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
Reader Entitlement Syndrome: Stacey Jay and the Windmill Full of Corpses
I would like to begin this post with a disclaimer: what will follow is unlikely to be pleasant; it will be filled with profanity and angry ranting. If that’s not your thing, then you can find a happy home next door where ponies dance in the moonlight and authors get shit all over for no good fucking reason and just have to smile and take it because they’re the modern equivalent of the court jester now. Yeah. So, if you didn’t know that a thing happened over the last few days, then you should probably read this less angry post on Chuck Wendig’s blog. In short, due to poor sales, an author named Stacey Jay (author of Princess of Thorns) was let go by her publisher, Delacorte Press, and decided to start a Kickstarter for the sequel to her novel. Among the things she included in her target goal were funds for living expenses ($7,000, to be exact). Apparently, some people really didn’t like that, and even less so the idea that Jay might not release the novel if she couldn’t reach her goal. And so they threw a fit about it. Jay eventually took down the Kickstarter and threw in the towel, saying she’d continue writing under other pen names. And still more people threw a fit. That’s where I come in. The moment I saw the post on Wendig’s blog, the rage monster rose up. I was so pissed off. I thought: Holy fucking hell; the people throwing fits are entitled pieces of shit. What the fuck is this garbage? And so I decided to hold off on the Twitter rant that I wanted to write at that moment so I could rant like a madman here. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this mentality of “what readers want is more important than the needs of the writer” became so embedded into the writing landscape. Regardless, it’s a mentality that needs to fucking die, not only because it’s toxic, but also because it derives from a series of totally bullshit premises about how writers earn their keep and what we as consumers should be asked to provide. There are few other classes of workers in this country that people would actually point to and say “you get paid when I damn well tell you” than writers. Even fucking employees at fucking McDonald’s are treated with more respect than writers, and they’re probably some of the most unloved workers in the whole of the Western world other than IRS agents (who everyone hates, but everyone still thinks should be paid more money than the guy who could be putting his boogers in their food). I’m not saying that McDonald’s workers deserve to be treated like shit. I’m just saying that we treat that guy a lot better than we do writers. Well, unless they’re writers we love and they make a shit ton of money and never have to ask for anything because publishers will toss $500K at them or their books sell so fucking much that it’s never an issue. Oh, wait. No. If a writer who sells a ton of books ever says “gosh, being a writer is tough,” someone will step up on the balcony over their heads and take a steaming shit all over them. Because NYT Best Selling Authors are as rich as Bill fucking Gates (lies). Writers are one of the few classes of worker to whom you can say “you write that thing and then I’ll pay you to live later” and almost nobody bats an eye. Now, it turns out that the mechanics of publishing demand this to a degree. After all, how the hell is a publisher supposed to know which book to publish if the damned thing hasn’t been written yet? But we’re not talking about a new writer. We’re talking about an established one, to a certain degree. And even so, that’s why good publishers pay this little thing called an advance. As you probably know, that’s the sad chunk of cash a publisher gives an author when they decide to publish a work, as if to say (not really), “Well, you did all that friggin work, so now we’ll give you something so you don’t have to starve anymore.” And some authors get paid those things even if the book isn’t fucking done, because they’ve built a relationship with their agent or publisher or whatever through writing other shit — as I’m sure Stacey Jay has. So the idea that Stacey Jay would say, “hey, you all liked my books, but the publisher wanted to sell 4,000,000 copies, and I’m never going to do that, so I thought, since a bunch of you liked the darn thing, maybe we could do this whole bit where you help me live for a few months so I can write the book without interruption, and then you’ll have it and we’ll all be happy” is really not that out there. Presumably, her publisher would have paid her that money anyway. The entitlement of those who think this is absurd is no more apparent than in the tweets from shitheads who seem to think writers are some kind of new class of serf. Take this shit, for example: @_KatKennedy if it were just the editor and the cover, i’d be like, yeah that makes sense but asking us to pay your bills is ridiculous — Nova Lee Zaiden (@NovaBlogder) January 5, 2015 @_KatKennedy EXACTLY. Threatening to stop writing if fans don’t pay her enough money to write full time? Hard pass. — Angie (@disquietus) January 5, 2015 @_KatKennedy i saw it and like, since when does buying groceries and gas count specifically for the project? — Nova Lee Zaiden (@NovaBlogder) January 4, 2015 @booknerdcanada Yeah…which is just a whole world of no. — Molli Moran (@MissMolliWrites) January 5, 2015 Again, the question: since when does buying groceries and gas count specifically for the project? SINCE FUCKING EVER. Why, yes. It is
5 Annoying Author Habits on Twitter
I spend far too much time on Twitter, which means I read a lot of tweets from a lot of authors. Some authors are great at interacting, carving out their little niche and creating a kind of Twitter persona to represent them. Others, however, are kind of like social media bacterial infections who must do everything they possibly can to sell their own work; they basically turn into walking spam monkeys. And still others present themselves as bitter, rage-infested monsters fit for the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars. Neither of these latter two groups are particularly fun to engage, which might explain why the five things I’ve listed here haven’t actually helped many of these individuals develop a steady writing career. Here goes: Constantly Complaining About Your Career There are two kinds of career complaints: Legitimate grievances which occasionally happen and need to be addressed in a public forum (or privately in a different context) Unsubstantiated complaints about why your work isn’t doing as well as you’d like Whether or not it is actually true that there’s a conspiracy to keep you from being successful, constantly harping about such things makes you look less like a victim and more like a bitter failure. I have seen authors rant and rant about how their careers aren’t going the way they want, but it’s not their fault; someone else is responsible for the fact that their books don’t sell. It’s certainly possible that you’re being sabotaged by individuals or an -ism, but it is more likely your work isn’t selling for reasons within and beyond your control: your writing isn’t good enough, you don’t know how to market your work, you are writing X when the market is tired of it, nobody actually knows who you are because you’re published by a nobody, the previous book sold better than the second because it got into more bookstores, many of which are now closed, and so on an so forth. A lot of the times, the first two are the most likely culprits. Not everyone is a great writer. Some authors have pushed ahead too soon, expecting that their writing will meet the demands of the market. There’s no easy way to tell these folks that they need to spend more time developing their writing style and learning the craft. If you say anything, they’ll go back to the conspiracy theories about how you’re out to ruin their career or whatever. I’ve yet to see one of these conversations go well on Twitter, which I suppose is to be expected. Regardless, this perspective on the world of publishing is an annoying one, as the individual who believes it tends to become engrossed in the conspiracy against themselves, turning bitter, angry, and sometimes rude. Inserting Yourself Into Every Vaguely “Relevant” Hashtag Hashtags are a great Twitter tool. They’re useful for spreading opinions about a topic among a wider range of users. I’ve started running a hashtag called #monthlyreads, which is designed for a once-a-month sharing of the things you read. I expect this hashtag to get abused. Most people are pretty good about hashtags. They understand that they are for having a conversation or sharing information, and so they use it for that single purpose. But then there is that minority of people who believe every hashtag that is vaguely related to their work is a perfect place to insert said work. This happens most often in hashtags for sharing works of literature that fit within a category (diversity, for example). Everyone else shares their favorite books while some random author pops up to suggest their own work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mentioning your own work on Twitter, but there is something tacky and downright annoying about constantly inserting said work into these hashtag conversations. Hashtags are not exclusively promotional in attitude, and so it is blatantly obvious that an author is trying to hawk their work when they join these conversations. Authors who do this are also rarely good writers. There’s something off about their work, either because it is substandard and has been self-published on the cheap or it is released through questionable means or the author is simply desperate and doesn’t know how to properly advertise. Hashtags are not about you. They are communal. Using them incorrectly is, frankly, irritating. It doesn’t bode well for you as an author if a portion of your potential readers identify you and your work with negative emotions. Constantly Being Angry About Stuff It doesn’t matter what you’re angry about: local politicians, racism, bad food, the fact that monkeys stole your wallet, sexism, liberals, how much you hate Country X, conservatives, gerbils, people who tweet about their cats…doesn’t matter. If your Twitter account is a long stream of angry tweets about anything in particular, it gives me the impression that you are an insanely angry person and, therefore, unapproachable. In my mind, that’s a bad thing. I’m an aspiring author and a podcaster. If I have little interest in interviewing you because you seem bitter and angry all the time, then I can assume other podcasters, interviewers, and so on might feel the same way. This isn’t to suggest that you shouldn’t complain about things that bug you. Twitter is a social network, after all, and that means you should use it to, well, be social. Anger is part of our social culture. But it should be clear that you also like things. Movies, hamburgers, recycling, the smell of new books…whatever. If the entire world pisses you off all the time, maybe you need to re-evaluate your entire life. There are good things on this planet, and your social network presence should show more than just the things that drive you up the wall. There’s also a separate issue here: people who are bitter and angry all the time (or most of the time) are also more likely to fall into the confirmation bias bubble. This can lead to a kind of
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?
Speculation Station: Worlds Without Gunpowder
Liz Bourke foisted this question upon me on Twitter using her profound ability of psychic suggestion and the promise of free alcohol.[1] The question is this: what would the world look like if gunpowder had never been discovered? First, a few caveats: I’m only going to consider worlds like our own in which the materials for gunpowder exist. I feel inadequate to the task of arguing the science involved in imagining the absence of gunpowder materials. I’m only going to consider worlds like our own in which the inhabitants didn’t discover gunpowder until much later — up to about when the early modern period began. I find it unlikely that gunpowder would go undiscovered indefinitely. Due to my limited knowledge of other gunpowder-using cultures, most of what I will say below will come from a largely Western perspective. It will likely be somewhat reductive primarily because I can’t write a 200-page book about the subject and expect anyone to read it. However, if you can shine some light on how the above question might have affected different cultures before (or after?) colonization or contact w/ other cultures, please write a post in response. I don’t have that expertise, and so I will refrain from making too many assumptions. My understanding of gunpowder is that it was discovered by the Chinese sometime between the 9th and 11th centuries (the Tang and Song Dynasties, respectively). Its explosive potential, however, wasn’t fully realized until many centuries later — somewhere around the 13th century in China. The rest of the world more less caught on after the powder’s discovery, using it eventually to make weapons at roughly the same time as the Chinese.[2] Between the 15th and 17th centuries, the formula was perfected and put to use in weaponry on a wide scale.[3] But if a world were to exist where gunpowder did not get discovered by the Chinese (or anyone) in the 9th/11th century and did not change the course of history until some centuries after the 200 year period mentioned above, wouldn’t the world we know now be a drastically different place? Obviously. For one, the course of warfare would have to change considerably to meet the demands of battle. More advanced form of crossbows would likely fill the gap as medieval technicians created better ways to load and fire bolts. I suspect we’d see widespread use of ballistas and crossbows with the ability to fire multiple shots before the need for reloading. Some of these weapons already existed in the day, but they were inefficient and were eventually supplanted by better forms of weaponry (the musket, cannons, etc.). The Chinese, for example, had a repeater crossbow as early as the 4th century BC, and the Greeks had designed a repeating ballista in the century afterwards. These devices were certainly difficult to create and expensive, but without the explosive power of gunpowder, the need for more accurate, efficient, and speedy forms of these devices would become necessary.[6] Over time, the adaptations of warfare would include changes in armor, greater use of castle defenses, and perhaps the development of other forms of explosives or flammable liquids for use in catapults and other siege machines. Personally, I like the idea of Greek fire becoming a common tool used in warfare, though this would eventually become less useful over time as everyone began to prep their defenses against such things. While I’m no expert on medieval sea warfare, I imagine the absence of gunpowder-based cannons would mean greater need for well-trained soldiers on the decks of ships and a frequent use of flammables either in the trapping of enemy ships or as a matter of the boat siege process. In my mind, I imagine balanced crews of soldiers, sailors, and chemical experts, each in place in just the right numbers to combat the onslaught of chemicals and soldiers trying to crash or take over enemy ships full of supplies or ground troops. And don’t forget the crossbows and ballistas. A ballista whose tip contains a pouch of flammable liquid could be launched through the wooden hull of an enemy ship, and fire-tipped bolts or arrows could be used to light the enemy ship on fire. In a weird way, I just imagine warfare to be a more violent, flammable, terrifying endeavor, such that it might actually be against the better judgment of monarchic leaders to consistently wage war against their enemies. At some point, the cost would become too great to constantly grab for territory. The more interesting part, for me, is the impact all of this would have on the colonization of the Americas.[7] Because muskets and cannons were such a strategic advantage for the Europeans who eventually took the Americas for themselves, it is curious to think about the ability of the Native Americans to actually combat the invasion. Though Native American weapons would have to adapt to the needs of warfare, there wouldn’t be as large a difference in terms of the technology between European projectiles and Native American ones. The Europeans could certainly outmatch Native American warriors in terms of firing range and speed, but I wonder if they would still have the advantage in hand to hand combat or in dealing with guerrilla tactics, particularly with reduced ability to deploy explosives at long distances (cannons, etc.). In particular, I imagine the Europeans would have kept to their armor-based marching style, which might work in a frontal assault, but against a non-traditional fighting force, such as that deployed by Native Americans at various stages of the conflict in our own world, I don’t think it would help in the long term. Unfortunately, I still think the Europeans would come out on top, but that’s largely because the inevitable bio-warfare would become a center piece. There’s nothing to be done about the introduction of smallpox and other diseases into the Americans that the Native Americans simply hadn’t survived yet. And I imagine the Europeans would eventually figure out, as they did
Writing Question: Best Method for Introducing People of Color?
I’m currently writing a relatively far future military SF novel (or revolutionary military SF, since it involves revolution). One thing that I want to indicate about this future and its wide-reaching human empire is its relative inclusiveness. Race is not as much an issue there as it is today, which means that the cast of characters I intend to show will embody a mixed world. To make that clear in the story, I feel as though I need to identify several characters by their race (or everyone by their race, really). But I don’t want to in part because I really don’t know how to go about doing so without essentializing or reducing characters to their race (or even identifying them by something that I personally feel has no say on one’s character). What exactly is the best method for introducing the race of a character (any race)? I honestly don’t know…and I’d much rather have an idea on how to go about it before shoving my foot in my mouth. The comments are yours.