The Passive Voice

From the School Library Journal:

Newbery-winning author and naturalist, Jean Craighead George, who inspired many children to pursue careers in the natural sciences, died May 15 at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, NY, from complications related to a stroke. She was 92.

George wrote more than 100 books for young adults, including the Newbery Medal-winning Julie of the Wolves (Harper, 1972). Since writing her first book, Vulpes, the Red Fox (Dutton) in 1949, which she co-wrote with then-husband John L. George, she strived to bring a love of nature to her readers.

George went on to connect readers with wildlife in her Newbery Honor book, My Side of the Mountain (Dutton, 1959), which tells a story of a 12-year-old boy named Sam Gribley who runs away from his cramped New York City apartment to find his grandfather’s abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains. There he befriends a peregrine falcon and a weasel.

“I believe it will be read year after year, linking together many generations in a chain of well-remembered joy and refreshment,” wrote Ruth Hill Viguers in her review the book for The Horn Book. To this day, visitors stop at the Cannon Free Library in Delhi, NY, where Gribley befriends a librarian, to ask questions about the book. My Side of the Mountain was placed on the Hans Christian Andersen Award 1959 honors list.

Link to the rest at the School Library Journal

Regular visitors to The Passive Voice will recall that Ms. George recently asked to join a lawsuit over her right to publish ebook versions of her books.

From Publishers Weekly, quoting the Census Bureau:

Bookstore sales fell 3.7% in March.

. . . .

For the first quarter of 2012, bookstore sales fell 2.3%, to $3.94 billion. Store sales fell in every month of the quarter.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

Census Bureau bookstore sales figures do not include online bookstores.

From news.com.au:

EVER wonder why you come away with a sense of exhilaration after a hard day of trolling the internet?

It could be because you’re drunk with power.

A new study has found that anonymity gives people the same feeling of abandon as power and alcohol intoxication.

Researchers at Northwestern University in the US found that all three states led to extreme behaviour — both good and bad.

“Although these pathways appear to be unrelated on the surface, they all lead to disinhibited states through a common psychological and neurological mechanism,” said Jacob Hirsh of the university’s Kellogg School of Management.

Dr Hirsh’s colleague Professor Adam Galinsky said the loss of inhibition led to “significant behavioural consequences”.

. . . .

When people lose their inhibitions, they often behave in a manner more consistent with their true motives or character. At the same time, they also tend to be more easily influenced by their environment.

“In effect, disinhibition can both reveal and shape the person, as contradictory as that may sound,” Professor Galinsky said.
The end result is that power, alcohol and anonymity can all inspire either strong pro- or anti-social sentiments in people.

. . . .

Dr Cross said the vitriolic nature of internet comments was a symptom of something similar to a split personality.

“I think what we have is, people have two personas,” he said.

“The first is an in built human instinctual personality and that’s always there for all of us, it’s an animal instinctual personality.

“And then there’s always the second personality which is the more conservative, the more guarded, the personality is more in perspective.

“What you’ve got (online) is people who are prepared to let their instinctual personality out rather than really taking a second perspective, looking at it in a different way, and then saying the second thing that comes into their mind instead of the first.”

Link to the rest at news.com.au and thanks to Barb for the tip.

We are storied folk. Stories are what we are; telling and listening to stories is what we do.

Arthur Kleinman

From Nina Amir via book designer Joel Friedlander:

If you are like most bloggers, you may not realize your blog represent a gold mine filled with content that can be published beyond the blogososphere. Stop looking forward to the next new post you will write, and realize “There’s gold in them ‘thar posts.” You can find nuggets of content that can be refined into a variety of manuscripts. In other words, you can find publishable gold in your blog. You just have to do a bit of prospecting.

Indeed, every blog post you write, have ever written or will write in the future has the potential of becoming part of a book. If you stop thinking like a blogger and begin thinking like a writer—or, even better, like an aspiring author—you’ll find your blog holds more publishable content than you know what to do with. Additionally, your blog can turn into a way for you to produce books quickly and easily.

. . . .

It’s a good idea to know what angle you might want to take with your book, what content you want in your book, etc. I suggest creating a content plan prior to repurposing your blog posts, or “booking a blog,” a term the author of this particular blog, Joel Friedlander, coined. You can then search out posts to fit into that plan, or outline.

You can do a search though your tags (in WordPress) or labels (in Blogger) to find posts on the topics you need to flesh out your content plan—assuming you labeled them well using such keywords. You can also search for posts in your categories, again assuming you have “filed” your posts by subject matter.

. . . .

The last way to mine your blog for gold involves purposely setting out to create these valuable nuggets. Rather than booking your blog, blog a book. In other words, create a content plan for a series of posts that will fill a book. Then write the book in post sized bits, and publish these on your blog.

Link to the rest at The Book Designer

From Working Knowledge at the Harvard Business School, an announcement of a new research paper:

The professional critic has long been heralded as the gold standard for evaluating products and services such as books, movies, and restaurants. Analyzing hundreds of book reviews from 40 different newspapers and magazines, Professor Michael Luca and coauthors Loretti Dobrescu and Alberto Motta investigate the determinants of professional reviews and then compare these to consumer reviews from Amazon.com. Key concepts include:

• The data suggest that media outlets do not simply seek to isolate high-quality books, but also to find books that are a good fit for their readers. This is a potential advantage for professional critics, one that cannot be easily replicated by consumer reviews.
• Expert ratings are correlated with Amazon ratings, suggesting that experts and consumers tend to agree in aggregate about the quality of a book. However, there are systematic differences between these sets of reviews.
• Relative to consumer reviews, professional critics are less favorable to first-time authors. This suggests that one potential advantage of consumer reviews is that they are quicker to identify new and unknown books.
• Relative to consumer reviews, professional critics are more favorable to authors who have garnered other attention in the press (as measured by number of media mentions outside of the review) and who have won book prizes.

. . . .

Reviews are determined not only by the quality of the product, but also by the incentives of the media outlet providing the review. For example, a media outlet may have the incentive to provide favorable coverage to certain authors or to slant reviews toward the horizontal preferences of certain readers. Empirically, we find that an author’s connection to the media outlet is related to the outcome of the review decision. When a book’s author also writes for a media outlet, that outlet is 25% more likely to review the book relative to other media outlets, and the resulting ratings are roughly 5% higher. Prima facie, it is unclear whether media outlets are favoring their own authors because these are the authors that their readers prefer or simply because they are trying to collude.

Link to the rest, including the complete paper, at Working Knowledge

Attorney C.E. Petit, who focuses on copyright and author’s issues, comments on the letter the Association of Authors’ Representatives sent to the Department of Justice recently:

[T]he trade association for literary agents demonstrates its inability to understand law — despite its members’ obligation to look out for the legal interests of its clients — and demonstrates rather definitively why literary agents should be licensed and regulated. In particular, its misunderstanding (presumably deliberate) of the Department of Justice’s suit against Apple and a number of major publishers over the deceptively misnamed “agency model” resale price maintenance agreement for e-books . . . demonstrates its intellectual and ethical bankruptcy.

. . . .

The letter is not just nonsense. It reflects disdain for the AAR’s clients, to whom each AAR member owes a duty of loyalty. It reflects abject ignorance of the powers and limitations of courts, of regulation, of legislation, and of market economies. It reflects failure to actually read the complaint, especially the requested remedies, and ponder how what is actually being done meets the “objections” stated in its letter… as opposed to the spin put on things by various PR statements from Apple and publishers. Most of all, it reflects an abject failure to think.

. . . .

One of the underlying principles of antitrust law is that market participants may not violate antitrust law in the name of combatting competitors’ independent violations of antitrust law; the AAR seems to have forgotten this.

. . . .

The third logical error in the AAR’s letter — and here is where things get really disturbing, if you weren’t already disturbed — is that the so-called “agency model” provides added pressure for author compensation from e-book sales to be measured from “publisher’s net” rather than from “list price.” Under “traditional” royalty calculations, an author’s royalty rate is a percentage of the list price of a work; that is, for books not shipped at a “deep discount” or otherwise not in the ordinary course of trade, the author’s royalty is a percentage of that $24.95 list price whether the consumer purchases it at full list price or at some vendor-offered discount. Under net-revenue calculations, the author can never predict how much he/she will earn from a given sale.

. . . .

The hidden problem here is not predictability; it is auditability. Anyone with any knowledge of commercial publishing understands that royalty statements are, at best, somewhat fictional. If I were responsible for auditing any publisher . . . , I couldn’t even start to do my job. One of the other dirty little secrets about e-book sales that will eventually come out during the course of litigation is that the big e-book vendors are treating the actual sales as trade secrets, and will not disclose them to the publishers; in turn, the publishers, when they get even summary data, are bound by the trade secret provisions in their contracts with the vendors and won’t release them to the authors.

. . . .

Collusion on price between purported “competitors” has such serious, and difficult to measure, consequences that it is an unacceptable means for reaching any economic end. A marketplace defined by collusion is neither a fair nor a free market… and every economic measurement stated in the AAR’s letter is valid only in fair and/or free markets. The whole point of antitrust law is to prevent the harms caused by unfair/unfree markets, regardless of the benefits that some can siphon off from unfair/unfree markets.

Link to the rest at Scrivener’s Error

As Charles demonstrates in his blog post, antitrust law is an unusual combination of legal and economic concepts. In this case, we’re looking at an underlying statute that’s over 120 years old. During the intervening years, the law has developed through a series of very complex cases.

Passive Guy has tried to quote those portions of Charles’ longer post that set forth some of the underlying principles of antitrust.

The basic charge against Apple and five of the six largest publishers is price-fixing. This charge is the antitrust equivalent of first-degree murder – the worst and most despicable act prohibited by this 120-year-old statute, The Sherman Antitrust Act. Its principal author, Senator John Sherman, said the purpose of the law is ”To protect the consumers by preventing arrangements designed, or which tend, to advance the cost of goods to the consumer.”

Based upon the allegations of the Department of Justice complaint, Apple and these big publishers intended to push up the price of ebooks sold through all retail channels and were successful in doing so, increasing the cost of these goods to book buyers.

Antitrust law contains a lot of gray areas, but collusive price-fixing isn’t one of them.

The whiny complaint of the publishers that Amazon is selling too many books at prices that are too low is not justification for price-fixing. Publishers love to accuse Amazon of monopolistic practices. If that is the case, the remedy is to provide evidence of wrongful behavior to the Department of Justice  or bring private antitrust suits against Amazon.

The absence of DOJ action or private antitrust suits by publishers is evidence to PG that the publishers’ attorneys have concluded Amazon is not presently violating any antitrust laws. It’s just a tough challenger, not an illegal one.

Capitalism can be a bitch if you’ve let yourself go flabby in a cozy little shared monopoly. When a real competitor comes along, all at once you realize you’ve lost your game and cry like a little girl baby.

In the class-action suit for antitrust violations filed against Apple, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, the defendants filed a motion to dismiss.

This is a routine motion for this stage of the litigation and is routinely denied.

However, the trial judge put a lot more pepper into her order than was strictly necessary. It’s dangerous to project any long-term attitude from a single order, but the Price-Fix Six could not have been very happy at some of the judge’s words.

From the Order:

Prior to December 2009, the Publisher Defendants’ standard practice was to release eBook and hardcover versions of titles at the same time.  After a key meeting with an important industry executive, however, this practice changed abruptly.  In late November 2009, representatives from a number of publishing companies met with the Chairman of Barnes & Noble, a major chain of brick-and-mortar retail bookstores.  During the meeting, the Chairman of Barnes & Noble complained about the potential for Amazon’s low prices to hurt hardcover sales.   This meeting spurred a sudden and dramatic change in the business practices of most of the Publisher Defendants.  On December 3, 2009, the Chairman and CEO of Hachette met with an Amazon executive and tried to convince Amazon to raise its prices.  He stated that Amazon’s pricing was a “big problem for the industry,” and that this “industry” problem would be solved if Amazon raised its eBook prices by two or three dollars.  Amazon indicated that it had no plans to raise its prices, at least in the short term.  On December 4, Hachette informedAmazon of its intention to begin windowing a large percentage of its newly released titles for a number of months.  On December 7, Simon & Schuster advised Amazon that it would window at least twenty-five titles released between January and April 2010.

These developments did not become public until four days later, when the Wall Street Journal reported on December 8 that Hachette and Simon & Schuster would begin windowing a number of their eBook titles and quoted the Chairman and CEO of Hachette as saying, “We’re doing this to preserve our industry.”

. . . .

The Complaint describes specific conversations from which it is fair to infer that the Publisher Defendants had agreed among themselves to adopt a joint strategy to force an increase in the price of eBooks.  These include Hachette’s representation to Amazon on December 3, 2009 that the “industry’s” problem with eBook pricing would be solved if Amazon raised its prices by two or three dollars, and the separate meetings on a single day, January 20, 2010, in which four Publisher Defendants each presented Amazon with the identical demand that it adopt the agency model.  There are ample allegations that Apple became an integral member of this conspiracy and well understood that the upshot of its participation would be the elimination of price competition at the retail level, forcing consumers to, in Jobs’s words, “pay a little more” for eBooks.

. . . .

At the January 27 iPad launch event, Apple announced that it had signed agreements with each Publisher Defendant to sell eBooks under the agency model.  Apple also revealed that the prices for eBooks on the iPad would be higher than $9.99.  Nevertheless, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs (“Jobs”), told a reporter at the event, “The prices [on the iPad and the Kindle] will be the same,” and “Publishers are actually withholding their books from Amazon because they are not happy.”   The following day, Jobs told his biographer the following:

Amazon screwed it up.  It paid the wholesale price for some books, but started selling them below cost at $9.99.  The publishers hated that — they thought it would trash their ability to sell hard-cover books at $28.  So before Apple even got on the scene, some booksellers were starting to withhold books from Amazon.  So we told the publishers, “We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.”  But we also asked for a guarantee that if anybody else is selling the books cheaper than we are, then we can sell them at the lower price too.  So they went to Amazon and said, “You’re going to sign an agency contract or we’re not going to give you the books.”  . . . Given the situation that existed, what was best for us was to do this aikido move and end up with the agency model.  And we pulled it off.

. . . .

The [Plaintiffs' complaint] describes the separate meetings four of the Publisher Defendants had with Amazon on the very same day in which they made identical demands on Amazon to switch to the agency model.  Finally, Jobs’ prescient prediction at the iPad launch that the prices consumers would be paying for eBooks would all “be the same” and the other quotations from Jobs, Murdoch and Sargent, combine to provide ample evidence that the Publisher Defendants had agreed with each other to undertake collective action to raise eBooks’ prices and that Apple intentionally and knowingly joined that conspiracy.

The entire order is embedded below:

From historical romance author Courtney Milan:

This is (one of) the times of the year when royalty statements from publishers arrive, and I just received mine.

I don’t intend this post to imply any moral condemnation of publishers themselves or of people who choose (for a variety of legitimate reasons) to publish with them. What I want to do is lay out two royalty statements: one for This Wicked Gift, my 2009 Christmas novella which was published by Harlequin, and one for Unlocked, my self-published novella released at the end of May in 2011. This is for informational purposes only.

This Wicked Gift was part of an anthology released with Mary Balogh and Nicola Cornick. Both the Balogh and the Cornick had been released earlier, but Balogh is a perennially popular author, and she’s particularly known for her Christmas tales. The anthology spent two weeks on the USA Today list and sold a bunch of copies. Since then, it has been translated into three other languages and released in both the UK and Australia

In other words, for a relatively new author–and this was my first published work–this story had an amazing run.

Between 2009 and December of 2011–in other words, a little bit more than two years–my novella made me $23,593.78.

. . . .

Unlocked also had a pretty freaking amazing run for a novella. It spent three weeks on the USA Today list. It’s been translated into one other language (that would be German). And in the last 11 months, it has made a total of $46,970.03–almost exactly twice as much, in half the time.

Now some of you are thinking, “Sure, Courtney, but you have to compare apples to oranges. You had to bear the costs of production for Unlocked. That can’t be cheap.”

True.

So to make this accounting more clear, I have to include costs.

I spent a total of $4143.48 on Unlocked. A good chunk of that went to producing the German version.

. . . .

But to make this fair, we also need to think about what I spent on This Wicked Gift, because there are expenditures involved with a book release. My accounting wasn’t nearly as good back then–today, I track every penny I spend. But I went back through my tax records and have reconstructed what I’ve spent. Ready?

I spent $6289.07.

. . . .

So I spent more on my traditionally-published novella than I did on my self-published one.

. . . .

I don’t want to imply that anyone who chooses Column A is making a bad choice. The fact that I had a traditionally published novella in an anthology that did very well absolutely contributed to my success when I went into self-publishing. And Unlocked benefited from a confluence of random series of lightning, striking often and repeatedly.

But for those who are looking for information, the bottom line is this: As an author, I spent 50% more on a traditionally-published novella. And I made half as much in twice the time.

Link to the rest at Courtney Milan and thanks to Leah for the tip.

Update: Courtney has shared details on her out-of-pocket costs in a comment to this post.

From Joe Konrath, a fisking of an agent’s blog post:

Recently Ann Voss Peterson wrote of her decision to never sign another contract with Harlequin. One major statistic from the article is that she sold 170,000 copies of a book but earned only $20,000.

Multiple clients sent me Peterson’s “Harlequin Fail” article and wanted my opinion. My first thought is that this was the typical “a publisher is ripping me off” fodder. But that would be a simplistic and knee-jerk reaction and unfair to both Peterson and Harlequin.

Joe sez: Hmm. What if I said this was typical “agents siding with publishers” fodder?

Well, I’d be right. More and more agents are siding with publishers. Because publishers are who pay them, and if all authors begin to self-publish then agents will be out of business. So, as much as it is a conflict of interest for an agent to side with a publisher, I can understand why agents are doing so, wrong as they may be.

If the plea of “a publisher is ripping me off” is fodder, I’d like to see links to those posts you’re alluding to so I may scrutinize their veracity. Because publishers ARE being very unfair to writers, as I’ve shown many times. 

As an agent, shouldn’t you care that this is happening? Why are so many authors saying this that it has become fodder you can casually dismiss?

Yes, Harlequin pays a modest royalty that is less than some publishers. Since when is that news? That has always been their business model because it is the only way to create and maintain an aggressive Direct-to-Consumer and Trade publishing program. Their publishing machine is huge and they are a “for profit” company. For Profit. If they are unprofitable, they go away.

Joe sez: See this? Everyone look closely! This is a rope! Everyone look at this rope that I’m holding up! Now watch what happens next! 

If an author is uncomfortable with the terms, then don’t sign the contract (which is Peterson’s decision going forward). I urge each of you to be careful not to sign a contract and then complain about it later. Unless you were completely hoodwinked you agreed to those terms and should abide by them.

Joe sez: I agree. Ann could have refused to sign the contract, and instead gone to work in a factory with unsafe conditions where employees have no benefits and are paid pennies.

This is called exploitation. It happens when companies try to make profits at the expense of another person’s labor without paying them adequate compensation.

I think we can all agree that exploitation is a bad thing, whether the person signed up to work in an unsafe factory, or promised to work off their passage to America from a foreign country, or got 2.4% royalties on a book that sold 180,000 copies. 

Understand that I am not being critical of this lady’s decision. It is her choice to do so.

Joe sez: This is called Blaming the Victim. It’s when people are partially blamed for their own maltreatment. Because you ARE being critical. That is the point of your blog post.

For the record, Ann didn’t complain. She simply expressed sadness. Like I can express sadness about the 600,000 homeless people in America. So, there are homeless! Since when is that news? Why should we try to change anything or do anything about it?

. . . .

But my issue is not with the money (although it is important) it is a larger question. She says she has sold 170,000 books but not made that much money. For the record Peterson has signed with Thomas Mercer which is one of the publishing divisions of Amazon.com…a traditional publisher of sorts, so she may still reach a 100,000 plus audience. So is it all about the money and not about number of readers? If Peterson had chosen to go Indie (solo) and published using the e-book option (like the Kindle Direct Program) and sold 10,000 copies she would make the same amount of money. BUT she would have 160,000 fewer readers! One Hundred and Sixty Thousand.

Joe sez: Everyone remember that rope from earlier? This is what happens when someone brings a noose to their own hanging. It’s funny, and sad, all at once.

Steve, you said earlier that Harlequin’s publishing machine is a huge “for profit” company. 

I may be wrong, but it’s my guess that many writers, Ann included, cite writing as their job. A job is “for profit” isn’t it? That’s why they list it as such on their income taxes, and have to pay the IRS. It certainly isn’t for altruism, or to help mankind, or to fulfill some hidden inner fetish to lick a piece of paper with her name on it.

Ann is in this for the same reason Harlequin is: to make money. That’s what professional writers do.

Are you a professional agent, Steve? I’ve never heard of you before, but a cursory surfing of your website shows you do accept queries. So here is a serious question: would you represent a writer for 2.4% commission?

Maybe you would. Maybe you wouldn’t. But what if every writer you repped demanded that you only accept 2.4%? What if the only writers you could work with were those you said, “You get 2.4%. If you’re uncomfortable with those terms, don’t sign with me.”

Then you’d have zero clients. Is that your fault? Or were you bullied out of the business because you couldn’t afford to make a living? Or would you accept it because you were forced to and had no one on your side to help you get better terms?

See how a choice isn’t really a choice?

Link to the rest at A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing

PG wonders if all the agents went to the same convention and caught something from the water.