Authors, Publishers and the Status Quo
Writers need editors, publishers, marketers, and booksellers. Few artists can create, support and distribute their art. Most of us are not eccentric geniuses who can do it all. It is true, we are not Prince. This is why the publishing/bookselling industry exists, to support and distribute our work efficiently (while making a profit of course). We NEED distribution. Now that we are all wet and vulnerable, let’s talk business.
The publishing/bookselling industry is broken, or as a fellow writer put it to me “breathing through its ass.” If you’ve done your writerly duty and researched how the industry works then common issues like the reserve for returns, obfuscation on sales numbers, advance amounts, royalty rates based on post discount prices, time lapse to market, time lapse to payments and 100% returns from booksellers are no surprise to you. If you think everything is just peachy, see Decline of Reading, The End and Pitfalls of Traditional Publishing for some basic schooling.
The real problem here though is that our “distributors” own us. Our distributors control which works enter the market, when they enter the market, at what price they enter market, in what forms they enter the market, how profits are divided…you see where this is going. What is the main goal of our distributors? Profit my friends, profit, and not yours either. It is because of this Humbert/Lolita relationship that the industry is so broken. Writer’s have spread their legs and touched their toes for every archaic, lazy, exploitive policy that our distributors have introduced or retained. Shame on us.
Take the whole e-book/self-publishing phenomenon for example; it is a flashbang in the pants for the publishing industry precisely because it changes the author/distributor relationship significantly. It is a sign of how weak that the majority of discussion (and fighting) is about the changes among the distributors (publishers, booksellers, Apple, Amazon etc.). Who is fighting for the author? Agents? (See the upcoming post on Agents and Conflict of Interest for more on that).
The consensus appears to be that it is too late to change this relationship, that our distributors have pwned us since the first cave dweller peed a pattern in the sand. It is very close to the truth too. Head over to any popular publisher or agent blog and you will find tons of advice on how to succeed within the status quo, what kinds of advances to ask for, the perils of self-publishing, how authors can self-market more (i.e. take on more distributor responsibility without a corresponding change in contract terms/advances/amounts/nada).
The message is, “be afraid writer person, scurry around in our little box and you will be ok.” This post The End of the World As We Know It (And I feel Fine) makes several valid arguments for the traditional publishing model but like everyone else it places a higher value on distribution than the authors work.
So what then? Gather our manuscripts and head for the self-publishing hills? Go all in on ebooks? Demand changes in royalty rates? Refuse to sign publisher contracts that automagically include ebook rights? Give up advances in return for a larger cut of the profits (check out HarperStudio)? Work with only smaller presses that allow more participation in the publication process?
YES to all these questions, but it depends (you knew it was coming). It depends on how large and how bronzed (brass is also popular) your Cojones are.
We need to recognize our weakness in the status quo. We need find our Cojones and either take our rightful place within the status quo or sidestep it completely.
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