Tag Archives: publishing

Articles I Like: Six Myths About Traditional Publishing

PolyWogg.ca
December 2 2018

As someone who is interested in writing, I naturally have an interest in the publishing world. I grew up as an insatiable reader, and always dreamed that perhaps one day I would be selling books as an author. Later, I realized it wasn’t my primary interest in life, or at least not my only interest, and that I was more interested in the steady-paycheque world of being a salaried employee of a government entity doing public administration and policy. You know, a public servant, without the snide view of their role.

My writing has shifted over the years. Some email stuff from time to time, later some blogging and presentations. A few long reports for government. And I realized that as much as I might have dreamed of writing fiction, I have a knack for taking relatively opaque and / or complex topics and simplifying them in order to explain them to others. It’s fueled much of my career in government, as well as some of my personal blogging.

In addition though, my interest in traditional publishing was never very high. Sending off query letters? Getting rejections? Negotiating rights? Maybe seeking an agent? I have zero interest in ANY of those things.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Should you write under a pseudonym?

PolyWogg.ca
May 2 2018

When people talk about creating a pseudonym for their writing, most existing writers fall into two camps…the “no, never” camp that thinks it’s better for people to find you as easily as possible and the “well, what if you write in different genres” camp where people are afraid your reader will pick up your book expecting your traditional Western and get your erotic thriller instead, and presumably be unhappy. Or vica versa. (As an aside, there’s something strangely amusing about the reader looking for an erotic thriller and getting a Western instead while thinking, “What’s going to happen with the horse?”, but I digress.)

I confess that on occasion I have thought of pushing out some fiction under a different name. Mostly because I love the idea of writing anonymously for fiction. It would feel a bit subversive to me, almost clandestine. I have this illusion of seeing someone I know reading my book but having no idea that I wrote it. But that’s just a fanciful dream, at least until I ever get around to finishing anything fiction-related. But when ThePassiveVoice shared an article from Nail Your Novel, I had to click.

The article runs through the basics early on:

  • The “pseudo-excitement’ of using initials;
  • Gender-specific names depending on the genre;
  • Trying to sound like a specific nationality (or alternatively not);
  • Having multiple identities for separate markets (like genres or fiction/non-fiction);
  • Separating writing from other employment roles;

It talks though too about the ability to keep your real name separate (with a good link to Kristen Lamb’s post too):

But these days… is there anywhere to hide?

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: The Key Book Publishing Paths: 2017

PolyWogg.ca
April 16 2018

Jane Friedman has a great personal site at JaneFriedman.com, but she also publishes articles frequently at WritersWrite. One of the more popular ones is her annual “what paths are there to publishing”. The chart and text goes through six different publishing models:

  1. Traditional publishing
    1. Big five
    2. Mid-size and large
    3. Small presses
  2. Alternatives to traditional publishing
    1. Hybrid publishing
    2. Assisted self-publishing
    3. DIY

Her intro to the chart spells out the approach more clearly:

Since 2013, I have been annually updating this informational chart about the key publishing paths.

[…]

One of the biggest questions I hear from authors today: Should I traditionally publish or self-publish? This is an increasingly complicated question to answer because:

– There are now many varieties of traditional publishing and self-publishing—with evolving models and varying contracts.

– You won’t find a universal, agreed-upon definition of what it means to “traditionally publish” or “self-publish.”

– It’s not an either/or proposition. You can do both.

There is no one path or service that’s right for everyone; you must understand and study the changing landscape and make a choice based on long-term career goals, as well as the unique qualities of your work. Your choice should also be guided by your own personality (are you an entrepreneurial sort?) 

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Shatzkin on ebook pricing

PolyWogg.ca
February 17 2017

I read a lot of different blogs about ebooks, writing, self-publishing, the publishing industry in general, etc. and there are several that are quite popular. Kristine Kathryn Rusch on anything to do with the business side of being an author; Dean Wesley Smith, her husband, on churning out new copy and generating revenue; Konrath et al on the wild west of self-publishing; ThePassiveVoice on an overview of just about everything newsworthy (a curation service); and then people like Mike Shatzkin if you want the view of big publishing. None of those descriptions are entirely fair, they’re not one-trick ponies, but Shatzkin often is on the opening tail of self-publishing as a viable business model. So it was interesting to see him last September talking about pricing with a bit more “indie-cred” than he would normally show (eBook pricing resembles three dimensional chess):

Amazon doesn’t need big publisher books to offer lots of pricing bargains to their Kindle shoppers; they have tens of thousands of indie-published books (many of which are exclusive to them) and a growing number of Amazon-published books, that are offered at prices far below where the big houses price their offerings.

That probably explains why Amazon can see its Kindle sales are rising while publishers are universally reporting that their sales for digital texts, including Kindle, are falling.

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Thoughts on the publishing industry in Canada

PolyWogg.ca
December 16 2016

Back in September, Carla Douglas published an article on the website “Publishing Perspectives” interviewing Merilyn Simonds on the state of publishing in Canada (A Leader in Canadian Writing Takes Stock of Self-Publishing). When I saw the title, I thought, “Cool, must read that.” Then I saw Simonds’ former job as chair of The Writers Union of Canada and thought, “Oh. Maybe not.”

I am not a giant fan of TWUC or their approaches to some issues. Like the Author’s Guild in the U.S., many of the members are sheep who think the publishing world is still flat and haven’t noticed that Amazon’s disruption was in giving authors the opportunity to bypass traditional publishing and go direct to readers, often with not only greater ease of access but also greater revenues. This of course is the 3rd sign of the Apocalypse for the Author’s Guild who surprisingly support the position of agents and publishers on issues almost 1:1. Considering those three groups have some issues that divide them pretty substantially for self-interest, the alignment is often puzzling at best or frustrating in the mild or infuriating in the worst.

So I almost didn’t read the article. Kind of a “yep, read that, got the narrow view t-shirt, thanks”.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Digital formats for books

PolyWogg.ca
August 29 2016

Most large newspapers, journals, magazines, establishment reps all have the same view of e-publishing…a giant collective “ewww”. Like you would only do it if you weren’t any good and had no other choice. Of *course*, they sniff, you would go with whatever format your obviously large and more knowledgeable publisher would do for you. I have little time for that stupidity, so often when I see those large establishment-supporters writing, I ignore them. If I want to see what is appropriate for 1975 instead of 2016, sure, maybe I’ll read them. Right after I read the tags on my mattress.

So colour me surprised when the NYTimes feed lists “Picking a Digital Publishing Format” as a headline. Technically, no pun intended, it’s not a full NYTimes article, it’s only on the website, and a Q&A in the “personal tech” area at that, but hey, I’ll take a gander.

The question was pretty straightforward — the reader wanted to know what the “best” publishing method for digital books was in order to ensure they could reach beyond Apple devices.

The answer starts out with a simple recognition that the author should find a format that works best for their book, and I wish they spent more time on that part of the response.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: A danger of identifying best practices in publishing

PolyWogg.ca
March 16 2016

Since I aspire to being a published writer, and will be eventually when I get some time and some butt glue to keep me in my writing chair, I haunt lots of writing sites and blogs and discussions to keep learning more about the business. Recently I came across a link to a post from Jane Friedman, one of the gurus in the indie biz talking about marketing, digital tools, and such. She was basically summarizing presentations at Digital Book World (DBW), and while I think JF has tons more experience than I, I found myself wanting to quibble with some of the conclusions (4 Lessons for Authors on the Current State of Publishing).

An author’s online presence is more critical than ever to long-term marketing strategy.

I don’t disagree that it is important, but hardly “critical” or even the greatest challenge in publishing. The changing nature of the marketplace from traditional to indie or self, the shifting weight from paper to digital, these are tectonic shifts. Self-marketing? Nowhere near as important as the primary role of the writer which is to write the best book they can first. JK Rowling wasn’t exactly burning up the digital world nor was her publisher when Harry Potter broke all the sales records around.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Self-publishing disrupting the industry

PolyWogg.ca
April 9 2013

I admit that I have developed an almost unhealthy fascination with the publishing industry’s changes over the last five years. Separate from my own vested interest, I am also interested from an analytical perpective. People argue that “self-publishing” or “ebooks” are the changes that are sweeping their way through the publishing world, but I personally feel that it is more about the disentanglement of a previously integrated and controlled business model.

In the past, you had authors who produced content as a raw product, agents who marketed those raw materials to publisher after publisher, or editor by editor at each publisher, and publishers who took the raw product, massaged it, processed it, turned it into a final product, and took the sellable version to market. And there were huge barriers to entry into the market — agents wouldn’t take just anyone, publishers often wanted only agent-repped products, stores and libraries would mainly take books only from the Big Six publishers or their subsidiaries. Breaking into those areas would give you huge leverage, but they were jealously guarded corridors of power.

However, in recent years, the whole business model has been disrupted end to end…authors can get their books on Amazon and in ebook form without an agent or a publisher.… Read the rest

Konrath’s resolutions for writers

PolyWogg.ca
June 3 2012

For those who read the rest of my blog, and not just the posts about writing, you know that I have a anally obsessively compulsive rigorous process for setting goals and tracking them — think of it as like setting New Year’s resolutions but on steroids. But there are some areas where “goals” are great, yet they only work if you can break them down in to digestible — and achievable — smaller chunks.

So let’s assume you have a big goal of being an author. Under traditional publishing, the ultimate end was outside your control — in theory, you could hammer away at agents and editors with proposal after proposal and never “succeed”. Your digestible “bits” were process stuff, not a measure of your ultimate outcome. With e-publishing, and self-publishing more specifically, coming of age in recent years (if not months), you can change your goal into something that is actually achievable i.e. even if no one “accepts” your MS for traditional publishing, you can bypass them and publish yourself.

Yet, you might still want to have larger writing goals. Konrath’s website, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, included a sample of his writer’s resolutions from 2006 to 2012, and I wanted to highlight a bunch that I think are worthy of emulation because they are not all about process…note, with apologies to the master, that the headings are mine, as are the groupings:

  1. Process
    • I will start/finish the damn book
    • I will finish every story I start
    • I’ll quit procrastinating in the form of research, outlines, synopses, taking classes, reading how-to books, talking about writing, and actually write something
  2. Improvement
    • I will listen to criticism
    • I will always remember where I came from
    • If you’re a writer, you must be a reader.
… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Konrath on the Mystery Writers of America

PolyWogg.ca
May 3 2012

There are very few windmills that I feel strongly enough to tilt at…stupid people is one. Bullies are another. People pretending they understand policy and government, and being condescending towards others’ views — although that tends to combine both of the first two. But I have a pretty strong respect for the importance of human rights, freedom of association, etc. when they are used as swords to advance legitimate causes or shields to prevent oppression. Where the heck is this idea going? Membership in a society that basically holds itself out as representing an industry but then turning around and barring people from the industry who don’t meet their standards.

If you look back to some lovely research published in the 1980s and 90s by the Harvard Business Review, everybody thinks their job qualifies as a profession. Janitors think they’re a “profession”. Taxi drivers another. And when people of like mind and employment get together, and talk about their profession, they frequently start saying things like “Hey, that person isn’t any good, we should really have standards and block these yahoos. They’re not ‘professional’ like we are. Our ‘profession’ is slipping.”

This makes sense in some quarters where professional certification can and should be required.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: KK Rusch on royalty statements, audits

PolyWogg.ca
May 3 2012

One of my favorite bloggers writing about the publishing industry is Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a former “upper-midlister” who has moved into the world of self-publishing and prefers the results. She has lots of history in the traditional publishing world, ranging from short-story mags to full-length novels, and everything in between, and probably every form of publisher alive. However, unlike the evangelical nature of some of the newly converted, Kris’ posts tend to be more practically oriented — here’s a business issue related to publishing, here’s her experiences with it, here’s how she thinks it fits into a current business model, and here’s what she thinks is the best option for her. She’s not trying to convert the masses, she’s sharing info with the masses. It’s a great balance, and she treads it well. One of her latest posts is about royalty statements, and, basically, how screwed up they are. But she also goes on to talk about two other issues that I think are great — basket accounting and the audits by DOJ of the “colluders” who are being sued for the agency model agreements they colluded upon. See excerpts below:

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about the fact that my e-book royalties from a couple of my traditional publishers looked wrong.

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: DW Smith on publishing, early decisions

PolyWogg.ca
May 2 2012

Dean Wesley Smith is one of my favorite bloggers. As another blogger described him, Dean is an ex-midlister who has drunk the self-publishing Koolaid, is happy with his success in multiple worlds, and is happy to share his approach and results with others. He has a couple of blog-based ebooks going, where he writes a chapter at a time and posts it for digestion and comment. Then he cobbles them all together into an actual book. His latest endeavour, the second edition of “Think Like a Publisher”, is being “reposted” with updates in close sequential order. Here are some excerpts from Chapter 1:

Some of the earliest decisions a publisher has to make can be changed down the road easily. Some are difficult to change. So, I’m going to break down some of these early decisions into basic groups. And keep in mind, there are no correct answers on any of these decisions. Just what you want to do.

…

Get the business set up, do the chores, look at your start-up inventory, and then look hard and fast at what kind of publisher you want to be.

See the full post at Dean Wesley Smith » Think Like a Publisher 2012.
… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Remember Amazon is always the bad guy

PolyWogg.ca
May 1 2012

The NYTimes had an interesting article on Sunday from David Carr writing about an author, Buzz Bissinger, who had a book promotion going on with Apple that Amazon matched and thus must somehow be evil.

…Apple, which had been looking to get into shorter works in a digital format, decided to include e-books in a promotion that it does with Starbucks. It selected Mr. Bissinger’s digital sequel as a Pick of the Week, giving customers a code they could redeem online for the book. (Mr. Bissinger said he still received a royalty of $1.50 for each copy sold.)

Amazon interpreted the promotion as a price drop and lowered its price for “After Friday Night Lights” to exactly zero. Byliner withdrew the book from Amazon’s shelves, saying it did so to “protect our authors’ interest.”

…

Mr. Bryant, who formerly edited a sports magazine for The New York Times, said that Amazon’s “price bot” had picked up the fact that the book was being given away as part of a weeklong promotion and responded by dropping its price to zero. (In an e-mail later, Mr. Bryant said that when the company told Amazon about the promotion, before it began, Byliner was warned the price might drop to zero.

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Consumers vs. Publishers

PolyWogg.ca
April 24 2012

Jeremy Greenfield had an interesting post on Digital Book World about e-book pricing — but focused on the costs. The article tries to basically explain both why consumers think costs (and the price) should be a lot less, and publishers saying, “No, wait, costs are not that far off”.

Here are some excerpts from Greenfield’s post:

Publishers are making a killing on e-books because they cost nothing to produce, distribute and sell and are almost 100% pure profit. At least, that’s what many consumers think.

…

While consumers understand the basic costs involved in the bricks-and-mortar retail world, they don’t understand the costs involved in selling something that is, well, much, much smaller than a bread box.

…

“We still pay for the author advance, the editing, the copy-editing, the proofreading, the cover and interior design, the illustrations, the sales kit, the marketing efforts, the publicity, and the staff that needs to coordinate all of the details that make books possible,” said Bob Miller in February 2009 on the HarperStudio blog (which has been defunct since April 2010 when the publishing start-up folded) when he was president and publisher of that company; he is now president and publisher of Workman Publishing.

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: E-book lawsuit in Canada

PolyWogg.ca
April 24 2012

Marsha Lederman had an interesting article in the Globe and Mail on April 18th trying to put a Canadian spin on the charges in the U.S. of collusion and price-fixing by the Big Six publishers (Harper Collins, MacMillan, Penguin, Random House, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster) with Apple. Just to be clear, there are TWO lawsuits in the U.S. — a class-action civil suit launched by “consumers” against this group for trying to raise ebook prices above Amazon’s preferred ceiling of $9.99 (targeting all six plus Apple) and a completely separate Department of Justice civil suit that targets everyone in that list except Random House. I’m not including separate state plans in that list.

Here’s an excerpt from Lederman:

A proposed class-action lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court by the Vancouver firm Camp Fiorante Matthews Mogerman alleges that Apple Inc. and a number of publishers engaged in a “conspiracy” to lessen competition and “fix, maintain, increase or control the prices of e-books.” It is the most recent of at least five such suits filed recently in courts in Ontario, Quebec and B.C.

It also alleges that the defendants or their representatives communicated secretly, in person and by phone, to discuss and fix e-book prices, in the lead-up to the introduction of Apple’s iPad, which can function as an eReader, in April of 2010.In

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: The Threat of Free Riders

PolyWogg.ca
April 23 2012

The Harvard Business Review has a great website, combining not only the articles from their magazine, but daily summaries of key articles, interesting statistics and a number of cool blogs ranging from “soft” HR issues to “hard” business articles. Frances Frei and Anne Morriss wrote a blog entry called, “Target and the Threat of Free Riders” that is pretty good. I know what you’re thinking — umm, doesn’t the heading for this blog entry say it’s about “publishing”? Yes, yes, it does. Because while Frei and Morriss are primarily talking about Target, the hidden subtext behind it is Amazon.

You might remember the big kerfuffle at Christmas time…Amazon released a new App that could scan bar codes, and they encouraged you while shopping in bricks and mortar stores to do some price comparisons. And then, *gasp*, buy from Amazon if the price was cheaper. They even had the audacity to offer initial discount coupons to those using the apps. The blogs exploded with stories of how Amazon was evil, how dare they do this, it was destroying the local infrastructure. They were essentially complaining that Amazon was being a “free rider” — the store chains have physical locations with large overhead costs they have to pay, and here Amazon was saying “go visit them, touch and feel your items in person, exploit their overhead, and then buy from us.”… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Critics of E-Books Lawsuit

PolyWogg.ca
April 23 2012

The Wall Street Journal has a pretty good article by Thomas Catan entitled Critics of E-Books Lawsuit Miss the Mark, Experts Say (link may expire). In it, Catan gives a pretty good overview of the Ebook “collusion” lawsuit and has some outstanding points about those who think the Department of Justice “got it wrong” (i.e. they went after the wrong company) and are really just puppets of Amazon:

U.S. antitrust law doesn’t seek to protect little companies against big ones, or even struggling ones against successful ones. Companies can grow as large as they want, as long as they do it through lower prices, better service or niftier innovations. Companies can even become monopolies, as long as they don’t get there illegally or try to extend their power by unlawfully stifling competition.

…

“Price fixing is kind of the first-degree murder of antitrust violations,” Prof. Hovenkamp says. “They don’t have discretion to just walk away from what appears to be a strong set of facts that, if true, are one of the most central of antitrust violations.”

…

The government might already have shown some leniency. For one, the Justice Department brought a civil, rather than a criminal, case, so no executives will go to prison.

… Read the rest

A different perspective on e-returns…

PolyWogg.ca
February 29 2012

I am an active follower of a lot of blogs, but very few discussion groups. For me, I often find that the discussion groups are too general with high volume (Dorothy-L), or too technical (some web-focused ones), or too narrowly focused (single app approaches, for example). I do however follow the “Murder Must Advertise” discussion group regularly as it seems the right mix of volume, topics, and valuable content. This past week, one of the hot topics has been Amazon allowing readers to return e-books for refund, and it got me looking at it a bit more broadly.

Not surprisingly, the people who are in favour of allowing returns are mainly readers, those against are mainly writers. Those in favour argue that of course returns should be allowed, since sometimes you buy the book with high hopes and confidence and it turns out that the thing is a steaming pile of armadillo dung. This happens despite reading previews, other reader’s reviews, etc. Those against allowing returns tend to follow one of four threads of thought:

  1. E-books don’t cost a lot of money, and for those less than $2.99 on Amazon, we’re talking extremely small profit margins. So authors aren’t getting rich here.
… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Share, don’t tell your way to marketing

PolyWogg.ca
February 16 2012

I confess that I’m a bit of a Blog ‘Ho — I’ll read just about any blogger that has something interesting to say that resonates with me. Click here, press add there, and I’ll follow their RSS feed pretty fast. If over time they start to fade, I can click and drop just as easily. Both for work purposes and my personal interest in writing, or an interest combining the two (writing about HR), I really enjoy the Harvard Business Review’s site various feeds. One of them is their feed on Technology (which often co-links itself to talking about innovation).

Today’s feed includes an article by Nilofer Merchant (Rules for the Social Era — note link may expire). An excerpt from her post appears below…she talks mainly in her article about lots of big companies are not adjusting to the new social era of supply-chain production that is more about being lean, rather than big and talking to your customers in a way that is integrated in product design, delivery, etc. rather than just market research. But, on the writing and publishing front, the best “shift” for me is the third one:

Sharing, not telling. When companies think of social media, they hope to get consumers to “like” them or “fan” them, as if that increased connection is meaningful.

… Read the rest

Online piracy, music and ebooks…

PolyWogg.ca
February 1 2012

One of the blogs I follow is Passive Guy (at his site called the Passive Voice), partly because he has a really good site for the latest news on the ebook front with several excerpts / re-tweets a day. And one of his posts today caught my eye given the whole Megaupload thing in the past week — the post was entitled “Piracy Does Depress Sales”. The post is an excerpt from another site by an attorney named Terry Hart, linking to a study by Stan Liebowitz at the University of Texas entitled “The Metric is the Message: How Much of the Decline in Sound Recording Sales is Due to File-Sharing?”. The claim from Liebowitz? That *all* of the decline in record sales could be attributed to file-sharing.

Now many of my readers know that I did a MA in public policy. Which means I also did graduate-level stats and economics courses. So, when I see an academic making such bold claims, two things happen — first, my interest is piqued … maybe they have some ground-breaking analysis and research to support this argument, after all it’s “published” and their careers depend on on it, and if not, maybe at least an innovative approach; second, my BS detector goes haywire.… Read the rest