This is the fourth blog post in a shortish series in which I analyse an article written by David Rozansky, publisher of Flying Pen Press (discussed here at AbsoluteWrite), regarding literary agent Andrew Wylie’s decision to set up his own publishing house, and license e-book rights to some of his clients’ works exclusively to Amazon. Mr Rozansky’s piece first appeared here, and my other blog posts in this series are here: part one, part two and part three.
I shall now hand you over to Mr Rozansky, who we meet in full flood. Remember that I’ve chopped his original article into a few episodes, so he is bound to sound just a little disjointed.
They Had It Coming [continued]
We writers, who have screamed from the street with fist held high, “I’m mad as hell, and I am not going to take it anymore!”, have started our own publishing companies, with a focus on serving writers, not on serving shareholders. And now we stand laughing as the giant publishers desperately try to save themselves from eventual obsolescence by stepping up their bully ways.
The focus of your publishing company is not on serving writers: it’s on avoiding any risk to yourself as a publisher, and on shifting all that risk onto your writers, editors and designers. And even if your focus were on writers, that’s not what real publishing is about: like every other business it focuses on its customers—the readers. Only vanity presses focus on writers because writers are their customers. And big publishers aren’t bullying their way out of obsolescence: they’re adapting, and changing, and funding research, much as they always have done. This is another dose of your ill-informed opinion, slathered with more rhetoric.
This business of publishing has always been about getting the words of the writer to the eyes of the reader. Thus, it is only natural that authors would seek out the easiest form of publishing that most efficiently reaches the reader.
That’s a fallacious argument. Turn it into a syllogism and you’ll see. And “easiest” very rarely equals “best”—for writers, publishers or readers.
When authors can give their material directly to readers via blogs, internet and electronic books, they quickly adapt such formats. That it is more profitable for the authors to do so is just an added bonus.
More profitable than what? Print books? But it isn’t. Blogs rarely make a lot of money; they’re more usually a promotional tool for a book rather than its primary income stream. And writers have been able to produce blogs and e-books for years: neither facility has significantly changed publishing, nor have they had much of an impact on print sales.
Bookstores will also suffer obsolescence. In the 1970s, bookstores insisted books be returnable to the publishers. And it became the industry standard.
Your history is off: bookshops didn’t insist on returns, the system was pioneered by publisher Ian Ballantine (a lovely man: I met him just once) in the early half of the twentieth century in an effort to boost sales in an austere time. The whole system of returns was already a long-standing industry standard by the 1970s. I think it could do with reworking, but that’s not pertinent to this discussion.
But offering low-price, narrow-margin products universally on a return basis is very risky, and very expensive. The bookstores squeezed the publishers, and the publishers had no one else to squeeze in return other than the authors.
Publishers go to great lengths to ensure that they’ve got their pricings right, and to take into account the delays involved in getting paid for the books they publish and sell. And if you think that the writers have taken all the cost-cutting measures on their shoulders alone you’re wrong: have you not read about industry redundancies? Publishers have negotiated cheaper print-runs, lower freelance rates with editors and designers, tighter discount structures with their distributors and sales teams and so on. Many writers are being paid lower advances (although so much there depends on their agents): but their royalty rates remain pretty much the same.
Despite what most authors say about supporting independent bookstores, the truth is, given the choice between selling books on a returnable basis through bookstores or selling directly to the reader at no cost or risk, authors will serve the customer directly. After all, the reader is not the bookstore’s customer, the reader is the author’s customer.
The issue of supporting independent bookshops and (presumably) favouring them over chain bookshops has nothing to do with whether writers should sell to bookshops or direct to their readers. This is another fallacious argument. Nor does it have anything to do with returns, which have little to do with a writer’s cost or risk when selling direct to readers.
As for whether or not the reader is the customer of the bookshop or the writer, well, it depends on where the reader buys the book from. According to the UK’s Sale Of Goods Act the sales contract is between the customer and the seller, not the creator of the goods concerned. I’ve not checked US legislation but suggest that you might want to in your role of publisher.
The bookstore is merely an intermediary, one that has become irrelevant in the author-reader relationship.
Last time I was in Waterstones there was a heck of a lot of people standing in line, waiting to take part in that irrelevant act.
And Amazon is in no better shape. While Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Sony and Apple all try to control access to ebooks, the truth is, ebooks are not controllable by device. The open Internet trumps them all.
Fallacy again. Amazon is doing well: it’s dominating the market and, last time I looked, making a profit. DRM is a separate issue from Amazon’s commercial success or otherwise; hackers will almost always be able to defeat DRM protocols eventually, but reading a Kindle e-book on the iPad is pretty dire, because of the errors in formatting which result even with the Kindle-for-iPadd app, so I do have my doubts about the quality of the hacked books you seem to be supporting; and who is this mysterious Open Internet which is somehow trumping everyone? (And you do know what trumping is slang for, right? Because I couldn’t read your comment without sniggering. Shame on me.)
The Internet, where you are reading this article, where you read thousands of articles, stories, and websites, millions of words, and watch an ungodly amount of video—the INTERNET!
You’re assuming that everyone uses the internet in the same way that you do. They don’t. Most people don’t look to the internet for all their entertainment, many people don’t buy things online, and most people don’t yet read electronic books.
Already, the Internet is the easiest tool for authors to reach readers. Almost all serious authors write blogs.
No, books are the easiest way for writers to reach their readers. And despite the huge numbers of blogs and websites there are out there, relatively few writers write blogs, regardless of how serious they are about their craft: most of them are far too busy writing their books. If you think I’m wrong, please put me right and provide me with your source for this statement. Unless, of course, it’s just supposition on your part.
As more devices can access the Internet in more places, and more people become comfortable with the data cloud, books on Internet will become the norm. No one will be able to control this distribution, not even Amazon with its “shocking” exclusionary contract with The Wylie Agency. Soon, when you want to read a book, you will simply enter the title or the author’s name in a search engine or click on a link on some blog somewhere, and presto, the book appears on your favorite browser.
You mean we’ll be able to download e-books with the click of a mouse? But we can already do that. What’s so revolutionary about it? And if no one is “control[ling] this distribution” then who will be accountable, and how is it going to happen?
If there is no control, there can be no accounting. Which means that no one will know how many books have been sold, if they’ve been paid for or given away, or if they’ve been pirated and distributed illegally. And if that happens, how will writers get fair recompense for their writing?
You’ll be glad to know that we’re nearly there. The next article in this series will be the last, and will appear on September 20. Thank you for sticking with it for so very long.
Hmm, yes, that first quotation is one of the things that really REALLY winds me up about many “indie” presses. What bugs me as a literary type (and I know you’ll disagree with the specifics, but the general point holds), and what I want to address by setting up my own small press, and a collective, is that I don’t think READERS are well-served by the current set-up. I’m so glad you put it the way you did – that’s exactly it -publishing is a business like any other, and as such it’s customers – readers – should come first. It’s not only good etiquette, but basic business sense when contemplating a new venture to ask, “can I give readers something that’s great, that they’ll want, and that they can’t get elsewhere?”
I do think his remarks on bookstores are a little muddle-headed, and I think I agree with what he’s actually saying, but I couldn’t really work it out. I do think chain bookstores are on the way out – I’v said it since May last year when I started yabbering on about the future of publishing. I have no stats, but I have a very strong intuition backed up with a basic sense of how general business is demerging and specialising, but I’m happy to be laughed at for being wrong as long as I’m acknowledged if I’m right – I certainly wouldn’t pontificate it as fact though. As for distribution – I deal in niches so I can’t really comment on David’s position (I don’t really understand it, I have to say, which reflects badly on one of us). I think in my niches it makes real sense to control distribution through a small number of specialist retailers (like my favourite indie bookstore owner, I really don’t thik being independent is a reason to support a bookstore – I think being superb is the best reason to support one) – that way both the writer and the store benefit from the arrangement. I *think* David’s model isn’t a niche one (I can’t tell – my main issue with Flying Pen is it’s a big sprawling thing that doesn’t really have any confidence what it is – and confidence in one’s identity, and preparedness to say “no” to offers to deviate from its core [whereas i thik FPP is too eager to please] is essential for any business), but is one that seeks to maximise targetted impulse buys, which is how much mainstream fiction is sold. But for that to work you need to be on the front page of websites, on the tables of bookstores, by the counters at checkouts – places where your book will catch the eye of browsers – and that takes cash, and is something I think mainstream publishers still do WAY better than small or self-publishers can do. We just can’t compete for the impulse market, so we HAVE to focus on ncihes – whcih means the kind of generalised rhetoric David uses is irrelevant. Gah, it’s all so muddle-headed it makes me frustrated because it gives those of us who want to do it righ a bad name – or rather it means we have to fight harder to get a good name.
David said: This business of publishing has always been about getting the words of the writer to the eyes of the reader. Thus, it is only natural that authors would seek out the easiest form of publishing that most efficiently reaches the reader.
This statement is half true. It is about getting books into the hands of readers, however, David’s arguments on how that can be best attained is flawed. A POD scenario isn’t geared to getting books out to the marketplace in an efficient manner because they lack distribution.
He suggests that the internet is that distribution outlet, and he’s woefully wrong because it lacks efficiency. There is no way that I can publish, say, 12 books a year and depend on the internet to create demand because there is no control. Bookstores, libraries, and the online outlets like Amazon are centralized places where people can buy our books.
That said, I do wonder about the future of bookstores. While at the Alaska Writer’s con, I sat on a panel with my colleagues, and one agent said that bookstores wouldn’t be around in the future. Obviously, we have no idea whether that’s true or not, but the industry does seem to be moving in an electronic direction that would make bookstores obsolete.
I hope we’re wrong. But nothing in this world remains the same except death and being taxed to death, and it’s our job (big and small publishers) to evolve. David may be woefully wrong right now because he hasn’t the proof to back up his claims. But at some point in the future, this could very well be the case. I only hope the evolutionary process won’t compromise quality.
@ Lynn Price:
I have a feeling that, such is the way with booms of new business models, initially quality will be compromised greatly but very very quickly the dead wood will be weeded out and new gatekeeping doyens, which may or may not be form the same places they are now, will emerge as readers scrabble for quality. It’s like dot.coms where 95% of them went bust but the ones that survived were by and large pretty solid. So I don’t think signs of short-term quality leakage should be taken as signs of gloom when they come – they could be the early stages of two very different outcomes
Thank you again for the discussion. I apologize for taking so long to respond to your rebuttal, as it is now trade show season here in the States and we have several new titles we are offering. It’s been very busy, as it always gets in September and October.
I’ve never dodged the fact that small presses like Flying Pen Press have to shift the risk to the writer, in return for greater royalty to the writer. We just don’t have the big cash barrels and the mighty legal cannons to fight the risks involved. It’s always been that way.
But it is clear that the readers are not the publisher’s customers, they are the writers. The publishers serve the writers, in that they help them reach the writer’s customers. While the focus is always on readers, it does so with the knowledge that the reader—the end customer—is only interested in buying the writers’ works, not the publisher’s works or the booksellers’ works or the agents’ efforts.
Thus, if the writer walks away from the publisher relationship, she takes her readers with her, and the publisher is left without anything to sell. Thus, the publisher serves the writer, ultimately. And many writers are leaving the publisher-author relationship behind for a better relationship with their readers.
Small presses, even without advances, are closer to the authors. We provide more time to confer with authors on the packaging and editing of their books, we discuss the marketing plans and merge our plans much more closely with the authors’ marketing plans and desires. And we are more attached to the authors’ career plans than a larger publisher.
But that pales in comparison to a self-published author who has direct control of the marketing, packaging, editing, and has direct contact with readers. With the nature of printing, packaging, editing and distribution becoming rather simple and cheap, it is only natural that more writers will pursue this path, with more rewards in the form of profits.
Yes, “easiest” and “best” are not synonymous. However, when “easiest” produces results that are as good as “best,” then “easiest” wins out over “not as easy.” The Kindle and the entire ebook and print-on-demand process have closed the gap considerably, such that the larger publishers are actually using the “easiest” methods that self-published authors have already exploited.
According to Publishers Weekly, the average “professional author” in the U.S. makes roughly $5,000 a year, according to a survey. The survey defined “professional” as someone who works at the task at least eight hours a day as his primary means of making a living.
Contrast that to what PW said “professional bloggers” make a year: On average, they earn more than $116,000 per year.
I was certainly critical of those numbers, but as I look at professional bloggers and the number of ads and products they sell, the number of followers they have and the resulting speaking tours, mailing lists and other services that such a large following brings, I think it is not a stretch. Apply yourself to blogging and it will pay off.
There are a number of blogs that earn more than $1 million for their owners.
I do wish I could remember when that was published by PW, but alas, it did not occur to me at the time to record the link. The numbers are tough to swallow, and the research I am doing now finds a Technorati article that says the number is more like $75,000 a year for “dedicated bloggers who have more than 100,000 followers,” but when you mix in all bloggers (amateurs and casual bloggers, and bloggers with smaller audiences), the average sinks to $5,000 profit on average, on about $6,000 average revenue. The Technorati article link is http://technorati.com/blogging/article/day-4-blogging-for-profit/
I like where the article points out that you European bloggers earn 75% more than U.S. bloggers.
So, ultimately, one must ask, is it easier to acquire 100,000 readers to your blog, or sell a like number of books through a publisher? The average sales run of a print book is only four hundred, and the Technorati article points out that the bloggers spend on average $1,800 on their blogs and associated sales calls. The cost to launch a 100,000-copy campaign is six figures just for the printing.
It is these figures that make me state: Blogging is more profitable than writing for printed books. Unless, of course, we discuss ebooks, which have different production, distribution and marketing channels.
While you can mark Ballantine as the first to offer returnable copies, booksellers are unanimous that they won’t carry a title unless it is returnable. Ballantine was not the inventor of the concept, he was the first to bow to the pressure and seize the initiative.
As to “returnable” status for all titles not being pertinent, I have to differ. They are most certainly relevant. Returns cost money to process, both for the bookseller and the publisher. Returns are not sold as easily, because the returned book is now in inventory long after the initial marketing push. All too often, the publishers opt for destroy and return (strippable covers) or remaindering, both of which effectively write off the printing cost of a book and all the associated shipping and warehousing costs.
But ebooks do not and cannot be returned. There is nothing there to return. Even when an ebook is refunded for some reason, there is no restocking cost of a product that once also had a production and storage cost, so nothing is lost. Because of this model, authors are more apt to bypass publishers and booksellers and produce ebooks, because there is no need to retain a return allowance or risk upstart capital. “Straight to Kindle” has become the publishing choice of many successful authors.
When you consider that inventory risk is the greatest of all risks a publisher (or self-published author) can face, the elimination of that risk is a huge factor in making a publication decision. Since you seem to say that your greatest grievance is with the transfer of risk to authors, I don’t understand how you can say that inventory risk of returns is not pertinent. No other factor in publishing is more risky.
Yes, the publishers do benefit from being large when it comes to production, and other savings in the form of mass purchase power. I won’t deny that. But over the years, those costs have increased even for them, and yet the market is flooded with good books, so the pressure is on to keep cover prices low. Thus, a shrinking margin. The reduction in advances is a result. And there has been more creative accounting to reduce the actual royalties. The “allowances for returns” is one such tactic, which brings us back to returns being pertinent to this discussion.
Compared with ebook, however, a medium that costs nothing to produce, and an equal amount to edit, and nothing to distribute (unless you work through a middleman like Amazon, which is taking a smaller cut than bookstores do on print titles), and the royalties are paid immediately (or, in Amazon’s case, every two weeks) without slippery accounting, the Kindle route again seems favorable.
The narrowed margin also applies pressure on authors to do more of their own self-promotion, as only the authors with the largest platforms can promise the larger sales figures that counter the margin pressures. Yet authors are not getting paid more for this work. As you say, advances are decreasing, and royalty rates have not changed. Thus, the authors are earning less after subtracting their publicity and marketing costs, and as print-book sales overall are declining, the final tally on income is indeed less.
Regardless of the legal definitions in the UK (which are notoriously circumspect), the truth is, the reader pays a certain amount of money to read what the writer has written, be it through a public library, a newspaper serial excerpt, or a bookstore, or online. If the author stops producing, the customer stops buying. That the customers have many other authors to select from when that happens serves the bookstores and the publishers; readers need to read and will continue to read relentlessly. But if an author changes to a different format or distribution system, the customers are now showing a willingness to follow them into the electronic realm. The decline of the newspaper and the magazine is evidence of that; to bloggers like you and I who rely on readers in the electronic realm, this is no great surprise.
Is the line at Waterstones really holding up? I see that their sales figures have been declining rapidly since Summer 2009. (http://investing.thisismoney.co.uk/security.cgi)
The sales graph is almost the exact reverse of the Kindle book sales figures.
But when I say, Amazon is in no better shape, I did not mean they were currently suffering financially. I meant, as I said, that Amazon is trying to control ebooks to its devices. This will only fail, as ebooks will become merely electronic files that can be read on any internet-accessible device. People will find ways to read a Kindle file regardless of device, and the Kindle will not be able to hold its market if Amazon cannot engineer it to be a universal reading device, and given the competition that has heated up to produce just such a device, it is not likely to have the cheapest, best or fastest device on the market. But Amazon, despite its efforts, cannot maintain a lock on how ebooks are sold. It is too easy to sell ebooks; buying an ebook will require only a link to some website.
You don’t believe in the open Internet? And yet, you publish your blog on an open platform. You don’t really run your own proprietary software on your own Internet server, do you? The entire Internet is open, and there are plenty of sites that are now offering YouTube-like access to ebooks.
I agree that many people are not using the internet. But I also know that Amazon is, by far, the greatest font of book sales. People go online to get their books. People go online to do research, to read word after word after word, far more than is read in print. To dismiss the internet is rather silly in this day and age. And if an author can reach internet readers at only a hundredth of the cost of reaching them in the inefficient print world, one begins not to miss the non-internet readers. They will hear about the book eventually, and they will get it any way they can if they want it.
You seem set against the value of blogging to authors. Yet every publisher is saying, authors need to blog to reach their readers. I also find that many agents state this. As well as successful writers. If blogs are as you say, that they are not worthy of an author’s time, then I can point to many an author that has not blogged who has had a marketing push behind the book and the book was worthy that failed. If you don’t attract your fans somehow to your writing, they won’t come. No amount of advertising and sales representation can make that happen. And I confirm that with my own experience with Flying Pen Press. Only the blogging authors ever succeed.
Of course, it is entirely possible to put one’s writing up on a blog, such that blogging takes up no extra time other than set up.
When there is no control, there is no accounting. I agree with that. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Which means that authors are going to find new ways to monetize their writing. And in fact, authors are. They are discovering new ways that publishers cannot duplicate, ways that are more valuable than royalties. The professional bloggers have certainly figured out how to do that, and it is no surprise that many new authors are bloggers who have figured out how to outperform the publishing world’s marketing processes.
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Response to comments:
Dan Halloway: I agree that the impulse-buying nature of readers is not best served by the internet, which is driven by search engines and links. However, impulse-buying pales in comparison to word-of-mouth recommendations, and the internet and its globally social nature, accelerates this type of promotion by several magnitudes. Whereas a recommendation by a friend once reached one, maybe two pairs of ears for a short period of time, not it reaches thousands of eyes for an indefinitely period of time.
Impulse buys will still be the domain of supermarkets and big box stores. Bookstores cannot continue to retain the square footage required.
If your niche is best served through a few select bookstores, that’s great. I applaud you. However, keep this in mind: can your niche support those bookstores, or will they be forced to follow more general topics and mainstream fiction to stay alive? It’s a serious issue as the failure rate of indy bookstores is staggering (I received another bankruptcy notice from a store again yesterday).
Yes, Flying Pen Press has a wide focus. In some ways it would be more efficient to focus on a single niche or two. But it also limits growth. We, like larger publishers, develop imprints to focus on each market sector. We are strong in Science Fiction, because that is an early niche we moved upon, and we are opening other imprints carefully. Our focus is on platforms that we can serve repeatedly with different titles. Crowdsourcing a lot of the work allows us to focus on several at once, a specific part of our growth plan.
Lynn Price: Well, we’ve had this argument before. POD via Lightning Source gets books in wider distribution than the shipping of physical books does through mass production. Just this Friday, Lightning Source released the news of a new facility being built in Australia to serve the Asian Pacific market. With facilities in France, England, and two in the U.S., and now Australia, and all of them tied in to the distribution system of the world’s major wholesalers for distribution to all bookstores and Amazon customers, distribution has been global and it’s been flawless. It happens naturally. Bookstores order the POD book from a wholesaler such as Ingram, and in less time than it takes Ingram to find a book in the warehouse, the POD book is in the Ingram box. No fuss, no muss, no sales reps, no distributor’s markups, no problems taking back the returns. This is all simply the next wave in Manufacturing-on-Demand processes and Just-in-Time distribution, the standard that now exists in most all sectors of commerce.
You are correct, this will shift the slush pile from the editors’ desks to the reading public at large. But not to fear. This is already an issue on Amazon. How do we find the good books on Amazon? Reviews, sales ranking, and links, and finally, sampling a few pages. It has been a very efficient vetting system, one that many booksellers use to determine if a book is worth stocking in their own store.
At Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Trade Show this last weekend, I overheard a Publishers Weekly reporter and a Shelf Awareness reporter saying the exact same thing, that the demise of the bookstore is in sight.
–David Rozansky
Publisher, Flying Pen Press
http://FlyingPenPress.com
[Edited only to add paragraph breaks, because I struggled to read this long response without them. --Jane.]
David Rozansky wrote:
No problem, David. It’s book fair season here too. Are you going to Frankfurt next week?
Flying Pen Press might have to shift the risk to the writer, but most small presses don’t. Look at Lynn Price’s Behler Publications; look at Snowbooks and Myrmidon in the UK; they’ve all published fabulous books without putting their writers in the front line. And the need to have legal insurance is completely separate to your decision to effectively make writers and editors the load-bearers in your publishing house.
Sorry, David, but this is such an important point that I don’t think it’s worth debating with you any further. If you can’t see how this discredits both you and Flying Pen Press then it’s clear to me that you have no idea how publishing really works, or how reputable publishers work.
I’ve asked you to provide sources to several of your more outrageous claims in some of the other posts in this series: I’d be grateful if you would. Otherwise we’ll all have to assume you can’t.
Yes, Amazon is profitable *now*, but what seems to have tipped it out of the red is the sale of secondhand books in its Marketplace, not its core business.