On Self-Publishing and the Hugh Howey / Data Guy January 2015 Report
(Parts of this post originally appeared on my Google+ page and in the comments on Mike Reeves-McMillan’s post on the report.) You may be aware that Author Earnings, a data analysis site run by Hugh Howey and someone called Data Guy, recently released a report on ebook sales and the market share of those sales by the various publishing methods. There is a lot of interesting information here, so I do recommend checking it out if you have the time. As you may expect, I have some issues with the report and with responses to the report — and to my questions regarding the report. I should start by saying that I haven’t bothered with the self-publishing vs. traditional publishing debate in any serious sense for years because I find the entrenched positions on either side to be, in light of the current publishing climate, monstrously stupid. There are too many pundits out there trying to prescribe the “right” path for publishing while rejecting any alternative as viable; yet, so few of them have much in the way of hard, objective data to back up their arguments. As it stands, most of the debates about which method is better are based almost entirely on anecdotes or reports like the one I’m going to talk about here. Unfortunately, that invariably means these arguments are fundamentally faulty. While I don’t doubt that a lot of the data here is accurate (and interesting), there are two immediate problems that come to mind: 1) As a statistical study, it does a poor job of maintaining objectivity. From the start, it is clear where the author’s biases lie, and it’s hard not to think that that perspective affects how the authors interpret and compare the data. Given that Hugh Howey, a fairly staunch pro-self-publishing pundit, is involved here, that’s not surprising.* That’s a serious issue for me, because I find the debates concerning traditional publishing and self-publishing to be largely fought on ideological grounds. When that ideology creeps into the data we’re using to talk about either side, it will invariably change the way data is perceived either by the reader or the one doing the analysis. 2) The data doesn’t actually tell us much in any usable sense. Honestly, I don’t know why data regarding sales is a valid metric for determining who is better off: a self-published author or a traditionally-published one. Short of instances where one author or another is clearly getting a raw deal (bad publisher or Amazon contract terms, for example), sales figures really don’t paint a clear enough picture of the writing life for either group — or the hybrids that arise from either end. There are more factors than sales here. How money is allocated, whether literally in the case of a traditional publisher or based on effort (or via a hire of some kind) for a self-publisher, is actually a more useful application of the data. If the average self-publisher makes less / the same / more per hour on average than a traditional publisher, that tells us something useful. I just want hard data without the bias. Objective data analysis. Given how long these industries have been in play, you wouldn’t think that would be so hard. But it is… Obviously, part of this argument didn’t go over well with everyone. As I noted on Mike’s original post: There are very VERY successful people in either camp, and some VERY successful people who do it both ways. Some have to do PR. Some don’t. Some like to. Some don’t. Some spend more time doing PR than they do writing — to little effect; some have great success for the effort. But basic sales data and market share doesn’t divulge that kind of information. I don’t know if anybody actually knows how the two publishing lives compare, except via anecdote. But I think we desperately need that data so we can have actual useful conversations about both forms of publishing. Mike was receptive, stating that he thought that data would be of interest, too. Another commenter by the name of Brian Rush was less enthused: It’s not valid to assume that indies spend more marketing time than the traditionally published. That’s almost certainly not true. Indies do spend more time and/or more of their own money on editing, cover design, and formatting than the trads, because all of that is handled by the publisher. However, for successful authors it’s a trivial difference, because it’s a fixed per-title cost, not a per-volume cost. Look at it in dollars (although in fact you can trade time for money for a lot of it, dollars make it easier to calculate). If you go full-on professional in all three categories, you’re probably talking about $2000 on the average. If you sell 10,000 copies, that’s 20 cents per copy. If you sell 100,000 copies, it’s 2 cents per copy. See what I mean? Trivial, unless the book doesn’t sell well. I pointed out that unless you have hard data to back these claims, you have no way beyond anecdote and self-reported information to know how hours are allocated based on publishing method, nor how those hours change depending on publisher, format, sites used, etc. Hours worked ≠ fixed per-title cost. There’s no available data to compare the average SP to the big name examples that are pointed to as “the successes,” nor the same for the alternative OR for hybrids. Without that information, any claim about either method that offers an analysis of its efficacy is faulty. We cannot use sales numbers alone to assess anything but the size and health of an “industry” in totally superficial terms. That would be like using touchdown numbers to determine how good your football team is. Brian disagreed, resorting to tactics that are probably pretty tame by comparison to the kinds of verbal abuse faced on the traditional publishing vs. self-publishing debate: Everything I said is easy to know, and you’re just dumping
Self-Published Books vs. Literary Awards: In Response to Linda Nagata
I’m a little late to the party, but Linda Nagata kindly rebutted my original post on the logistical issues of literary awards as a rationale for the rejection of self-published books from the consideration lists. Here, I’d like to respond to some of her arguments. First, I’ll say that I don’t disagree with most of what Nagata has to say. As an author who has traveled in both publishing camps, she of course understands the issue on a different level, and thus has valid points to make about the value of literary awards to SPed authors, etc. My main point of contention surrounds this quote: The way I see it, there are two main purposes to a literary award: (1) to bring attention to specific books and authors, and by so doing (2) to shape the genre. Whether (1) & (2) come to pass or not, neither purpose is harmed or diminished by consideration of a self-published work. This may be an issue of wording, but I don’t consider these two components as the purposes of literary awards. While the “shaping the genre” is certainly an effect of an award, to some extent, it is also a somewhat ambitious concept to apply to an extremely focused practice, particularly since “shaping,” as I see it, is organic rather than artificial. We shape the genre by our reading choices and what we talk about as a community, not by recognizing works as “good” by a set of disparate, cross-purpose standards — as all awards invariably are. Awards certainly cross over with the trend-setters and shaping works, but I find it hard to imagine the genre shaped purposefully by awards as opposed to by side effect. This is particularly true of populist awards, which certainly suggest some potential for shaping, but which themselves are fickle, shifting, and disparate in form. What the public likes one year will not match what they like the next, and in the long course of time, what they liked in 1987 may have been forgotten in 2007. Curated awards suffer from a separate issue, which I’d simply call the limits of critical focus. (This is a somewhat truncated explanation, so I hope the reader will forgive me here.) The first of Nagata’s points is, of course, related. For me, awards are not there to bring attention to works, but rather to recognize works that fit within a certain paradigm based on that paradigm’s criteria. This is where the wording comes in, as I see something different between “recognizing” and “bring attention to.” The first denotes the idea that this work deserves attention because it meets certain criteria, while the second seems to have a more directed shaping effect — i.e., here’s a work you should talk about. Recognition, however, is about achievement. In curated awards, it’s an acknowledgement that your work successfully fulfilled the award’s criteria, and is thus noteworthy. In populist awards, it’s the public’s acknowledgement of the same, but with less stringent and often impossibly variable standards. I suspect Nagata and I don’t actually disagree here, though. Basically, I see the literary award as contingent upon its established criteria, however nebulous, and the process of applying that criteria necessarily specifies texts and author. For example, the Nebulas only recognize science fiction and fantasy works from authors who are members of the SFWA; from there, the awards themselves only recognize what that small community determines is “the best,” which itself isn’t a hard set criteria we can accurately describe, since it is entirely subjective. As such, narrowing by publication method is just another set of arbitrary criteria. The other thing I should mention here concerns the idea that the awards we have in our community are naturally open to SPed works. While it is true that most (or all) of the awards are open to SPed works based on its given criteria for selection, there are few examples of such works appearing on lists from authors who themselves have not at one point, especially recently, had their work published traditionally. This distinction may seem trivial, but I think it is important to recognize how our community applies validity to a given work. In many respects, our community still does not look highly upon authors who have been published primarily on their own; it is far more forgiving when that author has a traditional publishing career either before or after the publication of an SPed work. That’s something we’ll see change in the future — possibly when SFWA raises its pro payment rate for magazines to $0.25/word (ha) — but probably not after some form of mass culling or shift within self-publishing. On that last sentence, I’d like to expand something I’d said before on the nature of the SPed world. Nagata doesn’t address at length my contention about the quality of SPed works (not that she needed to, mind), but she does say the following: “[That SPed works are more commonly bad in comparison to TPed works] is still a common assumption, so credibility is extremely important for a writer who chooses to publish her own work.” I concur that recognition via an award is certainly good for any author, particularly since, as Nagata discusses briefly in her post, awards can have a measurable impact on one’s career. However, Nagata’s track record is one that is fairly unique in the SP world. In comparison to the sea of SPers, most of them are not also traditionally published and award winners. Nagata, as it turns out, has won awards in the past — the Locus for best first novel[2] (The Bohr Maker) and the Nebula for best novella (Goddesses)(woot) — and she has most certainly had a decent career as a traditionally published writer of short and long fiction, though of late she has been primarily of the other stripe. I don’t bring this up to discount her argument, nor to poke mean fingers at her career or anything (a considerably one, actually), but rather to point out
Self-Published Books vs. Literary Awards: A Logistical Problem?
Back in August, The Guardian posted a column by Liz Bury entitled “Why is self-publishing still scorned by literary awards?” The article doesn’t exactly make an argument about the apparent snubbing of SPed books in the literary awards circuit, but Bury does essentially imply in the body of the article that the inability of these awards to address the widespread consumption of SPed books will not work on their favor. I’m not sure that’s true either, to be honest. These same literary awards are just as relevant as they were before SPing became normal (lots of relevance or no relevance whatsoever — depends on your view). I, however, have a different perspective on this problem. As a podcaster (The Skiffy and Fanty Show) and blogger, I get a lot of requests for reviews, interviews, guest posts, and so on. On the blog, I’m a little more lenient when it comes to everything but reviews. But the podcast is an entirely different matter. Throughout the year, we have maybe 25-26 slots for proper interviews, and perhaps another 25-26 slots for discussion episodes. With the addition of a steady blog for the podcast, that jumps the number from 50ish slots to about 100. One hundred slots for tens of thousands of SF/F authors. Understandably, we’re extremely selective on the show. We have to be. There aren’t enough slots for everyone, so we have to think hard about who we want to interview, what we want to talk about on the show, and so on and so forth. Inevitably, that means we tend to avoid self-published books; for me, it’s for the same reason as always: how exactly are we to wade through the drivel to find those good SPed books? This is a similar problem, I imagine, for the literary awards circuit. Granted, there may be a bigger agenda in place there, but they must be aware of the impossibly large field of published works out there, and so they make the decision, like us at The Skiffy and Fanty Show, to cut that field down to a more stable pool. There’s crap in traditional publishing, too, but my experience has always been that it’s much easier to find good things in traditional publishing, whereas the inverse is still true in the self-publishing world. There’s also another question here: cost. On the podcast, it costs us nothing (mostly) to interview or host authors of any sort. Even when there are costs, they are astronomically low and infrequent (a couple bucks here or there). But the literary award circuit has to hire judges, whom they sometimes (or usually) pay. Even if they’re not paying those judges, the request for their time is high, since they have to read dozens of books or short stories, etc. If you open the field further, you can imagine how much time (or money) would be lost just on going through the onslaught of TPed and SPed books sent their way. Let’s also assume that there might be a way to get around that by narrowing the field with various new criteria. In the end, those criteria will be flawed and, in some cases, controversial. They’re not going to base things on sales, since popularity is never an indicator of quality anyway. Personally, I can’t imagine any valid criteria that would weed out the trash from the legitimately quality books. In the end, it just makes more sense to cut the field in half. In a game of numbers, the easiest criteria is the one that makes the job a lot easier. But there’s also one more question I have: why would SPed authors want to win these awards anyway? The field is large enough that they could easily create equally valid awards just for SPed books. And if they did that, it might make the task of including SPed books easier, since you could use those other awards as a mandatory criterion for the selection process: if your book was nominated for X award, it is eligible for Y award. It may not be the best criteria, but it’s a start. In any case, the point is this: it’s a numbers game. It’s a logistical problem. There are just too many damned books out there just in the traditional publishing world alone. Expecting these awards to toss out their arbitrary standards to include another massive pool of literature seems counter-productive to me. You won’t end up with a better awards system, but an overburdened one. And you may end up doing more damage than would happen if one were to leave it alone. That’s my two cents. What about you?
My Current Thoughts on Self-Publishing / Traditional Publishing Gurus
To all the people out there telling me how I should publish my first book: please take your advice and shove it. You have no frakking clue what you’re talking about. Anyone who says “there is only one way to do it” should be discounted as idiots. J.K. Rowling got rich publishing the old fashioned way. Amanda Hocking got rich self-publishing (and now she’s got the old fashioned thing going). Lots of people have got rich doing it either way. Anyone who says “but my way is the only way” is full of shit. WTF do you know? Sometimes there is no right way. You just do what feels right to you and hope for the best. Publishing is a crapshoot. Some of us make it. Most of us don’t. The only sure advice anyone can give is this: if you really want to make it, don’t give up. Keep improving your writing and write better stories. Meh. ———————————————————- That more or less sums up how I feel about it all now. My thoughts have changed a lot in the last few years. Such is life… (Originally posted on Google+)
“The book market be flooded with bad books,” said the Bookstore Man!
The following comment was left on John Ottinger’s Grasping For the Wind. Specifically, I left it on a guest post by R. L. Copple entitled “Wading Through the Crap,” which is an interesting take on the “there will be so much crap” anti-self-publishing argument. I take some issue with the logic, even if I now also take issue with the anti-SP argument being refuted, but the post is interesting enough to check out on your own (which I expect you all to do; go on, leave some comments!) Here’s what I had to say: This post is just as riddled with fallacies, which is ironic when you argue that the post linked at the start is equally plagued by them. Two examples: 1. You say: “Now let’s say with the explosion of indie books, it adds 20,000 new titles to the pile each year, giving the reader a total of 30,000 new books to browse through. And let’s say the average reader will only like 2% of those books, meaning among those 20,000 indie books, they would have 400 books they would enjoy reading if they came across them. That means among the 30,000 books they could wade through, there would be 900 they would pick up if they came across them, which amounts to a 3% chance of finding a book they like instead of 5%. If that scenario was true, it would mean it grew a tad harder to find a book the reader likes, but only by 2%.” While a 2% decrease seems minor, in the grand scheme of book “finding,” it’s not. When you take into account the time, energy, and other variables that go into book “finding,” that 2% decrease is substantial, particularly since it represents a 40% reduction in possibility. That’s nothing to scoff at. You’re using numerical trickery here to suggest something that isn’t such a big deal, but you leave out the primary thing that makes readers very unlikely to buy anything whatsoever: wasting their time. Even a 1% (or 20%) decrease would put off a substantial number of readers who simply can’t be bothered to put in the extra effort to find something they may or may not like (which, let’s face it, even when you take into account the various ways readers come to books, and, thus, choose them, that doesn’t include the time and effort it takes for that reader to actually discover if they got the right book; this implies that your model must take into account the percentage of occurrences in which a reader found a book, but discovered upon reading that it wasn’t to their liking — contrary to popular belief in self-publishing circles, most readers aren’t willing to read huge previews and the like; if you’re lucky, they’ll read a page or two, which explains why publishers are so adamant about those first few pages, even today). 2. You spend a lot of time talking about slush piles and how readers see the demise of the slush pile as something good for them, since it means there will be more good books to find. The problem with this is that you earlier argue that the publication form is one of the least relevant methods by which readers come to books, and, thus, a direct contradiction of your earlier sentiments. Now, setting aside the lack of statistical support for most of what we’re talking about (nobody really knows how many readers care about the publisher and how many don’t, etc. only anecdotal evidence that suggests they avoid SPed books in bookstores), you still have the problem here of turning readers into slush readers. I hate everything to do with this concept, because the moment you make it my job as a reader to do a job other people should be doing and getting paid for (publishers, reviewers, editors, and related people, some of which may be related to non-traditional publishing models) is the moment you take all the joy out of reading, after which I’ll simply stop buying books. I’m not kidding. I will stop buying books completely, with the exception of things printed from the previous era of publishing. I have no incentive as a reader to participate in a system that wants me to do extra effort to find what I want. Most other markets don’t do this to me; in reality, most other markets have made it *easier* for me to find what I want to consume (think super stores, malls, online music stores with really good recommendation features, online music sites for streaming music, etc. etc etc etc etc etc). Yet it’s only in the book publishing world that we talk about making the consumer the worker. I wouldn’t be going out on a limb if I said a lot of readers who have recently come to routine reading would be equally inclined to leave the whole thing behind. Easy access isn’t necessarily a good thing (at least, it comes with consequences). It’s all about coupling easy access with tools that help the consumer find what they want without creating additional effort. The fact that SPers (and indies, trads, and other publishing models) are talking about a future which makes the consumer an unpaid intern is the most bizarre kind of archaic logic to me… Don’t tell me what you think on this post, though. Go respond to me and Mr. Copple on John’s blog. It’s an interesting discussion to have, methinks, even if I have made similar arguments elsewhere on this blog.
Why I’m Going Indie: An Anti-Self-Publisher’s Perspective
Longtime readers of this blog will be aware of my harsh opinions about self-publishing. The title of this post is intentionally inflammatory to highlight a point which I hope will be clear by the end of this post. I consider myself exceedingly critical of the concept of self-publishing, not because I think SPing is inherently wrong or improper, but because the field of self-publishing, if one can call it that, is flooded with people who lie or misrepresent traditional- and self-publishing. This is not something you see on the other side of the scale; there are so many writers and authors and editors writing about how hard it is to be traditionally published, and what you have to go through to get there — it’s a gruesome process, after all. I have a tag devoted to these issues. Perhaps this is why some of you may be surprised that I am doing an indie/self-publishing project (namely, podcasting the rewritten version of The World in the Satin Bag and putting together an ebook version to be released later). Why would I put my feet into the self-publishing bucket when I’ve been so critical of it in the past? There are a number of reasons for why I’ve gone indie with WISB. I’ve never been interested in sending it to a traditional publisher, for starters. The book has been sitting on this blog for years, and traditional publishers are generally averse to blog novels, unless it’s extraordinarily popular (some podcasters have had their books picked up, but you already know that). But I also don’t want the novel to sit on this blog and fester, which is what it has been doing for the last four years. In a lot of ways, letting it sit as long as I did was a good thing, because by going back to it now to rewrite it has taught me how far I’ve come as a writer. If you look at the old version, it is absolutely dreadful; the new version, which I’m now podcasting, is a million times better and reflects more of what I think are my strengths as a 27-year-old writer. But now that I can see how far I’ve come, I don’t want WISB to sit; I want it to be more productive for me. But that isn’t a terribly good reason (in my mind) to self-publish. After all, there are plenty of things I’ve written that I’ll never publish in any form, either because they’re terrible or they’re too damned weird or “literary” to have much of a place. Maybe I want those stories to be found in my attic one day…Here’s looking at you, Kafka. The reality is that I’m self-publishing WISB as a podcast and an ebook because the field really is changing. The more I read about all the work the major publishers want me to do on my dime, the more I feel like I should try doing it on my own at least this once. I’ve written about why I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot. The way publishers have been treating ebooks and authors (not exclusively, such as in the case of Angry Robot, who seem to approach ebooks intelligently) is one of the many reasons why so many self-published authors are doing remarkably well without needing major publishers at their back. We’ve heard the names: J. A. Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and so on. Even Michael R. Hicks, who I have begun talking to on Twitter, is doing astonishingly well as an ebook author, so much so that he is quitting his day job of many years to pursue writing full time (see his sales figures here). I certainly don’t agree with everything Konrath says (he perpetuates falsehoods more than he does truths based on my limited experienced with his writing), but it’s hard to ignore how ebooks have changed what is possible for self-published authors. There are still hurtles (many of them, in fact), and there are still crappy books, bad authors, and shady practices (though I think it’s safe to say that vanity publishers are going to get even more unethical in their business practices in order to hold onto their clients, in part because it’s so damned easy to release ebooks on your own through major ebook retailers). But the field is not the same as it was two years ago. Some of the same problems from the old days still exist, but now the new problems are good problems to have (how to be a better writer, communicating with readers, formatting books, producing quality material and product, etc.). Traditional publishing has changed some, but most of the good changes have been made by the smaller presses, rather than by the big guys. Big publishers are slightly less interested these days in quality material than in the value customers will put on it by spending their money. This is not true of all imprints, as some of the best ones (Tor, etc.) produce some amazing works of fiction, but the more you look at what is on the bestseller list, the more you see books that critics would have used as toilet paper 100 years ago, not because the critics are pretentious assholes, but because a lot of published books are like comparing a McDonald’s cheeseburger to a real cheeseburger. When someone like Sarah Palin can make millions from a book that would give a fact checker ten brain aneurysms in a row, you know the quality of the industry has taken a stab in the heart. That doesn’t mean that I am throwing WISB out there as a podcast and ebook in order to be famous and to make lots of money. The podcast certainly has a financial hope attached to it, but the ebook side of things is really my attempt to test the waters and do something with a project I was otherwise going to let die. I’m still writing short stories and publishing them the traditional