Sorting Hat: good and bad of digital and self-publishing

Okay, I’ve been getting knocked on the head (a bit) concerning my rant on the failure that is self-publishing, ebooks, and digital presses. So I posted on sffworld.com to get some practical advice on the LEGITIMATE publishing industry.

ME: My two MS’s (over 100k words, I admit) were reviewed by editors in the industry that were friends of a college prof of mine (legitimately published in non-fiction) and I was told that I had talent, I work hard, but I’m not marketable. Two years later an Arizonan airhead was paid $750k for a sparkling Mormonpire series. I’m working on a third MS, so should I just wait until the idiotic trends are done, and agents are more willing to give a chance to people who LIKE to research and work?

SHEVDON: Bear in mind, rubym3575, that this is not a competition. There are no winners and losers and just because someone in Arizona gets paid a lot of money does not mean you are on the side-lines.

Think positively about this. If a whole new generation of teenagers, particularly girls, are introduced to speculative fiction, then that means they will be looking for something to read when they have finished the Arizonan’s masterwork. Perhaps your story, your idea, will be what they are searching for?

You cannot change what is already written and already published. You can only change what you write and make that the best that it can be. You can learn, improve and develop so that your writing stands out as being imaginative, rich and deep. Then your writing will get published because it is superb, and not because it is better or worse than someone else’s.

Do you really want to be published as the successor of someone else’s success?

I hear what you’re saying Shevdon, but I was raised to believe that there are winners and losers in life. The winners get thousands of dollars in advances and royalties and are able to buy the house, the car, buy jewelry, expand their personal libraries, get insured, pay bills and debts with not a care in the world because they know they have the money, and the world in the palm of their hand. Also, Writer Beware does (time and again) state that getting published LEGITIMATELY is a HIGHLY competitive industry. So you have a heart, but that’s where liberalism fails and I couldn’t help but pick up the stench of self-published self-deluded dolt.

Well Shevdon turns out to be Mike Shevdon of Bedfordshire, UK and is the author of Sixty-One Nails and its sequel The Road to Bedlam that will soon be out here across the pond in September. His publisher, Angry Robot Books, is an “imprint” of HarperCollins. Now when I went to the site it looked like a glorified blog, and as it turns out it’s set up here on wordpress. Their mission statement goes thusly:

Angry Robot ™ is a new global publishing imprint. Our mission, quite simply, is to publish the best in brand new genre fiction – SF, F and WTF?!

Traditional SF and fantasy has been ploughing an entertaining furrow for many decades, but to our way of thinking much of it is missing a trick. To the new generations of readers reared on Dr Who and Battlestar Galactica, graphic novels and Gears of War 2, old school can mean staid, stuck in a rut. “Crossover” is increasingly the way forward and you’ll find plenty of it here, without batting an eyelid. New heroes and new settings, or maybe just reinventing the wheel, we’re not fussed – if there’s an energy in a book that gets us jumping up and down, we’re all over it.

We know many readers are madly passionate about their genres. Angry Robot is too. If anything, we’re too passionate. We are fans, given at any moment to break into a lengthy harangue about why book X is a lost classic or author Y really should give it up already. The sheer joy, though, of being able to jump onto a table (only sometimes metaphorically) and tell the world about how bloody great a chosen writer or novel is, is what drives Angry Robot.

Run from the UK but publishing worldwide, Angry Robot’s books will pick from a menu of the following formats:

Physical paperbacks – in all good bookstores, worldwide

Limited run special editions – where demand is high enough, as hardcovers or trades, everyday or leatherbound; keep your collection in matching editions

PoD backlist – when we run out of our early printings, we can now keep copies in print for those who want them, using the latest, very high quality print-on-demand technology

eBooks – downloadable versions of all our titles, across all the main formats including ePub, Kindle and Stanza, alongside their first release anywhere in the world

Downloadable audio – our goal is to release every title we acquire in digital audio format, and we’ll shortly be announcing our first audio initiatives

Well ARB, I couldn’t help but notice that POD parasite there, then again Whorelequin does have DellArte Press to make money off the overdrafted credit cards of the desperately rejected. Mikey boy has seemingly escaped its sticky web if he’s available in brick-and-mortar stores, and I sincerely do hope that your advances and royalties aren’t the pocket change that Lorie O’Clare gets from EC (along with the minute markup she makes on her own).

Now my brother Archer9234 and I have spent hours trying to debunk the bunk that the entertainment industry has become. My beef is publishing, and his is comics (he’s pretty much an expert on it, and I’m trying to get him to audiotape a rant so I can put it up here). Well with the success of Iron Man 2 and the WTF that Jonah Hex was, you can definitely say that the industry is going for a broader audience that doesn’t know jack fuck him in the ass about what they’re watching or reading. I mean John Rambo, Die Hard IV, the X-Men films pretty much says it all: we’ll clean up on the merchandise and hope for the best in ticket sales. JH‘s sountrack was composed by Mastodon (and was kickass) but I’m not buying it, I’m just waiting until someone uploads it. That’s how much I hate the shit (I saw it on bootleg)! JH was a relatively successful DC character, but (like Captain America) H’Wood will do anything for a buck (John Malkovich was pretty great and I say the same for his performance in Eragon, but seriously he must need the money considering he, Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and her husband the prince of Austrian prostitution were caught in the Madoff trap). They dumb down everything and warp plots just to get the Average Joe and Jane interested in the flashy effects, sexy cast, and will (hopefully) buy the T-shirt (or watch, or flamethrower, or vibrator, or cell phone, ad infinitum…).

But it backfires. The Average Joe and Jane don’t even bother because they don’t want to be caught dead with the comic geeks. They also feel intimidated by the lingo and tech. So the only thing that the studios have left are the DVD sales, and with the multiple releases, they’re sure to at least break even (JH budget: $47 million; gross revenue: $10,226,919). Now for publishing I posted in my rant a link to a little discussion as why suck-ass books get published. Well one of the bloggers spelled it out plain as day: BIG BOX STORES. At the end of the 80s the big box store was breeding past their humble Midwest roots (I first heard of Target in 1998 when Katya Gordeyeva was hawking her fragrance) and we had Caldor for a time until it went belly up in ’99. Then Target and Best Buy sprouted like weeds killing off HMV, Virgin Mega (although it dug its own grave opening up so many locations that failed), Circuit City (see Virgin Mega), and Suncoast. Looking for music, books, manga, comics, and movies isn’t fun anymore- especially when you have some toddler moron running into you at full speed and the mother that’s too busy yakking on her phone who doesn’t give a shit. We have BJ’s and Costco’s here in the Big Apple, but Wal-Mart ain’t welcome (that will certainly ring a death knell for local business including the neighborhood mortuary- and ours just closed up shop after 125 years).

Big box stores create big box mentality: I could digest loads of cheap crap! So books were being written for people that don’t read. Keep it stupid and none too moving, or SO moving you drown in molasses (Bridges of Madison County, Endless Love, and Eat Pray Love) that you forget it’s crap. In the 21st century the new form is called self-publishing and digital publishing. One such author of digital crap is Lorie O’Clare. Now I don’t visit her site often, but she puts out a book a month it seems, and I’m not the only one who has critiqued her as shit. She writes mainly for EC but her crap has landed in brick-and-mortar stores for St. Martin’s Press. Now I have her Lunewulf series, Fallen Gods series, Malta Werewolves series, and Sex Slaves series in 4 paperback volumes and the rest ebooks. Now the romantica genre has many problems that I’ve bitched about before. Romantica publishers have screamed they don’t want purple prose, but whether it’s Whorelequin Blaze or some digital ass all I see is purple prose with cursing!

Now this is a sample of O’Clare’s Malta Werewolves 1:

She knew it would never happen. Bruno had no den. His sire and mother had died when he was a

teenager during one of the raids with the humans. He worked in the tobacco factory. She’d known him

since high school, and she and the other females her age often whispered about him when he drove by on

his motorcycle. A powerful alpha, he didn’t run with the other werewolves. At least not that she’d heard.

Any of the runs she’d been allowed to join, he’d never been present. No one knew him that well. But his

incredible good looks, the way he seemed to stalk anyone he approached—every bitch in the pack

wondered what it would be like to be sought out by Bruno Tangaree. But he was the rogue werewolf,

someone all of them knew they could never be seen with. With no den, no history with the pack, her

parents would have put a leash on her if she’d ever even mentioned his name to them. Bruno was a

werewolf to fantasize about. Larger than most, strong with a deadly stare, he frightened and had her

coming in her panties at the same time.

Yet here she was. In his arms. On the ground. His scent smothering her. And that kiss. That kiss almost

dragged her soul right out of her body. His lips were so soft yet his actions so demanding. Her heart

thudded in her throat. Hell, he’d thrown her to the ground and kissed her so aggressively, for a moment

she thought the change would take over.

Remembering his words about her gifts sobered her enough to regain control of her senses. “We

shouldn’t be doing this,” she whispered, barely able to make her voice work.

“We’re going to be doing a lot of this.” He stroked his rough finger down her cheek and then outlined

her collarbone, stretching his fingers around her neck, tightening his grip, and then relaxing it.

No real fuck scene here, but it was puh-lenty purple prosey! Now here’s a scene from the self-published Concubine by Kota Ozembwe:

“Shiao-Shiao,” First Wife whispered, breaking the strained silence. “When you were a little kid, did you ever read stories about demons?”

Shiao-Shiao didn’t know what to make of the question. Warily, she responded, “My mom once read me a story of a prince who fought an evil king. And the evil king was possessed by the demon, which made him stronger than an army, but it also made him evil.”

First Wife turned her head slightly towards Shiao-Shiao. “It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but that works.” First Wife’s voice sounded raw, somehow stripped of its usual polish. “I have always been good at whatever I did. No, that’s not right. I have always been the best at whatever I did. There is something in me that makes me like that- like some supernatural force that doesn’t know how to lose. I make almost as much as Stan, although he is older and male. It’s a killer instinct so to speak, something without mercy. In any competition, I win. Not just win, but WIN, destroy my competition. Do you know that Ver Publishing drove ten other companies out of business last year? And even if there’s no competition I win anyway.”

See the difference? Concubine is a 150-page novella fuck book. It needs editing- quite a bit frankly- but Ozembwe should’ve gotten a contract and should have been in a compilation book. He/She did the research, the structuring and continuity is good overall, all it needs is some grammatical upkeep. O’Clare did NO research on Malta, didn’t tell us why the den was even in Malta, what their problems were, or say anything remotely interesting about Bruno and Renee except that she’s bitchy and gorgeous, and he’s an ass and gorgeous. Oh, and it was 31 pages. So my complaints aren’t sour grapes- they’re real! People need to wake up and get down to their libraries and go cold turkey on the big box books. Prove to them you can think for yourself.

Why Men Don’t Read: How Publishing is Alienating Half the Population

Some startling statistics

Steve Jobs: “People Don’t Read Anymore,” Android Is Going Down

2008 Romance Fiction Industry Stat Report

 

Repetition IS NOT good for the soul pt. III and the author’s earnings

First off I’d like to make a quick clarification, Smeyer isn’t the only writing diva-bitch on the planet. Fanfiction.net’s author list on who’ll take legal action against FF.net and its members should they use their work in fanfiction says it all. Fair Use (with mandatory written disclaimers) are on the fic writer’s side, but according to them, it’s clearly copyright infringement. The truth, writers are afraid. Their books can’t stay on the NYT bestseller’s list forever. Their printing contracts will expire, thus ending their royalties. And these people like to live like royalty. The last thing they need is some young upstart taking their spot- they’d be fucked over, forgotten about. Even if their TV movie of the week adaptation is enjoying a syndication run on Spike TV, TNT, or Lifetime. What about their theatrically released adaptations recently got a Blu Ray treatment or a second (and possible third) SE DVD. Not to mention the manga publishers beating their doors down. How dare they steal my thunder?! Now I’ll have to deal with those geeky, unwashed jerks at comic-cons! Or do the university speaking circuit after I get my honorary doctorate! GRRRR!!!!! As soon as I get the crap with Relapse done, I’ll do my best to make an author’s earnings clearer for you.

Eclipse

1)Perfect – 40x/ 2)beautiful – 31x/ 3)murmured – 90x/ 4)hissed – 14x/ 5)hiss – 5x/ 6)stunned – 6x/ 7)stunning – 1x/ 8 )gorgeous – 1x/ 9)murmur – 4x/ 10)whisper – 16x/ 11)whispered – 137x/ 12)amazing – 6x/ 13)golden – 11x/

14)chuckled – 36x/ 15)chuckle – 3x/ 16)gold- 11x/ 17)chagrin – 3x/ 18)chagrined – 1x/ 19)smirked – 1x/ 20)smirk – 2x/ 21)snarling – 2x/ 22)snarled – 5x/ 23)snarl – 3x/ 24)whispers – 1x/ 25)amazingly – 2x/ 26)gracefully – 2x/

27)laugh – 22x/ 28)grace – 5x/ 29)graceful – 3x/ 30)laughed – 139x/ 31)perfection – 3x/ 32)perfectly – 13x/ 33)props – 2x/ 34)flawlessly – 3x

Yeah, it’s that bad. The Cullens really are the ideal Mormon family.

A couple of things pertaining to LBC: in ’06 Time Warner Book Group dumped LBC on Hachette media forming the company Hachette Book Group USA that lists LBC as one of their publishing companies. At this time Relapse was written and “leaked”. Even if TWBG still owned LBC, they still would’ve bowed to Smeyer’s demands. But this new company saw the potential profits- regardless of reception- and hungrily renegotiated. This also included the publication of The Host in ’08 at the “completion” of the Twifuck “saga” listing it as adult scifi. The Waste was in fact more LDS garbage about Melanie Mary Sue Stryder getting a spirit baby (Wanderer) from God’s planet Kolob to be grafted onto her brain stem to take a body of flesh to advance to godhood status and enter into celestial plural marriage with Jared-Jacob and live with him and a bunch of still plain ole humans in the caves of 1,000 year purgatory playing kickball and abstaining. Hey, you think that Xenu might’ve invested in some real estate on Kolob?

And now for what you’ve all been waiting for: the real life of an author!

Now mind you I did rip this off from a link on the Ellora’s Cave blog Redlines and Deadlines. EC’s owner Tina Engler (a.k.a. Jaid Black) is online romantica publishing’s Smeyer. She thinks she can trick us with R&D into believing that any quality control and editing exists at EC. Don’t believe me? Go to 4shared do a search on EC and you’ll find  GIGABYTES of digital EC books. 90% are shit. Plot, execution, editing, polish- that’s thrown out the window! My personal favorite is Lorie O’Clare’s vignette The Cop. It belonged on Adultfanfiction because it looked like a horny 16-year-old girl was scribbling about Don Flack (and I really enjoyed her Lunewulf series overall- the glaring exception was Man of Her Dreams).

Despite everything you’ve heard about advances, writers essentially make their money from royalties.  They do get advances, but those advances are against royalties. That means they don’t earn any royalties on the book until the publisher has recouped its advance. If the advance is really large or sales are really bad, they may earn only a few royalties or not even earn out their advance at all. But if they have wily agents and fabulous sales, they may get an advance bigger than any prospective royalties they will ever get on the book (Tom Clancy, for example). After all, it’s better for the publisher to keep an author like Tom Clancy generating millions of dollars even if he doesn’t earn back $60,000 of the multi-million-dollar advance it originally paid him.

And what is a royalty? A percentage of the retail price of every book sold.

Note the importance of each word in this statement. First of all, it’s a percentage. For most paperback authors, that percentage is 4 to 8 percent (4 is what is offered at the very bottom rung). So for a $7 book, the author gets 28 to 56 cents.

Secondly, it’s the retail price, the one stamped on the book. The wholesale price is what a bookseller or distributor pays, often about 50 to 60% of the retail price.

And finally, authors do not receive a percentage for every book printed, just for every book sold.  Since booksellers can return for credit any books they don’t sell, the number of books sold generally amounts to about half of the books printed (less if sales were bad; more if sales were good).

So an author’s earnings are figured from this formula:

Royalty percentage x number of books sold x price of book

At present, this covers the majority of romance authors being published in single title. There are authors who make more (those fifty or so I mentioned, plus maybe two hundred lead title authors,), but it’s a minority. The book prices are currently typical for this level, and the royalty rates represent the range still existing in the romance publishing world. This chart is meant to explain how people can make vastly different amounts of money for books of the same genre or sales. It should give you an impression of possible royalty earnings, not demonstrate exactly what an author can make for her books. Read it with caution. I hope it will enlighten.

To these earnings you can add other sales: foreign rights sales (advances range as widely for these as for the U.S. rights—they can be in the hundreds or they can be in the thousands), audio sales, in-house book club sales (generally accounted at 2.5% royalty for Harlequin/Silhouette), and out-of-house book club sales (Book-of-the-Month club, Doubleday, Rhapsody, etc., which offer advances plus royalties). This will probably add a couple of thousand to your earnings, unless you’re doing well, in which case it could add as much as several thousands to it. Of course, some people don’t get other earnings at all.

Royalty earnings + other sales = gross earnings. But gross earnings for a full-time author aren’t the same as for someone who works for a company. If you work for a company, it buys your supplies and it pays 7.5% of your social security tax. Anything related to the business is paid for (not work clothes and lunches, but paper, computer, etc.). An author who writes full-time has to pay all of her social security tax (15% total as opposed to a regularly employed person’s 7.5%), along with an agent’s commission, which ranges from 10% to 15% of the gross (most authors do need agents these days). She foots the bill for promotion (the author often pays out of her own pocket for those bookmarks and flyers and copies of galleys that you see), computers, supplies, research, etc. And she is responsible for her own health insurance, retirement fund, etc.

One more thing to consider is that an author has to cover her expenses while waiting for her royalties. And those take a long time to come, many times as long as two or three years after she sold the book. All the money doesn’t come in until a few years after the book has been published. I once had a friend tell me, “Yes, but the royalties come in forever, so the more books you have, the more little checks you’re getting.” That’s true—if your book is kept in print. Most midlist books are not. In fact, all of my Deborah Martina and Deborah Nicholas books are now out of print. So unless an author gets her rights back and resells the books (and reselling is only possible if she has established a fairly big name), the royalties do end eventually. That means that each book earns a finite amount.

Let me give you a concrete example of the earnings of a single title book. Rosalind Romancer has one of the top publishers and actually makes a living at her writing. She’s had four historical romances out. Her sales are fairly good. She has a good agent and has a track record, so her royalty rate is 8%. Her publisher prints 75,000 copies of To Live a Romance, 40,000 of which sell. Since she’s not at the bottom, but still midlist, TLAR is priced at $5.99. She makes $19,168 in royalties on it (remember, this includes her advance).

She sells TLAR to Russia for $1000 (her portion—the publisher has already gotten their percentage of the sale, too) and to France for $2000 (her portion). She makes an audio sale with a new audio company for $750. That brings her earnings up to $22,918. Sounds pretty good, huh? Wait, I’m not done.

Now she must subtract 15% for her agent’s commission ($3437.70) and 7.5% for self-employment tax ($1718.85 more). That’s a total of $5156.55 taken off that $22,918, which leaves her $17,761.45.

If you figure expenses for supplies, promo, etc., of anywhere from $1500 to $5000, then this author has made $12,000 to $15,000 BEFORE subtracting the taxes YOU pay generally, and that’s with no benefits. Is it any wonder that authors have to write two books a year to make a living? And remember that this is someone doing decently. There are plenty of authors out there making $5000 a year or less after all is said and done.

Thankfully, writers love what they do. It’s what makes up for the low pay and the long hours (I spend most of my day at the computer, believe it or not, and am writing this on a Sunday). The thrill of watching a character emerge or having a problem plot suddenly fall into place or capturing a feeling in words can be more rewarding than any paycheck. If it’s not that way for you, I’d think long and hard about becoming a writer.

I hope this helped a bit (to bring wannabes down to earth). So I suggest that you finish uni, get your degrees, a day job, and write at night, on your lunch, and have fun! Sometimes it just won’t happen, but you might turn out a better person for it.