad news for the makers of all those more open format ebook readers, since Amazon’s business model, emulating what Apple did with the iPod and the iTunes store, is to tie its Kindle ebook reader to its proprietary format and its way out in front number of ebook titles to create as close a thing to a vertical monopoly as it can get, about 75% or more of ebook sales in the United States.
On the other hand, this might be good news for writers because Amazon allows anyone to self publish ebooks on their site, set the price within certain limits, and keep 70% of the gross, and Barnes and Noble has followed the leader. More good news for writers is that there are now several freeware programs that will transform word processor output in doc or word or rtf or pdf into ePub or mobi.
So I’ve been experimenting with self publishing my out of print backlist books on Amazon and Barnes and Noble plus a few originals like an unpublished short story, an original short story collection, a collection of my critical essays in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, something over 20 titles in all, long enough to see the results over a good sampling of time.
The bad news is that I’m netting hundreds of dollars a month, not thousands by self-publishing my backlist. But the good news is that most of my backlist books are now available to interested readers as ebooks and at reasonable prices and always will be unless I decide otherwise. And this is good news indeed because, given limited rack space in book stores versus the number of new books published each year, the chances of getting a backlist of such magnitude back into paper print, let alone keeping it there forever, are slim and none.
So, since 70% of something is a lot more than 100% of nothing, this is good news for authors and also for for would-be readers, since by eliminating the rack space problem and reprinting costs it allows authors to immortalize our backlists for as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers flow. Now any book that anyone wants to immortalize will be available to anyone who wants to read it forever. For decades now, writers have been bemoaning the disappearance of their backlists, and now, however much or little money they may garner, that sad story is happily over.
But traditional ink and paper publishers are demanding control of ebook rights and 75% of the net and are mostly making this a deal-breaker. So if you can’t give them ebook rights, you can’t get them to publish the books in question in ink-and-paper format. On the other hand, if you self-publish on Amazon and/or Barnes and Noble only, you can pull the ebooks in minutes if that’s what stands in the way of a conventional deal.
But beware of small “ebook publishers” because they are really aggregators. For a percentages of the net that varies, they will create the ebooks from files or sometimes even by scanning books if need be, and in the various necessary formats, and distribute them to retail sites, not only Amazon and Barnes and Noble but the minor sites too.
This is a valuable service, and some PR may be part of it out of self-interest, and if this sounds like what conventional publishers are supposed to do, that’s because it is. And having such a company doing it for you instead of having to do it all yourself is not only a big plus, but by reaching more retailers, may gain you more money than self-publishing in the end by increased sales making up for reduced royalty percentages, which are still better than the 25% of ebook net you get from conventional publishers.
If it works. So when Reanimus expressed interest, I decided to give it a try with THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE and BUG JACK BARRON. The full results are not yet in, but so far the sales are about the same as for say THE IRON DREAM or MEXICA which I self-published on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
But there’s a catch. Even though the contract allows me to revert these rights more or less upon request, in practice it’s another matter, because there’s no practical way to free them from that multitude of minor retail sites, so in the short term at least, it would seem to preclude any volume publication.
In the medium term, however, the ebook tail is already beginning to wag the ink-and-paper dog, and sooner or later, and I think even sooner than the conventional publishers fear, ebook income is going to become more important than paper book income, and these publishers will have to either up the ebook royalty percentage they pay authors, or allow them to separate ebook rights from volume rights. And when ebook publishers begin paying competitive advances, the ball game will be over.
Indeed, it’s happening already, at least for Anglophone backlist SF books. The Orion Publishing Group, a British outfit in turn part of the international French publishing conglomerate Hachette, has created an SF ebook venture called SF Gateway at least initially dedicated to backlist titles that is revolutionary several respects.
They are paying small but significant advances. And their royalty rates have an upward sliding scale, going from 25% to 35% depending on sales, and while the top end seems presently out of realistic reach, the cumulative sales may be able to reach it over time. And what they are acquiring is separate ebook rights, not including volume rights, though they have right of first refusal on them, and, via the Gollancz imprint, the ability to publish ink-and-and paper editions. Initially at least, they had seemed to be acquiring world English language ebook rights from British authors and only requiring separate US ebook rights from American authors.
But there’s a huge kicker here, an advantage that can only apply to SF titles. First as a paper-and-ink book, and then on CD as well, they have been the publisher of THE SCIENCE FICTION ENCYCLOPEDIA, which is exactly what the titles says it is. And now they have are taken an updated third edition and putting it online with free unpaid access.
What is more, there are entries for virtually all authors of significance in the entire history of the genre, and each essay has links to every title to which they have ebook rights so that the reader can click to buy more or less instantly.
I have been saying that if publishers want writers to accept 25% cuts on ebook net instead of the 70% possible via self-publication, they have to pay advances and offer marketing services that will increase sales volume. And that is what Orion is certainly doing.
Malcolm Edwards, in charge of the project, initially offered to acquire separate British ebook rights to 18 of my backlist titles, and I accepted. This required me to remove availability for sale of the ones I had self-published from Amazon UK and Barnes and Noble, which were the only retail sites where they were available. But checking on some of the titles in my encyclopedia entry, I saw that while they were available on Amazon UK, they were, of course, not available directly on Amazon US, though the self-published versions still were.
So why not offer the US ebook rights to Orion? In other words, for another small advance, give Orion world English language ebook rights? After all, free access to THE SCIENCE FICTION ENCYCLOPEDIA is world-wide, not limited to people in the British rights area. And what is more, that would in effect include Open Market rights too. So anyone anywhere in the world could read my entry in the encyclopedia, and click on any title there to buy it. And checking on Gateway, I saw that there were already links to retail sites in non-Anglophone countries all over the world.
This time, I made the suggestion to Malcolm, and he accepted. So I’m removing all the books to which Orion now has ebook rights from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Orion has thusfar acquired something like 1000 titles, and their ultimate goal is to be as definitive as possible, so they’re publishing stepwise, not about to do everything at once, so my self-published versions of those ebooks will disappear for a while but reappear as Orion ebook titles, not just on Amazon, but on diverse retail sites all over the world.
Thusfar, Orion ebooks have already published and made available worldwide THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE, AGENT OF CHAOS, and THE VOID CAPTAIN’S TALE, which have replaced my self-published versions on Amazon, as well as first ebook editions of THE SOLARIANS, SONGS FROM THE STARS, A WORLD BETWEEN, THE STAR-SPANGLED FUTURE, and NO DIRECTION HOME.
Soon to come: THE IRON DREAM, CHILD OF FORTUNE, LITTLE HEROES, RUSSIAN SPRING, PICTURES AT 11, JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS, GREENHOUSE SUMMER, OTHER AMERICAS, DEUS X AND OTHER STORIES, and SCIENCE FICTION IN THE REAL WORLD.
All of the above on Amazon world-wide directly, or via my Gateway entry, from many other worldwide sources as well: http://www.sfgateway.com/authors/s/spinrad-norman/
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
OSAMA THE GUN--an ebook first English language edition
THE ULTIMATE EBOOK PUBLISHING EXPERIMENT
and the reason why
by Norman Spinrad
In the first week of July, I’m self-publishing the first English language edition of OSAMA THE GUN as an ebook original on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites. This after having had more than a score of novels published in traditional ink-on-paper editions throughout the world.
BUG JACK BARRON got me denounced in the British Parliament as a degenerate, as a communist by fascists and a fascist by communists, and THE IRON DREAM was banned for eight years in Germany, but I knew OSAMA THE GUN would surely be my most politically controversial novel and very difficult to get published in the United States because of its politically incorrect sympathy for the devil de jour.
But I couldn’t help myself. Something like OSAMA THE GUN had to be written, but no one else had done it, so I felt compelled to write the novel by a kind of idealistic transnational patriotism and in-my-face personal experience.
I had returned from Florida to New York City late at night on September 10, went to sleep in Dona Sadock’s apartment on 9th Street only a few kilometers from Ground Zero, and woke up with the twin funereal clouds of the Twin Towers right in my face. Inside the restricted zone. NATO fighters circling overhead and glad to have them. Fury. Anger. Patriot rage. Up close and personal.
I was commissioned to write about it soon thereafter by the national French newspaper Liberation, and again to reflect on it a year later, when the Hole was still smoking and there were American troops venting righteous tribal outrage against the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan. By then many writers were beginning to try to write fiction explorations of this historical discontinuity, and my reputation being what it was, I began to be asked why I wasn’t.
My response was always that what I was reading in that vein was far too small scale personal reaction, and I wasn’t interested in adding one more “how 9/11 changed my life” story even though it certainly had. If I was going to try to deal with the results thereof, I would have to relate the geopolitical matrix and the clash of civilizations to the inner consciousness of the enemy, of a sincere, dedicated, likable jihahdi.
Monstrous acts by terrorists in its name had painted the religion of Islam itself demonically evil in the eyes of multicultural secular western civilization and bin Laden had successfully caused America to transform itself into the Great Satan in the eyes of the Umma, to much of the world-wide Islamic community.
It seemed to me that what was needed was a novel that did not deal primarily with the personal reactions of Americans to this transformed reality and not only the complexities of the geopolitics, but a work of fiction that put readers inside that alien alien jihadhist consciousness, that allowed its complexities and moral conundrums to be empathetically experienced from within and understood, if not applauded. Sympathy for the devil, if not for his demonic deeds.
OSAMA THE GUN, set in a not-so-far future when the “Sons of Osama” have re-established a powerful Islamic Caliphate with Pakistani nuclear weapons and Arabian oil money, is the story of one of those sons of the martyr, a naive and sincere young man named after him, who becomes a Caliphate secret agent just to escape its closed confines to see the world, and stepwise finds himself becoming the reluctant hero of the title, as told to the reader by Osama the Gun himself.
Osama becomes a terrorist leader on a small scale by happenstance, a mercenary used by Islamic forces fighting an American proxy invasion in the oil lands of Nigeria, an iconic figure in the manner of “El Che,” and all the while charms the reader as a likable, sincere, idealistic and sympathetic human doing very unsympathetic things to the interests of the United States of America.
I wanted the reader to experience the difference between odious terrorist deeds done in the name of Islam and Islam as religion, but also the moral ambiguities in the relationship between them, between the true transnational brotherhood of the Hadj and the snakepit of Arab political nationalisms, between the innocently idealistic naiveté of the young man and the Islamic terrorist icon Osama the Gun.
I wanted reader to hate the sin, but love the sinner, or at least understand the monster’s human heart enough to acknowledge than he had one.
Which was why OSAMA THE GUN had to be written, and why, as one foaming at the mouth rejection letter predicted, no American publisher would touch this book, and no doubt why the editor who wrote it has thusfar been proven right.
So after I still couldn’t find an American publisher for OSAMA THE GUN after it was published in France, and after delving deeply into contemplation of the ebook revolution as detailed on this blogsite and experimenting with backlist titles and then an original short story, I screwed up my courage to take the experiment to perhaps the ultimate belief and self-publish OSAMA THE GUN as an ebook original.
I’m doing this not just as experiment in ebook publishing, which it is, not only to rescue a novel in which I passionately believe from undeserved oblivion, but also because I feel OSAMA THE GUN should be read for reasons that transcend the publishing business, that perhaps have extra-literary dimensions, that in some way are moral reasons. And I can give it a try because advent of the ebook and the ebook reader is revolutionizing what publication means at warp speed.
OSAMA THE GUN the ebook will be priced at $7, as affordable as a mass market paperback book, at least until October 1. And then we’ll see, it is, after all, an experiment. No one has ever tried to launch a literarily and politically important novel as an ebook original before.
I may fall on my face. I may end up with an ebook best-seller. Most likely something in between, which in the end may help define what a “successful ebook” might look like in the electronic marketplace. A conventional ink-and-paper publisher might be emboldened to pick it up. Or not. Or the continuation of OSAMA THE GUN as an ebookn if successful enough might turn a conventional publishing contract into an offer I might then want to refuse.
And as part of the experiment, the first third of OSAMA THE GUN may be downloaded free of charge via the link to it on Scribd below and freely distributed, even while the complete novel is on sale.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/326098/OSAMA-THE-GUNnovel-portion
If that doesn’t grab you, don’t buy the book.
If it does, here's where to buy it on Amazon:
or on Barnes & Noble
And if you want to learn the full story and historical back story, here are the videos:
OSAMA THE GUN 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkVgVlz0TuY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbxxBgo0eY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nT15yiY_PE&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SaVnlJNQdc&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CVL6Qtvdb0&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
Free electronic copies of the entire novel for critical or journalistic purposes available on an indiviudal basis upon individual request.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
English commercial for OSAMA THE GUN--cause celebre in French, currently unavailable in English
English commercial for OSAMA THE GUN--cause celebre in French, currently unavailable in English
Watch the original English version of the commercial for the French translation, OUSSAMA, featuring Norman Spinrad:
http://youtu.be/JYhWG-QSyc0
And if that grabs you, download and read the portion of the novel free, from Scribd. If you're a reader, who then wants to read the whole thing, about all you can do now is shout out loud and spread the word.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/326098/OSAMA-THE-GUNnovel-portion
If you're a publisher, the rights are available from Carole Saudejaud, in charge of rights for Fayard in France because world rights were sold to Fayard due to lack of courage at the time by American publishers:
csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr
But electronic copies of the whole novel maybe be had directly from Norman Spinrad if you are a reputable publisher, critic, or journalist:
normanspinrad@hotmail.com
And if you want to learn the full story and historical back story, here are the videos:
OSAMA THE GUN 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkVgVlz0TuY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbxxBgo0eY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nT15yiY_PE&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SaVnlJNQdc&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CVL6Qtvdb0&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
Now y’all know what to do, so do it!
Watch the original English version of the commercial for the French translation, OUSSAMA, featuring Norman Spinrad:
http://youtu.be/JYhWG-QSyc0
And if that grabs you, download and read the portion of the novel free, from Scribd. If you're a reader, who then wants to read the whole thing, about all you can do now is shout out loud and spread the word.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/326098/OSAMA-THE-GUNnovel-portion
If you're a publisher, the rights are available from Carole Saudejaud, in charge of rights for Fayard in France because world rights were sold to Fayard due to lack of courage at the time by American publishers:
csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr
But electronic copies of the whole novel maybe be had directly from Norman Spinrad if you are a reputable publisher, critic, or journalist:
normanspinrad@hotmail.com
And if you want to learn the full story and historical back story, here are the videos:
OSAMA THE GUN 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkVgVlz0TuY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbxxBgo0eY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nT15yiY_PE&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SaVnlJNQdc&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
OSAMA THE GUN 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CVL6Qtvdb0&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
Now y’all know what to do, so do it!
Friday, May 20, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
BUG JACK BARRON & THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE
BUG JACK BARRON & THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE
a comparative ebook experiment
For some time now, I’ve been exploring and experimenting with the exfoliating frontiers of ebook publishing--the business end, the hardware end, the software end. You can read all about it on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE--the complete THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL and THE FUTURE OF EBOOKS IS NOW. (http://normanspinradatlarge.blogspot.com/)
But on the experimental side of the business end, I’ve been experimenting only with do-it--yourself, and confining myself to titles with computer files I could lay my hands on by hook or from crooks. Meaning whatever I didn’t write on a computer or couldn’t find a scanned pirated version of could not be made available.
But that meant that BUG JACK BARRON--denounced on the floor of the British Parliament, the basis of a famous unmade movie in Hollywood held captive by Universal, more or less in continuous print for four decades in France, nominated for various awards, published in more languages than I can remember, reprinted in more editions in the US than I can remember, generally considered one of my magnum opuses and certainly the most famous--could not have an ebook edition because it was written on a typewriter.
Until now.
(more on BUG JACK BARRON, the Bug Jack Barron show, the non-movie
The Bug Jack Barron Show
Bug Jack Barron the non-movie
But now I am experimenting with ebook publication through an independent ebook publisher. Reanimus.com is a start-up company whose service to the writer is to scan backlist novels when necessary, create ebook versions in the various significant formats, place them on its own online bookstore site and on the major sale sites like Amazon directly or through aggregators like Smashwords, and hopefully help to promote the product. This relieves the author of various tedious and perhaps only marginally doable tasks that he just might perform himself, as I have with the exception of the scanning process, but would rather not.
In exchange for which, the ebook publisher takes a percentage of the gross, or rather at least in large part, the net after the major retailer and maybe the aggregator have taken their percentages of the gross, leaving the author with something a good deal less than the 70% you can get when you do it all yourself, hopefully making it up in the volume, said hope hopefully not the punchline of a very old joke.
Reanimus pays no advances, but otherwise this is much like being a traditional paper book publisher and part of a potential business model for the future of epublishing not unlike the old publishing model for paper books, except that the royalty rates are much better.
So the question is, do I come out ahead by self-publishing or by doing it through an ebook publisher? I’ve put together and self published an original ebook short story collection called NEW WORLDS COMING consisting of later uncollected stories and Reanimus is publishing THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE, my first collection, considered something of a classic and once a book club choice, but still two short story collections, so a pretty good experiment designed to answer that question.
THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE ON AMAZON
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Hurrah-Golden-Horde-ebook/dp/B0050SS66M/ref=sr_1_21?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1305513178&sr=1-21
THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE ON REANIMUS.COM
http://reanimus.com/store/?item=1001
Reanimus is also publishing the first ebook edition of BUG JACK BARRON and that is something else again. A novel of a certain historical literary significance, and forty years after its first publication perhaps of more realtime political significance than ever. Published in most of the world’s major languages, still in print in several of them, including English, currently in an Overlook small press edition after a long strange trip through many other editions down through the years.
But the Reanimus edition is a first ebook edition actually published by an ebook publisher, making BUG JACK BARRON far more widely available than Overlook could with a trade paperback, and at a cheaper price too. What will happen? Quien sabe? That’s why it’s an experiment. And one the results of which should tell us something about the possible future of ebook publishing and/or ebook self publishing.
BUG JACK BARRON ON AMAZON
http://www.amazon.com/Bug-Jack-Barron-ebook/dp/B0050SS00E/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1305513942&sr=1-20
BUG JACK BARRON ON REANIMUS.COM
http://reanimus.com/store/?item=1002
And whether I just might take the ultimate experimental step and one way or the other publish a novel never before published in English in an ebook first edition. Way out there, and scary, but I’m thinking about it. And so is my publisher. And what happens with BUG JACK BARRON just might help us decide.
That novel is the notorious OSAMA THE GUN and why it is notorious and presently unpublished in English you can see and hear on my YouTube video series of the same name.
OSAMA 1
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/21/nkVgVlz0TuY
OSAMA 2
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/19/JnbxxBgo0eY
OSAMA 3
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/16/1nT15yiY_PE
OSAMA 4
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/15/6SaVnlJNQdc
OSAMA 5
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/11/1CVL6Qtvdb0
a comparative ebook experiment
For some time now, I’ve been exploring and experimenting with the exfoliating frontiers of ebook publishing--the business end, the hardware end, the software end. You can read all about it on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE--the complete THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL and THE FUTURE OF EBOOKS IS NOW. (http://normanspinradatlarge.blogspot.com/)
But on the experimental side of the business end, I’ve been experimenting only with do-it--yourself, and confining myself to titles with computer files I could lay my hands on by hook or from crooks. Meaning whatever I didn’t write on a computer or couldn’t find a scanned pirated version of could not be made available.
But that meant that BUG JACK BARRON--denounced on the floor of the British Parliament, the basis of a famous unmade movie in Hollywood held captive by Universal, more or less in continuous print for four decades in France, nominated for various awards, published in more languages than I can remember, reprinted in more editions in the US than I can remember, generally considered one of my magnum opuses and certainly the most famous--could not have an ebook edition because it was written on a typewriter.
Until now.
(more on BUG JACK BARRON, the Bug Jack Barron show, the non-movie
The Bug Jack Barron Show
Bug Jack Barron the non-movie
But now I am experimenting with ebook publication through an independent ebook publisher. Reanimus.com is a start-up company whose service to the writer is to scan backlist novels when necessary, create ebook versions in the various significant formats, place them on its own online bookstore site and on the major sale sites like Amazon directly or through aggregators like Smashwords, and hopefully help to promote the product. This relieves the author of various tedious and perhaps only marginally doable tasks that he just might perform himself, as I have with the exception of the scanning process, but would rather not.
In exchange for which, the ebook publisher takes a percentage of the gross, or rather at least in large part, the net after the major retailer and maybe the aggregator have taken their percentages of the gross, leaving the author with something a good deal less than the 70% you can get when you do it all yourself, hopefully making it up in the volume, said hope hopefully not the punchline of a very old joke.
Reanimus pays no advances, but otherwise this is much like being a traditional paper book publisher and part of a potential business model for the future of epublishing not unlike the old publishing model for paper books, except that the royalty rates are much better.
So the question is, do I come out ahead by self-publishing or by doing it through an ebook publisher? I’ve put together and self published an original ebook short story collection called NEW WORLDS COMING consisting of later uncollected stories and Reanimus is publishing THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE, my first collection, considered something of a classic and once a book club choice, but still two short story collections, so a pretty good experiment designed to answer that question.
THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE ON AMAZON
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Hurrah-Golden-Horde-ebook/dp/B0050SS66M/ref=sr_1_21?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1305513178&sr=1-21
THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE ON REANIMUS.COM
http://reanimus.com/store/?item=1001
Reanimus is also publishing the first ebook edition of BUG JACK BARRON and that is something else again. A novel of a certain historical literary significance, and forty years after its first publication perhaps of more realtime political significance than ever. Published in most of the world’s major languages, still in print in several of them, including English, currently in an Overlook small press edition after a long strange trip through many other editions down through the years.
But the Reanimus edition is a first ebook edition actually published by an ebook publisher, making BUG JACK BARRON far more widely available than Overlook could with a trade paperback, and at a cheaper price too. What will happen? Quien sabe? That’s why it’s an experiment. And one the results of which should tell us something about the possible future of ebook publishing and/or ebook self publishing.
BUG JACK BARRON ON AMAZON
http://www.amazon.com/Bug-Jack-Barron-ebook/dp/B0050SS00E/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1305513942&sr=1-20
BUG JACK BARRON ON REANIMUS.COM
http://reanimus.com/store/?item=1002
And whether I just might take the ultimate experimental step and one way or the other publish a novel never before published in English in an ebook first edition. Way out there, and scary, but I’m thinking about it. And so is my publisher. And what happens with BUG JACK BARRON just might help us decide.
That novel is the notorious OSAMA THE GUN and why it is notorious and presently unpublished in English you can see and hear on my YouTube video series of the same name.
OSAMA 1
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/21/nkVgVlz0TuY
OSAMA 2
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/19/JnbxxBgo0eY
OSAMA 3
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/16/1nT15yiY_PE
OSAMA 4
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/15/6SaVnlJNQdc
OSAMA 5
http://www.youtube.com/user/normanspinrad?feature=mhsn#p/u/11/1CVL6Qtvdb0
Thursday, March 31, 2011
A VIABLE AND JUST BUSINESS MODEL FOR THE EBOOK AGE
A VIABLE AND JUST BUSINESS MODEL FOR THE EBOOK AGE
by Norman Spinrad
past President, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
Hubris, or not, I’ve been asked to write something like this by diverse interested parties, for the American publishing industry from top to bottom--the writers, the publishers, the points of sale--is in the middle stage of a deep crisis it cannot possibly survive in its current configuration.
The times they are a-changing, the question of when will probably be answered after the next Christmas season as ebooks emerge at minimum as a major market force, over 20% of book sales is a conservative guess, so the answer to that one is soon.
But into what is the existential question--for the writers who create the literary product, for the presently existing publishers and for the remaining traditional retailers at point of sales who rightly fear being evolved out of existence by the Darwinian mojo of corporate Goliaths like Amazon or Barnes and Nobel, let alone Godzilla Google.
But unlike the question of when, the answer to the question of into what is not already pre-determined. What emerges from the shark pond and what sinks into the tarpits is in the process of being decided now, and we do have free will.
That which best adapts survives, but vampire bats and urban sewer rats are as well-adapted as it gets, and the former are blood-sucking parasites, and the latter garbage eaters, and their engine of evolution is their prime directive, all-out slobbering and gobbling greed. Evolution has no moral imperative, it just blindly follows the objective of one bottom line or another, which, I suppose, is as good a definition of greed as any other.
Up to a point greed drives upwards and onwards. But when greeds collide, it’s feeding frenzy in the shark pond unless the players realize that any stable order has to have survival value for the collectivity in question, that null sum games eventually destroy themselves. Which is as good a case for the evolutionary practicality of economic justice as anything fancier ponied up by Karl Marx.
So it behooves writers, publishers, agents, writers’ organizations, and so forth to reach a collective consensus for a business model for the ebook Age, and it’s not going to be any more viable than the business model that’s disintegrating now unless it factors justice into the cold accounting equations. Otherwise the only winners will major best-selling writers, Amazon, Google, and maybe Apple, because the Big Teams are going to enter the game sooner or later.
What goes around comes around, and the brick and mortar bookstore chains having decimated the independent bookstores, are now disappearing themselves, for with the demise of Borders, Barnes & Noble is the sole major book store chain remaining and it’s been closing stores and sucking in its gut and not exactly guaranteed to survive in any but its online incarnation.
Barnes & Noble had long had a direct catalog business which more recently migrated online where it became a pretty feeble competitor of Amazon because Amazon was way ahead in the ebook market with the Kindle, which locked its ebooks into it with a proprietary format, ala the favored business model of Steve Jobs.
But Barnes & Noble chose the ePub format for its ebooks and that is an open standard, and not just for the Barnes & Noble line and its Nook. The Nook will read a few other open formats as well, and most of the other ereaders will read ePub books. So here we have two strong but quite different business models competing--the vertical monopolies of Amazon/mobi/Kindle/ and I-Pad/ Apple and the open market format based on ePub and semi-universal ebook readers.
And together, they are changing the power relations between writers and publishers ultimately in favor of the writers, to the point where if publishers don’t change the ebooks rights clauses in their contracts, they will be committing seppuku.
Publishers have been demanding control of ebook rights and the lion’s share of the proceeds since before there were ebooks or proceeds, and now it really is a deal breaker. Their contracts presently call for giving the writers between 15% and 25% of the proceeds from ebook sales.
But Amazon and Barnes & Noble allow any writer, previously unpublished or blockbuster best-seller, to sell their own ebooks directly on their sites and set their own prices within certain parameters. And such self-publishing writers get 70% of the price of every ebook sale not the 25%, which seems to have evolved into the so-called “industry standard.”
Compare the numbers for an ebook put on sale directly by the writer at $9.00 and the same ebook put on sale by a publisher at say $12.95. In the first instance, the writer makes $6.30 on each sale, in the second, through a publisher and the “industry standard” about $3.25.
Talk about greed! The publisher takes about $3 a copy for whatever it does to enhance the sales of the ebook, which, as many writers than not have unfortunately discovered, much more often than not amounts to exactly nothing.
Nothing? publishers will now exclaim. We pay for the production of the paper books, the shipping, the promotion, and we have to eat the costs of returns and remainders! And we pay 10-15% royalties on hardcovers and about 8% on trade paperbacks out of what’s left. If we’re so greedy how come our balance sheets are not exactly flourishing?
And they have a point. But only when it comes to the economics of paper books. When it comes to ebooks, once the marketing copies are uploaded to Amazon,
Barnes & Noble, and so forth, there are no production costs. No printing and binding costs, no shipping or warehousing costs, no returns, nada. The publisher collects 70% of the cover price, not what in the paper world would be 40% or 50% after the author’s royalties and the discount to retailers. After the set-up of the online sales points, which costs virtually nothing but some computer time and hassle, it’s all pure profit, and everything stays in cyber print forever.
I’ve done this all by myself with backlist books that had no offers from paper publishers because of some complex tax rules which make republishing anything that’s not going to sell several thousand copies a year economically non-viable. No such problem with my self-published ebooks of previously paper published novels. I’ve been at it for less than a calendar a year thus far, making hundreds of dollars a month not thousands, which is still thousands of dollars a year for keeping titles that otherwise would disappear alive for as long as anyone wants to read them.
When you think of a century or so’s literarily worthy novels out there in limbo because golden oldies can’t compete for finite rackspace by selling only hundreds of copies a year instead of thousands, and when you consider that electronic rackspace in cyberspace is free and infinite, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to know that ebook publication is going to be the eternal afterlife of the vast and vastly growing backlist literary legacy because the way things have evolved, there is no other viable alternative business model for its survival.
Right now these are the main spoils over which publishers and writers are contending. The publishers have long since imposed cute contract language that gives them control of ebook rights at 25% of the take for the writers as long as the book is “in print” and defines “in print” as “available for purchase” including as ebook downloads, and therefore effectively meaning forever.
The publishers win this one for the moment. But the literary legacy will never be the dominant profit center of publishing, this is just about the future of the past, and this is the kind of victory that does not sweeten the atmosphere when the power balance shifts in epublishing in a broader sense, when a certain subclass of writers realize that it’s now coming into their hot little hands as the game moves into the main arena.
That one is about the future of publishing.
Let’s say you’re a major best-selling author on the Steven King or Danielle Steele level. You’ve just finished a new novel without a contract because you’re rich enough not be need an advance to finance the writing of it, but you’re greedy enough to want to make as much off it as you can. Who isn’t?
Let’s say that it’s far enough in the near future so that ebooks are roughly half the book market. Let’s say that a hardcover would go for $30 and an ebook for $10. Let’s say you took a big advance from a publisher at the cost of agreeing to that 25% of ebook sales. To make the calculation simple, let’s say the novel sells a million hardcovers and a million downloads. At 15% of $30, you make $4.5 million on the hardcover. At 25%$ of $10, you make $2.5 million off the ebooks. Total take $7 million.
But what if you sidestep the traditional publishing industry and self-publish for $10 an ebook at 70%? That’s $7 million on a million ebook sales alone. And you still own the paper publishing rights. Can you not then make a deal for those volume rights alone with a publisher for a lower advance or even no advance and still come out way ahead?
The top ten or twenty best-selling authors won’t need publishers. They can hire a computer geek to do the setting up for a grand or two and another grand or two for the online “cover art” and that’s it. They’re already brand names, and in the ebook age, national net pr would be relatively cheap and easy to buy from hired guns.
Advances? Who needs your stinkin’ advances, Random House and Simon & Schuster?
The answer, of course, is most everyone else, including, of course, yours truly. Divide all of the above by 100. At 10,000 sales at 15% of $30, I’d make $45,000 on the hardcover, at 25% of $10, $25,000 on the ebook . Total take, $70,000 for maybe an average a year’s work.
Same $70,000 if you self-publish and sell just the same 10,000 ebooks for $10 at 70%. But you still own the paper volume rights, and anything you can get for them is gravy.
A successful mid-list novel published in the traditional manner won’t make a writer rich but it will at least for a year elevate you into the dwindling middle class, ditto for just the ebook sales.
But divide that by two and you get the 5000 hardcover sales which is the average brute reality for the majority of paper novels these days and 5000 ebook sales which seems like blue sky at the moment. Total, $35,000 for a novel’s first year take, at which level a writer does need advances to keep going without a day job.
So the superstars would lose money by swallowing the publishers’ deal-breaking demand for 75% of ebook proceeds instead of self-publishing, and the paper publishers lose the top of the best-seller list unless they either raise the already onerous advances to the superstars, or up their percentages of the ebook take to make themselves attractive again. The top stars have them by the shriveling family jewels.
At the bottom end, the publishers still have the literary proletariat by the gonads, it’s accept the greedy ebook rights clause in the contract, or no contract. No advance, no deal, if you don’t like it, tough shit, it will be, and you’ll be in it.
So what else is new? It’s always been that way, and it always will be in the lower levels of the minor leagues. That’s why it’s the minor leagues. But it’s also why it can only be a minor profit center for any major publisher virtually by definition. The true existential question resides in what happens to what is presently called the “mid-list” when the major best-selling authors are lost to the traditional publishers.
The traditional publishing industry will shrink and its publishers will have to survive on so-called mid-list books, and may be able to if they play their cards realistically. “Mid-list” has come to mean anything not aimed at the best-seller list, but I’m using it to mean books that can sell something like 10,000 to 20,000 hardcovers and ebooks combined, books without the hope of even the lower end any best seller list, but that are profitable and can earn out large enough advances to keep the authors in the middle class by writing full time.
These are the writers the old line publishers will need to keep if they are to retain commercial relevance, and these writers and their books are going be their future if they are to have one. These writers can easily self-publish too, but the down and dirty economic reality being what it is, most of us are not usually in an economic position to trade away up-front money for higher royalties later.
So there is a mutual self-interest here, and this is where economic justice becomes pragmatic. In the real world to come, the old line publishers will not be able to afford to keep successful mid-list writers away from ebook self-publishing with bigger advances, since times are already tough and tight-fisted as it is on the balance sheets as the old order collapses.
So the old-line publishers must offer the writers they need to retain a more just percentage of the ebook proceeds. 50% would be a nice symbol of true partnership in the trenches.
50% would raise up the banner of communal solidarity to replace 25%’s Jolly Roger of the publishers. The writers reduce their share of what would be their 70% of ebook sales if they self-published by 20% and cede it to the publishers, the publishers meet them more or less in the middle by cutting their share of ebook money by 25%, but retain the rights to the title as long as it is still really selling some minimum number of copies a year in paper or ebook form.
In return for which they front advances and remember what the job of being a publisher once was and of necessity return to doing it. Time was, publishing was an artisanal enterprise, and while editors might have seldom been overweeningly dominant, they weren’t as subservient to BookScan numbers, publishing committees, and the sacred bottom line as they are now.
The work had an esthetic literary end to too, editors had a lot more to say about what their houses should acquire, a lot more freedom to follow their instincts and tastes, and at the literary and even practical nuts and bolts level, were teachers, and could be artistic collaborators.
The business level had always been a Darwinian arena but over the last decade or two, it devolved into a Catch-22 situation, where the big best sellers who least needed it got most of the advertising and pr money, and the mid-list which needed it most got bupkis. This made a kind of ruthless economic sense when publishers owned the rights to the best sellers, but when ebooks turn the authors thereof into their own free-standing corporations dealing directly with point of sale, that business model is gone with the electronic wind.
So the old line publishers that survive are going to live and die with what is now the mid-list because it will have to become their major profit center when authors of the top end best sellers go into business for themselves, and ditto literary agents because the best seller authors will do better hiring lawyers, pr services, and computer geeks at fixed prices than if they were paying 15% commission on their grosses.
The good news is that the same electronic revolution that will lose such publishers their superstars, upon whose titles most of their advertising and promotion budget was spent because there was no way to buy national advertising for anything else that made economic sense, now can, and must, spread it around more widely via the online media, where you can get real national coverage at affordable expense for good mid-list titles.
This is not the worst case scenario for the traditional publishing industry, this is the best case scenario. It survives by nurturing commercially viable non-best sellers, and giving the writers thereof a more just ebook deal:
50% of all ebook proceeds, advances up front as before, and some sales floor under which ebook publication no longer counts as “in print.” And who knows, some writers who come up to best sellerdom through this more just system might just feel the sense of loyalty presently in short supply between writers and publishers and stick around for the paper volume rights at least.
This is the business model publishers, writers, their agents, and writers’ organizations should be seeking to establish out of enlightened pragmatic communal self-interest.
Those who adapt survive. Those who don’t could find themselves facing the worst case scenario:
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple can easily afford to pay 70% of ebook cover prices to any writer who wants to self-publish because it costs them exactly nothing to garner their 30%--no publisher’s cut, no shipping expenses, no returns, no acquisition costs. Money for nothing and the product they’re selling is free.
What if one or all of them and maybe even Google later decided to pay advances on ebooks selected to be featured in some kind of top list on their sites, competing with the traditional publishers dollar for dollar on all professional levels, while continuing to pay 70% royalties on ebook sales and offering to sell print on demand editions with traditional volume royalties?
Why they would become publishers themselves, now wouldn’t they? Publishers with a new business model that would either force traditional publishers to give up ebook rights entirely on anything worth publishing at all or out of existence completely along with the brick and mortar bookstore chains already reduced to one and become collectively a vertical monopoly.
Do traditional publishers really want that to happen?
Do writers?
Think about it.
But not for too long.
The Great Wheel turns, and we turn with it, those who do not will be crushed beneath it. Those who adapt will survive.
end
by Norman Spinrad
past President, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
Hubris, or not, I’ve been asked to write something like this by diverse interested parties, for the American publishing industry from top to bottom--the writers, the publishers, the points of sale--is in the middle stage of a deep crisis it cannot possibly survive in its current configuration.
The times they are a-changing, the question of when will probably be answered after the next Christmas season as ebooks emerge at minimum as a major market force, over 20% of book sales is a conservative guess, so the answer to that one is soon.
But into what is the existential question--for the writers who create the literary product, for the presently existing publishers and for the remaining traditional retailers at point of sales who rightly fear being evolved out of existence by the Darwinian mojo of corporate Goliaths like Amazon or Barnes and Nobel, let alone Godzilla Google.
But unlike the question of when, the answer to the question of into what is not already pre-determined. What emerges from the shark pond and what sinks into the tarpits is in the process of being decided now, and we do have free will.
That which best adapts survives, but vampire bats and urban sewer rats are as well-adapted as it gets, and the former are blood-sucking parasites, and the latter garbage eaters, and their engine of evolution is their prime directive, all-out slobbering and gobbling greed. Evolution has no moral imperative, it just blindly follows the objective of one bottom line or another, which, I suppose, is as good a definition of greed as any other.
Up to a point greed drives upwards and onwards. But when greeds collide, it’s feeding frenzy in the shark pond unless the players realize that any stable order has to have survival value for the collectivity in question, that null sum games eventually destroy themselves. Which is as good a case for the evolutionary practicality of economic justice as anything fancier ponied up by Karl Marx.
So it behooves writers, publishers, agents, writers’ organizations, and so forth to reach a collective consensus for a business model for the ebook Age, and it’s not going to be any more viable than the business model that’s disintegrating now unless it factors justice into the cold accounting equations. Otherwise the only winners will major best-selling writers, Amazon, Google, and maybe Apple, because the Big Teams are going to enter the game sooner or later.
What goes around comes around, and the brick and mortar bookstore chains having decimated the independent bookstores, are now disappearing themselves, for with the demise of Borders, Barnes & Noble is the sole major book store chain remaining and it’s been closing stores and sucking in its gut and not exactly guaranteed to survive in any but its online incarnation.
Barnes & Noble had long had a direct catalog business which more recently migrated online where it became a pretty feeble competitor of Amazon because Amazon was way ahead in the ebook market with the Kindle, which locked its ebooks into it with a proprietary format, ala the favored business model of Steve Jobs.
But Barnes & Noble chose the ePub format for its ebooks and that is an open standard, and not just for the Barnes & Noble line and its Nook. The Nook will read a few other open formats as well, and most of the other ereaders will read ePub books. So here we have two strong but quite different business models competing--the vertical monopolies of Amazon/mobi/Kindle/ and I-Pad/ Apple and the open market format based on ePub and semi-universal ebook readers.
And together, they are changing the power relations between writers and publishers ultimately in favor of the writers, to the point where if publishers don’t change the ebooks rights clauses in their contracts, they will be committing seppuku.
Publishers have been demanding control of ebook rights and the lion’s share of the proceeds since before there were ebooks or proceeds, and now it really is a deal breaker. Their contracts presently call for giving the writers between 15% and 25% of the proceeds from ebook sales.
But Amazon and Barnes & Noble allow any writer, previously unpublished or blockbuster best-seller, to sell their own ebooks directly on their sites and set their own prices within certain parameters. And such self-publishing writers get 70% of the price of every ebook sale not the 25%, which seems to have evolved into the so-called “industry standard.”
Compare the numbers for an ebook put on sale directly by the writer at $9.00 and the same ebook put on sale by a publisher at say $12.95. In the first instance, the writer makes $6.30 on each sale, in the second, through a publisher and the “industry standard” about $3.25.
Talk about greed! The publisher takes about $3 a copy for whatever it does to enhance the sales of the ebook, which, as many writers than not have unfortunately discovered, much more often than not amounts to exactly nothing.
Nothing? publishers will now exclaim. We pay for the production of the paper books, the shipping, the promotion, and we have to eat the costs of returns and remainders! And we pay 10-15% royalties on hardcovers and about 8% on trade paperbacks out of what’s left. If we’re so greedy how come our balance sheets are not exactly flourishing?
And they have a point. But only when it comes to the economics of paper books. When it comes to ebooks, once the marketing copies are uploaded to Amazon,
Barnes & Noble, and so forth, there are no production costs. No printing and binding costs, no shipping or warehousing costs, no returns, nada. The publisher collects 70% of the cover price, not what in the paper world would be 40% or 50% after the author’s royalties and the discount to retailers. After the set-up of the online sales points, which costs virtually nothing but some computer time and hassle, it’s all pure profit, and everything stays in cyber print forever.
I’ve done this all by myself with backlist books that had no offers from paper publishers because of some complex tax rules which make republishing anything that’s not going to sell several thousand copies a year economically non-viable. No such problem with my self-published ebooks of previously paper published novels. I’ve been at it for less than a calendar a year thus far, making hundreds of dollars a month not thousands, which is still thousands of dollars a year for keeping titles that otherwise would disappear alive for as long as anyone wants to read them.
When you think of a century or so’s literarily worthy novels out there in limbo because golden oldies can’t compete for finite rackspace by selling only hundreds of copies a year instead of thousands, and when you consider that electronic rackspace in cyberspace is free and infinite, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to know that ebook publication is going to be the eternal afterlife of the vast and vastly growing backlist literary legacy because the way things have evolved, there is no other viable alternative business model for its survival.
Right now these are the main spoils over which publishers and writers are contending. The publishers have long since imposed cute contract language that gives them control of ebook rights at 25% of the take for the writers as long as the book is “in print” and defines “in print” as “available for purchase” including as ebook downloads, and therefore effectively meaning forever.
The publishers win this one for the moment. But the literary legacy will never be the dominant profit center of publishing, this is just about the future of the past, and this is the kind of victory that does not sweeten the atmosphere when the power balance shifts in epublishing in a broader sense, when a certain subclass of writers realize that it’s now coming into their hot little hands as the game moves into the main arena.
That one is about the future of publishing.
Let’s say you’re a major best-selling author on the Steven King or Danielle Steele level. You’ve just finished a new novel without a contract because you’re rich enough not be need an advance to finance the writing of it, but you’re greedy enough to want to make as much off it as you can. Who isn’t?
Let’s say that it’s far enough in the near future so that ebooks are roughly half the book market. Let’s say that a hardcover would go for $30 and an ebook for $10. Let’s say you took a big advance from a publisher at the cost of agreeing to that 25% of ebook sales. To make the calculation simple, let’s say the novel sells a million hardcovers and a million downloads. At 15% of $30, you make $4.5 million on the hardcover. At 25%$ of $10, you make $2.5 million off the ebooks. Total take $7 million.
But what if you sidestep the traditional publishing industry and self-publish for $10 an ebook at 70%? That’s $7 million on a million ebook sales alone. And you still own the paper publishing rights. Can you not then make a deal for those volume rights alone with a publisher for a lower advance or even no advance and still come out way ahead?
The top ten or twenty best-selling authors won’t need publishers. They can hire a computer geek to do the setting up for a grand or two and another grand or two for the online “cover art” and that’s it. They’re already brand names, and in the ebook age, national net pr would be relatively cheap and easy to buy from hired guns.
Advances? Who needs your stinkin’ advances, Random House and Simon & Schuster?
The answer, of course, is most everyone else, including, of course, yours truly. Divide all of the above by 100. At 10,000 sales at 15% of $30, I’d make $45,000 on the hardcover, at 25% of $10, $25,000 on the ebook . Total take, $70,000 for maybe an average a year’s work.
Same $70,000 if you self-publish and sell just the same 10,000 ebooks for $10 at 70%. But you still own the paper volume rights, and anything you can get for them is gravy.
A successful mid-list novel published in the traditional manner won’t make a writer rich but it will at least for a year elevate you into the dwindling middle class, ditto for just the ebook sales.
But divide that by two and you get the 5000 hardcover sales which is the average brute reality for the majority of paper novels these days and 5000 ebook sales which seems like blue sky at the moment. Total, $35,000 for a novel’s first year take, at which level a writer does need advances to keep going without a day job.
So the superstars would lose money by swallowing the publishers’ deal-breaking demand for 75% of ebook proceeds instead of self-publishing, and the paper publishers lose the top of the best-seller list unless they either raise the already onerous advances to the superstars, or up their percentages of the ebook take to make themselves attractive again. The top stars have them by the shriveling family jewels.
At the bottom end, the publishers still have the literary proletariat by the gonads, it’s accept the greedy ebook rights clause in the contract, or no contract. No advance, no deal, if you don’t like it, tough shit, it will be, and you’ll be in it.
So what else is new? It’s always been that way, and it always will be in the lower levels of the minor leagues. That’s why it’s the minor leagues. But it’s also why it can only be a minor profit center for any major publisher virtually by definition. The true existential question resides in what happens to what is presently called the “mid-list” when the major best-selling authors are lost to the traditional publishers.
The traditional publishing industry will shrink and its publishers will have to survive on so-called mid-list books, and may be able to if they play their cards realistically. “Mid-list” has come to mean anything not aimed at the best-seller list, but I’m using it to mean books that can sell something like 10,000 to 20,000 hardcovers and ebooks combined, books without the hope of even the lower end any best seller list, but that are profitable and can earn out large enough advances to keep the authors in the middle class by writing full time.
These are the writers the old line publishers will need to keep if they are to retain commercial relevance, and these writers and their books are going be their future if they are to have one. These writers can easily self-publish too, but the down and dirty economic reality being what it is, most of us are not usually in an economic position to trade away up-front money for higher royalties later.
So there is a mutual self-interest here, and this is where economic justice becomes pragmatic. In the real world to come, the old line publishers will not be able to afford to keep successful mid-list writers away from ebook self-publishing with bigger advances, since times are already tough and tight-fisted as it is on the balance sheets as the old order collapses.
So the old-line publishers must offer the writers they need to retain a more just percentage of the ebook proceeds. 50% would be a nice symbol of true partnership in the trenches.
50% would raise up the banner of communal solidarity to replace 25%’s Jolly Roger of the publishers. The writers reduce their share of what would be their 70% of ebook sales if they self-published by 20% and cede it to the publishers, the publishers meet them more or less in the middle by cutting their share of ebook money by 25%, but retain the rights to the title as long as it is still really selling some minimum number of copies a year in paper or ebook form.
In return for which they front advances and remember what the job of being a publisher once was and of necessity return to doing it. Time was, publishing was an artisanal enterprise, and while editors might have seldom been overweeningly dominant, they weren’t as subservient to BookScan numbers, publishing committees, and the sacred bottom line as they are now.
The work had an esthetic literary end to too, editors had a lot more to say about what their houses should acquire, a lot more freedom to follow their instincts and tastes, and at the literary and even practical nuts and bolts level, were teachers, and could be artistic collaborators.
The business level had always been a Darwinian arena but over the last decade or two, it devolved into a Catch-22 situation, where the big best sellers who least needed it got most of the advertising and pr money, and the mid-list which needed it most got bupkis. This made a kind of ruthless economic sense when publishers owned the rights to the best sellers, but when ebooks turn the authors thereof into their own free-standing corporations dealing directly with point of sale, that business model is gone with the electronic wind.
So the old line publishers that survive are going to live and die with what is now the mid-list because it will have to become their major profit center when authors of the top end best sellers go into business for themselves, and ditto literary agents because the best seller authors will do better hiring lawyers, pr services, and computer geeks at fixed prices than if they were paying 15% commission on their grosses.
The good news is that the same electronic revolution that will lose such publishers their superstars, upon whose titles most of their advertising and promotion budget was spent because there was no way to buy national advertising for anything else that made economic sense, now can, and must, spread it around more widely via the online media, where you can get real national coverage at affordable expense for good mid-list titles.
This is not the worst case scenario for the traditional publishing industry, this is the best case scenario. It survives by nurturing commercially viable non-best sellers, and giving the writers thereof a more just ebook deal:
50% of all ebook proceeds, advances up front as before, and some sales floor under which ebook publication no longer counts as “in print.” And who knows, some writers who come up to best sellerdom through this more just system might just feel the sense of loyalty presently in short supply between writers and publishers and stick around for the paper volume rights at least.
This is the business model publishers, writers, their agents, and writers’ organizations should be seeking to establish out of enlightened pragmatic communal self-interest.
Those who adapt survive. Those who don’t could find themselves facing the worst case scenario:
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple can easily afford to pay 70% of ebook cover prices to any writer who wants to self-publish because it costs them exactly nothing to garner their 30%--no publisher’s cut, no shipping expenses, no returns, no acquisition costs. Money for nothing and the product they’re selling is free.
What if one or all of them and maybe even Google later decided to pay advances on ebooks selected to be featured in some kind of top list on their sites, competing with the traditional publishers dollar for dollar on all professional levels, while continuing to pay 70% royalties on ebook sales and offering to sell print on demand editions with traditional volume royalties?
Why they would become publishers themselves, now wouldn’t they? Publishers with a new business model that would either force traditional publishers to give up ebook rights entirely on anything worth publishing at all or out of existence completely along with the brick and mortar bookstore chains already reduced to one and become collectively a vertical monopoly.
Do traditional publishers really want that to happen?
Do writers?
Think about it.
But not for too long.
The Great Wheel turns, and we turn with it, those who do not will be crushed beneath it. Those who adapt will survive.
end
Friday, March 11, 2011
QUARANTINE--an epub experiment
QUARANTINE
a little ebook experiment with a little ebook
Sometimes you find yourself writing a story that you know you’re going to have trouble publishing in a magazine no matter how well told because it’s too dangerously plausible, besides which it’s way too gross. I enjoy writing in that mode while in the act, and worry about what I’m going to do with the result when the thing is finished.
Curiously enough, while I can’t say that it’s all been quick and easy, sooner or later I’ve always gotten the stories I’ve wanted to see published purchased for magazines or original anthologies, and if I waited long enough for the right karmic moment, it would probably arrive for QUARANTINE too.
But hey, it had bounced from a finger in the face first look to The New Yorker, down the steps of major sf magazines to the penny a word sub basement, and to tell truth about it, I wasn’t surprised.
After all, QUARANTINE is the story of a terrorist attack on New York using a genetically engineered virus that spreads ambiently and gives the entire population of Manhattan Island, tourists and all, uncontrollable diarrhea. Worse still, this isn’t surrealism or satire, the biotech is all too plausible, and uh, this is what it would be like, like it or not, folks.
No way around it, shitting is a major determinative factor in QUARANTINE. No doubt that this sort of ruthless non-violent attack would not be a cit-com custard pie, but really rubbing our faces in it.
Be that all as it may, from experience I was certain that there were readers who enjoyed this sort of stuff, and sooner or later the right ass would be placed in the right editorial chair. But it might be quite a bit later, by which time magazine fiction in any medium might have dwindled beyond the event horizon.
And as you may have noticed if you care about such matters at all, the magazine publication of short fiction in general is more than halfway to the tarpits already. In the wider world, with the exception of weekly short stories in The New Yorker, there’s already not much left beyond “little magazines” that tend to pay in author’s copies or not at all. Not that long ago, speculative fiction magazines were the proud last bastion of the Anglophone short story, but there are less than 50 issues a year of such “major” sf magazines left, and “major” these days is less than 30,000 a month, and what is peeking out of the Cretaceous undergrowth are idealistic online magazines yet to evolve dynamically viable business models.
But we are well into the ebook revolution evolution now, and a business model which adapts to it can maybe allow the short story to live long and the authors’ thereof to prosper, after all.
Quien sabe?
I’ve made backlist novel titles and even a couple of original collections available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as ebooks, and so am familiar with the deal and its numbers. You can set your own prices, but they can’t be lower than $2.99. That’s not a high price for a novelette, about the cost of two lousy beers or one good one in the store. And the writer gets 70%. Try to get a royalty rate like that with a traditional paperbound publisher!
So here’s the little experiment:
As in the macrocosm of the novel, so perhaps a cozy microcosm for the short story, a sweet little literary ecological niche.
I’ve put QUARANTINE, a 9000 word novelette on sale as epub original for sale on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/QUARANTINE-ebook/dp/B004RHB5VU/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1299861471&sr=1-19) and Barnes & Noble (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/QUARANTINE/Norman-Spinrad/e/2940012183972/?itm=2&USRI=Norman+Spinrad ), pricing it at $3 even to make the calculations something easy to do in my head.
At $3 an ebook, my cut is is $2.10 a download. So even 500 sales would net me about $1000, which would already be more than all but a couple three remaining magazines would pay for a story, besides which it can remain available permanently rather than whisked off the stands in 30 days inside a magazine issue.
That’s the business end. A magazine with a circulation of less than 1000 copies is a dead duck, but if a writer sells 1000 copies of a short story for 3 bucks each, it’s $2000, and if you could keep even that level up regularly, it becomes once more possible to make some sort of living writing short fiction exclusively.
The literary payoff for writers and readers and the relationship between them would be freedom to write whatever you wanted to as long as 1000 people were willing to pay 3 bucks to read it for writers, and freedom of choice for readers.
In the music market these days, listeners are buying more and more individual songs and fewer and fewer albums. So why not short stories?
QUARANTINE would seem to be the perfect experimental guinea pig. Certain to gross out, disgust, and/or outrage a far greater percentage of middle of the bell-shaped curve of a mass audience, but just the sort of thing that arouses pleasure for the very same reason in a certain niche readership.
The question this experiment seeks to answer is how many readers is that? If this can work for something like QUARANTINE, it can work for all sorts of fiction by all sorts if writers, and if it does, the short story could teleport itself from condition terminal into an unexpected golden age.
Will it?
Quien sabe?
That’s why this is an experiment.
a little ebook experiment with a little ebook
Sometimes you find yourself writing a story that you know you’re going to have trouble publishing in a magazine no matter how well told because it’s too dangerously plausible, besides which it’s way too gross. I enjoy writing in that mode while in the act, and worry about what I’m going to do with the result when the thing is finished.
Curiously enough, while I can’t say that it’s all been quick and easy, sooner or later I’ve always gotten the stories I’ve wanted to see published purchased for magazines or original anthologies, and if I waited long enough for the right karmic moment, it would probably arrive for QUARANTINE too.
But hey, it had bounced from a finger in the face first look to The New Yorker, down the steps of major sf magazines to the penny a word sub basement, and to tell truth about it, I wasn’t surprised.
After all, QUARANTINE is the story of a terrorist attack on New York using a genetically engineered virus that spreads ambiently and gives the entire population of Manhattan Island, tourists and all, uncontrollable diarrhea. Worse still, this isn’t surrealism or satire, the biotech is all too plausible, and uh, this is what it would be like, like it or not, folks.
No way around it, shitting is a major determinative factor in QUARANTINE. No doubt that this sort of ruthless non-violent attack would not be a cit-com custard pie, but really rubbing our faces in it.
Be that all as it may, from experience I was certain that there were readers who enjoyed this sort of stuff, and sooner or later the right ass would be placed in the right editorial chair. But it might be quite a bit later, by which time magazine fiction in any medium might have dwindled beyond the event horizon.
And as you may have noticed if you care about such matters at all, the magazine publication of short fiction in general is more than halfway to the tarpits already. In the wider world, with the exception of weekly short stories in The New Yorker, there’s already not much left beyond “little magazines” that tend to pay in author’s copies or not at all. Not that long ago, speculative fiction magazines were the proud last bastion of the Anglophone short story, but there are less than 50 issues a year of such “major” sf magazines left, and “major” these days is less than 30,000 a month, and what is peeking out of the Cretaceous undergrowth are idealistic online magazines yet to evolve dynamically viable business models.
But we are well into the ebook revolution evolution now, and a business model which adapts to it can maybe allow the short story to live long and the authors’ thereof to prosper, after all.
Quien sabe?
I’ve made backlist novel titles and even a couple of original collections available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as ebooks, and so am familiar with the deal and its numbers. You can set your own prices, but they can’t be lower than $2.99. That’s not a high price for a novelette, about the cost of two lousy beers or one good one in the store. And the writer gets 70%. Try to get a royalty rate like that with a traditional paperbound publisher!
So here’s the little experiment:
As in the macrocosm of the novel, so perhaps a cozy microcosm for the short story, a sweet little literary ecological niche.
I’ve put QUARANTINE, a 9000 word novelette on sale as epub original for sale on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/QUARANTINE-ebook/dp/B004RHB5VU/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1299861471&sr=1-19) and Barnes & Noble (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/QUARANTINE/Norman-Spinrad/e/2940012183972/?itm=2&USRI=Norman+Spinrad ), pricing it at $3 even to make the calculations something easy to do in my head.
At $3 an ebook, my cut is is $2.10 a download. So even 500 sales would net me about $1000, which would already be more than all but a couple three remaining magazines would pay for a story, besides which it can remain available permanently rather than whisked off the stands in 30 days inside a magazine issue.
That’s the business end. A magazine with a circulation of less than 1000 copies is a dead duck, but if a writer sells 1000 copies of a short story for 3 bucks each, it’s $2000, and if you could keep even that level up regularly, it becomes once more possible to make some sort of living writing short fiction exclusively.
The literary payoff for writers and readers and the relationship between them would be freedom to write whatever you wanted to as long as 1000 people were willing to pay 3 bucks to read it for writers, and freedom of choice for readers.
In the music market these days, listeners are buying more and more individual songs and fewer and fewer albums. So why not short stories?
QUARANTINE would seem to be the perfect experimental guinea pig. Certain to gross out, disgust, and/or outrage a far greater percentage of middle of the bell-shaped curve of a mass audience, but just the sort of thing that arouses pleasure for the very same reason in a certain niche readership.
The question this experiment seeks to answer is how many readers is that? If this can work for something like QUARANTINE, it can work for all sorts of fiction by all sorts if writers, and if it does, the short story could teleport itself from condition terminal into an unexpected golden age.
Will it?
Quien sabe?
That’s why this is an experiment.
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