Even by the standards of early year movies, the start of 2014 has been full of a stunning array of must skip movies.
I will include in that list the surprise sensation of February, the Lego Movie, Surprisingly good reviews, robust box office indicative of strong word of mouth, and if I hadn't been attending with a friend I would have walked out after ten minutes, or retreated to a quiet corner to read on my iPad while the film played, Thus was just another boring superhero movie with overlong fight scenes, only with Legos. Even at the end, the movie didn't have any charm for me. Everything is not awesome.
Non-Stop on the other hand was a nice action movie. Liam Neeson lends gravitas and depth to the role of an air marshall being framed for a remarkably clever feat of airplane crime. The movie is never terribly believable but is always just plausible enough that I was willing to buy in. I have no idea how the bad guys got at the pilot, or now they fond out secrets about the people the bad guys were framing, or how the rhetoric of the bad guys matched up with their plot, or why everyone got to lounge around the crash landing site at the end, or any one if a thousand other things. But the movie moves briskly, has a jaunty score, generated real suspense, and works. It will do OK at the box office but deserves to do better than that, since it does more in its limited way to entertain than a handful of overlong over CGId over pretentious superhero movies that collect in a day the box office receipts that this will collect over a weekend,
A book just came out called Mad As Hell, which chronicles the making of the movie Network, which I saw in Montclair, NJ in 1976. In conjunction with the book's release the movie was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, followed by a discussion between Keith Olbermann and the book's author, NY Times reporter and culture writer David Itzkoff. The movie holds up well, as good or bad as it was when it first came out almost 40 years ago. It's very relevant for the science fiction fan, since it's a movie that seemed like science fiction at the time but has essentially come true. A newscaster goes a little crazy, becomes the initiator of the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" catch phrase, and is rewarded by going from fired to being the host of a nightly news loud with segments from a psychic produced live to high ratings in front of a cheering live audience. Until he decides to take on his corporate overlords when they are going to be taken over by the Saudis, which has consequences.
So it holds up, but that means that the first half or two-thirds of the movie are still pretty much brilliant, while the latter sections never quite work as well as the rest of it. When Robert Duvall leads a meeting where the TV execs discuss killing the now-wayward newscaster kind of like they might discuss changing the producer or the set, it doesn't quite work the way the rest of the movie does. This is about as near to happening today as the rest of the things the movie depicts were near to happening 35 years ago. The conglomeritization of the TV business, the resultant pressure on the news departments to make money instead of being loss leader public services, the move toward reality TV, TV becoming a platform for the shrillest voices over the voices of reason. All of these things seemed unlikely in 1976, especially perhaps to those closest to the events, but were in fact just days away from, one-by-one, coming to pass. And the movie anticipates these events with scabrous dialogue and brilliant performances and keen vision in just about every way. But the next step still seems tacked on. It's so close to being real that it kind of almost seems like a piece with the rest of the movie, but honestly, deep down, my instinct tells me that this is where Paddy Chayefsksy, the screenwriter, went from being a visionary to being as desperate to find an ending for his movie as his characters were to find a way out of the Howard Beale dilemma, so he came up with this.
In any event, it's a film worth seeing if you haven't.
The book was short, so I decided I had hours enough in the day to read the entirety of it, so I did. I would have enjoyed it more if the gym hadn't been incredibly uncomfortable. I wasn't working out all that hard, but it was so hot and humid even by gym standards that it wasn't a fun few hours of reading and exercising. The book Mad as Hell is kind of like the movie it depicts. Solid for the first two thirds. Gives good background on the auteur of Network, Paddy Chayefsky, as context for his development of the movie itself. It serves some nice dish on the casting and production and artistic decisions in the film. I even got a little teary-eyed at the climax of the movie's story, when Chayefsky invites Peter Finch's wife to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept his posthumously awarded Oscar. But the aftermath of the movie,the part that takes us from the vision of Network to today's reality, falls flat. It's full of too many quotes from the usual suspects to say "yes, work of genius, look what happened" when I feel like a slightly longer second act that talked about the actual of what happened would have been more meaningful. Don't just have Keith Olbermann tell us how real it all is, but talk about how Keith Olbermann has worked for a variety of conglomerates that have undergone the come-to-Jesus moments about the importance of profit to the business of television for the suits that run the business. Actuallly write, even briefly, about the real life suits that are like the suits played by Robert Duvall and Ned Beatty. Actually show how Brian Roberts at Comcast is the third cousin twice removed of the Ned Beatty character, or compare and contrast Fred Silverman,, the person who was closest at the time the movie was released to being the real-life Faye Dunaway.
That book would have diverged a little bit more from being a book about the making of Network to being a book about something a little bigger than just that, but it would have been a more important book that way, more enduring in the manner of Network itself.
My other recent cultural activities include a documentary about the Broadway performer Elaine Stritch, which was worth seeing for a Broadway/Sondheim admirer like I kind of am but not so much for a wider audience than that, and the actual Broadway play Outside Mullingar, from the pen of John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Doubt). The play has a great cast. Readers of my blog are most likely to know Debra Messing from Will and Grace, but a NYC theatregoer will know Brian F. O'Byrne or Peter Maloney every bit as well. They act up an entertaining storm that kept me well enough amused. But I've seen better from Shanley, including Doubt and his recent Storefront Church, and for a play about true love I felt the characters did a better job of talking about their true love than actually showing it in a way that made the outcome personal to me. So, enh.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Friday, February 28, 2014
I Want You To Want Me, I Need You To Need Me
In the final of my current series of posts about the e-book business, we're going to talk about the food chain a little bit.
The average run-of-the-mill self-published e-book author is kind of at the bottom of the food chain. This person goes on-line, accepts the terms of service, the KDP or Nook Press contract, and away they go.
We at JABberwocky, I must admit though I hate to do so, are not that much further up. We get to be in something called the Kindle White Glove program for agents. We represent many authors, we have the ability to put up books by multiple published authors, we have people we can talk to.
Above us, I'd probably put small publishers that may be able to provide a few thousand titles, that may have dedicated legal teams to negotiate with Amazon, that may have have a few core titles in a particular category that would be important for Amazon to sell.
Then you've got Open Road or Rosetta Books, dedicated e-book publishers with lots and lots of titles, backers with deep pockets, publishing players running them. They have multiple major programs from multiple major authors or estates.
And then, the Big Five.
From my experience, I think that the fiercest advocates of self-publishing don't always recognize what it means to be toward the bottom of the food chain.
Let me explain a little bit, what it means:
The average run-of-the-mill self-published e-book author is kind of at the bottom of the food chain. This person goes on-line, accepts the terms of service, the KDP or Nook Press contract, and away they go.
We at JABberwocky, I must admit though I hate to do so, are not that much further up. We get to be in something called the Kindle White Glove program for agents. We represent many authors, we have the ability to put up books by multiple published authors, we have people we can talk to.
Above us, I'd probably put small publishers that may be able to provide a few thousand titles, that may have dedicated legal teams to negotiate with Amazon, that may have have a few core titles in a particular category that would be important for Amazon to sell.
Then you've got Open Road or Rosetta Books, dedicated e-book publishers with lots and lots of titles, backers with deep pockets, publishing players running them. They have multiple major programs from multiple major authors or estates.
And then, the Big Five.
From my experience, I think that the fiercest advocates of self-publishing don't always recognize what it means to be toward the bottom of the food chain.
Let me explain a little bit, what it means:
The Kindle White Glove program goes only so far. If there is a search algorithm that is screwed up that makes it hard for people to find our books, we have someone we can complain to directly, but this person will not generally do anything to overrule the computer. Because we are in the White Glove program, our books are nominated for Kindle Daily Deals, but the odds that we will ever get one aren't very good, in part because there isn't a mechanism to explain why it might be particularly appropriate to have a KDD at a particular time. We can complain about how royalty statements are formatted, and our concerns will be taken seriously, and addressed over a two or three year time frame, maybe. Just like any KDP author, we'll get treated a little bit better if we do things with Amazon exclusively. We sign the same KDP contract at the end of the day that anyone else does.
Let's talk about Kindle Daily Deals a bit.
We recently arranged with Open Road for them to publish six of our Simon R. Green titles as part of a package that will include a Simon R. Green short story collection that will come out this summer. Within a few weeks of Open Road taking over, they got a Kindle Daily Deal for Simon R. Green. I couldn't have gotten that. I have someone to talk to, my titles are in the running, but I don't have a realistic chance at this. All the people that are higher up on the food chain than me have that chance. Open Road probably provides slates of nominees for Daily Deals as do the big publishers, with dedicated talk-to-Amazon people at the publisher talking to dedicated talk-to-Open-Road people. It wouldn't surprise me if there are more Daily Deal slots over the course of a year that go to people lower down on the food chain as examples, models, inspirations, whatever. Kind of like not too many people actually win the lottery, but you want to have winners to get people to play. I don't have the scope or the scale to seriously compete for one of only 365 Kindle Daily Deal slots over a year, and I'd have to compete with all the other literary agencies in the White Glove program.
Let's talk about contracts.
We are not sure what to do with Barnes & Noble. As part of the transition from their PubIt program to their Nook Press program (and why is there a transition, anyway; what is the underlying advantage of making everyone migrate from one platform to another, which there has to be...) we notice, which we hadn't paid as much attention to when our e-book program first started up with PubIt, that B&N isn't as helpful on e-book territoriality in their Nook Press contract as other vendors are. This is now important to us. We have more books from our partner agency, Zeno, in the UK, where we may have rights to sell a book only in the US and Canada. Maybe we'll want to do e-books only in the UK for authors who seem likely to sell something there but don't have a UK publisher. No vendor promises absolutely for sure that they will sell books only in the territories we say to sell them in, but B&N promises less of an effort. Not a commercially reasonable effort or a best effort, but not much of an effort at all.
Interestingly enough, if we move from a Nook Press contract to a publisher contract, they will agree to pay more attention contractually to territoriality. And their price for doing so? A smaller royalty rate than everyone else offers.
There are other issues as well, maybe four or five things where B&N's Nook Press contract offers language that is inferior to other people in the e-book space. I haven't fully joined the battle and am not sure where it will all shake out at the end, but I am 99.99% certain that we are having problems negotiating our contract that wouldn't exist for people higher up in the food chain. I can't imagine that a Big Five publisher has to take a smaller royalty rate in order to have B&N respect territoriality. Another of the clauses we are fighting about, I know we don't have the provision B&N wants from us in most of our contracts with Big Five publishers, so those Big Five publishers can't be agreeing to what B&N wants us to agree to. If the publisher doesn't have it from us, they can't give it to B&N.
I had lunch with an editor this week. I mentioned how our last couple of checks from Kobo were bigger than our last couple of checks from Apple. In fact, we just got our biggest ever Kobo check. Not big, but twice or more what we were getting from Kobo two years ago. The Big Five publisher this editor works for is doing a much bigger percentage of their business with Apple. We think, this editor and I, that the difference is almost certainly a marketing difference. The Big Five publisher can get books promoted in different places on the iBooks store where we cannot. Impulse buyers can find their authors and titles more easily than they can find ours.
We would like to sell our books via Google, but in order to do so we would have to set up entirely with self-serve via their on-line system without any human intervention. I'm not willing to do that; I think I'm big enough and important enough that I should have someone to talk to. Nook and Kobo don't have White Glove programs, but we do have people we can e-mail, and get responses from. I am 100% certain that the Big Five publishers can talk to people at Google, while for me, selling books on Google is supposed to be as automated and inhumane a process as trying to get human help for using Blogger or Gmail.
And finally...
Rather quietly, Audible just announced that they are reducing royalty rates for self-published audio books done through their ACX program. Audible is an Amazon company.
What leverage do the authors have? None, really.
The bigger you are, the more attention you get.
The bigger you are, the more you can go "mano a mano" with the Amazon lawyers.
The bigger you are, the more marketing you can get.
And the bigger you are, the less likely it is that you'll be forced to take a cram-down on your royalty rates.
And there's a reason for this.
Amazon and the Big Five publishers may argue with one another from time to time. Amazon removed all the "Buy" buttons from Macmillan titles. There was a time a few years ago when Penguin stopped providing new releases to Amazon, including things like a #1 bestselling Sookie Stackhouse title. But at the end of the day, Amazon can get away for a short while not selling Brandon Sanderson's Words of Radiance when it comes out next week, but they can't go for an extended period of time not selling major #1 bestselling books from major authors. Over time, there are lots of other places to buy e-books, but only one publisher in the US to sell Words of Radiance. Amazon wasn't entirely incorrect to declare in a statement at the end of the Buy Button Battle with Macmillan to declare bitterly that Macmillan had a monopoly. But for the JABberwocky e-book program, I don't really have a program if I'm not selling through Amazon somehow or other. I might have a program without selling through B&N, but I don't have one not selling through Amazon.
So what will we do if Amazon does ever do with Kindle royalties what it just did with ACX royalties? Will we all decamp to selling only on Kobo, B&N and Google? Will Hugh Howey use his self-publishing fortune to set up a site for selling e-books direct to consumers that will be an open platform for anyone wishing to sign the HHDP publishing agreement? Or do we just have to suck it up?
There is no guaranty, no tablets from Sinai, no fine print in the contract, no law, no nothing, that says that we shall always receive a 70% royalty as the sellers of independently published e-books. There is more room for that rate to go down than for it to go up. And if Amazon wants it to go down, the Big Five publisher that has a monopoly on selling Words of Radiance next week has a big advantage in holding the line over the agent that represents the book or the run-of-the-mill KDP published author.
Much as I love the ability of any author to publish their own e-books, I am also self-aware of what I can and cannot do as a provider of e-books. Heretical as it might seem to say this, I believe on the most holistic global level that the bigger publishers add value to the publication and sale of e-books, because they are bigger and have clout and can get marketing and go mano-a-mano with Amazon and Apple. And I can say this and say at the same time that their royalty rates are too low; it's simple math that I don't believe the value they add is equal to the percentage they take. It's also simple math that makes me want to stick with the JABberwocky e-book program, to give us leverage to get those royalties up and because globally I can do better across the full range of JABberwocky clients by offering e-books from a full range of our clients. Individual results may vary. Some authors are going to be better off being self-published. The math may change, if publishers offer a higher royalty rate or if the big companies we deal with to sell e-books make it easier to do business with them just like the Big Five do.
Prior posts on this subject from recent weeks:
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Ebook-olution in action
Two interesting developments in the e-book marketplace in recent days. One of which shall be used as a springboard today, this being the announcement that Richard Curtis has sold his e-Reads business to Open Road. Like myself and several other leading agents in sf/f, Richard is an alumnus of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, around twenty years prior to my time there. He started e-Reads in 1999 when the e-book business was barely in existence, and interestingly, I've traveled in some familiar circles with agents with an interest in the e-book business. My boss for 15 months at Scott Meredith after Scott died was Arthur Klebanoff, who founded Rosetta Books a couple years after Richard founded e-Reads.
The reason Richard Curtis gave in the press about the sale was that there was a perceived need to do more marketing of the e-Reads list, which would have meant stepping up the investment in the business, and that it seemed better to find a company that could do that rather than to make that investment or seek the investors that would make that investment feasible.
In some ways, Richard Curtis' decision has no bearing on what JABberwocky does with its e-book program. e-Reads was a separate enterprise from Curtis' literary agency, publishing books by authors who weren't all Richard Curtis clients, designed to make money as a separate entity. JABberwocky's e-book program is a service to JABberwocky clients, where we take our standard commission of 15% on most of the books in the program (we only take 50%, which is the Open Road model, if the author wishes to have us pay all conversion costs and limit us to recouping those costs solely from within the e-book program) rather than the 50% cut that often prevails with smaller e-book publishers or the 75% cut that often prevails with larger.
And one of the biggest limitations to our e-book program, though not to ours alone, is that we under-market it. We have one staff person who devotes a good chunk of time to the e-book program, and especially as we have vastly increased the number of books in the program, most of that time has been spent on dealing with authors on sign-up issues, with the conversion house on the file conversions, with our cover artists and cover copy writers, actually getting the books up, and dealing with vendors. (The vendor issue is a second limitation, which we will look at in another blog post.)
Since we are taking such a small cut, smaller than pretty much any other e-book publisher, I can forgive myself the under-investment in marketing, but it is nonetheless my hope that eventually we can devote more time and energy to this, either by re-tasking as we slow the pace of new books into the program or as part of an overall expansion at JABberwocky.
These are things our marketing person might do:
Send out review copies of our books. Many of our titles predate the explosion of websites dealing with sf/fantasy, and those sites might cover our releases more or even review some of the books, which came out long before the websites themselves started.
Coordinate more sale pricing, including analysis of the effects of sale pricing.
Help willing authors (and not all are willing to put too much promo energy into their twenty-year old books) to do guest blog posts.
Maybe set up a separate Twitter account or other social media devoted to the e-book program.
Improve the website we have for the e-book program.
Have a small budget to begin experiments with on-line advertising using Google AdWords, Facebook, or other programs.
Videos.
There's lots more that could be done, and I could easily spend close to $50K a year on salary, benefits, and other expenses for a full-time marketing person, even at entry level.
Absent making that marketing investment, our e-book program generally relies on reflected marketing for its success. Simon R. Green, Tanya Huff and Jack Campbell all do very nicely with reverted backlist and/or collections of short fiction that are included in our e-book program. That is almost certainly because they have books being marketed and distributed by Big Five publishers, have had this for many years, and can rely on an audience that comes along from the Big Five books to discover ours. In the next tier would be Rick Shelley, a deceased author who had fifteen books published by a Big Five publisher and who writes in an established sub-genre, military sf, that has loyal core readership. Thereafter, the success of our e-book authors kind of tracks the success of their print books, and considering the nature of our program this isn't a surprise. But it is limited; we don't have a good way other than word of mouth or reflected marketing to bring someone to a higher place.
Clearly, marketing would be a good thing!
But where is that marketing money going to come from?
Forget about what the JABberwocky cut is, but the total annual royalty revenue from our entire e-book program is under $100K. Even if you say that we could increase overall revenue by 50% if we had better pricing, and then by another 50% if we had better marketing, the total royalty revenue might just scrape past the $200K mark. No matter how you look at it, we'd be spending an enormous percentage of gross royalty earnings for the e-book program on the marketing, so where's it going to come from?
If I took a poll, I wonder how many authors in the JABberwocky e-book program would choose to give me another third of their income in exchange for having dedicated marketing, and would feel like they would come out ahead in that process. Their sales would need to increase by 70% in order for them to break even.
And for the authors at the lowest end of our earnings scale, would it be worth their time and energy to self-publish their own e-books? We make their decision to have us do it a little easier by taking a small cut of their earnings. But a lot of our e-books earn less than $20 per month in gross royalty revenue. How much time do you want to take to self-publish your e-book to save $250 or less over a year vs. having someone else do it? Can all of those authors even find someone else to do it when the cost of setting a book up for an e-book can be $400, which can take several years to recoup?
Even though I want to spend more on marketing, it is magical thinking to say it will automatically pay for itself. You can see why Richard Curtis would say he wasn't up for doing that.
From the perspective of the aspiring self-publisher, you must reflect on the fact that marketing expense is a real expense that comes from somewhere. I am sure we can find examples of self-published authors who managed to succeed by word of mouth alone, just like we can find examples from Big Five publishers of little under-the-radar novels that went on to become something big. But otherwise, someone has to do the marketing, and it has both a cost and an opportunity cost (what else you could be doing with the money). When you realize that many people have day jobs, have children, have family or social or volunteer obligations, you can see why many people don't want to do that. They want to have a publisher put some time and money into marketing their work. Even if it's going to be one of those Big Five publishers that is very likely to under-market, it will likely be better than they can do on their own.
From the perspective of even the very successful author, let's look at a JABberwocky client like Brandon Sanderson. He self-publishes his own e-books, and has the staff and support capability to do it. At the exact hour of this writing, his self-published Kindle edition of The Emperor's Soul and of Legion are both in the 5000s on Amazon. He makes real money at this. Before we placed print rights with Emperor's Soul with Tachyon we had a long talk on the cost-benefit of different publication models. We did this for his Hugo-winning novella The Emperor's Soul, we did this before selling two new Mistborn novels to Tor, and we will continue to do that.
Because even though Brandon Sanderson is underpaid for his e-book royalties, as all authors with the Big Five are, the low royalty rate isn't the only thing the Big Five offer.
Even though I love marketing and want to do more of it, I am extremely dubious of the Open Road business model. When I look at the cost of marketing vs. the likely return for my own little e-book program, how can Open Road justify itself? As they say on their website "Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media."
To be sure, Open Road can gain benefits of scale in its marketing. If I have a marketing person who markets 100 books by 20 authors and Open Road has 4200 books by eight hundred authors... At the most basic level, any website they are in contact with for marketing or any social media anything they have for marketing can be used for many more authors. It doesn't take much more time to us an email to Pat's Fantasy Hotlist to pitch ten giveaways instead of one or two. Another benefit of scale: shortly after we transferred several Simon R. Green titles to Open Road, they were able to get a Kindle Daily Deal for Simon, and in all likelihood we at JABberwocky could not have. Amazon pays more attention to Open Road because Open Road is bigger, has deeper pockets, many more prominent authors.
However, you also start to come up against limitations of scale. The acquisition of e-Reads will bring Open Road's catalog to over 4,000 books. If they scale up their marketing by 30% because e-Reads scales up Open Road, they can. But ultimately, the marginal cost of hiring an additional publicist, an additional sales person, an additional whomever, is going against the marginal author and the marginal book. So they have to make choices just like the big publishers do. Even at JABberwocky, we have to make choices. When I first went to London Book Fair in the late 1990s, I could include every JABberwocky author in a catalog that I could put together myself, and which was a few dozen pages at most. The current layout for our 2014 catalogs is over 100 pages divided between a main catalog, YA/middle grade catalog, and special mini-catalogs for our two biggest clients. How can we feature important backlist which we feel is undersold in the translation markets, major #1 bestselling authors, ongoing bestselling series a level or two down, deserving new clients, and still have room to mention the books we sold in 1997 that are now long out of print? The bigger we make the catalog, the less impactful it becomes for everyone, and the added expense of going from 100 pages to 120 pages would be allocated against the books we sold in 1997 that are now long out of print. The expense cannot be justified. I and the Big Five and everyone else could choose to allocate things differently and say to ourselves the new marketing spend is dedicated to the top of our eco-system, but that isn't how economics works when trying to run a profitable business
The bigger Open Road gets and the more selective it has to become, the more it becomes like the Big Five publishers, only with a better e-book royalty rate.
So we will look closely at how well the Simon R. Green titles do, because we are very curious to see what happens to the sales revenue for those titles. If Open Road can't increase sales revenue by at least 50% from what we can do on our own, there isn't any good reason to consider having other of our books with Open Road or with other third-party vendors rather than keeping as much by our clients within the JABberwocky program. If Open Road can increase sales revenue considerably, then we want to have more books with Open Road or other vendors.
But that creates another problem. Third party vendors will exercise more selection over the books they choose to include. They will happily take our best and most successful authors, but the JABberwocky e-book program then becomes a little like the health insurance marketplace, subject to adverse selection risks. We have fixed costs that now have to be allocated against our least successful titles only. That makes it hard to justify even as a service, and ultimately could force us to stop offering the service for the authors who could most benefit from it, or to increase the subsidy. (Or, to turn it into e-Reads, scale it up as a separate entity, and be able to offer it as a package.)
This blog post has come rather far afield from a discussion just of e-Reads or just of the marketing of e-books, but I've also tried to approach it with some real rigor, and to give an understanding of how an easy real world question like "JABberwocky should spend more on marketing" which is a simple and inarguable truth, just like it is for all the Big Five publishers we deal with, gets very complicated very quickly when put into the real world. Not just for us, but for all the authors we deal with, who have many options themselves for publishing and marketing their books. You'll also see, or I think you will, that I'm not asking and answering these questions from a pre-conceived agenda that there is only one way to do things. The goal is to go where the evidence leads. But it takes a lot of trial-and-error with different approaches for different sorts of authors and different sorts of books going down different paths to find all that evidence, so even the search for the best way to make money doing this ends up being a costly one.
I've hinted above at some of the benefits of scale which an Open Road offers vs. JABberwocky, and that is the thread I'll pick up on in my next post on these topics.
The reason Richard Curtis gave in the press about the sale was that there was a perceived need to do more marketing of the e-Reads list, which would have meant stepping up the investment in the business, and that it seemed better to find a company that could do that rather than to make that investment or seek the investors that would make that investment feasible.
In some ways, Richard Curtis' decision has no bearing on what JABberwocky does with its e-book program. e-Reads was a separate enterprise from Curtis' literary agency, publishing books by authors who weren't all Richard Curtis clients, designed to make money as a separate entity. JABberwocky's e-book program is a service to JABberwocky clients, where we take our standard commission of 15% on most of the books in the program (we only take 50%, which is the Open Road model, if the author wishes to have us pay all conversion costs and limit us to recouping those costs solely from within the e-book program) rather than the 50% cut that often prevails with smaller e-book publishers or the 75% cut that often prevails with larger.
And one of the biggest limitations to our e-book program, though not to ours alone, is that we under-market it. We have one staff person who devotes a good chunk of time to the e-book program, and especially as we have vastly increased the number of books in the program, most of that time has been spent on dealing with authors on sign-up issues, with the conversion house on the file conversions, with our cover artists and cover copy writers, actually getting the books up, and dealing with vendors. (The vendor issue is a second limitation, which we will look at in another blog post.)
Since we are taking such a small cut, smaller than pretty much any other e-book publisher, I can forgive myself the under-investment in marketing, but it is nonetheless my hope that eventually we can devote more time and energy to this, either by re-tasking as we slow the pace of new books into the program or as part of an overall expansion at JABberwocky.
These are things our marketing person might do:
Send out review copies of our books. Many of our titles predate the explosion of websites dealing with sf/fantasy, and those sites might cover our releases more or even review some of the books, which came out long before the websites themselves started.
Coordinate more sale pricing, including analysis of the effects of sale pricing.
Help willing authors (and not all are willing to put too much promo energy into their twenty-year old books) to do guest blog posts.
Maybe set up a separate Twitter account or other social media devoted to the e-book program.
Improve the website we have for the e-book program.
Have a small budget to begin experiments with on-line advertising using Google AdWords, Facebook, or other programs.
Videos.
There's lots more that could be done, and I could easily spend close to $50K a year on salary, benefits, and other expenses for a full-time marketing person, even at entry level.
Absent making that marketing investment, our e-book program generally relies on reflected marketing for its success. Simon R. Green, Tanya Huff and Jack Campbell all do very nicely with reverted backlist and/or collections of short fiction that are included in our e-book program. That is almost certainly because they have books being marketed and distributed by Big Five publishers, have had this for many years, and can rely on an audience that comes along from the Big Five books to discover ours. In the next tier would be Rick Shelley, a deceased author who had fifteen books published by a Big Five publisher and who writes in an established sub-genre, military sf, that has loyal core readership. Thereafter, the success of our e-book authors kind of tracks the success of their print books, and considering the nature of our program this isn't a surprise. But it is limited; we don't have a good way other than word of mouth or reflected marketing to bring someone to a higher place.
Clearly, marketing would be a good thing!
But where is that marketing money going to come from?
Forget about what the JABberwocky cut is, but the total annual royalty revenue from our entire e-book program is under $100K. Even if you say that we could increase overall revenue by 50% if we had better pricing, and then by another 50% if we had better marketing, the total royalty revenue might just scrape past the $200K mark. No matter how you look at it, we'd be spending an enormous percentage of gross royalty earnings for the e-book program on the marketing, so where's it going to come from?
If I took a poll, I wonder how many authors in the JABberwocky e-book program would choose to give me another third of their income in exchange for having dedicated marketing, and would feel like they would come out ahead in that process. Their sales would need to increase by 70% in order for them to break even.
And for the authors at the lowest end of our earnings scale, would it be worth their time and energy to self-publish their own e-books? We make their decision to have us do it a little easier by taking a small cut of their earnings. But a lot of our e-books earn less than $20 per month in gross royalty revenue. How much time do you want to take to self-publish your e-book to save $250 or less over a year vs. having someone else do it? Can all of those authors even find someone else to do it when the cost of setting a book up for an e-book can be $400, which can take several years to recoup?
Even though I want to spend more on marketing, it is magical thinking to say it will automatically pay for itself. You can see why Richard Curtis would say he wasn't up for doing that.
From the perspective of the aspiring self-publisher, you must reflect on the fact that marketing expense is a real expense that comes from somewhere. I am sure we can find examples of self-published authors who managed to succeed by word of mouth alone, just like we can find examples from Big Five publishers of little under-the-radar novels that went on to become something big. But otherwise, someone has to do the marketing, and it has both a cost and an opportunity cost (what else you could be doing with the money). When you realize that many people have day jobs, have children, have family or social or volunteer obligations, you can see why many people don't want to do that. They want to have a publisher put some time and money into marketing their work. Even if it's going to be one of those Big Five publishers that is very likely to under-market, it will likely be better than they can do on their own.
From the perspective of even the very successful author, let's look at a JABberwocky client like Brandon Sanderson. He self-publishes his own e-books, and has the staff and support capability to do it. At the exact hour of this writing, his self-published Kindle edition of The Emperor's Soul and of Legion are both in the 5000s on Amazon. He makes real money at this. Before we placed print rights with Emperor's Soul with Tachyon we had a long talk on the cost-benefit of different publication models. We did this for his Hugo-winning novella The Emperor's Soul, we did this before selling two new Mistborn novels to Tor, and we will continue to do that.
Because even though Brandon Sanderson is underpaid for his e-book royalties, as all authors with the Big Five are, the low royalty rate isn't the only thing the Big Five offer.
Let me demonstrate this very clearly:
In 2013, Brandon Sanderson had two major NY Times bestsellers published, The Rithmatist and Steelheart, and these were among the things that his Big Five publishers did to support those books: outing to the Random House sales conference; major events at BookExpo America including booth signings, official autograph sessions, and the audio tea; national author tours; ads in magazines like Entertainment Weekly, and not just a couple but in a dozen or more; a reciprocal campaign with DC Comics; tens of thousands of books put into mass merchandisers like Walmart, Costco and Target; books on the most prominent "stepladder" displays at Barnes & Noble; other placements in endcaps, section tables and elsewhere that have been running for one book or another almost non-stop for the past nine months and with the release of Words of Radiance in two weeks may end up running for a year or more; a major promotion at dozens of Hudson Books travel locations. I don't know the exact costs for many of these things, but can any of us doubt when you look at all of this that the publishers have spent well into six figures marketing Brandon Sanderson over the past year?
So we chose a hybrid model for The Emperor's Soul. Tachyon Press doesn't offer the size of marketing spend that the Big Five can do, but it markets very heavily toward a different part of the sf/f audience than the usual Brandon Sanderson crowd. And this was a very successful book for Tachyon, even without having e-book rights. Brandon Sanderson has something for his self-publishing pipeline. We send a message to the Big Five that we have alternate ways to do some things, and gives us some leverage there. But should Brandon Sanderson test what would happen if he withdrew from the Big Five ecosystem entirely, and never had a year like 2013 with all that third party marketing investment behind him and his work?
To be sure, Open Road can gain benefits of scale in its marketing. If I have a marketing person who markets 100 books by 20 authors and Open Road has 4200 books by eight hundred authors... At the most basic level, any website they are in contact with for marketing or any social media anything they have for marketing can be used for many more authors. It doesn't take much more time to us an email to Pat's Fantasy Hotlist to pitch ten giveaways instead of one or two. Another benefit of scale: shortly after we transferred several Simon R. Green titles to Open Road, they were able to get a Kindle Daily Deal for Simon, and in all likelihood we at JABberwocky could not have. Amazon pays more attention to Open Road because Open Road is bigger, has deeper pockets, many more prominent authors.
However, you also start to come up against limitations of scale. The acquisition of e-Reads will bring Open Road's catalog to over 4,000 books. If they scale up their marketing by 30% because e-Reads scales up Open Road, they can. But ultimately, the marginal cost of hiring an additional publicist, an additional sales person, an additional whomever, is going against the marginal author and the marginal book. So they have to make choices just like the big publishers do. Even at JABberwocky, we have to make choices. When I first went to London Book Fair in the late 1990s, I could include every JABberwocky author in a catalog that I could put together myself, and which was a few dozen pages at most. The current layout for our 2014 catalogs is over 100 pages divided between a main catalog, YA/middle grade catalog, and special mini-catalogs for our two biggest clients. How can we feature important backlist which we feel is undersold in the translation markets, major #1 bestselling authors, ongoing bestselling series a level or two down, deserving new clients, and still have room to mention the books we sold in 1997 that are now long out of print? The bigger we make the catalog, the less impactful it becomes for everyone, and the added expense of going from 100 pages to 120 pages would be allocated against the books we sold in 1997 that are now long out of print. The expense cannot be justified. I and the Big Five and everyone else could choose to allocate things differently and say to ourselves the new marketing spend is dedicated to the top of our eco-system, but that isn't how economics works when trying to run a profitable business
The bigger Open Road gets and the more selective it has to become, the more it becomes like the Big Five publishers, only with a better e-book royalty rate.
So we will look closely at how well the Simon R. Green titles do, because we are very curious to see what happens to the sales revenue for those titles. If Open Road can't increase sales revenue by at least 50% from what we can do on our own, there isn't any good reason to consider having other of our books with Open Road or with other third-party vendors rather than keeping as much by our clients within the JABberwocky program. If Open Road can increase sales revenue considerably, then we want to have more books with Open Road or other vendors.
But that creates another problem. Third party vendors will exercise more selection over the books they choose to include. They will happily take our best and most successful authors, but the JABberwocky e-book program then becomes a little like the health insurance marketplace, subject to adverse selection risks. We have fixed costs that now have to be allocated against our least successful titles only. That makes it hard to justify even as a service, and ultimately could force us to stop offering the service for the authors who could most benefit from it, or to increase the subsidy. (Or, to turn it into e-Reads, scale it up as a separate entity, and be able to offer it as a package.)
This blog post has come rather far afield from a discussion just of e-Reads or just of the marketing of e-books, but I've also tried to approach it with some real rigor, and to give an understanding of how an easy real world question like "JABberwocky should spend more on marketing" which is a simple and inarguable truth, just like it is for all the Big Five publishers we deal with, gets very complicated very quickly when put into the real world. Not just for us, but for all the authors we deal with, who have many options themselves for publishing and marketing their books. You'll also see, or I think you will, that I'm not asking and answering these questions from a pre-conceived agenda that there is only one way to do things. The goal is to go where the evidence leads. But it takes a lot of trial-and-error with different approaches for different sorts of authors and different sorts of books going down different paths to find all that evidence, so even the search for the best way to make money doing this ends up being a costly one.
I've hinted above at some of the benefits of scale which an Open Road offers vs. JABberwocky, and that is the thread I'll pick up on in my next post on these topics.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
The Missionary Impulse
So if all of the people who are so committed to the idea that the whole wide world of writers should be self-publishing their books on Amazon would devote just a wee bit of their energy to getting some more of the developers near our current office to shovel the sidewalks of their development sites so my employees don't slip and fall on ice sheets, I'd be very happy.
Where does one begin to dissect this incredible piece of self-publishing "science" by Hugh Howey...
First, the science doesn't rest on actual figures of how much anyone is making. Rather, the starting point is to look at a list of Amazon bestsellers, and to determine the future from this list, and this list alone. Ugh! I had my first experience with bestseller list quackery in 1990, when a book that I knew wasn't selling very well in hardcover somehow managed to appear on the Locus bestseller list for multiple months. More recently, Myke Cole has been aiming for the #1 bestseller in the Space Marines category for a book with no Marines in it. I've seen books appear on the NY Times bestseller list with very little correlation, especially on the mass market side, to their hard sales numbers as reported on Bookscan. So any article that starts out with breathless promises of answering all questions by analyzing a trove of Amazon bestseller information is looking a little dubious to me.
Then, there is a very beautiful chart putting the average review score of a book next to the average price for the book, with little bars based on whether the book comes from a big five publisher, an indie publisher, etc.
Even assuming that we want to consider Amazon reviews the be-all and end-all of qualitative analysis, this data is questionable. For one, how do you categorize the many books that are currently from one type of publisher but used to be from another?
But Amazon reviews don't correlate necessarily with quality. There are the one-star reviews because the e-book costs too much. There are the one-star reviews because the book that says "graphic novel" in the description is a graphic novel. I didn't know for sure until I got the manuscript, but I was a lot less surprised than a lot of the one-star review givers that Sookie chose Sam, because the vampires -- hate to break it to anyone -- weren't exactly princes of kind-heartedness and generosity when dealing with Sookie. Yes, there are some cases where I'd like to take a client of mine, point them in the direction of their Amazon reviews, and say there are some lessons to be learned, but there are way too many cases where the Amazon reviews are not indicative of anything.
The article then jumps from there to saying that the better average reviews for books priced less expensively suggests that readers are grading on a curve and perhaps giving better reviews to cheaper books from self-published authors because e-book prices are too high.
There is a logical fallacy here. One second, it says Amazon reviews are reliable. The next second, it says Amazon reviews are graded on a curve where readers are more inclined to be generous to books that offer better value. A reliable review shouldn't be given on a curve. It shouldn't have the moral relativism of a politician that likes filibustering judges until either the majority party in the Senate or the party affiliation of the President changes, when all of a sudden night is day and day is night. The logic is circular, fallacious or both.
Also, ebook prices are not too high. Compare the value of reading a book to multiple other entertainment options. The average price of a movie, of an album, of a magazine, of a ticket to a concert or a show -- all of these things are more expensive than books, and usually of shorter duration. Yes, there are some things like getting Netflix for a month that are cheaper than the price of a book, but on balance, a book give solid value for the money in whatever format you buy it in.
Another thing to keep in mind -- this study basically starts out by saying e-book prices are too high without any underlying rational, other than to say that cheaper e-books get better Amazon reviews.
So we move on to Act Two of the essay.
A chart shows us that Big Five publishers account for just over a quarter of the bestseller days for the most popular e-book categories. One thing I can agree with -- romance, sf/f and mysteries are among the most popular categories for e-books. The chart shows that the Big Five publishers account for just over one-quarter of the bestseller days, that this is under-representative, and suggests that the Big Five publishers are therefore under-publishing in the most popular genres. I might agree with this. It would be good for my business if there were more sf/f markets, that's for sure. But the implication that publishers aren't doing anything with this data is flat-out wrong. In the UK, multiple new sf/fantasy imprints have started up in recent years, we have several clients who are selling in the UK only on account of those new options and imprints, and the e-book business to be had by doing sf/fantasy has to be the motivating force for those imprints, because it sure can't be the Bookscan sales for print editions of these books, which are often below 1,000 copies for the home market.
The next conclusion drawn is that publishers should lower e-book prices. Which isn't a conclusion that follows automatically from anything else. Maybe that is why I have seen publishers react to this news by publishing more sf/f in the global English marketplace, but not by lowering their prices.
Next chart. Daily unit sales by category of publisher. Again, the category of publisher is a hard nut to crack. Every book published in the JABberwocky e-book program was once published by a bigger publisher. I will concede that it is possible to get an approximate sense of sales by looking at Amazon rankings, but it is only approximate. As an example, being #5 on an Amazon bestseller list on December 23 means more than being #5 on that same list on August 23. There is then the "eye-popper" of a revelation that indie authors are outselling the Big Five. Is this an eye-popper? The Big Five aren't big because of the volume of titles they publisher, they are big because of the revenue they generate for the titles they publish. In 2013, Simon & Schuster had sales over $800 million.
Then more breathless reporting of news that isn't news, which is that e-book sales in the major e-book categories are higher than the overall sales percentage for e-books.
Run this by me again. You have one number that is an average, then you have the people that are above average, and you are shocked to find out that the above average people are above average. This is like breathlessly reporting the discovery that the average GPA is a 2.5, and the Phi Beta Kappa students have a higher GPA than that.
This isn't a secret. I don't take out ads in the NY Times, but I think I have mentioned in blog posts or on twitter or on panels or in conversation with people that e-book sales were reaching parity, then at parity, then surpassing. Which isn't to say that plenty of people studying up on the e-book business won't find this to be newsworthy, but it isn't news, or isn't a secret.
From there, Hugh Howey's blog post goes on to discover that big publishers make more profit from e-book sales than print news. Not news. Hugh could have read a blog post entitled "Do The Math" that reported this news two years ago. Two years ago.
After a lot of fuzzy math and bad statistics that occasionally intersect with the truth, Howey comes up with this conclusion: "Our data suggests that even stellar manuscripts are better off self-published."
Sorry, Hugh. There is absolutely nothing in your blog post that justifies that conclusion. This is not the same as saying that your conclusion is wrong. Maybe it's right. But if it's right, it's not because of anything -- anything! -- in your blog post.
Your post fails to look at the revenue big publishers can generate from sales other than e-book sales.
It fails to look at the opportunity cost for the writer of having to self-market books rather than have a publisher do so.
It fails to look at the present value of a guaranteed advance vs. royalty money that may or may not come along down the road.
Your advice to publishers is for them to (a) lower e-book publishers (b) give a bigger share of their lower revenue to the authors they publish. Obviously, the publishers are not going to take this advice. There is no business model for them in taking in less money while simultaneously giving more to the authors.
I don't say these things because I am in bed with the major publishers. I fight with the major publishers all the time, including fights to get reversions of rights so the authors can self-publish or utilize our e-book program to publish those same books. JABberwocky offers e-book services to our clients in part because we want to demonstrate that there are alternative publishing models, and hope that those alternative models will lead to higher e-book royalties. But that certainly won't happen if the publishers also price every e-book at -- well, what price? The entire Nightside series by Simon Green is available for $5.99 per book. Myke Cole's just-published Breach Zone is $5.99. The entire Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, under $14, and his Way of Kings $8. Should that be $2.99, $4.99, what lower price?
And what then happens when everyone has lowered prices as you suggest? If every e-book is $2.99, what price does the self-published author go to in order to present as a bargain? $1.99? $.99?
How elastic is the demand for books? Yes, at the margins, you can increase sales some by lowering prices. But after a point, that stops working. There are only so many people who like to read with only so many hours in the day to do it. You can't have a never-ending price war.
Comparisons to the music industry don't help. The publishing industry has offered a wide range of products at a wide range of prices, and most of those prices reasonable. The music industry tried to sell $14.99 albums to people who wanted $1.49 singles. But most people want full novels, not the A side or the B side of the single. And even in 2014, a typical paperback book costs half or just over what a CD cost in 1989. Also, authors can't tour. Unless readers want to go to pay-by-the-panel conventions, authors are stuck making most of their money from writing, so if the publishing business ever does become like the record business, authors are cooked. All the $1.99 e-books in the world won't be able to keep the typical author going.
More e-book posts to come...
What does the sale of Richard Curtis' e-Reads to Open Road say about the e-book business, e-book marketing, and the costs and benefits to the e-published author.
Where does one begin to dissect this incredible piece of self-publishing "science" by Hugh Howey...
First, the science doesn't rest on actual figures of how much anyone is making. Rather, the starting point is to look at a list of Amazon bestsellers, and to determine the future from this list, and this list alone. Ugh! I had my first experience with bestseller list quackery in 1990, when a book that I knew wasn't selling very well in hardcover somehow managed to appear on the Locus bestseller list for multiple months. More recently, Myke Cole has been aiming for the #1 bestseller in the Space Marines category for a book with no Marines in it. I've seen books appear on the NY Times bestseller list with very little correlation, especially on the mass market side, to their hard sales numbers as reported on Bookscan. So any article that starts out with breathless promises of answering all questions by analyzing a trove of Amazon bestseller information is looking a little dubious to me.
Then, there is a very beautiful chart putting the average review score of a book next to the average price for the book, with little bars based on whether the book comes from a big five publisher, an indie publisher, etc.
Even assuming that we want to consider Amazon reviews the be-all and end-all of qualitative analysis, this data is questionable. For one, how do you categorize the many books that are currently from one type of publisher but used to be from another?
But Amazon reviews don't correlate necessarily with quality. There are the one-star reviews because the e-book costs too much. There are the one-star reviews because the book that says "graphic novel" in the description is a graphic novel. I didn't know for sure until I got the manuscript, but I was a lot less surprised than a lot of the one-star review givers that Sookie chose Sam, because the vampires -- hate to break it to anyone -- weren't exactly princes of kind-heartedness and generosity when dealing with Sookie. Yes, there are some cases where I'd like to take a client of mine, point them in the direction of their Amazon reviews, and say there are some lessons to be learned, but there are way too many cases where the Amazon reviews are not indicative of anything.
The article then jumps from there to saying that the better average reviews for books priced less expensively suggests that readers are grading on a curve and perhaps giving better reviews to cheaper books from self-published authors because e-book prices are too high.
There is a logical fallacy here. One second, it says Amazon reviews are reliable. The next second, it says Amazon reviews are graded on a curve where readers are more inclined to be generous to books that offer better value. A reliable review shouldn't be given on a curve. It shouldn't have the moral relativism of a politician that likes filibustering judges until either the majority party in the Senate or the party affiliation of the President changes, when all of a sudden night is day and day is night. The logic is circular, fallacious or both.
Also, ebook prices are not too high. Compare the value of reading a book to multiple other entertainment options. The average price of a movie, of an album, of a magazine, of a ticket to a concert or a show -- all of these things are more expensive than books, and usually of shorter duration. Yes, there are some things like getting Netflix for a month that are cheaper than the price of a book, but on balance, a book give solid value for the money in whatever format you buy it in.
Another thing to keep in mind -- this study basically starts out by saying e-book prices are too high without any underlying rational, other than to say that cheaper e-books get better Amazon reviews.
So we move on to Act Two of the essay.
A chart shows us that Big Five publishers account for just over a quarter of the bestseller days for the most popular e-book categories. One thing I can agree with -- romance, sf/f and mysteries are among the most popular categories for e-books. The chart shows that the Big Five publishers account for just over one-quarter of the bestseller days, that this is under-representative, and suggests that the Big Five publishers are therefore under-publishing in the most popular genres. I might agree with this. It would be good for my business if there were more sf/f markets, that's for sure. But the implication that publishers aren't doing anything with this data is flat-out wrong. In the UK, multiple new sf/fantasy imprints have started up in recent years, we have several clients who are selling in the UK only on account of those new options and imprints, and the e-book business to be had by doing sf/fantasy has to be the motivating force for those imprints, because it sure can't be the Bookscan sales for print editions of these books, which are often below 1,000 copies for the home market.
The next conclusion drawn is that publishers should lower e-book prices. Which isn't a conclusion that follows automatically from anything else. Maybe that is why I have seen publishers react to this news by publishing more sf/f in the global English marketplace, but not by lowering their prices.
Next chart. Daily unit sales by category of publisher. Again, the category of publisher is a hard nut to crack. Every book published in the JABberwocky e-book program was once published by a bigger publisher. I will concede that it is possible to get an approximate sense of sales by looking at Amazon rankings, but it is only approximate. As an example, being #5 on an Amazon bestseller list on December 23 means more than being #5 on that same list on August 23. There is then the "eye-popper" of a revelation that indie authors are outselling the Big Five. Is this an eye-popper? The Big Five aren't big because of the volume of titles they publisher, they are big because of the revenue they generate for the titles they publish. In 2013, Simon & Schuster had sales over $800 million.
Then more breathless reporting of news that isn't news, which is that e-book sales in the major e-book categories are higher than the overall sales percentage for e-books.
Run this by me again. You have one number that is an average, then you have the people that are above average, and you are shocked to find out that the above average people are above average. This is like breathlessly reporting the discovery that the average GPA is a 2.5, and the Phi Beta Kappa students have a higher GPA than that.
This isn't a secret. I don't take out ads in the NY Times, but I think I have mentioned in blog posts or on twitter or on panels or in conversation with people that e-book sales were reaching parity, then at parity, then surpassing. Which isn't to say that plenty of people studying up on the e-book business won't find this to be newsworthy, but it isn't news, or isn't a secret.
From there, Hugh Howey's blog post goes on to discover that big publishers make more profit from e-book sales than print news. Not news. Hugh could have read a blog post entitled "Do The Math" that reported this news two years ago. Two years ago.
After a lot of fuzzy math and bad statistics that occasionally intersect with the truth, Howey comes up with this conclusion: "Our data suggests that even stellar manuscripts are better off self-published."
Sorry, Hugh. There is absolutely nothing in your blog post that justifies that conclusion. This is not the same as saying that your conclusion is wrong. Maybe it's right. But if it's right, it's not because of anything -- anything! -- in your blog post.
Your post fails to look at the revenue big publishers can generate from sales other than e-book sales.
It fails to look at the opportunity cost for the writer of having to self-market books rather than have a publisher do so.
It fails to look at the present value of a guaranteed advance vs. royalty money that may or may not come along down the road.
Your advice to publishers is for them to (a) lower e-book publishers (b) give a bigger share of their lower revenue to the authors they publish. Obviously, the publishers are not going to take this advice. There is no business model for them in taking in less money while simultaneously giving more to the authors.
I don't say these things because I am in bed with the major publishers. I fight with the major publishers all the time, including fights to get reversions of rights so the authors can self-publish or utilize our e-book program to publish those same books. JABberwocky offers e-book services to our clients in part because we want to demonstrate that there are alternative publishing models, and hope that those alternative models will lead to higher e-book royalties. But that certainly won't happen if the publishers also price every e-book at -- well, what price? The entire Nightside series by Simon Green is available for $5.99 per book. Myke Cole's just-published Breach Zone is $5.99. The entire Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, under $14, and his Way of Kings $8. Should that be $2.99, $4.99, what lower price?
And what then happens when everyone has lowered prices as you suggest? If every e-book is $2.99, what price does the self-published author go to in order to present as a bargain? $1.99? $.99?
How elastic is the demand for books? Yes, at the margins, you can increase sales some by lowering prices. But after a point, that stops working. There are only so many people who like to read with only so many hours in the day to do it. You can't have a never-ending price war.
Comparisons to the music industry don't help. The publishing industry has offered a wide range of products at a wide range of prices, and most of those prices reasonable. The music industry tried to sell $14.99 albums to people who wanted $1.49 singles. But most people want full novels, not the A side or the B side of the single. And even in 2014, a typical paperback book costs half or just over what a CD cost in 1989. Also, authors can't tour. Unless readers want to go to pay-by-the-panel conventions, authors are stuck making most of their money from writing, so if the publishing business ever does become like the record business, authors are cooked. All the $1.99 e-books in the world won't be able to keep the typical author going.
More e-book posts to come...
What does the sale of Richard Curtis' e-Reads to Open Road say about the e-book business, e-book marketing, and the costs and benefits to the e-published author.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
So the first 2014 movie I saw in 2014 was Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.
Took me a while. Even by the standards of January/February movies, this year has been off to a pretty shabby start. Not many movies I wanted to see, not many new movies coming out that I was anticipating seeing, so I could keep shoving this aside in favor of other things.
I enjoyed it.
For one, I like Chris Pine very much. He has "it," that special movie star quality. He radiates charisma and likability, much like Denzel Washington over the course of his entire career (the two of them together in Unstoppable is a casting coup central to an excellent movie), or Tom Cruise twenty or thirty years ago, or Ryan Gosling when he doesn't do bad indie movies. He is very Chris Pine here!
I have a soft spot for Kenneth Branagh. Oh, he's not one of the great directors of the past thirty years, but his Dead Again was a movie I liked enough to see twice, he's done some good Shakespeare movies, he did the good Thor movie. He knows how to direct actors with charisma, he doesn't get in their way, he let Chris Hemsworth shine outside of the Thor suit in Thor, and he lets Chris Pine by Chris Pine. And he's a solid enough actor himself.
So all in all, it works. It's a little bit similar to the last Mission Impossible movie, but not as big a budget so things happen on a smaller scale, and the movie's short and moves briskly, which isn't a bad thing. There's one major action set-piece in the middle which the film builds to nicely, and one major action piece at the end which impressed me for doing a good enough job of faking NYC without being in NYC that I was willing to buy into it even though I knew the geography was unfamiliar.
Branagh isn't as good, always, at directing women. Not much for them to do in Thor, Keira Knightley has a pretty thankless role to play.
Nothing great, but as January releases go this was a pleasant way to pass the time.
Saw two Broadway shows on the same day.
Machinal at the Roundabout's 42nd Street Theatre was good for a nap. When I was up, I was quite impressed with the set design and the costume design and the creativity and beauty of the physical production. And the play, some decades old and based on a real life murder case, is a decent enough choice for revival because the play and the case it comes from anticipate quite nicely a lot of today's celebrity culture, enough so that we have to reconsider if today's celebrity culture is really just today's. We'd like to think so, but the 24 hour news cycle may just be an accelerant and not the flame and fire itself. I can't exactly recommend the play, because it's clear I got enough out of it from staying awake for a third or a half, which suggests half of it just kind of sits there. But I've also stayed awake for many a play that's given far less back to me.
Little Me is a 1962 musical with a book by Neil Simon and a Cy Coleman score that was originally intended as a star vehicle for Sid Caesar. It's an old woman narrating her life story, which consists of a series of short-lived marriages, with the husbands all played by one actor. It's got a juicy role for the old woman, another for the young woman, and a very juicy role indeed for the man. Here, Sid Caesar's shoes are filled by Christian Borle, a Tony Award winner for Peter and the Starcatcher and a star of the TV show Smash (male half of the composing team). I was glad I saw this. The first act goes on too long, but the play starts off with charm and humor enough to almost allow it to coast over the dull hills later in the act. Christian Borle was perfect in his role, Broadway veteran Judy Kaye was excellent in her role as the old woman who narrates, and the supporting roles well cast as well. Part of the Encores series, the show had one week, seven performances, and is gone.
Took me a while. Even by the standards of January/February movies, this year has been off to a pretty shabby start. Not many movies I wanted to see, not many new movies coming out that I was anticipating seeing, so I could keep shoving this aside in favor of other things.
I enjoyed it.
For one, I like Chris Pine very much. He has "it," that special movie star quality. He radiates charisma and likability, much like Denzel Washington over the course of his entire career (the two of them together in Unstoppable is a casting coup central to an excellent movie), or Tom Cruise twenty or thirty years ago, or Ryan Gosling when he doesn't do bad indie movies. He is very Chris Pine here!
I have a soft spot for Kenneth Branagh. Oh, he's not one of the great directors of the past thirty years, but his Dead Again was a movie I liked enough to see twice, he's done some good Shakespeare movies, he did the good Thor movie. He knows how to direct actors with charisma, he doesn't get in their way, he let Chris Hemsworth shine outside of the Thor suit in Thor, and he lets Chris Pine by Chris Pine. And he's a solid enough actor himself.
So all in all, it works. It's a little bit similar to the last Mission Impossible movie, but not as big a budget so things happen on a smaller scale, and the movie's short and moves briskly, which isn't a bad thing. There's one major action set-piece in the middle which the film builds to nicely, and one major action piece at the end which impressed me for doing a good enough job of faking NYC without being in NYC that I was willing to buy into it even though I knew the geography was unfamiliar.
Branagh isn't as good, always, at directing women. Not much for them to do in Thor, Keira Knightley has a pretty thankless role to play.
Nothing great, but as January releases go this was a pleasant way to pass the time.
Saw two Broadway shows on the same day.
Machinal at the Roundabout's 42nd Street Theatre was good for a nap. When I was up, I was quite impressed with the set design and the costume design and the creativity and beauty of the physical production. And the play, some decades old and based on a real life murder case, is a decent enough choice for revival because the play and the case it comes from anticipate quite nicely a lot of today's celebrity culture, enough so that we have to reconsider if today's celebrity culture is really just today's. We'd like to think so, but the 24 hour news cycle may just be an accelerant and not the flame and fire itself. I can't exactly recommend the play, because it's clear I got enough out of it from staying awake for a third or a half, which suggests half of it just kind of sits there. But I've also stayed awake for many a play that's given far less back to me.
Little Me is a 1962 musical with a book by Neil Simon and a Cy Coleman score that was originally intended as a star vehicle for Sid Caesar. It's an old woman narrating her life story, which consists of a series of short-lived marriages, with the husbands all played by one actor. It's got a juicy role for the old woman, another for the young woman, and a very juicy role indeed for the man. Here, Sid Caesar's shoes are filled by Christian Borle, a Tony Award winner for Peter and the Starcatcher and a star of the TV show Smash (male half of the composing team). I was glad I saw this. The first act goes on too long, but the play starts off with charm and humor enough to almost allow it to coast over the dull hills later in the act. Christian Borle was perfect in his role, Broadway veteran Judy Kaye was excellent in her role as the old woman who narrates, and the supporting roles well cast as well. Part of the Encores series, the show had one week, seven performances, and is gone.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Print on Decrepitude
I've had a generally good relationship with Penguin over my 28 year career, but right now I am not feeling very charitable toward the folks on 375 Hudson Street.
Sometime in 2012 or 2013, it's hard to know exactly when because they don't really announce these things, they started a Print on Demand program.
Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. POD has come a long way since its early days, and you can do very attractive POD books, especially trade paperbacks, that are hard to tell from the standard offset edition.
But that's not what Penguin is doing. They are doing mass market POD editions, and they are awful and crappy and markedly inferior to the regular offset editions in pretty much every way imaginable.
Today's example, a copy of Simon R. Green's Hell to Pay, the 7th Nightside novel, spotted at a Barnes & Noble in CT.
I knew it was POD the second I opened the book. That's kind of bad sign #1. You shouldn't be able to tell a POD book from a regular book that easily. But these Penguin POD books have Wimpy Spine Syndrome. Which is... well, if you pick up a regular paperback and open it a wee bit at the center point and kind of push on one side and pull on the other, you aren't going to get a lot of give. The spine is going to kind of hold itself firm. Not the POD editions. You open it up, and there's a spine, but it's very malleable and elastic. This was that kind of book.
Then there's the paper stock. It's a very bright white. I gave my younger brother this book and another similarly sized Nightside book and asked if he could tell anything about them, and that was the thing he noticed. It didn't look like a book. It looked like it had been printed on copy paper, was how he described it. That nice 87 brightness sort of copy paper. The problem with that is that it offers a lot more contrast between the black ink and the white paper which can be a little annoying, and may also offer a little more glare.
Then there's the guttering. Depending on a lot of factors, a regular paperback you can usually read without having to push the pages back too far. There's enough space between the inside text and the spine that you can hold it open with one hand, and get enough room to read the book. Not with these POD editions. Even though they are the same size and use the same page plates in theory, the text is much more likely to run far enough into the spine that you've really got to hold the book open with two hands to read it. This means there is a much bigger risk that you might break the spine of your book. Happily, I guess, these POD editions have such wimpy bendable spines that they won't break in quite the same way?
In this particular book, the copyright page was very blurry. The text was generally crisp enough, but you could really tell on the copyright page that this wasn't well printed. It was the book version of watching a movie somebody recorded from their seat in the theatre.
The binding of the cover to the innards is just a little off. In a properly printed mass market, the gluing of the cover to the spine runs to the edge of the spine. In these POD editions, the gluing will be off kilter. On this copy of Hell to Pay, the front cover was glued a fraction of an inch more to the first page than it is supposed to be.
According to our website, the last regular printing we spotted was 5th printing. This one says it is the "1st". On the copyright page, that's the "10 9 8 7 6" countdown. The lowest number is supposed to be the printing. I am pretty certain that the list of other books by Simon R. Green was updated along the way from the first printing to the 5th printing. This POD edition has the list of other books by the author that was current when Hell to Pay was first published seven years ago. The Nightside series was twelve books, but this "other books" panel only goes up to this 7th book. Good luck figuring out from here the right sequence for reading all the books that came after. There is no mention of the Secret Histories series, a NY Times bestselling series by the author. There is no mention of his Ghost Finders series.
The POD books are much more susceptible to generic printing errors than regularly printed books. Another client of mine, Del Howison, has purchased a few batches of these POD copies of his first Dark Delicacies anthology to sell in his Dark Delicacies store. Can't have purchased more than 20 or 30 of these. One had a seriously wrinkled spine. Another had the cover for his book wrapped around the innards of another book. In another, they put the final pages of the book from page 340 on at the beginning of the book instead of at the end of the book. All of these are the sorts of things that sometimes happen with books printed by regular means. But they don't happen in 10% of the copies.
Penguin also tries very hard to say that these aren't POD books, because there are contractual implications to saying that. They are "managing the inventory." Maybe we have 5 copies, maybe we have 48 copies. But the bottom line is that they are printing them in very very small quantities, and only when they absolutely need to print them. Del Howison generally has to wait a bit getting his books from Baker & Taylor, because B&T doesn't maintain much more than a one or two copy inventory and has to wait for Penguin to supply if Del wants to get five or six.
Penguin now charges $9.99 for a shoddily printed copy of Dark Delicacies. The better-printed copies cost $7.99.
How can you tell if your paperback with Berkley or Ace or Jove or Roc or NAL or whatever imprint of Penguin is being printed in this way? Well, on the one hand, it's very easy, because if you've read this blog post, you might accurately get a "you'll know it when you see it" feel. But it's also very hard, because the publisher doesn't want to utter the words POD or let you know that their book is in their Special Inventory Program. It's hard just looking at Amazon or B&N.com or anyplace to tell a book that has just a few copies around because it's in this program from one that is in its end of days with the regularly printed copies. By definition they're doing these POD runs for books that don't sell a lot of copies and are probably not carried regularly at most bookstores (in fact, I'm surprised a Nightside book by Simon R. Green is being printed this way) so you may not know until you decide you need another five copies for your shelf or some reader complains to you via the contact link on your website. However, on the very last page of the book opposite the inside back cover, I have noticed that the POD editions have some kind of string of characters, a printing code of sorts, that you don't see on the regular editions. Of course, Penguin will now do its best to get rid of that, or to add a random string of characters to the back ad on the last page of all of its books just to confuse us.
Do you want your book printed this way?
I've had communication with people at Penguin about this dating back many months, and I don't get the sense that they really care. We are supposed to be happy that our book is being kept in print. And the decision to do this isn't the editor's department and isn't anything the editor can influence, and who wants to spend a lot of time worrying about things you can't do anything about. So even though I don't usually like to do business blog posts like this one, I think at this point that it's time to let the sun shine in.
This is the kind of bad, foolish, short-sighted behavior that will end up putting big publishers like Random Penguin out of business. Because any of us can go to CreateSpace or Lulu and print a book that looks better than these Penguin group POD editions. And if I can't even count on the publisher of my clients' books to print them half decently...
Sometime in 2012 or 2013, it's hard to know exactly when because they don't really announce these things, they started a Print on Demand program.
Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. POD has come a long way since its early days, and you can do very attractive POD books, especially trade paperbacks, that are hard to tell from the standard offset edition.
But that's not what Penguin is doing. They are doing mass market POD editions, and they are awful and crappy and markedly inferior to the regular offset editions in pretty much every way imaginable.
Today's example, a copy of Simon R. Green's Hell to Pay, the 7th Nightside novel, spotted at a Barnes & Noble in CT.
I knew it was POD the second I opened the book. That's kind of bad sign #1. You shouldn't be able to tell a POD book from a regular book that easily. But these Penguin POD books have Wimpy Spine Syndrome. Which is... well, if you pick up a regular paperback and open it a wee bit at the center point and kind of push on one side and pull on the other, you aren't going to get a lot of give. The spine is going to kind of hold itself firm. Not the POD editions. You open it up, and there's a spine, but it's very malleable and elastic. This was that kind of book.
Then there's the paper stock. It's a very bright white. I gave my younger brother this book and another similarly sized Nightside book and asked if he could tell anything about them, and that was the thing he noticed. It didn't look like a book. It looked like it had been printed on copy paper, was how he described it. That nice 87 brightness sort of copy paper. The problem with that is that it offers a lot more contrast between the black ink and the white paper which can be a little annoying, and may also offer a little more glare.
Then there's the guttering. Depending on a lot of factors, a regular paperback you can usually read without having to push the pages back too far. There's enough space between the inside text and the spine that you can hold it open with one hand, and get enough room to read the book. Not with these POD editions. Even though they are the same size and use the same page plates in theory, the text is much more likely to run far enough into the spine that you've really got to hold the book open with two hands to read it. This means there is a much bigger risk that you might break the spine of your book. Happily, I guess, these POD editions have such wimpy bendable spines that they won't break in quite the same way?
In this particular book, the copyright page was very blurry. The text was generally crisp enough, but you could really tell on the copyright page that this wasn't well printed. It was the book version of watching a movie somebody recorded from their seat in the theatre.
The binding of the cover to the innards is just a little off. In a properly printed mass market, the gluing of the cover to the spine runs to the edge of the spine. In these POD editions, the gluing will be off kilter. On this copy of Hell to Pay, the front cover was glued a fraction of an inch more to the first page than it is supposed to be.
According to our website, the last regular printing we spotted was 5th printing. This one says it is the "1st". On the copyright page, that's the "10 9 8 7 6" countdown. The lowest number is supposed to be the printing. I am pretty certain that the list of other books by Simon R. Green was updated along the way from the first printing to the 5th printing. This POD edition has the list of other books by the author that was current when Hell to Pay was first published seven years ago. The Nightside series was twelve books, but this "other books" panel only goes up to this 7th book. Good luck figuring out from here the right sequence for reading all the books that came after. There is no mention of the Secret Histories series, a NY Times bestselling series by the author. There is no mention of his Ghost Finders series.
The POD books are much more susceptible to generic printing errors than regularly printed books. Another client of mine, Del Howison, has purchased a few batches of these POD copies of his first Dark Delicacies anthology to sell in his Dark Delicacies store. Can't have purchased more than 20 or 30 of these. One had a seriously wrinkled spine. Another had the cover for his book wrapped around the innards of another book. In another, they put the final pages of the book from page 340 on at the beginning of the book instead of at the end of the book. All of these are the sorts of things that sometimes happen with books printed by regular means. But they don't happen in 10% of the copies.
Penguin also tries very hard to say that these aren't POD books, because there are contractual implications to saying that. They are "managing the inventory." Maybe we have 5 copies, maybe we have 48 copies. But the bottom line is that they are printing them in very very small quantities, and only when they absolutely need to print them. Del Howison generally has to wait a bit getting his books from Baker & Taylor, because B&T doesn't maintain much more than a one or two copy inventory and has to wait for Penguin to supply if Del wants to get five or six.
Penguin now charges $9.99 for a shoddily printed copy of Dark Delicacies. The better-printed copies cost $7.99.
How can you tell if your paperback with Berkley or Ace or Jove or Roc or NAL or whatever imprint of Penguin is being printed in this way? Well, on the one hand, it's very easy, because if you've read this blog post, you might accurately get a "you'll know it when you see it" feel. But it's also very hard, because the publisher doesn't want to utter the words POD or let you know that their book is in their Special Inventory Program. It's hard just looking at Amazon or B&N.com or anyplace to tell a book that has just a few copies around because it's in this program from one that is in its end of days with the regularly printed copies. By definition they're doing these POD runs for books that don't sell a lot of copies and are probably not carried regularly at most bookstores (in fact, I'm surprised a Nightside book by Simon R. Green is being printed this way) so you may not know until you decide you need another five copies for your shelf or some reader complains to you via the contact link on your website. However, on the very last page of the book opposite the inside back cover, I have noticed that the POD editions have some kind of string of characters, a printing code of sorts, that you don't see on the regular editions. Of course, Penguin will now do its best to get rid of that, or to add a random string of characters to the back ad on the last page of all of its books just to confuse us.
Do you want your book printed this way?
I've had communication with people at Penguin about this dating back many months, and I don't get the sense that they really care. We are supposed to be happy that our book is being kept in print. And the decision to do this isn't the editor's department and isn't anything the editor can influence, and who wants to spend a lot of time worrying about things you can't do anything about. So even though I don't usually like to do business blog posts like this one, I think at this point that it's time to let the sun shine in.
This is the kind of bad, foolish, short-sighted behavior that will end up putting big publishers like Random Penguin out of business. Because any of us can go to CreateSpace or Lulu and print a book that looks better than these Penguin group POD editions. And if I can't even count on the publisher of my clients' books to print them half decently...
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Lone Survivor
Over the weekend I saw Lone Survivor with Myke Cole, my favorite Coast Guard Reserve officer.
Wow!
The only real question is this: In ten years, when it is movie night at FOB Somewhere, are the troops going to be downing their popcorn with this, or Black Hawk Down. Lt. Cole votes for Black Hawk Down. I vote Lone Survivor.
An odd choice for me. Black Hawk Down tried hard to let us get to know its characters, and Lone Survivor tries hardly at all. The context comes from a montage of SEAL training under the opening credits, to give you some sense of what these men endure to get where they are. And other than that, an email or two with the gal at home, some discussion of whether to get the gal an Arabian (or is it Arabic?) horse, a race around the base channeling either the yard race in Chariots of Fire or the volleyball in Top Gun. Hazing the new guy. But not much. And all the guys are buried in facial hair so you can't see their features or tell them apart all that easy. They have to act thru their hair thickets.
But when you get to the fighting it doesn't matter.
And I think this might be where I prefer Lone Survivor over Black Hawk Down.
I have seen plenty of urban war in my cinematic history.
Peter Berg, the director of Lone Survivor, did urban war in The Kingdom. Kubrick did it in Full Metal Jacket. Black Hawk Down wasn't the first or the last, and even if it is the best it doesn't lack for other films with similar scenes. They abound. And jungle warfare abounds in any number of Viet Nam movies and elsewhere.
But I can't remember a film that gave me the gut-wrenching chill of watching these guys tumble down a mountain like real life versions of a Road Runner cartoon, each bump against the rocks rendered in very verisimilitudinous Dolby Atmos. I felt like I was on the mountain with this band of brothers. I liked Black Hawk Down but have no memory of it, no scene that sticks in my mind. I can still feel those jolts from Lone Survivor a few days after.
I am assured that most of the details in the movie are spot on. Myke Cole showed me his Maverick gloves, vouched for the use of Under Armour.
I can vouch for the A+ rating from Cinemascore, the company that polls Friday might audiences. The movie is that good.
The movie isn't a political statement. Read it how you want, a study in the futility of waging war in Afghanistan with radios that don't work, or a testament to the strength of character of the American military, or anywhere in between.
The movie will not be shown at the next Raytheon annual meeting.
The Oscar nominations it has in sound categories are well deserved. Those jolts I feel four days later -- sound, baby, sound. That Lone Survivor has about as many nominations as Lone Ranger is feeble. The movie doesn't lend itself to acting awards; hard to act past those 'staches. But no Best Picture nod?
As a historical note, I have now seen a Ben Foster movie at the UA Court Street with both Myke Cole and Peter Brett.
Wow!
The only real question is this: In ten years, when it is movie night at FOB Somewhere, are the troops going to be downing their popcorn with this, or Black Hawk Down. Lt. Cole votes for Black Hawk Down. I vote Lone Survivor.
An odd choice for me. Black Hawk Down tried hard to let us get to know its characters, and Lone Survivor tries hardly at all. The context comes from a montage of SEAL training under the opening credits, to give you some sense of what these men endure to get where they are. And other than that, an email or two with the gal at home, some discussion of whether to get the gal an Arabian (or is it Arabic?) horse, a race around the base channeling either the yard race in Chariots of Fire or the volleyball in Top Gun. Hazing the new guy. But not much. And all the guys are buried in facial hair so you can't see their features or tell them apart all that easy. They have to act thru their hair thickets.
But when you get to the fighting it doesn't matter.
And I think this might be where I prefer Lone Survivor over Black Hawk Down.
I have seen plenty of urban war in my cinematic history.
Peter Berg, the director of Lone Survivor, did urban war in The Kingdom. Kubrick did it in Full Metal Jacket. Black Hawk Down wasn't the first or the last, and even if it is the best it doesn't lack for other films with similar scenes. They abound. And jungle warfare abounds in any number of Viet Nam movies and elsewhere.
But I can't remember a film that gave me the gut-wrenching chill of watching these guys tumble down a mountain like real life versions of a Road Runner cartoon, each bump against the rocks rendered in very verisimilitudinous Dolby Atmos. I felt like I was on the mountain with this band of brothers. I liked Black Hawk Down but have no memory of it, no scene that sticks in my mind. I can still feel those jolts from Lone Survivor a few days after.
I am assured that most of the details in the movie are spot on. Myke Cole showed me his Maverick gloves, vouched for the use of Under Armour.
I can vouch for the A+ rating from Cinemascore, the company that polls Friday might audiences. The movie is that good.
The movie isn't a political statement. Read it how you want, a study in the futility of waging war in Afghanistan with radios that don't work, or a testament to the strength of character of the American military, or anywhere in between.
The movie will not be shown at the next Raytheon annual meeting.
The Oscar nominations it has in sound categories are well deserved. Those jolts I feel four days later -- sound, baby, sound. That Lone Survivor has about as many nominations as Lone Ranger is feeble. The movie doesn't lend itself to acting awards; hard to act past those 'staches. But no Best Picture nod?
As a historical note, I have now seen a Ben Foster movie at the UA Court Street with both Myke Cole and Peter Brett.
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