The Art Of The Novella

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I’ve been trying to figure out how to teach an in-person novella class for years now, but I knew it would be both time and cost prohibitive. I love novellas and I love discussing them and I love reading them and writing them and…

We tried a novella “workshop” kinda sorta after the in-person workshops. I would tell the attendees a short-hand way of doing a novella in the same world they’d been writing in, and then they could submit the finished novella few weeks later.

I don’t think that was satisfying for them. It certainly wasn’t for me. It felt like a Band Aid. Teaching a class in-person would be tough, because I figure it would take a minimum of two weeks. We don’t have a cheap place for people to stay here in Las Vegas, and even if we did, the kind of teaching and writing wouldn’t really blend.

Finally, I decided on a faux in-person workshop. I’m going to do the workshop I planned, only spread over 9 weeks, not counting the writing. After all the learning, the writing starts. Participants turn in their novellas and I will read them. (Note: I will not edit them. People who’ve been to my workshops know that I don’t edit. I read for story.)

I’m very excited about this. More importantly, I think it’ll work.

I planned a leisurely announcement, but success got in the way. I just found out that the novella class that focuses on science fiction is more than half full, and that was only with it being announced to Dean’s people. I want you all to have a chance to get into that one, so I’m announcing now.

I mentioned a science fiction workshop. Yep, there is one, and one for mystery, romance, and fantasy as well.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books.

Findaway and Corporate Rights Grabs

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I know many of you have asked me to write about Findaway’s giant rights grab this week. I just finished a short post on it. I’m no longer doing the regular business blog. Instead, I post about business things on my Patreon page. I made this post wide, so everyone can see it, but most posts will not be.

. . . .

A lot of you have written to me, asking me to write a bit about Findaway’s rights grab. I think those of you who wrote knew what I was going to say.

For those of you who aren’t aware of what’s going on with Findaway, I’m going to give you the quick & dirty and then a bit of context.

. . . .

Anyway…on Thursday, February 15, they posted a new Terms of Service that would go live on March 15. It said:

Accordingly, you hereby grant Spotify a non-exclusive, transferable,  sublicensable, royalty-free, fully paid, irrevocable, worldwide license  to reproduce, make available, perform and display, translate, modify,  create derivative works from (such as transcripts of User Content),  distribute, and otherwise use any such User Content through any medium,  whether alone or in combination with other Content or materials, in any  manner and by any means, method or technology, whether now known or  hereafter created, in connection with the Service, the promotion,  advertising or marketing of the Service, and the operation of Spotify’s  (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including for systems  and products management, improvement and development, testing, training,  modeling and implementation in connection with the Spotify Service.  Where applicable and to the extent permitted under applicable law, you  also agree to waive, and not to enforce, any “moral rights” or  equivalent rights, such as your right to object to derogatory treatment  of such User Content. Nothing in these Terms prohibits any use of User  Content by Spotify that may be taken without a license.

I was going to underline the egregious parts, but it’s all egregious.

It sparked an immediate and forceful backlash.

Today when I went to look at the TOS, it had changed. It now says: 

Accordingly, and without limiting any payment obligations under Section 5  herein, you hereby grant Spotify a non-exclusive, worldwide license to  reproduce, make available, perform, display, distribute, and otherwise  use your User Content on and in connection with the Spotify Service and  the Distribution Services (as defined in Section 5). This license  permits the use of the User Content by Spotify for systems and product  management and development, testing, training, modeling, and  implementation in connection with anti-piracy and anti-fraud measures  and the discoverability, promotion, marketing, curation, distribution,  and sale (or developing the user experience in connection therewith) of  the User Content and the Spotify Service. Spotify’s distribution  partners also have the right to distribute your User Content via the  Distribution Services, subject to your right to discontinue distribution  as described below in this Section 4 and/or to opt out from particular  Distribution Partners as described in Section 5. For the sake of  clarity, these Terms do not authorize Spotify to use User Content to  create a new book, ebook or audiobook, or to use User Content to create a  new, machine-generated voice without your permission.

Note that some of the terrible language is gone, such as waiving moral rights and the creating of derivative works. It still will let them use your product to train AI though and other stuff, but to my surprise and their credit, they did change their TOS.

Does that mean that after next week, you will find my work on Findaway? Um, no. You will not. As a friend of mine said, they’ve shown their true colors. Musicians have had trouble with Spotify for years and these are Spotify-inspired changes.

Spotify bought Findaway in 2022, paying about $123 million dollars. At the time, Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, told investors that he was “confident that audiobooks will deliver the kind of earnings that  investors are looking for, with profit margins north of 40 percent.” 

Over the past 18 months or so, Spotify has tinkered with Findaway in a variety of ways, mostly to do with the way that they’re paying content providers. Then this new TOS rights grab, which is not unexpected. In fact, it’s right on time.

Remember, what Spotify wants to do with Findaway and Anchor and all of the other services it is buying is increase profit margins for investors. The company does not care about providing a good service for its content partners. Because this is a giant corporation which is publicly traded, it has corporate goals that have to do with investors, making big money, and profit margins. 

If Findaway does not earn the kind of money that Spotify hopes, then Findaway will be discontinued, broken off and sold, or dissolved.

In other words, don’t expect that lovely tiny company that started in indie audiobook distribution to ever return.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

PG has signed up for access to The Patreon Site Kris set up on January 1 of this year because he likes the style and insights he finds in her essays on a regular basis.

Kris has also structured her Patreon membership costs in a savvy manner. Memberships start at $1.00 per month. There are steps up from that fee, but she includes a lot of interesting resources in the basic tier.

PG has shied away from any number of Patreon offerings that start at $100 per year and go up from there. That price may seem reasonable to some, but, for PG, that large an ask requires a lot more work than he suspects more than a few expensive Patreonistas will be willing to devote to their sites.

Business Musings: All Good Things

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I should have seen it coming when I couldn’t figure out how to write the year-end blogs. I found a dozen topics that fit, but none really interested me. They’re all important from different perspectives. The perspectives are so different from each other that they no longer feel like part of the same industry.

For example, traditionally published writers claim they care about craft, but really, they care about old-fashioned readership—which has been declining through the trade channels for the past five years or more. Bestselling books published by traditional publishers sell half of what they sold in 2009, and that was already down by another third from 1999.

Traditional publishers don’t help writers get an audience. Traditional publishers buy up copyright for the term of the copyright so that they can have assets on their accounting books. They take years to publish something, which is often unrecognizable from what the author initially intended.

Still, traditional writers hope for “legitimacy,” whatever that means, and strive to get agents, even though book agents take 15% of the book for the life of the book and do very little work (as well as often practicing law without a license).

Traditional publishing has changed for the worse in the decade plus since I started this blog, and still writers get sucked into trad pub. I was done about five years ago writing for writers who want to go that route, because I hate to see their dreams crushed.

Just this week, I watched a writer whom I respect, who should know better, try to find a new agent because the writer’s partner, also a writer, has a New York Times notable book (which is also a bestseller), and can’t get their book agent to return phone calls.

How discouraging. When someone else (not me) suggested hiring an attorney instead of a book agent, the writer (whom I respect a bit less now) essentially called that someone an ignorant idiot.

That same interchange could have happened in 2015 or 2009. No one learns on that side of the fence, and very few people change. They don’t want to.

On the indie side of the fence, learning is essential. Writers share knowledge and ideas, all while writing the books of their hearts (to use the romance term). Some writers go awry because they get caught up in analytics or trying to write “what sells” but writers have always been like that.

The problem with indie these days is that there are so many good ways to make a living that there’s no longer one path.

Okay…that’s not a problem. That’s a good thing.

I started writing this weekly blog at the advent of the indie movement, mostly to remind myself that this is a viable career path. Now I can’t imagine existing without indie publishing. Going back to traditional wouldn’t be possible for me.

It was barely possible in 2009. The contracts got worse, the editors were a nightmare, and I wasn’t about to give my copyright to some corporation for a mere five figures, when I knew the copyright on a single book could bring in licenses worth tens of thousands of dollars.

I wasn’t that desperate in 2009 and I’m certainly not that desperate now. As I noted in some recent blogs, my books are all in print. The books of my traditional friends? Not in print at all. Or if they are in print, my friends aren’t making a dime off of them.

It’s discouraging, but as I’ve seen over the past few years, people have dug in. It doesn’t matter that traditional writers now have to get a “real” job to make a living. Or that the changes in indie have made it possible for those of us who understand business to make a good living while writing what we love.

We’ve changed.

The world has changed.

And honestly, I’m not that interested in writing about the publishing industry weekly. There is no publishing industry anymore. There are different aspects of book publishing, all of which fascinate me, and none of which make me want to pontificate for a few thousand words every single week.

Then there’s my writing itself. In the spring, I made a list of the books clamoring to get out of my brain. The series that need finishing right now, the standalones I’ve been dying to write, the books I’ve intended to write since the turn of the century if not longer, as well as the short stories that rise to the top of my to-do list because I read an inspiring article or saw an amazing play.

I will have time to write all of that if I double down on my fiction writing. Or triple down. When I write fiction, I write a minimum of 1,000 new words per hour. The blog takes a minimum of 10 hours per week from idea to page, including the audio (which is maybe 20 minutes of that 10 hours). I love the audio. It’s fun.

The blog, not so much.

In fact it had become such a drag that I put it off until the last minute, and then have to give up even more fiction writing time to get it down.

And while the blog makes me more money per month than someone would earn making minimum wage (not counting all the nonfiction books I get out of it or the other perks), I could make more money if I write three novellas a year, whether I sell them to traditional markets or not.

The blog is self-sustaining financially, but it’s actively costing me money. My earnings as a fiction writer have gone up dramatically in the past fourteen years.

The earnings—for those of you who still have a traditional publishing dream—do not come when a book or story is released but slowly over the course of a year. I used to say that indie writers don’t get advances, but with presales and the rise of Kickstarter, indie writers make money before the book comes out. Sometimes that money is more than a typical book advance. Sometimes it’s less.

But it’s always at the beginning—and then the writer goes on to sell copies of the book for years, rather than a few months as it happens in traditional.

So each moment I spend writing fiction brings me more money than I made even five years ago. I used to clock my writing time at $500 per hour, but it’s more like $1000 per hour…and that doesn’t count other licenses like sales of related merchandise or movie options. I haven’t done that math.

Thirty dollars per hour writing a blog post that has little resale value or $1000 per hour writing stories that can sell for decades. It’s really a no brainer.

I never really worried about that when I needed the blog to explain the changes in the publishing industry to myself. I just wanted the blog to pay me for my time. I did turn the posts into many books, some of which sell really well and some of which need massive updating. But I don’t want to update them. I have other things to do.

Yes, you’re beginning to understand where this is going. The weekly blog on my website is going away. I will be using the time to write more stories, finish some book projects, do other book projects and, oddly enough, do a lot more promotion of my existing work.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

PG will miss seeing the thoughts Kris shares on a regular basis and hopes she posts her thoughts and insights from time to time even if they don’t appear as frequently as they have in the past.

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

Totally Different Careers

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Every year, the Las Vegas Book Festival takes place three blocks from my condo. Every year, I watch the tents go up for the outdoor presentations and the book sales, and every year, I think, Hmmm, maybe I should go.

A few years ago, I tried to get a ticket the day before to see one of the featured speakers, not because of a book he’d written, but because he’s a personal hero of mine. Unsurprisingly, since he’s uber-famous, the tickets had disappeared months before. (The festival is free, but you still need tickets to attend the big events.)

As you can probably tell, I don’t pay a lot of attention to the literary scene here in Las Vegas. There’s a writers institute here that focuses on traditional publishing. It condescendingly includes “genre fiction” in some of its programming, but the people it puts on panels wouldn’t make a panel at a major sf convention or comic convention. Maybe a small town sf convention in the 1990s that had no budget at all. Maybe. Because they just don’t have the credentials.

This year’s Las Vegas Book Festival has some good panels on romance and a rather silly “genre fiction” topic combining…wait for it…history, horror, and sci-fi. There is a worldbuilding panel with a few writers who actually build popular sf/f worlds. But for the most part, this festival still shows its literary and traditional publishing roots.

Which is why I keep forgetting about it, year in and year out.

I do keep an eye on the book programming of the various tiny local festivals, just to see if a friend will show up or to get tickets to see someone whose work I adore. Last year, a friend and I went to see Roxanne Gay as part of the Wave In festival (which included music and art as well as books). We sat outside in the heat at Springs Preserve to listen to her excellent talk, as well as the interview conducted afterwards.

My friend, also a writer, asked why I didn’t go up and introduce myself to Roxanne Gay before the event, when she was sitting alone. I didn’t for a variety of reasons. Usually those introductions are awkward. If the featured writer hasn’t heard of me, then they’re embarrassed or dismissive. If they have, and it’s through my editing, there’s a chance that I rejected them. If they have, and it’s through my writing, there’s a chance that they don’t read or like that sf (mystery, romance) crap.

Just better to let me be a reader-fan than it is to try to impose on their moment in the sun.

Besides, I’m keeping a low profile with the local literary scene, a decision that I realized was a good one when another friend with a long career in science fiction moved to the area. She was treated by one of the organizations like something that needed to be scraped off their shoes. That’s embarrassing too, but not as bad as being recognized.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

Business Musings: The Aging Writer

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

This past week, I had a fascinating text exchange with one of my very best friends. We have known each other for more than forty years. We met in college—and no, this friend isn’t Kevin J. Anderson. This is another friend. We worked in different professions, but we’ve been at each other’s side, either physically or virtually, for decades now.

He’s retired now. I met him while he was a late-returning undergraduate, looking for a new career. Then marched beside him through the milestones, from getting an advanced degree through marriages and divorces (his and mine), children (his), successes, failures, and the health challenges that we’ve both suffered over the years.

We talked about the life trajectory this week, because my one class per semester at UNLV keeps bringing up bits of the past. This week, I watched a couple of students bond on a project. Over the past month or two, I watched them get to know each other and slowly become each other’s support system. Whether that lasts another forty years—or even six months—I don’t know. But they’re working on it.

I’ve seen a few other friendships grow too. These kids are just beginning to figure out who they are deep down. Watching that discovery is great. I think I finally understand why my father, a college professor, got so inspired by his students. I’m seeing it in real time.

But my friend and I also discussed age. He has one of those time-markers—children—that I don’t have. So it’s easier for me to pretend that I’m the same as I was in my forties (I’m not; I’m healthier) or that time really hasn’t passed—not unless I look at my hands, and see how they’re aging. They don’t look like mine anymore. They have the same short stubby fingers that my grandmother’s hands had, and now I’m starting to get that same web of lines that she had.

Occasionally, articles hit me hard as well. One, a Buzzfeed clickbait piece, said, You’ll Never Guess Who Is In Their Mid-Sixties! And I thought: Sure, I would, followed by…Crap! I’m nearly to my mid-sixties.

That was a bit earth-shattering in the weirdest of ways. The societal message about growing older, which means in U.S. parlance that I’m becoming less relevant. My friend mentioned that he has a lot of time now because he’s retired, and he struggles with that, although he doesn’t want to return to his old job. It intrigued him thirty years ago, and left him battered by the end. He doesn’t want to return and he doesn’t want to reinvent himself…yet. I suspect he might, though.

It gets worse: I’m female, and the message in American society is that older women are not beautiful or attractive or even interesting. Except that there’s this undercurrent of Don’t mess with grandma, implying that women my age, particularly in non-white cultures, have a lot of strength and power.

I was raised by a weak alcoholic woman who constantly told me that I would have to bend my life to my husband’s (as she did) and who got progressively weaker as she got older. I became quite good at negotiating hospitals because my alcoholic parents had to be taken to the ER with startling regularity (don’t ask). I learned, as a teen, how to ask the right questions and get them in and out quickly.

The survival skills you acquire…

Anyway, my role models, except for my grandmother who was 69 when I was born, were not very good ones. And even my beloved grandmother wasn’t a good role model on aging. She would often go to the hospital herself and then we’d get a call: Hurry! We think she’s going to die! She didn’t. She outlived my father, a few grandchildren, and at least two great-grandchildren, dying years after her hundredth birthday.

For decades I held her up as a beacon, but she was lacking in a few other areas as well. She hadn’t had a career. She’d been a housewife and not the best one, since she really couldn’t cook. (She could bake.) She didn’t have a career to fall back on or one that interested her or kept her active. Neither did my mother. My father retired at 75 and died within six months, just like his father who, at age 69, retired in January and was dead by March.

My brother was deathly afraid that when he retired, he’d follow the Rusch male tradition and leave the planet a few months later. Thankfully, he lived another 15 years after his retirement and might have made it longer if it weren’t for the sacrifices he made for others during Covid.

Of course, no one else in my entire family had a career in the arts. Not a one. My mentors in the writing field were…mentors. They were people I knew and, in some cases, cared deeply about, but not people I observed in everyday life. I knew how long they lived and I also knew that almost all of them (with one exception) kept writing until the day they died.

Knowing that…and seeing that…are two different things.

I turned sixty during Covid, and then pretended that I hadn’t. I stuffed that birthday aside, and the next, and the next…during which I got sick, for the first time ever on one of my own birthdays. I had weird health problems this year, maintenance stuff that required minor surgery or some changes in habits.

Dean had a serious health crisis this past year as well. He’s ten years older and remarkably healthy, but he has age-related problems too. He said to me, in the waiting room of our third medical professional’s office last June (two for me; one for him), that we had better get used to this: seeing doctors was our future.

And that sent me into a mental funk. The word “future” and “doctors” became a nightmarish vision of all those ERs of my teen years, carting unwilling and belligerent adults around, driving without a license to get them to and from some kind of help that they didn’t want and ultimately never took.

I suddenly saw the next decade or two as a long slow decline with only death at the end of it. Most people would say I came face to face with my mortality, but that’s not really true. A few near-death experiences of my own, as well as losing my high school best friend to breast cancer at 36 and other friends throughout the past three decades, made it really clear that death comes for us all whenever it’s ready and not a moment later.

. . . .

I figured out that I am in the last third of my life, and that I’d better hop to so I can complete everything. That added to the doctors/decline panic I was already having. It didn’t matter how many discussions Dean and I had about realistic time. If this is the last third of my life and provided there is no cognitive decline, well then, thirty years is damn near (not quite) as long as I have been with him.

Wow, has a lot changed in that period of time. Wow, have I written a lot. Wow, am I underestimating what I can do.

But…

Those conversations weren’t helping. I intellectually knew that I had more than enough time to write everything and more, even with illness and life events. I had had more problems before I moved to Las Vegas, years when I had migraines 21 out of 28 days every month, and I still managed to get a lot done.

But nothing was getting through to that weird panic about the last third of my life. Then Dean and I had a very serious discussion about role models on the way to the second WNBA finals game on Wednesday. He pointed out that I really had no role models growing up—all that stuff I put above were things he helped me put together.

And then that game gave me a gift.

Midway through the game, two women helped an elderly woman into the nosebleed seats. Seriously, our seats are so high up that people who are afraid of heights have trouble climbing the very steep staircase.

These two women—obviously relatives of the older lady—helped her get up the stairs, but primarily, she did it on her own power. She was ninety-eight years old and fierce. She wanted to see her team in the finals.

She stayed until the final minutes, when the other two women—probably her granddaughters—insisted she leave before the crowd did. Fortunately for her, the Las Vegas Aces were so far ahead that there was no way they could lose as she headed down those stairs.

Still, she fought. She wanted to see the game through. But they convinced her, and down she went, watching the game more than the steep stairs ahead of her.

Determined.

She was going to see her team win, and she did.

At ninety-eight she had a dowager’s hump and looked a bit frail, until you saw her face. That fierceness and intelligence. That determination. She was in good enough shape to take the stairs six times (there was a pit stop).

She needed to see something that no one could imagine in 1925, the year she was born. I do not know her history. I couldn’t tell from her size if she ever had athletic ambitions, not that it mattered. She had no hope of fulfilling them born as she was in those years.

But she saw something amazing—a championship team, two female coaches who were as fierce as the woman before me, and some players (on both teams) who are so great they could go toe-to-toe with most NBA players and beat them.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris’ author page on Amazon. Check out her books if you’re intrigued by her thoughts.

Business Musings: Platforms

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

At the beginning of August, Patreon had what some termed a payment meltdown. Some creators couldn’t access their payments. Banks notified some Patreon backers that their payments were being flagged as fraudulent.

Patreon claimed that the problems weren’t one problem; they were two problems. For the creators, the problem was a payment partner of Patreon that wouldn’t let them cash out. For subscribers, the problem was a lot more arcane than I want to go into here.

The secondary problem for creators, though, was that the subscriber issue brought the subscription to the attention of the subscriber. The great thing about subscriptions is that once people subscribe, they tend to forget how much they paid for the subscription.

If that subscription in any way loses value in the mind of the subscriber, or if their financial situation has changed, or if they had completely forgotten the subscription existed, having that subscription brought to their attention makes them reevaluate it. When they do that, many cancel. In this latest kerfuffle, one creator claimed they lost 300 subscribers.

A friend on Facebook gleefully reported all of this, and mentioned this was why they avoided all outside platforms, choosing to go through their website and with the systems they had built. (And yes, I see the irony of a friend using a platform to claim that they never use platforms. Don’t go there.)

They did have a point about platforms, though. We’re moving to our own online store for a variety of reasons, but one is that it gives us a cushion should one of the bigger online retail platforms change its way of doing things.

Another friend complained about online store platforms like Shopify, and said that they preferred to design their own. Turns out when I looked at their site, they had defaulted to WooCommerce, which we had tried and didn’t like.

The first friend’s point about outside platforms caught me, though, and got me thinking. My initial gut reaction to both of these folks was that my website has had a lot more problems over the past 25 years than I’ve ever had with the platforms. The idea of depending solely on my website scares the bejeezus out of me.

Having only one point of contact for all of my work is too risky for me, even if I supposedly control that one point. I don’t control the platform on which my website rests. It’s also taken forever to get someone to help me rebuild the website here. Some of that is me stalling, but some of it is finding the right fit.

Still, outside platforms have their own issues. At Christmastime last year, Amazon caused a lot of turmoil by dropping its newspaper and magazine subscription service. Some magazines were invited into the Kindle magazine program, but others were not. As Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld wrote at the time:

Earnings from Amazon subscriptions provide a varying and sometimes significant portion of the revenue that these publications require to stay in business. If you don’t already know, genre magazines are subscription-driven, meaning that subscriptions make up the bulk of their income. Some people think advertising is a major source, but it actually represents a tiny fraction for us….

None of these magazines are entirely reliant on Amazon, but as the largest ebook retailer in the field, the cancelation of this program will hurt and in some cases, hurt badly. Badly enough to shutter a magazine? Maybe. It’s too soon to tell …

Platforms change all the time. They make decisions that have a huge impact on the people they partner with. Amazon’s change was a cost-cutting measure driven by severe layoffs in the fourth quarter of 2022 and into 2023. The Patreon problem had a lot to do with a platform they had hired to help them process payments.

PayPal also changed its fee structure in late 2022, closing a loophole that a lot of businesses used as well as upping some fees. I’m sure online store platforms like Shopify will change how they do things as well over time, and many of those changes will harm some group of their partners.

Sometimes these companies do things seemingly en masse. They’re not. (Well, some of them might, but mostly, no.) Generally, they’re responding to market conditions which were not favorable in the last half of 2022 to anything online.

. . . .

The online boom started roughly fifteen years ago, when I already had an established career. Frankly, it saved my novel career. I couldn’t sign the contracts from the major publishers any longer. I couldn’t take the rights grabs.

I was looking at a short-story-only career. At that point, I thought I could still bring in some money from royalties. That changed as well.

I had assiduously gotten my rights back for almost every book that was an original. I owned the books and could relicense them; I just wasn’t sure how to proceed.

Then the online revolution, from viable ebooks to print on demand to easy-to-produce audio to podcasting to video podcasting to video production—well, you were there. You know.

All of these things go on various platforms. I have too much product to put it all on my website or on websites controlled by me. I would never get to all of it.

Dean and I had to hire people to help us put our books and short stories up on the various platforms, otherwise we would have had to give up writing. That’s why we started WMG Publishing, so that we had people to handle the various platforms.

We have a good staff, but they’re horribly overworked. They can’t control everything, just like Dean and I couldn’t. We’re constantly researching and finding the best way to put our product out into the world. We do a lot of experimenting. That’s why we were on Kickstarter in 2012. It was an experiment—one that worked. We did a variety of experiments that did not work.

. . . .

I decided long ago to use other people’s platforms for a lot of the work that we do. We use Amazon and Barnes & Noble and D2D and Bookfunnel. We use Mailchimp and Kickstarter and Teachable and YouTube. I use Patreon. We now use Shopify. I’m sure I’m missing a lot of platforms that we use. I do know that there are many that we are investigating and some we used to use. There’s a lot we’ve tried and a lot we abandoned and a lot that we have learned to love.

But that doesn’t mean we’re going to use them forever.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

My Magazine. My Voice. My Rules.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I did not want to write this post. In fact, I would have skipped the topic altogether if maybe a dozen different people hadn’t asked me to weigh in. I also felt that I was one of only a handful of people who could explain some of what editor Sheree Renée Thomas went through this summer. She can’t be 100% honest without jeopardizing her job.

In brief, a U.K. author mentioned on his website that he had sold a story to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in July. Writer Christopher Rowe saw that notification and immediately asked F&SF why they were publishing this particular U.K. writer. Turns out he’s affiliated strongly with the National Front, a U.K. political party with horrible white supremacist views.

This all took place in public, putting editor Sheree Renée Thomas in the forefront of a social media shitstorm. Eventually, the acceptance was rescinded, which caused another shitstorm. She got no support in this at all from owner and publisher Gordon Van Gelder until he issued a very tepid statement at the end of August.

Before I go deeper into this, let me say that this sort of thing has happened hundreds of times before at many publications over the decades. In the days before the internet, it would happen in public after the story was published if the editor and publisher were unlucky. If they were lucky, they would somehow catch the problem before the story made it to print.

In those days, there was a grapevine among editors which worked about 50% of the time. The worst failure during my tenure at F&SF was when a male writer of great ability sent out his first few stories. When a male editor rejected him, he was all sweetness and light. When a female editor rejected him, this writer wrote a long screed in great detail about how he would rape the editor and maybe even kill her when he saw her next.

I got one of those. Every female sf/f editor got one.

The male editors thought our warnings were “exaggerations” and we were “overreacting,” even though the writer in question was a violent paranoid alcoholic who had been imprisoned for assaulting women in the past. The night of the 1998 Nebulas, during which his story lost, he got drunk at the event and tried to assault a friend of mine running the SFWA suite. Fortunately, others saw this and managed to stop the attack.

As I was looking up this man’s name, which I will not repeat, I saw a recent article by another male friend of mine asking if the writer was a victim of cancel culture because the man’s career only lasted until 2008.

Nope. He was published for a decade after that horrific event. A male sf editor even published another story even though he had been terrified by the writer, because he believed that no one should be judged by their behavior. Only by their writing.

He was wrong, as publishing learned with Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott over four decades ago.

I have been quite reluctant to weigh in on the F&SF mess for personal reasons. I believe that rescinding that contract was the absolute right thing to do, and I will get to that in a moment.

But let me say this first:

I try very hard not to discuss The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I think Sheree Renée Thomas is a fantastic editor. She’s done a spectacular job at F&SF. I think she’s managed to honor the magazine’s traditions and bring it solidly into the 21st century.

I wish she had a better boss. But I have remained mostly quiet about Gordon Van Gelder. The transition between my editorship and his was ugly, with him sending a form letter to everyone with a story in inventory, telling them that the editing on their stories was poor and the stories needed to be re-edited. That was but one thing that he did when he came on board. The microaggressions continued for decades, including leaving me out of as much of the history of the magazine as possible (including the Wikipedia page, except as a name, until people complained).

The behind-the-scenes stuff got so ugly that a friend of mine, a big-name corporate lawyer, wanted to take my case for free because he said it was a textbook case of tortious interference. I did not let my friend or, later, another lawyer who offered, take the case because I was not going to edit any longer. I didn’t need editing work. If I had, I would have had to take them up on going to court.

But I was no longer interested in editing. I was more concerned with my fiction career. If Gordon and his friends managed to destroy my reputation under the Rusch name, I could—and did—write under pen names. I didn’t want to spend time in court, even though a few other lawyers (and one appellate court judge) who learned the story agreed that the case was a slam dunk.

But let’s just say that I have very little good to say about Gordon, and the lack of respect he showed, not just me, but most women in his orbit.

When he hired Sheree, I thought, Gosh, maybe being married and becoming a father helped him grow up. I was pleased that he hired a person I consider to be one of the best in the field. I was stunned that he hired a woman at all, given the crap he had said to me even before he followed me at F&SF. (He had bought The Best of Pulphouse from us when he was at St. Martin’s Press. That was…well, it’s another story.)

I thought of contacting Sheree directly when she was hired and warning her about my experiences with Gordon, but there was a distance of more than 20 years from my direct experience of the man to the start of her tenure. I thought that he had become a different person. After all, most of us change as we age.

But clearly, from his terse statements about a crisis in which he should have had Sheree’s back and did not, and from statements from Sheree’s predecessor, C.C. Finlay, Gordon has not grown up. He has just stayed mostly under the radar.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

PG had (and still has) a policy that basically boiled down to “Don’t work with jerks.” When he was practicing law, he wouldn’t accept jerks as clients. Even if they were rich.

Once, shortly after graduating from law school, he was working for a very, very bright man 35 years his senior who seemed like a wonderful guy when he asked PG to go to work for him. He gave PG a big bump in pay and PG was very pleased with his new job and the wide range of interesting new people he met in connection with his work.

All went swimmingly for a couple of years, then PG’s boss rather quickly evolved into a jerk. In short, he hired a curvacious woman with few job skills to be his secretary and spent quite a lot of time in his office with the door closed in meetings with his secretary. PG also knew his boss’s wife, who was a wonderful woman.

In short, a formerly nice guy had evolved rather quickly into a jerk.

PG skedaddled out the door at the first opportunity, and several months thereafter, the company collapsed. PG received a call from his former boss’s wife asking why he hadn’t told her what was happening with her husband.

So PG’s reactions to working with a jerk had caused him to behave badly toward the boss’s wife.

He can say that he only had to deal with one more jerk/boss in his life. A very nice non-jerk person had hired PG, but then the owners of the company fired the nice boss and replaced him with a jerk boss.

Fortunately, for the majority of PG’s working life, he was self-employed as an attorney and he worked hard to be a non-jerk boss for the people who worked with him.

Business Musings: Reading And Writing

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

A series of articles have appeared over the summer about the ways that the pandemic affected us as human beings. One of the most obvious is that people have forgotten how to behave in public. Vox did a long article on this, citing various examples, including many that featured concert goers throwing things at performers and actually injuring them.

Here in Las Vegas, we hit a lot of this behavior earlier than other communities. We’re a destination entertainment site. Some of the behavior I witnessed during the pandemic from people who didn’t believe in it was quite appalling, from hitting security guards who wanted them to walk through metal detectors to throwing drinks at bypassers on the sidewalk. These were mostly on my early morning runs in the heat, when I wouldn’t go anywhere near the gym.

In 2022, at a musical, I shamed some guy in intermission. I was sitting in a great orchestra seat, with friends across the aisle from me. The guy behind me was cracking jokes at the top of his voice throughout the first twenty minutes, so I finally turned around and told him to shut up. He did for a little while, then started again before intermission.

Intermission hit and I got up. My friend across the aisle thanked me for shushing the guy, and I said in my loudest voice, “Well, it didn’t work. The idiot seems to believe we paid to hear his truly awful comedy routine rather than the performers on stage.”

He was blissfully silent during Act Two.

As Vox noted in their article, shaming works.

All of us ended up with behaviors and coping mechanisms and various means of surviving those years. One of my survival mechanisms is to pay attention to everything, which is probably why I saw those people fighting, worrying that they might get too close to me, or felt I needed to shut the idiot up at the theater. (Okay, full disclosure: I would have shut him up pre-pandemic.)

But being on that level of alert for me meant that I couldn’t sink into story in any form—not all the way, anyhow, unless I knew I was completely safe. When we moved to a different condo in 2021, I got an office that has windows all around me and a clear door that I can see through.

This little space made me feel safe. It felt almost hidden even though I could see everything around me if I wanted to. I was able to sink into my own storytelling and get back to writing things that required my full concentration.

But with very few exceptions, I couldn’t sink all the way into someone else’s story in written form. I didn’t realize that I had lost the habit of going all the way into someone else’s book until this summer, when I had to recover from two different surgeries.

I took a stack of books with me, sat on the couch, and lived in a very dark and funny version of London for days. I sank so deeply into Mick Herron’s Slough House series that I can’t tell you much of what happened in my condo, let alone Las Vegas, during that period of time.

Oh, did it feel good.

I have long believed that fiction writers need to read fiction in order to write fiction. Not just the fiction that they read growing up, but now, today, as they continue with their craft. Part of learning is to see what other writers are doing.

It doesn’t matter if those writers are producing fiction in 2023 or if they’re long dead and their books have lived beyond them. What matters is the act of reading itself, the act of sinking into the story and letting it take you somewhere else.

A writer friend of mine has said for years that he doesn’t have time to read fiction anymore. I keep waiting for him to tell me that the stories in his head have dried up. I know he’s having a rougher time writing right now, but that could simply be because of shedding his pandemic skin.

I have heard writers say that they slowed down or stopped writing as they got older. In the next breath, they would tell me that they had stopped reading for pleasure years ago.

One writer actively told me that he’d seen all the stories and all of the plots and there was nothing new for him.

I’m very sad about that. The best writers make everything new. I recently read a time travel novel that had me on the edge of my seat because I had no idea how it would resolve. I’ve read a lot. I too see patterns and know how many stories will end.

That doesn’t bother me, maybe because I’m a romance reader. Romance carries with it the expectation of a happily-ever-after ending, so we readers know the couple will work it out in the end.

The key to a great romance isn’t the ending. It’s the journey.

That’s the same for me in many other genres where I see the patterns. It’s the key for me in lots of other books.

Reading informs writing. We get to live different lives by opening a book. Right now, I’m reading a lot of fiction by writers half my age. Their world is different from mine, and their perspectives—while familiar—are a product of the time in which they grew up.

Granted, I get some of that by taking a few classes at the university every year, but it’s not the same. It’s not that visceral understanding of difference. Difference and common humanity.

But I don’t just read for difference. I still read for entertainment.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Another Example (Niche Marketing Part 7)

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

So, this week, I settled into the trusty writing chair, reviewed what I had on the Grayson novella…and found myself looking up restaurant menus in search of soup (teeth, remember?). I figured I was just distracted, so I went back…and found myself peering at the weather for the next month.

I shut off the wireless, went back to the novella…and found myself organizing the papers on the desk to my left.

Okay, that’s a sign.

I opened a new file, and asked myself what was going on—and my muse had a fist-pounding, tear-streaked, screaming fit about not meeting my July schedule and how she wasn’t feeling like writing a romance since she has no teeth (I have teeth) and how much she admires hardboiled noir fiction and why weren’t we working on finishing the big Fey project?????

I boiled it down further and figured out that what was really going on was that I had planned the Grayson project as a palate cleanser between the third Fey book and the fourth.

Well, that palate has been cleansed, drilled, stitched, and sanitized, thank you. I had promised my muse the Fey in August, and she expected me to deliver.

What does that mean for this post in the blog series? Well, I had thought I would deal with the Santa series. Then I figured maybe I’d poke at Winston & Ruby. (Cat dishes as merch, anyone?)

I had said I would do things that float to the top, and what has floated to the top? The Fey, which is just too big, and frankly, if I make it small as an example here, this post will be filled with spoilers.

So I think I’m going to use this post as an unplanned example of when to leave well enough alone.

My scheduling brain—which comes mostly from my critical voice—had slotted in the Santa Series. I was ready to do the Grayson, if it was short, so that it wouldn’t mess with the Fey.

But, life intervened, the Fey got messed with, and while I know (and love) the new topic for the new Grayson, it’s not what I’m going to write.

I could force myself here to fill out all of the categories that I did in the previous post. I could pretend that I’m going to do the niche marketing on the Santa series.

But I’m not. And I don’t want to confuse the folks at WMG. I probably won’t finish the novella until next year, and by then there will be new things to try and think of, as well as new items that we’ve tested that might be perfect for this series.

I considered using the Holiday Spectacular itself as an example of niche marketing, but we’re not there yet. We’re putting this year’s together, planning the Kickstarter, and figuring out what we want to do there. That won’t hit until October.

It hasn’t floated to the top of my brain yet.

….

I don’t want to be a full time marketer. I’ll wager you don’t either. If I wanted to figure out how to market all of the product that I have, the effort would take me until January, if not longer. And the staff at WMG would work on nothing else.

If I thought my muse was cranky this past week, I’d hate to see her after six months of no writing and just marketing. Oh, I’m not sure this condo building would still be standing…

So this has turned into a different kind of example than the one I expected. This is how you decide to hold your fire on some marketing project because you already have too much on your plate.

It takes some self-examination (and maybe some soup and a glance at the weather for the next month). It takes scheduling. It takes a realistic look at what you can do in the time you have available to you.

It all sounds well and good to do everything all at once, but none of us can do that. Big corporations can. I was overwhelmed by the amount of promotion I saw on the Barbie movie. One of our casinos was bright pink for the release week and had a Barbie theme throughout.

But that was the tip of the iceberg, or the Malibu Dreamhouse or whatever. For the last half of July, everything was Barbie…on TV, in magazines, online, on Facebook…

And since I was thinking about niche marketing, I wondered how someone could do all of this.

Until I remembered that Mattel and Warner Bros. have been working on this for more than a year—and to them, it’s a niche.

Seriously.

Barbie is but one of Mattel’s toys, and the Barbie movie is but one of Warner Bros. offerings this summer.

All of this Barbie stuff went live in June/July and will slowly disappear. The casino looks like itself again, after the promotion.

That’s niche marketing on a grand scale, with dozens of advertising agencies and maybe hundreds (?) of in-house staff working on all of it.

But I’m a single writer with a small company that I share with my husband. The staff we have works on both of our promotions and WMG’s stuff individually.

We couldn’t do a Barbie-sized niche promotion if we tried.

But we can do promotions like the ones I outlined last week.

I think more important than that, though, is learning how to say no. How to figure out what’s important in August of 2023. What we can reasonably do to augment our various enterprises, rather than harm them.

That’s the discussion I had with my very angry muse this past week. My planning brain told me I had enough time to finish that novella and get to all the cool marketing stuff before the Holiday Spectacular Kickstarter. My muse wanted to finish a big project that I had promised her.

The big project won.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Niche Marketing Part One

From Kristine Katherine Rusch:

Niche marketing has existed since the beginning of marketing. Back in the day, though, companies didn’t call it “niche” marketing. These places marketed to their category or their type.

The idea that something could be marketed to everyone was a mid-20th century idea, bolstered by television. When programs went out to 120 million viewers or more every week, the way that Norman Lear’s shows  did in 1976, the idea of placing an ad on those programs was less niche marketing than trying to reach a percentage of that huge audience.

It wasn’t quite marketing to everyone, because advertisers were targeting Norman Lear shows like Sanford & Son and All in the Family, shows that were known for their liberal points of view. But still, the advertisers were trying to appeal to a broad swath of consumers rather than a select group of people who might fall in love with the product.

Now, appealing to a broad swath of consumers is almost impossible. We don’t have many venues—anywhere in the world—where we can advertise to hundreds of millions on a weekly basis. Here in the United States, the only programming that consistently brings in what’s now considered to be a large viewership are sporting events, and even that’s niche.

Most people here watch American football’s Superbowl, not because of who is playing, but to see the ads. Now, the ads play on YouTube and other venues before the big event, so people don’t even have to watch it.

This past week, I watched a lot of hockey, because the Las Vegas Golden Knights made it to the Stanley Cup Finals. The ads were different than they had been during the regular season. Less Vegas centric, and more product centric—anything from certain types of beer to…well…certain types of beer. The Vegas centric ads were less about local products and casinos and more about online sports betting.

Advertisers were aware that they were appealing to a wider audience, one that now included people in Florida, because Vegas was competing against the Florida Panthers. As a result, we also saw a lot of Disney vacation ads and even Disney movie ads.

It’s the job of many people at advertising agencies to make the decisions about how to market to a wide group of consumers and how to target consumers.

Social media created a frenzy for a certain kind of marketing, particularly by using influencers to target a very well known kind of consumer.

I had to laugh, though, as I went deep into the definitions of niche marketing for this blog series—and it will be a series, as I promised last week.  

Niche marketing is what traditional publishing is doing, and doing wrong.

Now, for that statement to make sense, you have to look at the history post that I put free for everyone on my Patreon page two weeks ago.

Here’s some information from that post that’s relevant to this one:

Sixty years ago, traditional publishing’s marketing was 100% niche marketing, geared at bookstores and book distributors. Eventually, the markets expanded outward to include department and grocery stores. But that was still niche—or in those days, targeted—marketing to a specific subset of businesses.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, traditional publishing is built on a Business to Business model (B2B). You’ll note that the targets above are all other businesses, not consumers. Up until the 1990s, it was the job of regional distributors to know what each bookstore and each grocery store needed for their racks.

I distinctly remember a regional distributor tell me that a certain Canadian fantasy writer was a bestseller in the America South, but that they couldn’t give his books away in Oregon.

That’s niche marketing on a B2B level.

It matters a lot less now to have B2B marketing in books. There are very few brick-and-mortar bookstores left. The online stores have infinite shelf space.

Writers have been relying on the algorithms of those online bookstores to target readers for their books, but the writers don’t know how to go about it. As Amazon and Google ads lose their effectiveness because the European Union (and other places) have policed them for privacy violations, writers have to figure out their own way to market to consumers.

The problem is writers in particular are stuck in the old traditional ways of doing things. Even the pioneers in modern book marketing are relying on the old traditional model.

When you see the gurus talk about marketing, they’re talking about marketing to a large swath of readers, rather than finding the right readers. Even when they’re discussing things like drilling down in Amazon ads to the also-boughts or a reader who might like a different book similar to yours, these gurus are still thinking like traditional publishers.

Ten years ago, I started up a series of newsletters. That was back in the day when writers were gathering 50,000 names on their newsletters with free promotions and giveaways and other gimmicks that would bring in names.

Those gimmicks died down, particularly when writers realized they had to pay for those names of people who signed up for free. Those people wanted the free book or the chance to win an iPad. They didn’t give a rat’s stinky behind about what book that writer promoted two months later, just like I didn’t care about the various kinds of beer pitched to me during the fifth game of the Stanley Cup finals, as Vegas dominated its way to victory. Those ads were wasted on me.

. . . .

Since I designed marketing ten years ago with my reader self in mind, I created different newsletter lists for my different pen names. I also created newsletter lists for my various series. I did the same with websites, although I let some go fallow. (That will change in the next six months as well.)

The gurus jumped all over me, telling me that I was wasting my time and energy and I should combine all of those lists into one giant list.

Well, I have one giant list. It’s for people who like all of my work. That’s the Kristine Kathryn Rusch list. It’s about three times bigger than my biggest list for a series. But if you take all of the pen names and all of the series and combine them, then I have way more names than I do on the Rusch list.

I don’t do that. I’ve promised readers that if they subscribe to, say, the list for my Diving series, they’ll only get news about my Diving series. I don’t bother them with information about any of the other series.

If I look at the weekly stats for my newsletters, I find it’s not uncommon to see someone unsubscribe from the Rusch newsletter and then turn around and subscribe to one of the series newsletters. Why? Because about every third Rusch newsletter, I remind people that they can get information targeted to the series that they’re interested in.

That, my friends, is niche marketing. To consumers. Who are self-selected.

A lot of those gurus who yelled at me are out of business now. They had 50,000 names on their newsletters, but only about 50 of those names were from people who liked their work.

Growing a readership is painstaking work. You tell good stories, let your readers know where they can get more stories like that from you, and ask them to join your newsletter so you can keep them informed about what you do.

You don’t goose the numbers. You let the readers come to you—after they’ve sampled your work.

The definition of niche marketing is this: You promote your products to a specific, well-defined audience. That audience is usually small, but it can be very loyal.

That loyalty will help you build your brand.

Link to the rest at Kristine Katherine Rusch

If Not Big Names, Then What?

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I opened a can of worms in my own head when I wrote last week’s blog which I titled “Stars.” The post deals with the fact that there are no big names in entertainment any longer, except for legacy names, like Harrison Ford in movies and Stephen King in fiction. A source I quoted from The Hollywood Reporter believed that there were no new stars created in the movies since about 2008, which he blamed on the collapse of the DVD market.

Although he had his finger on part of the problem, I don’t think he saw all of it.

. . . .

What happened in movies in 2008? The same thing that happened to books at the turn of the century. Part of their distribution system collapsed.

The music industry started dealing with this in the 1990s as well, as the record stores vanished and iTunes took over. I don’t know if any of you have looked at iTunes recently, but trying to find the latest hit single by anyone let alone someone you like requires using the search function, rather than seeing what’s happening on the home page.

The collapse of the distribution system—or rather, the changes in distribution—have had an impact on us all. One of the things the change has done is level the playing field. Now anyone with the proper equipment can enter an artistic arena with more than a snowball’s chance in hell of not only having a success but having multiple successes.

The problem is as it always was—discoverability.

I’m going to move off of the entire entertainment industry now, and look at books. As I wrote last time, books were part of a curated system, in which tastemakers (editors, publishers, publishing houses) determined what choices readers had in the books that hit the shelves.

Those shelves were limited, both in time and space. As a local bookstore owner learned back when I lived in Oregon, if you keep books on the shelves until those books sold, your store went from a store that featured “new” books to a store that featured books from years gone by. The product (books) had to be refreshed constantly or readers had no reason to browse.

Twenty years ago, the publishing industry was a B2B industry. It sold books to bookstores—business to business—and hadn’t learned any other way to do so. Traditional publishing is still a B2B operation, even though most bookstores have gone online or gone away entirely.

Indie publishers are a B2C business—Business to Consumer. It’s a much better system. We need to market to readers, not to some bookstore chain or nameless distributor somewhere.

The problem is that the book promotion shorthand is based on B2B, not B2C.

What’s the difference (besides the obvious final letter)? The owners of other businesses do not have the time to read all of the product in their stores. Back in the day of the megabookstores like Barnes & Noble once strived to be, there were literally thousands of books on the shelves, with hundreds more clamoring to get in each month.

No one can read all of that.

The local bookstore I mentioned above, the one that got stuck in amber, probably had five hundred titles in the store, and even when those titles remained on the shelf for 18 months, the employees still did not have time to read everything.

The consumer, on the other hand—who shall, from henceforth, be called the reader because it is more accurate—has one of two attitudes toward a book that floats past their eyeballs.

The first attitude is hey! I haven’t read that yet! What is it?

The second attitude is oh, yeah! I like that series and/or the previous book by that author. I’ll take a look at this one.

Then there’s the third attitude, one that doesn’t happen with a book in front of the eyes. The third attitude happens when there is no book. That attitude is Hey! Does Suzette T. Writer have a new book out? I should check.

Or that third attitude might be framed this way: Hey! Is there a new book in the AngelCat Extraordinaire Series? I should check.

Nothing in B2B marketing does more than answer the second two questions, maybe. And probably the only question it might answer is the one about Suzette T. Writer…provided Suzette T. Writer is what traditional publishing called a big name.

Readers buy stories. They want stories that will appeal to them. In addition, they want more of the same but with a surprise or two packed inside.

Traditional publishing did do one thing right in its quest for shorthand. It created genre categories. Genre categories and the subgenres within made it possible in a B2B world for readers to find the type of stories that they liked without relying on big names.

Ironically, genres weren’t created with marketing in mind. Or maybe that’s not ironic, considering how averse traditional publishing was to actual marketing. I was about to launch, yet again, into the history of traditional publishing marketing which I’ve written maybe a dozen times. I plucked history out of a past post and put it up on my Patreon page for everyone to read. I suggest you go there, so you understand how the marketing for traditional publishing evolved.

Anyway, genre and subgenre categories were the only thing that made life easier for the reader. The rest of what traditional publishing did made life easier for the distributors and the bookstores, by freeing up shelf space. This is why book series would often stop in the middle with no hope of finishing the saga or why an author would completely vanish from the shelves.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

Business Musings: Stars

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Me and the Google (as a friend of mine calls it) spent what I almost termed a “dispiriting” hour as I searched for the 21st century’s superstars in a variety of fields. I say “almost termed” because, when I think of it, “dispiriting” is the wrong word.

Adult me, who loves this modern world of indie publishing and going directly to the reader, doesn’t mind the lack of superstars or “big names” as most people call them.

Teenage me, who was trained to figure out the coolest, latest, most “in” superstar (and to judge people based on who they liked and who they didn’t like), feels…well, not dispirited either. But at sea, maybe. Because it’s not as easy as it was fifty years ago to figure out who is guiding the culture.

That whole concept—guiding the culture—comes out of curation. And class-based curation at that. Hardcovers, considered permanent and as a result difficult to afford, were for upper class and/or educated readers. Paperbacks came out of World War 2, and became even more popular thanks to the GI Bill (here in the States) paying for the education of anyone who served.

Paperbacks were considered disposable, though, like the pulp magazines before them. So anything that was in cheap paper was considered cheap fiction, and not worthy of all the things we used to measure “good literature.”

Curation is an important part of the creation of superstars. Yes, the fans have to like what they see, but to get the maximum number of fans to like something or someone, there has to be an information funnel. People need to see that something or someone in very, very, very large numbers.

Even so, those numbers don’t mean a lot when you move across the globe. Global superstars were extremely rare, even back in the day, and were often only in the movies—especially action films that didn’t have a lot of dialogue. Global superstar writers really didn’t exist ever. Each language and/or country had their own stars and often those writers didn’t translate well into a different culture.

Instead, books became blockbusters across the globe, and I’ll get to that in a later post.

One of the many, many reasons that global superstars are rare has nothing to do with language or cultural barriers in the arts. The reason is that there were no curators worldwide. Here in the States, we had a tightly regulated curation system in the mid-20th century, and it was all based on distribution.

There were only so many shelves in bookstores across the nation. Books that went into department stores (remember those?) were the cheap disposable kind (or as we knew them, the mass market paperback). Records had similar issues. There was a large struggle to get radio play, considered free advertising, and then record stores and yes, those department stores, clamored for the music that their customers came in and asked about.

Even then, nothing remained on the shelves long. There just wasn’t space.

Just like there wasn’t space in the movie theaters for more than a handful of films. The movie theaters expanded from showing one film for a month or two (the 1970s) to three or four films at the theater in the mall (the 1980s) to multiplexes (the 1990s), but even that didn’t make distribution easier.

Someone curated who saw what film, just like someone curated who heard what record, just like someone decided who read which books.

Television expanded outward faster, thanks to the arrival of cable, but the networks, which had dominated since the 1950s, held sway until we entered the new century.

Curators told us what to watch. We, the audience, chose among the curated product and accepted or rejected what we found.

Along the way, we found our favorites. Since the curators were nameless and faceless to people outside of the various industries, we couldn’t follow the curator, so we had to find a different way.

We followed the artist, the author, the actor. We couldn’t even follow the television program or the book series because the curators would often discontinue the television program or the book series for reasons that had nothing to do with popularity, and everything to do with contract negotiations or the difficulty of controlling the producers or other behind-the-scenes problems.

Because there was so little actual product out there, we had “watercooler” conversations in which everyone—and I do mean everyone in a particular country/culture—had an opinion about the latest bestseller, the latest movie, the latest album released.

Now, movies can appear and disappear without anyone noticing. It doesn’t matter if we make it to the theater before the movie leaves because the movie will eventually stream. Finding music that we like is as easy as picking a playlist on one of the streaming services, and in many ways, we curate those ourselves based on algorithms of things we have listened to before.

Books are similar. I’ve complained here before about the fact that I have to actively search to find a new release by one of my favorite authors. Many of those authors don’t have newsletters, not that I always open the newsletters that I get, letting them clutter up my inbox.

Distribution has changed, which is something I deal with on this blog a lot. Curation still exists, but it’s essentially worthless. It’s a dying profession in a dying corner of dying parts of the various entertainment industries. 

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

 Living In The Past

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Three things happened in quick succession recently, that forced me to write this blog now, not, say, months from now.

First, a writer friend astonished me by saying they have finally gone indie, after being urged to do so for more than a decade. They’ve been unable to sell a book traditionally for that entire decade, but they’ve kept writing.

Only…they’re not really ready to go indie, because they want to pay someone to design the book’s interior for both ebook and for paper. They want to pay someone else to design their cover, and they want to pay yet a third person for marketing.

I’m afraid my hair was on fire as I answered them…as gently as I could…informing them that they could do most if not all of these things on their own. They were looking at a cash outlay per book of a minimum of $5,000—and they wanted to publish a book per month.

I have no idea if this friend is wealthy. I do know that as a start-up, with zero track record outside of nonfiction and short fiction, this person would not earn back the full $60,000 they spend on this plan for years and years. I warned them about scammers, I gave my writer friend links, and I know that I overwhelmed them. But Good-freakin’-God, this person and I had the same conversation in 2012, when doing everything they discussed was a lot harder.

Then I sent them to a service…that went out of business, like every other service. (Except this service did not steal the writer’s IP in the process, like so many others had.)

I know other writer friends are trying to triage with this poor person, but I’m thinking, just let this writer spend the money. They’re actively refusing to learn modern publishing and have actively avoided it for 12 years. It’s not going to matter how much most of us yell; that person will not take the leap into indie.

Then, at lunch, I mentioned an older writer friend of ours, a writer in his eighties who declared fifteen years ago that he was retiring from writing because he was about to hit seventy. He crept into indie publishing with some unpublished backlist titles, then published all of his out-of-print titles and finally, about eight years ago, published a brand-new newly written book.

Yeah, this writer has help, because he’d run a business in the past, so he built a new business (after he retired) that resembles WMG. Someone else handles most of the publishing details, and he has social media folks because he can afford them. (He is wealthy, having had movies made from his work and because he’s a good money manager.)

Lo and behold, this guy, who fifteen years ago said that the words have dried up, has published at least 10 newly written books since that first one eight years ago.

I got a newsletter from him on the same day as I had gotten that other email about the writer who wants to be taken care of. Dean got the same newsletter and we discussed it at lunch.

I mentioned how this eighty-something writer had secretly unretired, and Dean said, “If he had stayed in traditional publishing, he wouldn’t be writing anymore. It’s indie that brought him back to life.”

Completely true. Not only has indie brought his fiction back to life, but he’s doing all kinds of creative marketing things, like limited editions and special editions and fan-favorite editions. He’s participating in bundles and is talking about a Kickstarter, but worries that he lacks the time, because he doesn’t want to take time from his latest novel.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

Business Musings: Assessing Pandemic Damage

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I suspect spring in Las Vegas will always have reminders for me. In those first dark days of the pandemic, when we were wiping off our groceries and viewing our neighbors with great suspicion, when we were wearing cloth masks that were makeshift at best, and running out of toilet paper as well as hand sanitizer, I ran outdoors.

Very early in the morning, taking the stairs from our condo down to the street, actually crossing the street if I saw anyone at all. There was a group of us who were out at that time of day—a redheaded runner who lived on Fremont Street (and ran the same route, only going the opposite direction), a middle-aged woman who walked and was usually on the phone, and a man from my building who walked his three bulldogs every day at the same time.

We didn’t talk. We waved from a proper distance. All of us carried masks, but weren’t masked. We’d hastily put the mask on if someone came close. I actually wore a neck gaiter that I could pull up like a bandit.

This morning, I was sorting my clothes for the upcoming summer and found some cloth masks. I’d already noted last fall that I was unwilling to throw my cloth masks away, even though I haven’t worn any since late 2020. I’ve been wearing K95 when I need to wear masks.

I did stash the cloth masks, though. They’re in a bag I got from the musical Hadestown. I think that’s appropriate.

There are many things that remind me of that spring. Not people—I haven’t seen the first two from my early morning group since 2021. I see the neighbor often. I also see the spring changes.

Back then, I would run, and later in the day, Dean and I would walk, around the neighborhood. We looked at little round cacti that got their spring growth (and sometimes bloomed). At the pollen that littered the street three blocks down. At the spring flowers that had a moment just before the summer heat crushed them.

The neighborhood is different now—there’s been a lot of building and remodeling and growth—but some of those pockets remain. And at this time of year, the sight of those things immediately sends me back to those fearful days.

I like to think I got through them pretty well. I was as realistic about the pandemic as I could be. My history background both informed me and worried me. Dean stopped asking me when I thought the pandemic part would end because my answer was always, Give it three years. That’s when the pandemic started waning in the 1920s.

Here we are, three years later. Yes, I know, dear readers, COVID-19 is still with us. Friends have had it all through the fall and winter. A friend just had a bout last week. If I log onto Facebook, I see even more friends who are suffering with the virus, even if they’re vaccinated. That disease is pernicious and it wants to infect us all.

. . . .

Markus Brauer, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison teamed up with professors from the School of Journalism and Communication on a study conducted in the early days of the pandemic. The results were published recently.

It found that “higher media consumption—seeking out the news—was associated with more emotional distress.”  I read an article about it in the University of Wisconsin alumni magazine, On Wisconsin, and had a visceral reaction:

I wasn’t extremely emotionally distressed.

Denial much?

I even had trouble getting through the article. Then I found this paragraph:

The study doesn’t allow for causal conclusions. While it is likely that seeking out news updates about the pandemic led to emotional distress, according to Brauer, it is also possible that people who are distressed try to manage their emotions by checking the news more often.

The second half of that paragraph describes me and my coping mechanism. When I’m upset, I seek information. The more information I have, the calmer I become.

Although I doubt I was calm after March of 2020. I doubt I was calm for years.

. . . .

I knew how to survive minute to minute, hour to hour. I also knew how to calm myself in moments of political stress (which we had an abundance of in the U.S. that year). I had been a reporter for a reason. When something goes haywire, I seek information. I look for causes and solutions. I gather data. I check the data to see if it changed overnight.

I am very aware of these habits and actively sought them out.

What I didn’t realize was the impact this all had on my fiction writing and reading. I noted a few things. Such as…I couldn’t read romance novels at all. A part of me no longer believed anyone would ever get a happily ever after. I didn’t want to read certain types of mysteries either, because they were distressing.

Science fiction and fantasy provided a lot of escape, but I have a problem with those genres. My years as an editor made me highly critical of them, so I needed to approach them sideways—trying not to look too hard at what the author was doing.

I defaulted in my reading to a lot of favorite authors because I knew I’d get a reliable read. That was helpful, but my reading declined and as it did, so did my writing.

Or so I thought.

What really changed was this: I had become what I call outer-directed. When I’m threatened or in crisis, I focus on what’s around me, not on what’s inside me. I can’t get lost in a made-up world, because that’s just too dangerous. I don’t dare go through this world with blinders on. Something even worse might happen.

I struggled and wrote and read what I could. I found other things to focus on, though. Writing and reading didn’t give me an escape, but learning Spanish did. It took concentration and felt like I was feeding that outer-directed part of myself.

That lead me to taking school (which was online at that point) too seriously, something I had to work my way out of last fall. I am not a young student with a bright future ahead of her. I really don’t need these classes. They’re for me. So I don’t need to be anal about it, and I don’t need straight As. I’m taking classes for myself, not to get a career or figure out my future. I’m there to learn, and, sometimes, to have fun.

During lockdown, I had to start running in the mornings, which took my best writing time, because the gyms were closed. Those morning runs became a lifeline. I met a lot of (properly distanced) Las Vegans on those mornings—everyone from the security guards at a parking garage (imagine that job) to the street vendors who slowly returned to Fremont. There are a lot of people who glue Las Vegas together in the hours before 7 a.m, people you don’t see later in the day.

I was out there with them, earlier and earlier, because it gets so damn hot here, and no way in hell was I going to the gym and trying to exercise masked among people who felt they didn’t need to follow the rules. (Yes, it was that bad, even into late 2021.)

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

Business Musings: AI, Copyright, And Writers

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Here we are—the mess of the mess of the mess. Right now, we’re in one of those technological befuddling moments, where the technology is ahead of the law.

What that means, exactly, is this: We’re not sure what the technology can do, so we don’t know if what it’s doing is legal, in a whole variety of ways.

The law is both a scalpel and a cudgel. If we use the law one way, it becomes a cudgel that smashes behavior and does its best to prevent the behavior from ever occurring again. Look at the laws against homicide in your state. Those laws are not scalpels. Those laws are cudgels, deliberately. As civilized humans, we don’t want other humans to commit murder for any reason. End of story.

(Please don’t write to me about exceptions. I know. I write entire novels about them.)

There are many times, however, that we need the law to be a scalpel. We need it to delicately carve good behavior from bad. We also don’t want it to accidentally smash something good to smithereens.

Just today, Dean and I were walking home in a wind tunnel created by the buildings near ours. The wind was bad anyway, but in that little area, it was extreme, like usual. Dean mentioned that there are entire computer programs that could explain why.

Those programs are often used now to examine how the wind works around bridges and tall buildings in relation to other tall buildings. In the past, those calculations were done by engineers and often by hand. One mathematical error and even brand-new bridges and buildings collapse.

. . . .

Now, though, tech allows us to prevent all kinds of wide-ranging disasters because of computer modeling.

In some ways, generative artificial intelligence in art, audio, and writing is nothing more than computer modeling. The artificial intelligence isn’t intelligence at all, at least as we know it. It’s an algorithm trained to respond in a particular way to a variety of inputs.

The inputs make the AI program reactive, not creative. My post last week titled “AI And Mediocre Work” dealt with a lot of this, but a comment by Matt Weber capsulized it with a quote from Oliver Sacks, in his book, An Anthropologist on Mars:

Creativity, as usually understood, entails not only a “what,” a talent, but a “who” — strong personal characteristics, a strong identity, personal sensibility, a personal style, which flow into the talent, interfuse it, give it personal body and form. Creativity in this sense involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing way of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one’s mind — while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.

These generative AI programs are useful for a variety of things, some of them mentioned in the comments on the last post, others mentioned in analysis about the programs that you can find most anywhere. What they are not is creative.

Let’s set that aside, though. We will all end up using these programs for one task or another.

What started this little miniseries of blogs was, in fact, my desire to start using AI audio. It had gotten to a level that I feel comfortable putting not only the blog posts into audio, but some of the nonfiction books as well. If you want to find out what I’m thinking about the various audio opportunities for my own work, please look at this post.

Up until that point, a lot of my readers thought I was opposed to using generative AI. I’m not. I have already used several different programs for minor things, and I’m going to use others for relatively major things.

I’m just as interested in the AI art programs as I am in the AI audio programs. I’ve used some mapping programs to help artists visualize the layout of my various worlds. I’m using the free programs, so the tools are often wrong in a variety of ways. I have to use words and bad maps to get my point across. But that’s okay.

I like some of the art I’m seeing from the various programs, and that art would be good enough to use on, say, short story ebook covers, where we don’t want to spend a lot of money. (If any.)

We’re not doing that yet, though, and there’s a really good reason.

Copyright.

The copyright issues on much of the AI usage are a complete mess and that, in my opinion, makes them dangerous to use in any commercial manner.

I don’t use the word “dangerous” lightly. Copyright issues could mean something as simple as removing the item from sale to hundreds of thousand paid in statutory damages.

The problem is that we don’t know what’s happening yet, and because we don’t know, we have to be really careful.

Some of the copyright issues can be resolved with a contract. The Terms of Service on these sites are contracts that you agree to, either by affirmatively clicking I accept or by using the site or by paying money for the service.

The problem with Terms of Service is that they can change on a whim. In its paper on artificial intelligence and copyright published in February, the Congressional Research Service made the passing comment about OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT and DALL-E.

OpenAI’s current Terms of Use, for example, appear to assign any copyright to the user: “OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output.” A previous version of these terms, by contrast, purported to give OpenAI such rights.

As I said, these terms can change drastically. It’s up to the user to check the terms constantly.

Contracts can supercede copyright if done properly, but doing the contracts properly means understanding the law.

And the law is just plain unclear. The article that I quoted above, from the Congressional Research Service, has a good overview of where the law stands right now in the U.S., and provides links.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

PG says AI is going to continue developing very quickly with or without changes in the copyright laws.

Yes, there undoubtedly will be changes in copyright laws, but legislators move at a snail’s pace compared with software engineers and designers. AI is a huge breakthrough and it will take some time for humans to coalesce around where lines are to be drawn between permitted and not permitted uses of AI.

There are certainly going to be some copyright infringement lawsuits and judges (who are anything but technically-oriented, but generally possess a respectable level of general intelligence) will make different and sometimes conflicting decisions for awhile.

Legislatures gonna legislate. Some will do better than others, but the first laws are going to be rough around the edges.

Wherever there are meaningful copyright laws, copyright attorneys are already thinking hard about AI and there will certainly be some lawsuits. That said, on the internet, there are plenty of places that are effectively beyond the reach of western copyright legislation. (China, Russia and a variety of island kingdoms come to mind.)

It’s going to be a legal Wild West for awhile. PG has already read articles about the various ways attorneys can use AI in litigation and contract drafting. He expects to read a lot more.

PG PS:

You should check out the comments to this post. Two valued and prolific TPV commenters elaborate on their forecasts and expectations regarding AI and courteously disagree with some of the thoughts the other has posted.

Comparison is the Thief of Joy

From Kristine Kathryn Ru sch:

I’m doing a lot of things here in Las Vegas that I only dreamed of doing when I lived in Oregon, especially small town Oregon. Sometimes I think I rolled myself into a little ball and cut out everything else. Some of that was health-related, some of it was the demanding job, but some of it was opportunity.

Not that I took advantage of a lot of opportunities when I had them.

Bear with me on this, particularly those of you who have read the blog for a long time.

The word “audition” used to scare the ever-living hell out of me. I won a lot of awards for singing, music, and performance when I was a child and as a teenager. I also modeled. I fell into it as a child because the photographer of the local newspaper wanted to date my older sister. She was one of those popular girls who treated her boyfriends like crap.

My mother used to assign her to babysit me, probably thinking it would keep her out of trouble. Instead, my sister used to pass me off on the wanna-be boyfriends, particularly the photographer. I was in the paper a lot.

Then she married, my parents and I moved to Wisconsin, and my mother still found a way for me to get photographed for the paper. I did a ton of artsy fartsy things, except actual drawing, which I sucked at. I competed a lot, but I never had to audition, until high school.

I don’t remember most of my auditions, but the last one—the very last one—sticks in my mind. I auditioned for Fiddler on the Roof. I was scared to death, and the music stuck in my throat. When it became clear to me that I couldn’t sing in tune at that moment, I apologized to the co-director.

“I go out of tune when I’m nervous,” I said.

She looked at me over the top of the piano. “Well, you’ll be nervous on opening night, won’t you?”

It was like an arrow to the heart. And that was it. I saw everything through that prism from that moment forward. If I was nervous, I would screw up.

What I didn’t see was this: I had blown the audition badly and I still got a singing part. (One of the two youngest daughters, Shprintze.) What I considered bad wasn’t awful. It just wasn’t good enough for a lead role.

I had no one to tell me these things. I had a perfectionist mother who believed one missed word, one missed note, ruined everything. So I decided to avoid anything that required auditioning…although I found ways around it.

I was in radio. I got my first job as a writer of copy, and eventually, I learned engineering and because we were short-handed, I went on the air a lot.

I had married another theater geek, and I had dreams of heading to New York. He would perform and I would write. That got tanked when he quit drama school after he had been chosen to work at a start-up theater (which later won a Tony). He “didn’t like the pay.”

. . . .

[Kris took a voice-over class.]

Seventy-five percent of the class was performance, sprinkled with a lot of learning about all the kinds of existing voiceover work. There’s an engineering course that I will take later in the year, if I can sign up (it fills fast), and there’s a lot more to learn.

Because I didn’t care about whether or not I was the best or even “good enough,” I tried all kinds of things. I had fun and I was eager to get in the booth and try something hard.

It knocked the rust off my radio skills, and reminded me how much I loved voice work. I had tried to revive some voice work back in Oregon, but I hadn’t felt comfortable, considering how much had changed.

And a lot had changed, but the fundamentals remained the same. One voice, one microphone, some engineering work, and ¡voila! a product. I had forgotten that.

So, while I was enmeshed with trying to work out which classes to take next, the VO studio sent an email about moving forward, and in it, had this quote:

Comparison is the thief of joy.

They sent it because students who finish that first class usually become a group who take other classes together. As in all of the arts, a group that starts from the same place does not stay in the same place. Some have early success. Some quit. Some work forever to make small gains. And some eventually become the solid folks in their field.

I’m not planning to become a major voice-over artist. I have a job. But I want to do a few things, and I want the skills (and the contacts) to hire the right people for the jobs I have.

Still, I stared at that comparison quote for a long time, and it got me thinking.

The writers I’ve been around, particularly those with some success, often compare themselves to others like this:

I’m more talented than XYZ Bestselling writer. How come he has all the luck?

And then they try to explain it to themselves, often with a result like this:

Oh, he’s successful because he dumbs his work down for the masses.

Or, he’s successful because he’s writing something trendy.

Or, he’s successful because he does more advertising than I do.

Or, he’s successful because he sucks up to everyone in power (in traditional publishing).

He’s never successful because of his abilities—not to that person. Not that it matters, either. In the arts, comparing two artists isn’t fair. They’re different. They’re on different paths.

Which was the point of the quote the VO studio sent.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

Supply Chain Woes…Traditional, Indie, And More

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

This morning, a regular reader of my blog forwarded a tweet to me from a bookseller and writer about supply chain issues for books. He then suggested I blog about those issues.

I had planned to, but I had a vague hope that they would improve. The bookseller’s tweet disabused me of that notion.

The tweet is below. Read the thread, and note that she does have a book coming out. In fact, I had initially thought she was a writer, not a bookseller and this had happened to her. (That’s what I get for reading things early in the morning.)

Well, it had happened to her, but her as a bookseller, not her as in her current release.  Here’s the link to the tweet.

For those of you who won’t bother to read the thread, she goes on to say that this is extreme red alert territory, because the book comes from Random House. Others chimed in with knowledge about other books going through similar issues or the way that they’re dealing with this.

I know some of you live under rocks and/or have decided not to pay attention to anything right now (and boy, do I relate), but surely even you all have noted the supply chain issues.

Your favorite grocery store doesn’t stock the same things it used to. My cats’ usual cat food has been discontinued (after years) because it includes some kind of tuna that’s no longer available. (Every supplier I know suggests I get them chicken, but Cheeps loathes chicken. I know. He’s not really a cat.) Fortunately for the cats, I found a variety pack of other food that they like better (even though that has supply issues as well), so all’s well that ends well there.

But half of what I usually buy, whether in person or online, has had some kind of delay due to some missing part. In 2020, we bought a new living room set, and that included 2 ottomans. The couch and loveseat were in stock, but the ottomans weren’t. It took four months for those to be delivered.

So, when we bought another new furniture set because of the move, we instructed the poor sales person to show us only items that they had in their warehouse. That took forever, because most sets had only one or two items in the warehouse, not everything.

We also somewhat optimistically partnered with another company on a game for a 2020 Diving Kickstarter. The game manufacturer went to China for his product, which hadn’t been a problem in the past. Then…well, you know. After a year, we will be refunding the game money. We’ll do the game when we have it in our hot little hands and not before.

The game manufacturer is dealing with this kind of delay on many of his products. I can’t imagine what that’s doing to his bottom line.

The New York Times had a pretty good article on the supply chain issues. (I’m sure you can find others.)

Paper books are no exception. In fact, Ingram sent out a series of warnings about the problems it anticipates in the Fourth Quarter. As those of you who follow several indie publishers on social media probably already know, one of those changes that Ingram Sparks has implemented are price increases, effective on November 6, 2021.

These increases are not small. The U.S. market will see a 6% increase, and the U.K. and Australia will see a 3% increase. As one publisher noted, that will make some of his hardcovers $40 or more. Ingram helpfully adds that they will be “We will also be identifying titles that will move into negative publisher compensation because of these price changes…”

In other words, they’ll let publishers who are going to lose money with the new pricing structure know before the new structure hits.

That’s just one way this is impacting publishing. There are other ways.

Let’s start with traditional first, because traditional publishers are making some amazing and difficult decisions. I actually have some empathy for them, because they’re not built to absorb this problem. Then I’ll move to indie, which can deal with the problem, with patience and a bit of creativity.

Traditional publishing, as I have written many times, is built on the velocity model. Books must sell quickly out of the gate, and then taper off later. Sometimes books that sell quickly sell faster than expected, and the demand is higher than originally thought.

In the past, the solution (though not ideal) worked well enough: the moment it became clear that the traditional publisher would blow through their inventory, they would sent in an order for reprinting. In the unlikely (but joyful) event that the first reprinting wasn’t enough, there would be a second, third, fourth and fifth.

Those days are now gone. As you can see from the tweet above, a book published two weeks ago has sold very well, but the publishing representative, talking to the bookstore that wants more copies, had the unenviable task of telling the store the book would not be reprinted.

At all.

Sounds like a stupid thing to do, right? And it is. If traditional publishing had a different business model, they would simply tell booksellers to be patient. The reprint would come eventually.

But that’s not happening.

This is because traditional book publishers must reserve time with their printers. Because everything is new, new, new, the new books get the most attention. Their printings are scheduled months in advance—a practice that has been part of traditional publishing forever.

Because of the supply chain problems and worker shortages and driver shortages and a whole bunch of other things that have an impact on paper books, there is less time to be reserved from printers, not more. That means that traditional publishers are pretty much guaranteed to get their first printings on their latest releases…and nothing else.

Even those first printings are delayed. As Ann Trubeck of Belt Publishing noted, it used to take two weeks to get a book printed. In July, it was taking her eight weeks.

Ingrams is encouraging booksellers to stock up early on the “hot” books of the season (whatever you guess they might be). But Ingrams is also encouraging publishers to print more books than usual, so that they will have books on hand, rather than run out.

But that traditional publisher, Ann Trubeck of Belt Publishing, included something quite savvy in her post. She wrote,

It is entirely possible to lose money by selling more copies than anticipated because an algorithm or overoptimism or “just in case” caution leads to large orders that force publishers to print more copies, only to have that demand evaporate, and all those freshly printed, last minute copies are sent back to the warehouse in a tsunami of bruised, tired cardboard boxes.

Remember, in traditional publishing, returns get eaten by the publisher. Booksellers who over-order can send books back for full credit, if they do so in the right amount of time.

So the traditional publisher put a lot of money into the product and find that they can’t sell it.

This is hard enough for the publisher. And Trubeck isn’t the only one dealing with this, quite obviously. If you read through that thread on Twitter, you’ll see Random House authors mention that their first printing sold out in 2020, they were promised a reprinting, and it never happened.

It won’t happen.

There’s not enough room in traditional publishing right now. I like Trubeck’s voice, so I’ll show you once again her publishing perspective. She notes that on Ingram, many of her books show no copies available. But readers can order from her directly because they have copies stashed at the office. (I have no idea how big her offices are or how many direct sales she makes. Probably not enough.)

Here’s what she says about that:

It’s as scary to anticipate losing sales as it is to be too late with an additional print run, but we will have books available for those who do an extra google search. This line of thinking leads, of course, to this thought: “boy I hope CBS News does NOT cover our October release, and nothing is nominated for a major award this fall!”

Now imagine that from the traditionally published writer’s point of view. They believe they hit the jackpot. Their book came out and got reviewed positively in every single mainstream publishing venue. Their book is the book of the moment—the kind of book that gets a crapload of attention, like so many political books got last year. Suddenly everyone wants to read that book, so folks who like paper order paper…and are told the book is out of print.

Then the book gets nominated for every single major award in publishing (that the book is eligible for). There’s no way, with a minimum of an eight-week delay on printing and time reserved ahead for the new, new, new, that their book will ever be reprinted in time to catch the wave.

Their publisher, who has been around the block a few times, knows that. Knows it very well in fact. So well, that after all the early COVID returns in 2020 (for full credit from closed bookstores) and because of all the supply chain issues and everything else, the publisher won’t even try to reprint.

The publisher will pat the author on the head, congratulate them for a job well done, and move to the new, new, new.

And the writer’s big perfect and wonderful launch—in which everything went right according to the traditional publishing gods—will result in a ruined career, because the books will not sell because there are not enough copies of the book to sell.

Worse, the people who read ebooks don’t like ebooks priced over $10. So, ebook readers will hear about this book, click on it, see that the price is $14.99 and will not buy. The paper book buyer will pick up the ebook, if forced, but will look at the price and think, “What the hell am I getting for my $14.99? I want something to put on my shelf. Ebooks should be cheaper.”

As a result, the ebook sales will increase, but not enough to cover the lost print revenue. Not by a long shot.

(And if you think I’m exaggerating the ebook prices of traditional books, I’m not. I did a spot check on books released this month—books that I preordered in paper from traditional publishers—and the cheapest one I found (from a non-bestseller) was $11.99.)

Sadly, this pandemic and the supply chain problems that will be with us, according to one estimate I saw, until early 2023, will tank a lot of traditional writers’ careers.

Yes, traditional publishers will know that a book that came out in 2021 will have lower print sales than a book that came out in 2019, but honestly, they won’t care. Because there are always new, new, new writers lining up to be fleeced. I mean, traditionally published.

Sigh.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Research And Learning And Blogging

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I spent the morning researching things like BookTok and NFTs for writers and Substack. I was going to write about each, but you know what? I don’t want to.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been blogging now on the publishing industry—the indie publishing industry in particular (which some folks still insist on calling self-publishing)—for 12 years now. Which makes me a relic.

When I started blogging, it was something that everyone did because that was the way to attract readers to your fiction. You could make a living by writing a blog.

The rule of thumb for writer-bloggers was never write a blog longer than 500 words. Yeah, you see how that worked for me. I never write a blog that short.

But folks were making a small fortune blogging about topics not being covered by the mainstream media. Eventually, though, that niche went away or it disappeared behind a paywall like Patreon. Now that paywall includes Substack, which I am truly interested in.

Honestly, though, if I blog about it, it really isn’t fair to you all. My knowledge of Substack is an inch deep, which is an inch deeper than my knowledge of NFTs, and two inches deeper than my knowledge of BookTok. I haven’t even been to TikTok, although I’ve seen some great vids designed for TikTok.

I had planned—weeks ago—to learn all of this in depth, so that I actually could cite articles and experts and do a good analysis of the changes happening in the digital sphere.

I didn’t do any of it, I thought for lack of time. But I managed to research some other things which are important to my career and I also managed to learn some new skills that I will continue delve into. So really, lack of time isn’t the issue.

Lack of priority is.

And I realized, that’s where the blog is, as well as the end of this particular series of posts.

When I started blogging in 2009, the indie world was small and contained. I wrote about that in the previous blog. In indie publishing, rather like traditional publishing, we were all doing the exact same things, because there wasn’t much more to do.

New things came on the scene, and we all analyzed them. Sometimes we made group decisions about them (you have to try BookBub!) and sometimes we did our own thing, after a lot of analysis. But we were talking about the same programs or opportunities.

As new things proliferated by 2014 or so, those of us in the blogosphere tried to keep up. The problem was that many of those new things would disappear shortly after we researched them. I got paid $4000 by an app developer around that time so that he would design an app based on my Fey books. And then he literally disappeared. He paid me, said he started, and poof! gone as if he had never existed. (And he paid me by check, so he wasn’t trying to get my bank account information.)

Stuff like that happened all the time. And eventually, I started to tune out some of the new. It was either keep up or get my writing done. For some reason, I preferred writing.

A friend of mine who makes part of their living off online work advising people what to do with their indie publishing opted to do something different. They just interviewed everyone about every bit of new tech. My friend did not investigate the tech or even use most of it. The upshot of it was that my friend knew about the newest latest thing, but rarely used it themselves.

That put them in almost reportorial mode even though they had started off only interviewing things they recommended. And, let me say as a former journalist, the problem with reportorial mode is the one that I mentioned above. Journalists are, by definition, generalists. Their knowledge of damn near everything is only an inch deep.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.