Publishers Constantly Mistreat Their Suppliers
A couple of days ago, Passive Guy included an indignant post by Dean Wesley Smith about receiving a rejection letter two years after he submitted a query to an editor. The first line of Dean’s query mentioned that he had professionally published over 90 novels.
The post generated several other indignant comments, but PG missed making his main point, one which demonstrates how dysfunctional most publishers are.
People like Dean are the suppliers, the only suppliers, for the products publishers sell. Once in a great while (every 10 years or so), someone at at a typical publisher may get an idea for a book (probably non-fiction) and start the ball rolling, but, by and large, publishers sit and wait for other people to bring them new product ideas.
Agents may be a bit more entrepreneurial (again, probably with non-fiction) and approach potential authors or interesting people who might make a good subject for a book, but, by and large, most agents adopt the same strategy as publishers and wait for other people to bring them new product ideas.
And even when great products, blockbuster commercial products, arrive in the mail, agents and publishers are notorious for not recognizing them.
Here’s an excerpt from Stephenie Meyer’s account of the origin of Twilight:
I sent out around fifteen queries (and I still get residual butterflies in my stomach when I drive by the mailbox I sent the letters from—mailing them was terrifying.). I will state, for the record, that my queries truly sucked, and I don’t blame anyone who sent me a rejection (I did get seven or eight of those. I still have them all, too). The only rejection that really hurt was from a small agent who actually read the first chapter before she dropped the axe on me. The meanest rejection I got came after Little, Brown had picked me up for a three-book deal, so it didn’t bother me at all. I’ll admit that I considered sending back a copy of that rejection stapled to the write-up my deal got in Publisher’s Weekly, but I took the higher road.
My big break came in the form of an assistant at Writers House named Genevieve. I didn’t find out until much later just how lucky I was; it turns out that Gen didn’t know that 130,000 words is a whole heck of a lot of words. If she’d known that 130K words would equal 500 pages, she probably wouldn’t have asked to see it. But she didn’t know (picture me wiping the sweat from my brow), and she did ask for the first three chapters. I was thrilled to get a positive response, but a little worried because I felt the beginning of the book wasn’t the strongest part. I mailed off those three chapters and got a letter back a few weeks later (I could barely get it open, my hands were so weak with fear). It was a very nice letter. She’d gone back with a pen and twice underlined the part where she’d typed how much she enjoyed the first three chapters (I still have that letter, of course), and she asked for the whole manuscript. That was the exact moment when I realized that I might actually seeTwilight in print, and really one of the happiest points in my whole life. I did a lot of screaming.
Link to the rest at The Official Website of Stephenie Meyer
Just so we’re clear, if the Twilight query had gone to an experienced agent at Writers House instead of a newbie, the experienced agent would have turned it down cold. Stephenie was very lucky a publishing “expert” didn’t review her new product idea.
JK Rowling had an even worse story with her first Harry Potter manuscript, which generated a minuscule advance after numerous rejections.
What are probably the two biggest new product lines for the publishing industry in the last 10-15 years came within a hairs-breadth of not happening at all.
That’s not the way well-run businesses operate. Far more publishing experts failed to see any promise in Twilight and Harry Potter than recognized that promise. If Stephenie and JK had sent out ten times as many queries, they would have been rejected at least ten times as often.
Authors look at this sort of thing and say, “All it takes is one acceptance.” The business side is a different story. In any field other than publishing, a well-run business that missed a JK or Stephenie idea would have tracked down the people who failed to see the potential in the idea, fired them and completely re-worked the query processing system so an error of that magnitude would never happen again.
The standard answer from Big Publishing to stories like this is that mere mortals can’t understand how hard it is to deal with a lot of incoming mail, electronic or otherwise.
Good companies do hard things.
All the time.
Is it harder to deal with a lot of incoming mail than it is to invent and build the iPhone? Or Facebook? Is efficiently handling a large stream of incoming new product ideas harder than operating Amazon? Or building a successful videogame company?
One of the reasons the publishing business is such a fat target for disruptive change is because it does such a terrible job running its business. If the big publishers hadn’t consolidated into a quasi-cartel with a paid-for monopoly on prime shelf space in most bookstores, they would have been defeated by smarter competitors a long time ago.
The rewards of monopoly are a quiet life. The consequences of monopoly are sloppy business operations and a steadily declining corporate IQ.
The idea that indie authors are at a terrible disadvantage competing with Big Publishing is incorrect. All the new JKs and Stephenies are working on her manuscripts right now. None of them are working for Big Publishing. Today, nothing requires that they give their ideas to anyone else.
Big companies routinely abuse their suppliers. Publishers are just farther along in the process. It appears to be a phenomenon related to size and/or market control, rather than specific to a particular industry.
Try running a machine shop sometime. Companies, especially big ones, outsource making things that are important to their business, then browbeat the sources, pay late, and generally engage in practices that induce resentment. Then they get on teevee and explain how it’s impossible to do business in America, so they have to send the work overseas and/or import hungry foreigners to get it done.
Writers are fortunate in that respect. It’s gonna be hard to outsource English writing to people who don’t have it as a first language.
Regards,
Ric
One word: India.
I’ve dealt with a few Indians who worked for outsourcing companies. They generally write English about as well as they write computer code…
“Is it harder to deal with a lot of incoming mail than it is to invent and build the iPhone? Or Facebook? Is efficiently handling a large stream of incoming new product ideas harder than operating Amazon? Or building a successful videogame company?”
One of the things that left me totally dumbfounded when I first started trying the traditional publishing route was the news that it took 1 to 2 years before a book hit the shelves AFTER a writer turned in a completed manuscript.
By way of contrast (and dependent on the type of vessel involved), I’ve seen ships designed, model tested, built, sea-trialed, and delivered, all starting from sketches on a napkin and completed in 16 months. That includes a technical library of perhaps 300 volumes and an equal number of drawings, all of which had better be correct or very bad things happen.
And shipbuilding is not a particularly innovative industry. Best I can tell, publishing suffers when compared to almost any other industry. To me it’s not that the folks running it are evil, just that they’re so hopelessly out of touch they don’t know how inefficient they are.
The big publishers don’t always take so long to get a book to market. They moved pretty fast after Martin’s ‘Dance with Dragons’ was turned in.
And they tend to move quickly on political and current events books.
So the possibility is there – for whatever reason they just don’t do it with most fiction.
Hi Linda. I never doubted faster turnarounds were/are possible, it’s just that they seem to be very much the exception to the rule in fiction and I can’t see any legitimate reason for that. I can’t think of a single industry that moves at the glacial pace of publishing and the tasks involved are simply not that difficult. My own book Deadly Straits was professionally edited (both developmentally and copyedited/proofread). I also contracted cover art and digital formatting. The only thing I did myself was the interior layout for the POD version. None of these tasks took longer than 3 weeks, and some were completed in a few days. I’ll put the finished product up alongside anything coming out of traditional publishing. I didn’t know Jack about any of this stuff starting out, so how can it possibly take these ‘seasoned professionals’ a year or so to turn out a book?
I’m trying to imagine a baseball team operating its scouting department like the publishing industry operates.
“You whiffed on all those evaluations? We could have drafted all these superstars but didn’t because you didn’t see their potential? That’s okay. This job is hard. We forgive you.”
Yeah, right.
As far as I know, there are *never* repercussions in the publishing industry for those who passed on “the next big thing.” In other words, the agents and editors who passed on Rowling and Meyer saw no negative impact at all on their careers. It’s usually passed off as “not being the right fit,” or some variation of that.
In some cases, “not the right fit” is reasonable — I don’t think a Christian-works publisher would do well for either, and Baen’s customers probably would have looked at Twilight, at least, with bafflement. (Probably a fair amount of bafflement at Potter, too, though it’s more straight fantasy and probably could’ve found a niche…)
In other cases… Yeah, I dunno either.
There’s no repercussions, but I wouldn’t say that there is no accountability at all. The agents who consistently choose right see their careers grow. Not so sure about how editorial works, but I’d think that the editors who consistently put out bestsellers would get promoted. Hmm, I have many more opinions about this topic, but I should go do some brain science first. Will be back…
Livia, I meant no repercussions for having missed that “big thing” to begin with. In other words, the agents and editors who passed on Potter or Twilight were fine because of the subjective nature of the business. They could even argue that if they’d published them they wouldn’t have been as successful because of “not being the right fit.”
I agree with you that agents and editors who don’t succeed in the sales arena either will fail (agencies) or, in the case of editors, as you said, not be promoted.
The problem is largely the subjective nature of the business. Agents and editors are predisposed to like certain kinds of books, and deviation from that “type” are often not considered. Only when someone *else* takes a chance on such a deviation and is successful, like JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, will agents and editors change what they are looking for based on business pressures. And then we get market saturation of product as everyone scrambles to chase the same finite segment, leading to an inevitable decline in quality of that product, and then decline in market share. The urban fantasy and paranormal romance genres are getting played out because of this, the same way horror comes and goes in cycles.
There is no “method” for finding the next big hit. That’s the real problem. There’s no formula or checklist an agent or editor can apply that will allow them to know, usually a year or more before a book hits shelves (and I agree with R.E. McDermott, this is a problem), whether or not it will be a success. Every book from a new writer is in some ways a total crapshoot. I hate the process, I truly do. But I also don’t see an easy way to reform it.
There’s a personal and professional stake in each book an editor represents that’s not analogous to the other industries you cited. An editor may be staking her reputation, and possibly career, on the next big hit. This naturally creates a conservative bias to be “safe” with what books are bought, and to continue with what’s familiar.
Amazon doesn’t have any personal stake in the products they sell. There’s no lead time, no need to edit, copyedit, proof, approve a cover, figure out distribution, etc., for the books, electronics, gardening supplies, whatever, that the company sells. Amazon just gets tons of crap in from everyone and sells it on its website. Yes, they are NOW getting into the book business, but it remains to be seen whether their methods will be any better than the Big Six.
Amazon has a huge advantage — they can see what’s selling already and go, “That author’s fans want more of THAT. Let us acquire that author.” In a way… no, strike that, it’s exactly like what happens when a high-selling author with a not-horrible contract says, “I have another series in mind. Who wants to bid on it?” Publishers go, “OOOO, WE WANT SOME OF THAT” and start bidding.
Amazon can just tell which way someone’s trending first, and hasn’t got any persnickity problems with “oh, but they have so much already e-published.”
Haven’t traditional publishers already started trolling for best-selling independent authors on Amazon?
If trad publishers aren’t looking at what’s selling big on Amazon/B&N/etc., then they really are cutting off their noses to spite their face.
But perhaps they are just deciding to let the mass market paper format go away and will focus on the higher margin trade formats…
Seeing what sells, hopefully — though I wouldn’t put it past some editors/houses to ignore the listings. But Amazon can see what’s trending, and have a record of what the trends are for that author’s other works. Basically, they have insider information that will give them an edge even if one of the publishing houses does notice a string of “oh, hey, author X consistently makes it into the top Y on the Amazon lists.”
“Amazon doesn’t have any personal stake in the products”..
Yes and no. The key they have is the long tail of low cost distribution, and they work that end hard and effectively. They sell to a ‘pull-market’ that lets the readers/reviewers pick the best content. Traditional publishers are editors first and then distributors second so they have been unknowingly setting up whole departments of guessers to ‘push’ the content out there “we think this will sell and that won’t”. It worked fine for a long time when they had control of book shelves, but consumers want what they want. Which includes Pet Rocks and Hoola-hoops.
Here’s an exercise, ask a reader you know to name which of the following brands they don’t recognize: Stephenie Meyers; Twilight; Little,Brown; New York Times Best Seller List. Then ask them which they buy/buy-from regularly. The crux of the publisher’s problem is in that set of responses. Consumers haven’t cared about which publisher was in the mix. The rest they do care a great deal about.
.
If companies like Apple relied on outsiders to design their new products, you can bet we’d see headlines about “the idiots who turned down the iPod.” (And that sort of thing does happen in other industries, just not nearly as much as it does in the entertainment business.)
The strength of the ideas and the quality of the writing are not the only factors that influence how successful a book will be, but they’re usually the only factors that an agent or editor has available when deciding whether to go forward with any given book. Trying to pick future bestsellers on that basis is like watching a group of children play football and asking which of them is most likely to score the winning goal in the FA Cup (or the winning touchdown in the Superbowl) in 10 years’ time.
IIRC, Big Publishing *did* miss Amanda Hocking. She had many, many rejections but fortunately those coincided with the opening up of indie publishing and Joe Konrath’s cheerleading pushing her to take control of her career. It wasn’t until she had sold a million dollars worth of books/whatever, that BP noticed her.
You would think that would be some kind of lesson for BP but apparently they are immune to learning from their mistakes.
Bravo! Despite the industry hacks protesting their innocence, making excuses, and rationalizing all their bad decisions, doesn’t EVERYONE know by now that publishers are just plain lousy business people?
Just look at their approach to marketing and advertising. What’s that? Stephen King and John Grisham have new books coming out? Great! Let’s advertise the devil out of them, andspend hundreds of thousands, or no one will buy them. Oh, and as to that new book by John Q. Nobody, let’s not advertise that one – not even a few thousand dollars. Nobody knows who he is anyway.
Huh? 180 degrees out of phase, just like most of the business decisions publishers make.
As a 25-year business manager, I can tell you that people in the real business world (publishing, of course, being surreal) face these kinds of pressures and tough decisions all the time, and they advance or languish (or get fired) based on how well they execute their jobs.
Publishers merely pat themselves on the backs and say, “Blah, the great unwashed just don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t understand that we… Oh crap, I’m going to be late for my tee time at the club!”
No one has been more responsible for destroying the publishing industry than publishers.
Publishers will one day be a thing of the past – it’s on the books and it will be in part their own faults.
Repeated rejections with a standard printed form (when sent at all!) are infuriating but they provide the fuel needed to propel those frustrated would-be writers to finding another solution – the ‘indie ebook’. If their rejections had been more personalised, it might have reduced the demand for an alternative outlet.
What is impressive is that the ebook takes up no veritable volume, a few hundred ko’s so there is unlimited space available for anyone wishing to try his luck. Some good writers may still be lost on the way to the ebook because of not being ‘computer savvy’ and/or inadept at typing. As for the rest, it will be the general public who will have the task of sifting and filtering the good from the bad. They might actually do a better job, picking up on those who were rejected out of hand.
A lot of public is out there who wield a lot of weight when it comes to knowing what they like and it is not necessarily what they have been fed by publishers!
PG, you wrote: ‘Stephenie was very lucky a publishing “expert” didn’t review her new product idea.’
Great post and great statement.
If I remember correctly, Dean Wesley Smith has remarked that NY publishers actually do a fairly poor job of gauging what the reading public wants. Maybe that’s part of the reason they’re in trouble now.
Hunter – The statistics of something over 90% of all books published failing to earn a profit would seem to indicate some problems with the product selection process in NY publishing.
Wonderfully understated, PG!!
It sucks to be the author of one of those 9 out of 10 books, but the publisher as a whole still makes a profit. If the bean counters decided that they wanted more of the books to be profitable, I’d expect that to make publishers even more risk averse than they already are. But wasn’t the original complaint that too many of them aren’t willing to take chances on something new?
The nine of out ten unprofitable books aren’t usually books where they’ve taken risks. They’re usually more of the “ooh-we-want-another-TWILIGHT/POTTER/SOOKIE-book!” that don’t find readers because they are generally poor knockoffs lacking whatever charms made the originals big hits.
That’s not to say that publishers don’t take risks that don’t payoff. They do. The advances paid for HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY and THE GLASS BOOK OF THE DREAM-EATERS are testaments to publishers trying to get ahead of the curve of the “next big thing.” Those high-profile failures serve only to make them more conservative in the long run.
You know, David, Twilight-Potter-Sookie could be its own genre.
That’s exactly my point. Those series got huge and then everyone was scrambling to duplicate that success after the fact, instead of looking proactively for the next big thing. It’s self-defeating in a way. The *next* Potter could be in their in-box, but because it’s not like the *old* Potter, it gets rejected.
In my former life as a performance measurement analyst, I always made sure that clients understood that there are two types of errors. Simply put:
Type I errors occur when the inferior (insert: products, services, people, … or in our case, books and authors) are accepted.
Type II errors occur when the superior (insert: all above) are rejected.
One of the most profound tenants of statistics is that TYPE II errors are by far the most damaging.
Before I was in the financial industry, I was in the music industry. I remember Clive Davis, at the time, President of Arista Records telling a few of us of how he past on The Beatles and Hendrix and how it took 11 invitations over an entire year to get him to check out Whitney Houston. I sat there thinking, ” … only Clive would be bold enough to admit that.”
TRADPUB was out of control by the time I queried (in 2009). Agents acting like Roman senators giving us the proverbial thumbs up or down (mostly down).
I may write a blog on the absolutely SILLY, HILARIOUS (to me) requirements some of the agents demanded to even send a query to them. They sounded like this:
“Any author attempting to query us (Queens’ English) MUST follow these guidelines TO THE LETTER!!! If you don’t, we will:
-NOT open your email
- NOT look at your query
- DELETE your email from our hard drive
- DELETE your name from our memory
- PLACE you on the “IMMEDIATELY BURN THIS QUERY” list FOREVER!
- WRITE blogs about you to our sycophant followers telling everyone about your digressions!
On second thought … I think I will have some fun writing one!
More to come … hehe …
I was on that crazy roller coaster at the same time. It kills me to think of all the time I wasted trying to get the formatting of my query email to be exactly how they wanted it. Ugh. People who still champion the old way of getting published keep saying to use your rejections to learn, but out of over 100 rejections, I only had minimal advice/response from two agents.
But hey, that rejected book made it to #15 in the Kindle Store in June, and has sold over 25,000 copies, so it couldn’t be all that bad.
(I love having the last laugh!)
Dear PG,
I think that I will need to write a post on this, but just to sketch out my first response, what struck me in the post and subsequent discussions is the fact that with self-publishing, authors and editors now have a new place to “scout” for talent that they seem to be ignoring–self-published books have made the best seller lists on Amazon.
I belong to the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative, and we are building a list of historical fiction ebooks so that readers of this genre have a way of finding books that have have been vetted for quality. To do this we search through the best seller lists and reviews of books in the genre which are self-published or published by small independent presses. We are finding real gems, and many of these books are climbing up the best seller lists on Amazon.
But are agents or editors reaching out to these authors? No. Which means that they aren’t even bothering to delegate to some intern the job of looking through the top 100 books in all the amazon categories, searching for unpublished, un-agented authors who are producing books that have sold in large numbers.
What a missed opportunity. They would rather take a chance on an author whose books have only been read by an agent or editor rather than read by the people who are actually going to be asked to buy the book.
No wonder they have such a large fail rate.
M. Louisa Locke
author of Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits
Member of HFAC (http://historicalfictionauthors.com/
PG – I’m sighing a big fat sigh. You know me, Queen of Extremes. I love and hate self-publishing. In the end I think it will all be for the good but right now it still feels like an roaring river.
A book reviewer recently said the following to me: “Why don’t you have an agent? Why aren’t you with a New York publisher? Your stuff is better than 99% of what I read daily from New York houses.”
Short answer – I wasn’t rejected a mere fifteen times, I’ve been rejected hundreds of times by both agents and publishers. The idea of a mere fifteen rejections boggles my mind.
There’s luck and then there’s luck. Stephanie may have lucked out with the editor who read her manuscript, but that’s only part of the process. She also had a unique concept that resonated with certain demographic groups.
OK, Julia, here’s my special deal for you:
- As of right now, I’m your agent. I’m not going to do anything for you. I won’t sell your book and forget about ever having me answer my phone or respond to an email.
- Fire me when you read this.
- From here on forward, if anyone ever asks why you don’t have an agent, you can say you had one, but you fired him because you can do better on your own.
That seems like a perfect solution! If you need a second agent to fire, let me know.
You’re fired.
I suppose you up your chances when you follow all of the specifications required by the [picky] agents when sending them your query. I can at least comfort myself in that I tried my best to follow their rules. Still, rejection. This post and the comments have been good for me. It seems New York is a lot like Washington, out of touch with the rest of the world.
“The idea that indie authors are at a terrible disadvantage competing with Big Publishing is incorrect. All the new JKs and Stephenies are working on her manuscripts right now. None of them are working for Big Publishing. Today, nothing requires that they give their ideas to anyone else.”
I love that! Yes, it is so true!
Dear PG,
one word.
Amen.
You’re very reverent today, Peggy.
And I’m back! Decided that I have done enough neuroscience for a short break. First of all, PG, let me say that you’re absolutely right that the publishing industry has many inefficiencies and could stand to change. I think it’s a very good thing that the pressure from Amazon and other disruption is forcing some changes in the industry. I do take issue with some of your arguments though, so if I may offer some counterpoints…
“Far more publishing experts failed to see any promise in Twilight and Harry Potter than recognized that promise. ”
You can look at it that way, but I don’t think it covers all the nuances of the situation.
1. Twilight had trouble with the initial gatekeepers for two reasons: a high word count, and a bad query letter. I’ll give you the word count point. One of the best things about the longtail model of digital publishing is that you can experiment with things that fall outside of industry conventions.
But you really blame the publishing industry for rejecting a bad query letter? Well, can you blame any company for rejecting a job applicant based on a bad resume or cover letter? Let’s say Meyer self published instead, and instead of writing a bad query letter, she wrote bad cover copy and bad book blogger queries. Is it possible that she still would’ve eventually been discovered, gone viral, and become a megahit? Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet money on it.
2. My second point, and probably the more important one, is that your claim does a disservice to the numerous publishing folks who *did* see Twilight’s potential once they read it. These include
1) Jodi Reamer, the agent at a Writer’s House
2) the editor who offered a preempt for twilight (rejected by Jodi because she thought it could do better)
3) The seven (!) publishing houses that fought tooth and nail for Twilight in an auction. Little, Brown finally bought it for $750,000 in a multiple book deal.
So was their serendipity involved? Yes. But was this a case in which the expert publishing folks sat around picking their noses until “Oh hai bestseller!”? Not in the slightest. In fact, given the massive marketing power and co-op given to books with such a high advance, you could make a fair case that Twilight owes a nontrivial portion of the success to its publisher’s efforts.
“In any field other than publishing, a well-run business that missed a JK or Stephenie idea would have tracked down the people who failed to see the potential in the idea, fired them and completely re-worked the query processing system so an error of that magnitude would never happen again.”
Again, I think you’re being a bit too simplistic. As some commenters have already said before me, spotting a runaway bestseller before it hits the market is not an exact science at all. Amazon is not any better at this. They just pick up projects *after* it’s been tested on the market. There are many books that are just as good or better than Twilight or Harry Potter. Those have not become bestsellers, and nobody knows why.
I’m a blogger. After a few years, I’m pretty good at figuring out on average which posts will do well, and which ones won’t. However, I am not at all able to predict which ones will go viral. That’s because they’re so much more involved than the quality of the post. Social factors and luck come into play. You have to hit the right influencers at the right time to get the right momentum. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has some really good examples of the social factors behind what makes something a hit.
Another thought. I would argue that Twilight’s success was in part manufactured by the publishers, but Harry Potter was a true black swan — even a paradigm shift in the industry. I draw an analogy to my own field of psychology. In my field, people plod on for decades, doing extensions of the same thing. But once in a while, an innovator will bring a new theory that causes a paradigm shift. And then after that, everybody will start imitating the new person. Sometimes people complain about the system of grant funding because it encourages people to tread the same paths as others. It discourages innovation because grant institutions tend to favor projects that are similar to previously successful projects. But can you really blame them? Going with known quantities will on average give you a better return for your money. If you have limited resources, it would be very dangerous to fund the crazy, high-risk ideas instead of dependable ones, even if in the long term it harms science. (To be fair though, I do think the grant system can be reformed.)
The same with publishing. Yes, there are black swans. And almost by definition, the biggest hits will be the ones that are fresh and unlike anything before them. But are publishers stupid for only going with things that have succeeded in the past? Risk-averse, perhaps, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say stupid. Indeed, why *would* you give a high advance to an unknown author in the (back then) non-lucrative field of children’s fiction?
Now, this is where Amazon might gain an advantage with their new technology. Because they don’t work under a venture capitalist upfront investment model, they can afford to give everybody a try and take the ones that succeed.
“Is it harder to deal with a lot of incoming mail than it is to invent and build the iPhone? Or Facebook? Is efficiently handling a large stream of incoming new product ideas harder than operating Amazon? Or building a successful videogame company?”
You’re right that publishers could probably make these changes if they wanted to. The thing is though, there’s been no reason to over the past few decades. Their business ran fine. They had plenty of submissions, plenty of willing writers, and it made more sense to focus their resources elsewhere. I’m not saying I would recommend that business model, but on the other hand, putting myself into their shoes, I can very well see myself making decisions the same way. But as you and DWS say, things are changing.