From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

The sea-change—which is what shifting sands are, after all, a change brought by the sea—means different things for different parts of the [publishing] industry.

. . . .

The change is also great for self-published writers (indie writers) who do a print edition as well as an e-book edition. In fact, the news for those indie writers is fantastic. The news will have no impact at all on indie writers who do e-books only, except that it might convince them to start putting their titles into paper as well.

The change will have a leveling effect on books sold through traditional publishers. They’re probably not even aware that this change has occurred, and they certainly don’t know what it means for them. I only stumbled on this change through an odd set of circumstances that I’ll try to explain over the next few blog posts.

However, for the very big traditionally published writers, like James Patterson and Nora Roberts, this change will show up as a negative in their royalty statements. They will lose market share, and will not know why. In fact, they already are losing market share, and the smart ones are worried about it. That’s one of the reasons Patterson believes the entire industry is in trouble; until four years ago, if Patterson’s sales declined across the board, then industry sales were declining across the board. As I showed in part last week, that is no longer true.

. . . .

Most people in publishing work in a vacuum. Editors don’t know what’s going on in their own publishing house let alone what’s going on with their writers or book distributors or bookstores.

Writers don’t just work in a vacuum. I’m beginning to think that most writers are vacuum-sealed. They seem to believe that watching what other writers are doing is more important than learning anything about business, career management, copyright, or how the publishing industry is changing. (Think of it like this: writers are like cats. They’re more interested in sniffing the butt of the cat standing in front of them on the freeway of life than they are in the truck barreling down on them at sixty miles per hour.)

Actual publishers pay more attention to what’s going on than editors or agents because publishers, theoretically, should understand marketing and sales. They generally understand marketing and sales to chain bookstores, but little else.

Bookstores understand what’s happening in their stores or in their towns. They also know what’s being published (maybe), but they’re as different from each other as possible. And bookstores generally do not share information with each other about important things, like how to handle accounts or deal with distributors.

. . . .

What has changed is this: Bookstores now have access to all published print books, whether they come from Createspace or from a big traditional publisher. Bookstores didn’t have access to all published print books before.

. . . .

Booksellers no longer order ten copies of a book that they think might sell. They order one, and put it face-out on the shelf. When that book sells, they order another which arrives from the distributor within one or two days.

Booksellers are learning how to run a leaner business. This cuts down on big orders (and we’ll discuss the implications of that in future blogs), but it also cuts down on returns. Returns, which had stabilized at 50% or more, were by the end of 2012, down to 27%. That’s huge, people. That’s an amazing shift.

. . . .

It is now not only possible, but likely that an indie book with good word-of-mouth will sell as well or better than a book with the same word of mouth published by traditional publishers. Why? Because indie books won’t go out of print quickly. They don’t have limited press runs (see Dean’s post from last week), and they don’t have useless stock sitting in warehouses.

Indie writers, indie books, indie publishers now have the same access to bookstores that traditional publishers do.

The playing field has just leveled.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Another valuable look inside the publishing business from Kris Rusch:

Finishing my first novel had been an event. A mountain climbed. A life goal achieved. It felt more important to finish than it did to publish the book. And the second novel, well, it felt even more important.

It did feel on par with giving birth to a wanted child.

Now, not so much. I’m still proud when I finish a novel, pleased at myself, pleased that something I imagined has become reality. But I also know there are more novels to write and more stories to tell and so much more to do.

. . . .

Books sometimes are events and sometimes they aren’t. Before the rise of indie publishing, prolific writers understood this. Some books got published well; others got anti-published to use Carole Nelson Douglas’s term. (Or the term that apparently gets used in the Tor offices, which came to me via Beth Meacham on Facebook, “privished” not “published.” Privish, as in private, as opposed to publish as in public. [She had to explain it to dumb little ole me.])

The most prolific traditionally published writers (back in the day) were in the romance genre, and most of them could manage about six new books per year.

. . . .

I looked at Nora Roberts’ publishing schedule for 2013, and she will have five new titles this year, all of which are probably a maximum of 100,000 words. That’s still half a million words per year in print, not counting how much she wrote on the side or blogged or did in anticipation of future projects.

. . . .

When you look at her new releases site, also note that her publisher will release eleven new reprints in 2013. If Nora handles her own copy edits and proofs, she will work on sixteen different titles in the United States in 2013.

. . . .

Three new books with her name on them came out in the first quarter of 2013, one of them a brand new, never-before-published JD Robb hardcover. In the second quarter, when her big new Roberts hardcover is coming out, she will have her name on four books. In the third quarter, her next big hardcover—a JD Robb book, will appear along with four paperback reprints. And in the fourth quarter, you’ll find two brand new books for the holiday season—one a mass market and one a trade, as well as two reprints.

A Nora Roberts book (or JD Robb, which everyone knows is Nora Roberts) will appear every month in 2013, either as a never-before-published book or as a reprint in a brand new package.

Roberts rarely tours. Usually, any appearances she does are related to RWA National, where she goes mostly to see her friends. She’s a working writer (albeit on a very high sales level), and I have a hunch if you ask her which book she considers an “event” book in 2013, she’ll look at you like you’re crazy.

Oh, she might have a favorite book. All writers do. Or a book that was so hard to finish, so wonderful to get off the plate, that it’s worth celebrating. But most people don’t celebrate going to work every day as an achievement, and working writers don’t either.

We write. We finish what we write. We start something new. We finish that. It’s our job.

That we enjoy it immensely, that we wouldn’t or can’t do anything else, is entirely beside the point.

. . . .

But as a professional, writing is what you do. Finishing is what you do. Go back to the beginning of Nora Roberts’ career, and you’ll see that she was publishing between six and eight category romances each  year. That brought her published word count then, at the beginning of her career, between 330,000 and 440,000 words annually. (Categories then were about 55,000 words. Some larger, some smaller.)

In other words, her great work ethic was already there, and she was in a genre that allowed her to write that many books per year for a traditional publisher.

. . . .

I’ve worked in publishing on all sides of the desk (except as an agent), so I can tell you about the other side of Nora Roberts’ career. Her publisher’s attitude toward those sixteen books.

One of the hardcovers—one in February, one in April, and one in September—is an event book. That’s the April Nora Roberts title. It came out this week, and I have seen promotion for this baby everywhere. The book will turn up in the pitiful book rack at my grocery store, when the two JD Robb hardcovers did/will not. The JD Robb books are top-of-the list books.

The two paperbacks, the trade and the mass market, are the top of a smaller list. They’ll come in the holiday season, and they’re priced perfectly for gift-giving. It’s brilliant, and they’ll get some holiday promotion, either alone or with some other romances that the publisher wants to promote. These books will piggy-back on everything else.

The reprints are there so that Roberts’ readers don’t forget her over the three weeks between books. They’re also in the slot to pick up new readers who weren’t alive when those books were first published (by another company, I might add). In addition, last year’s hardcovers will get their paperback releases, which will then promote the new hardcovers. Many cost-conscious readers wait that year plus to buy the new book, so that they save the ten to fifteen dollars per copy. The new reissues will have the first chapter or two of the new release hardcover to entice the reader to start the opening of the new book, and then hurry out (or online) to buy it and finish it.

This all took a lot of work at the traditional house to get this planning in place, and it was just one author for that house, in one particular product line. A lot of people, from the head of the sales force to the publisher (of whatever division Roberts writes for) to an editor to a mountain of assistants to bring this plan to fruition.

In addition, these people are working on dozens of other books at the same time. Some are “event books.” Others are top of the list books, like the JD Robb’s. They get a different level of promotion. And the rest get published to fill out the lists.

Want to see what I mean? Click the bookseller tab on the Penguin group website, then click on the catalog link on the left (or hit this link here) and look at all the catalogs you can download. I would suggest downloading them and viewing them online. You’ll see the monthly output of one imprint is more than Roberts’ entire publishing schedule in 2013.

This is important to understand. Because this is why books get anti-published (or privished), why many books disappear, and why all traditionally published books get treated like produce. They are produce. They do spoil, in a company’s collective hive mind, because the company is moving on to other things all the time.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

On April 2, 2009, I began what I called an experiment. I decided to write an entire book, section by section, online every week. It took me 18 months of weekly posts to finish the book, which is called The Freelancer’s Survival Guide.

. . . .

The biggest difference in my attitude between 2009 and now is this: In 2009, I thought writers who self-published did so as a last resort or on projects like the Guide that didn’t fit into the slow traditional system. I worried that new writers would give up on themselves too soon and go directly to self-publishing, hurting their careers.

Then I watched the stunning growth in e-publishing, the rise of the self-published bestseller, and traditional publishing’s response to the new technology. As writers gained the opportunity for more autonomy, traditional publishing responded with draconian contracts and refused to negotiate with all everyone except writers who were being offered $500,000 and up. (This has moderated some, but not a lot.) Agents became scammers by trying to publish the writers instead of acting as representatives. And worse, agents started demanding a percentage of a writer’s rights in the work as well as a percentage of the work’s earnings.

To say I’m appalled is stunning. I’m shocked that traditional publishing has gotten worse, not better.

. . . .

Weirdly—from my perspective—I now believe that any writer who goes to traditional publishing for book advance of less than $100,000 is getting screwed.

. . . .

As I watch other countries come into the new world of publishing, and have the arguments that the US had in 2010, I smile in recognition, and feel like I had those arguments in another life.

I remember the concerns. I mentally have written them off like I wrote off the new writer myths.

It’s moments like this anniversary that remind me how new everything is. I was a different person four years ago this week. I had different beliefs. If you had asked me about my future in publishing, I would have told you about my hopes for sales to traditional publishers.

. . . .

The traditional book world has become very writer unfriendly. Very music studio-like. Very Hollywoodesque. I dislike that world enough that I won’t play in it without several contractual guarantees that no one will give me at the moment.

. . . .

2009 was so twenty years ago.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Every morning, I read two or three newspapers on my iPad. One of those papers,The Los Angeles Times, has continued to showcase an editorial about the “death” of the self-published author. (I refuse to link to this thing; look it up yourself if you’re curious.)

Okay, the article’s not really the death of the self-published author. But the stupid piece, which I have clicked on three days in a row because I was tired and I didn’t recognize the headline, claims that because e-book growth has slowed in the last few months, self-published authors will never reach the pinnacle of success that they all dreamed about a short year ago.

. . . .

Hugh Howey is not the only writer to make a print-only deal with traditional publishers in the past six months. But his deal is the most watched. Everyone is looking at his deal to see if it can be replicated, and the timing couldn’t be worse for other writers who want print-only deals. Publishers are going to claim that Howey’s print books aren’t selling to expectation and no one will admit the reason why.

The reason? Howey’s print book got released by S&S on March 14, just as S&S began a war with Barnes & Noble.

. . . .

In the middle of this dispute, Barnes & Noble has demonstrated its clout by cutting back on the number of titles it has ordered from S&S. The publishing industry is screaming about this, because at the moment, B&N accounts for 20% of “consumer book spending and is a main conduit for publicizing new releases.”

. . . .

When you have middlemen, and they have businesses to protect, they have their own conflicts that have nothing to do with the product that they theoretically represent.

The writers who will get hurt the most are those whose books are being released in the first part of 2013 by Simon & Schuster, and that includes Hugh Howey.

Whatever S&S’s projected sales figures for Wool are, those sales figures won’t get met. If S&S is smart, they’ll accept that those numbers will be lower—that all of their sales numbers—will be artificially low this quarter, and they won’t make business decisions with those authors based on the artificially low sales numbers.

And pigs will fly out of my butt.

. . . .

And you know who is really being hurt here? Readers.

Because traditional publishers treat books like produce. So the books being released this quarter by S&S have only a few weeks to make an impression on the publishing world. If 20% of consumer spending occurs at B&N and S&S’s books aren’t there, then S&S’s books in this quarter will sell quite poorly.

Sure, a reader can get that book from a different retailer, probably with no problem. (Note to B&N: Great way to drive your customers to your competition. Just sayin’.)

But the future is the problem here. It sounds like Jodi Picoult is on top of this thing, doing signings and such to make up for that damaging loss in sales. However, most writers want to be “a writer, not a manager” to quote Charles Stross from this past week. Those writers are willfully naïve about the business of writing.

. . . .

Here’s the impact: When a first-time author negotiates her second-book contract with S&S, S&S will claim that sales were not to expectation and either not buy the next book or will low-ball the offer. And then will ship the same number of copies that got sold in this crisis period, so sales will continue to decline.

The same decline in sales will happen to a long-time author, and even to the bestsellers for S&S for the same reason. S&S will look at the sales figures for the previous book’s release and claim they were “disappointing” and will make the offer on those numbers.

That’s how it’s done in traditional publishing.

Will S&S admit that the low sales are its fault? No, nope. Not at all. Never.

. . . .

And believe me, some writers who are being published by S&S in the first quarter of 2013 won’t be able to make another traditional publishing deal under the same byline when the current contract ends.

Why don’t publishers care more about this? Why doesn’t S&S?

Because they publish thousands of books per year. If some books get caught in a dispute with B&N, so be it. If S&S wins this dispute, and gets better terms from B&N, then S&S will count this negotiation as a win.

. . . .

Why would writers self-publish in this climate? Because that way, the writer won’t get caught by someone else’s business dispute.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch and thanks to Ant and others for the tip.  You should definitely read the whole thing.

Passive Guy will observe that when an industry is contracting (and traditional publishers and their bookstore distributor system are definitely contracting), a couple of things happen.

1. Nobody wants their part of the pie to get smaller. Somebody else should take the hit.

2. The power relationships between major players in the declining industry change. However, nobody is quite sure exactly how much those power relationships have changed, so a discovery process happens to determine who still has how much power.

That’s what the Barnes & Noble/S&S fight is about. Does Barnes & Noble have the power to increase its charges to publishers? Barnes & Noble thinks S&S still needs it to move enough printed books to stay profitable. S&S thinks visibility and distribution in Barnes & Noble is important, but not quite that important any more, certainly not important enough to pay Barnes & Noble a bunch of extra money.

When the change is based on disruptive technology, that change can happen very quickly, so last quarter’s power relationships may no longer apply today.

This is not the last battle over the shrinking publishing pie. We will see many more.

When the dinosaurs are fighting each other, smart mammals stay out of the way. In the future, the dinosaurs will be gone, but, as Kris explains, in the mean time, their battles can still harm a lot of innocent mammals.

PG has lost track of the number, but avoiding dinosaur battles is either reason number 88 or 89 for authors to self-publish.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Not that there were actual news reports of the death of traditional publishing. But if you read the blogosphere in 2010 and 2011, a wide number of reputable publishing industry insiders predicted that traditional publishing would be dead or unrecognizable by the end of the Mayan Calendar on 12/21/12.

. . . .

Those of us who understand how the large industry that is publishing works, and how business works in general knew that those predictions were misguided to say the least. A number of the folks who predicted such things stopped when it became clear that the e-publishing revolution wasn’t storming the barricades of traditional publishing. Like most revolutionaries, e-publishing grew older and got subsumed into the traditional system. And those who felt the revolution’s initial passion and fire have either given up proselytizing, settled into the daily grind that a real work brings, or have given up the cause altogether.

Where is traditional publishing four-plus years into the revolution? Bigger, stronger, and richer than ever. Who ended up getting harmed by the revolution itself? Writers who never really learned how the business worked and/or writers who believed their traditional publishing careers were bulletproof, that these crazy changes in the delivery method wouldn’t touch them.

. . . .

The writing was on the wall as much as four years ago, when the recession hit. Book advances worldwide went down significantly, as much as three-quarters, according to an article in the London Times. Writers continued to accept those advances and bemoan them, so as the e-publishing revolution hit and publishers started to realize they could make more money than they ever had, they kept the advances low. Why put out a ton of money up front if authors will accept less?

It’s excellent business. Minimize your up-front costs. Think about it. Would you pay in advance for something if you could get the same (or better) product for less money, money paid out made six months after you’ve already profited from that product? You’d do the latter, of course. And many traditional publishers are doing the same. Pay less, pay lower royalties, get the same product for one-quarter the cost. Makes tremendous business sense to me.

. . . .

I have received four letters this past week from friends with many New York Times bestsellers under their belts who are now complaining that the new advances either aren’t forthcoming at all or are significantly lower than they were before. Significantly, meaning money that would have caused these writers to walk ten years ago. Now there’s nowhere to walk to that will pay a higher advance.

Back in the day, you know, ten years ago, traditional publishing advances were designed to encompass the entire future earnings of a novel. That way, the publisher wouldn’t have to pay royalties, even though royalties were listed in the contract, and the advance was essentially an interest-free loan against those royalties.

When the recession hit, traditional publishers lowered advances, thinking book sales would go down. And book sales did go down for a while—in print books only. Book sales went up in the more lucrative e-book area. And then they went up more and they went up even more. Publishers were paying only 25% of net on those e-book sales so the pay-outs to writers were significantly less on e-books than they were on print books.

Even if the publisher was selling fewer e-copies, it was making double the money it would make from print copies. In other words, folks, publishers are making much more money from the e-book revolution and they’ve designed publishing contracts so that they can keep more of that money.

Writers have signed those contracts, and continue to do so. So traditional publishers are making more money per sale and keeping more money per sale, while traditionally published book writers are taking smaller advances and making less money per sale, if they can even get accurate royalty payments from their publishers.

So…whose death should we be predicting? Maybe the career death of the full-time traditionally published midlist or lower level bestselling writer.

Not that there won’t be midlist or lower-level bestselling writers working for traditional publishers. But those writers will also have day jobs. They certainly won’t have big houses and assistants and the freedom to write whatever they want any more.

They didn’t just miss the handwriting on the wall. They missed the gigantic neon signs littering the town. They missed air raid sirens, the warnings, everything—mostly because they trusted their advisers (read: agents) to warn them that the world was going to hell.

. . . .

Now the business-savvy writer has a significantly bigger chance of becoming rich than the business-ignorant writer, even if the business-ignorant writer sells more books and has more readers. Got that? The business-ignorant writer has been squeezed by the publishers and the agents so that making a big six-figure income, year in and year out, is becoming nearly impossible—without a worldwide blockbuster.

The business-savvy writer is either a hybrid writer—traditional and indie—or goes indie only. Those writers can and are making six-figure incomes without having a single bestselling novel. They don’t need a blockbuster to save their financial future.

They control their financial future.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch and, as usual with Kris, you’d better read it.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

When Philip K. Dick died at the age of 53, he was a middlingly successful science fiction writer. Only the faithful had heard of him—I had, being involved only peripherally in the sf community at the time—but most people hadn’t heard of him at all. Most of his novels and short stories were out of print.

A film of his short novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, was under production and not only did the filmmakers change the title, Dick wasn’t real fond of the script.

Dick had two strokes in February and was taken off life-support in early March of 1982. On June 25, 1982, Blade Runner, staring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer,debuted to mixed reviews and fantastic word of mouth.  From that moment on, Philip K. Dick the author became one of Hollywood’s and publishing’s hottest properties. The New York Times said that so many movies were being made from Dick’s work that it had become “a cottage industry” and by 2007, more than 30 of Dick’s novels and “scores” of his short stories had come back into print.

. . . .

You cannot predict the future. (And, for you Dick fans, reality isn’t real. But you knew that. Sorry. I digress.) You have no idea if that drooling fan boy in the corner will grow up to be one of Hollywood’s biggest directors and will want your novel, which he read at 12, to be his latest blockbuster film. Or if that gamer who approaches you with an offer to pay you a small pittance for  your “world” will turn that world into one of the biggest games of the decade, with all the marketing spin-offs that entails.

Nor do you know whether or not you’ll live to see any of it.

. . . .

What I am going to talk with you about is this: your writing. Unlike your house, which can be sold if the person who inherits it doesn’t want it, your writing is a burden that your beneficiaries must make decisions about even if they don’t want to.

For example, you’ve devised a simple will, naming your closest relative—your cousin Doofy—as your beneficiary. You didn’t tell Doofy. Then you die. He’s happy to get the money. He sells your house for a tidy profit. He has no idea what to do about that writing stuff, so he ignores it.

Then Super Really Big Director, you know, the kid from the previous made-up anecdote, decides he wants your book My First Novel into his next film.  In tracking down the rights, his very good  (and expensive) legal team figures out that you’re dead and your entire estate went to Doofy. They contact Doofy, offer him what seems like tons o’money to Doofy (maybe $50,000) for the rights to My First Novel. Doofy doesn’t care. He signs it all away, along with book rights, etc.

And My First Novel lives on in perpetuity. The rest of your novels—all 35 of them—are too much for Doofy to handle even if he knew how, and they die a quick obscure death. Doofy only saw that $50,000, and doesn’t realize that had he hired a lawyer to negotiate his side of the contract, he would have made so much more. My First Novel goes out of print, but the movie made from it A Novel Filmbecomes a classic and no one knows that it came from an obscure little book, except cinephiles who read every word of the scrolling credits at the end of a film.

A Novel Film ended up having nothing to do with My First Novel besides the spark. Unlike the Dick estate, your estate did not maximize your 15 minutes of fame, and your work is now lost forever.

. . . .

One option a lot of writers and entertainers use is this: They give a one-time (large) cash inheritance to family members, bestow real property (from houses to jewelry and collectibles) on those family members, and give the copyrights and their management to a charity or a variety of charities. People who have no family have similar options.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Another invaluable blog post from Kris Rusch:

Because publishing is an old industry, with practices that developed over decades (in some cases, over more than a century). Outside of our small industry, those practices make little sense. Hell, let me be honest: Inside of the industry, those practices make little sense.

Dean and I write blogs that attempt to explain the industry, not just for indie writers but also for traditionally published writers. I’ll be frank: I think the traditionally published writers need a lot more help learning this business than indie writers do. Not because traditionally published writers are dumb, but because they’ve been encouraged for decades to outsource the business part of their careers to others.

Here’s the minimum traditionally published writers need to know about their business:

1. How to write a good book/story (we’ll call it the “work”)

2. How to get that work to someone who will publish it

3. Copyright

4. How to negotiate a good contract for the writer

5. Money management

6. How to hire good advisors—lawyers, accountants, and maybe, just maybe, an agent

7. How to manage a business

8. How to say no

Indie writers need to know all  of that plus:

9. How to run a business

10. How to do a cost-benefit analysis

11. How to design a good product—from e-book to print book to audio book

12. What makes a good product—from cover to interior to sound quality (for audio)

13. How to hire good assistants—from editors to cover designers to distributers/aggregators

14. How to get that product to retailers—from ecommerce sites to actual bookstores

. . . .

You look at the to-know lists I posted above and think, I can never do all of that. And in the aggregate, you’re right. You can’t do it all this week or next or the week after that. You have to do it bit by tiny bit, without neglecting your family, your day job, or the writing that means so much to you that you give up your precious free time.

You look at that list, and think, What she believes I should do is impossible. And that’s the point some of you smugly lean back and think, Thank God, I have an agent. Or, I’ll just hire someone to do all of my publishing work. Or, I’m happy I gave power of attorney to my accountant/business manager/foreign agent so they can deal with these matters and I don’t have to think about it.

These lists are why so many writers abdicate the tough job of running their business. Why so many have careers that implode or wonder why they’re not making enough money when others in the same category make more. Overall, it looks impossible.

But it’s not.

. . . .

Many traditionally published writers want someone else to handle all of the business details so that they can focus on the actual writing. The problem is that you can’t effectively manage someone—or even advise them—if you don’t understand what they’re doing.

For example, if an agent comes to a writing-only writer and tells her that a foreign publisher has offered $5,000 on an advance against such-and-so royalties, that writer has no way to know if the deal is good or not, if the offer is complete or not, if there is something left to negotiate or not. The writer must completely trust the agent, and that way doesn’t work. Even agents (at least the good ones) don’t like that. The agents (the good ones) know that they’re working for the writer, which means that the writer must make the decisions and the agent execute them.

If the agent makes the decisions, she will do something wrong. Same with the attorney, the accountant, or any other professional a writer hires.

Read the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Imagine my surprise when I realized that indie writers have ancient myths as well. Because the changes in publishing have happened so quickly—and probably because we live in a world where a smart phone gets outdated within 18 months—things we know to be true about independent publishing aren’t true any more.

Things have changed already and will probably continue to change for the next five years or so. Why five years? Because that’s how long, it seems, for something to get into our consciousness as “normal.”

Those of us who started self-publishing in 2008 or 2009 were at the beginning of a change. We could do things then that we can’t do now. Opportunities existed then that don’t exist now. That doesn’t mean things are worse now; it just means things are different.

. . . .

Fast forward to December of 2012. Dean still does a lot of the work himself. But we have also started four new companies to handle various things to do with just our indie publishing business, we have employees again (sigh), and we still don’t have our entire backlist up. Why? Because (1), the backlist is too damn big to swallow in one big chunk; (2) we had to redo all of our early efforts due to the changes in electronic delivery systems; (3) we added in print books; (4) we added audio books; and most importantly, (5) we moved most of our frontlist—our new books, anyway (I still sell short stories traditionally)—into indie publishing.

Suddenly—or not so suddenly—we have schedules and marketing plans and more work than Dean, I, and four employees can handle. We just hired someone new, and told her what we had said to our very first employee: You’re doing the work of five people, not because we’ve laid off four other people, but because we haven’t hired them yet.

. . . .

I just had lunch with a well-published friend, a New York Times bestseller, who was on an indie publishing panel at a science fiction convention recently, and was disappointed by his experience. He said he got attacked by the other people on the panel, and I said, “Let me guess, they told you your experience doesn’t count because you have a fan base….” and I went on from there, listing a series of criticisms that made him nod, then laugh in recognition.

Already, we can predict what the criticisms will be. That’s because there are “accepted” ways of doing things, and things that “everyone knows are true,” and all kinds of other nasties out there.

In my “Writing Like It’s 1999” post, I listed the myths, and then I added this sentence: “And you know what? Ten years ago, that was all true.”

Well, in 2009, most of this was true:

•You could put up an e-book with a crappy cover, a low price, and no proofing, and you’d get a lot of eager readers to buy the book.

•You could promote that amateurish-looking book on various web forums, particularly the Kindle Boards, and get enough traction to hit Amazon’s bestseller lists.

•Giving a book away for free, especially on Kindle, would give that book a halo effect when it returned to full price. The sales figures would rise, and the book would, again, hit a bestseller list, if only for a short period of time.

•You didn’t have to market your books to other e-book outlets (what other e-book outlets?) because Amazon was the only important outlet (read: the only outlet people were buying from).

•You couldn’t get your books into print without going to a traditional publisher.

•You needed an agent to handle the foreign/Hollywood rights, because that thicket was impossible to enter without an agent.

•You had to produce everything yourself because there was no one else to help you.

•Indie publishing was relatively scam-free.

•Hardcore readers read e-books; everyone else read traditionally published books.

Everything I wrote above is mostly not true any more.

. . . .

Probably the most wrong-headed piece of advice I’ve seen this week. It boils down to this: Know nothing about business? Hire someone to take care of that messy stuff for you rather than learn it yourself.  All that needs to be added is the shoulder-pat combined with: “And don’t worry your pretty little head about that horrible business stuff, dear. You can learn it later.” After you’ve signed legal documents you don’t understand, of course.

. . . .

From 2008-2010, e-publishing on the early e-readers was a gold rush. And if you look at the history of any gold rush, you’ll see a familiar pattern.

A few people hit it big in an unexpected way. They make a small fortune.  They broadcast the news of that fortune, and then hundreds, if not thousands, of people follow. They hook their horses to their wagons, drop everything, and head to the land of riches, expecting to become millionaires with very little work.

And what happens? Millionaires. Hundreds of them. Only those millionaires don’t get rich panning for gold. They open the supply shops, they serve food to the miners, they supply blue jeans and work boots and equipment, hay for the horses and rooms to rest in at night.

It’s not a coincidence that S&S has opened up an expensive do-it-yourself shop in indie-publishing land. It makes perfect sense. Think of S&S as the chain hotel who heard that there was a fortune to be made by offering rooms to miners who are too tired to pitch their own tents.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

After you die, what do you want for your writing?

Only you can answer this one, and the answer shouldn’t be vague. You need to make that decision first.

Then, once you’ve made that decision, you need to look at where your writing career stands right now, because what you decide for your future depends entirely on your present.

Let’s take a few general categories as an illustration of what I mean (and in here, I will talk about wills, but that’s a shorthand for whatever document you choose to govern your estate):

1.  Beginning writer.

You don’t have a name yet, or much of a reputation. You might have published a few things, or you might not have. But you are dedicated to your craft. You spend all of your free time on writing and getting that writing published.

If you get hit by that proverbial bus tomorrow, what do you want your heirs to do? Do you want them to try to get your unpublished works into print? Do you want them to attempt to make you posthumously famous?

Or do you want them to let it go and not do anything?

If you want them to let it go and not do anything, I would advise this: Don’t mention that in the will. Because what happens if you have some significant success between the date you complete the will and the date you die? Your will instructs your heirs to abandon your career. Guess what they’re obligated to do? That’s right: nothing.

The thing is, if you die and you leave no instructions, nothing probably is what your heirs will do. So, if you don’t want them to pursue your writing career after your death, then don’t address your written works in your will.

All of that will change after you’ve got a bit of a name because of, well, see the next topic.

. . . .

3. Indie publishing.

So…you’ve created e-books and print-on-demand books from your writings. You’ve put those books up on the current sites.

All well and good. The payments from sales will hit your account whether you’re alive or dead, and that income will be dealt with as part of your estate.

But who decides if the books should remain for sale? Who will handle any changes the books need to accommodate new formats or new regulations? Who will deal with any problems that arise through the various e-commerce sites?

And, if your work takes off, who will handle the auxiliary rights sales?

For example, right now your tulip mania mystery novel, set in the Dutch Golden Age, is merely a curiosity. You have a few fans, but nothing that suggests the book will take off.

But, for some reason, in 2035, the Dutch Golden Age becomes the hot property, and everyone wants stories set in 17^th century Netherlands. Suddenly, everythingabout tulips, herring, and Calvinists is hot, including your book. Who do the movie people, the gaming people, and those folks putting holographic stories on spaceship walls contact for the rights to your now-famous novel? And, again, who makes the decisions for the estate?

You’ll need to know the answer to that before you start writing your estate plan.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Kris has already written some good things about estate planning for authors and promises to write more.

Passive Guy would add one general caveat for dealing with what happens to your property after you die (and property includes the copyrights to your books): Picking somebody smart to handle your estate and giving them the freedom to do smart things is usually a better idea than spelling out what they must do in mandatory terms.

Why is that?

You can’t possibly foresee all the possibilities that might occur in the many years covered by your copyrights after you die.

When PG did occasional estate planning for farmers many years ago, he frequently had to talk his clients out of documents that said something like, “Whatever you do, don’t sell the farm.” In many cases, the farmers had spent a tremendous amount of time and money building up very productive farms, including land that had been handed down through several generations. They were looking at a successful business enterprise and wanted their heirs to continue to operate the farm utilizing the same principles that had been so successful for generations.

But what happens if neither the son who lives in Manhattan nor the daughter who lives on the beach in Malibu wants to move back to the midwest and raise corn? “Don’t sell the farm” might very likely lead to the farm being leased out to someone who doesn’t care about taking care of it for a tiny fraction of its real worth.

What if a new interstate cuts the farm in half, substantially reducing its value as a farm, but making it ideal for commercial development? It’s never going to regain its stature as a prime piece of agricultural property and won’t be worth passing down to the next generation as a farm.

As hard as anyone making a will tries, he/she will never, ever be able to make plans for everything that might happen to their property in the future.

Hence, PG’s general advice to put a smart person in charge of managing the estate (or, probably better, a trust that contains all the property in the estate) and allow them to make decisions based upon the information that is available 20 or 50 years after after the decedent dies. Give them the ability to appoint someone else who is smart to succeed them if they’re not likely to live for the term of the copyright, ending 70 years after the death of the author.

If the author has some important guidance to provide to heirs or trustees about managing the books, put the advice in the form of a non-binding document separate from the will or trust so it can serve as a reference, not a command.

Such advice might include continuing to self-publish the books with Amazon, Nook, etc. However, framing this as advice and not a mandate gives the executor or trustee the ability to do something else if Amazon, Nook, etc., decide to cut their royalties to 5% and a big publisher or a new kind of entity that doesn’t even exist today offers $100 million for rights to the books.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Recently a friend started contract negotiations with a medium-sized publisher that I’ve worked for. The contract the friend forwarded me was shockingly bad, worse than any I’d seen in the last year, grabbing every right, including rights to all of my friend’s future projects. The contract only paid for the first project. The rights to the other projects could have been tied up for decades without payment because this once-honorable publisher got greedy.

Fortunately, my friend is smart and has been negotiating the contract to something that passes for favorable to him. He still has one major deal-breaker to go, and since I’ve negotiated with this company myself, I have a hunch they’re not going to budge. He’ll have to determine if he’s going to walk away. I know I did, and I don’t regret it.

Here’s the thing: He has a fan base. He could put the same proposal that got his editor’s attention on Kickstarter or Indie-gogo, asked for a few thousand dollars from his fans, and he would probably make more money three months later than he would make in a year from the publishing company. And that doesn’t count all the other earnings on the project after it is through its Kickstarter phase.

It’s time for writers to explore all of their options. And many of those options should not include middle men.  The suits don’t care about midlist writers or indie films or small movie theaters. They care about whatever bottom line they see, and they don’t care how they reach that bottom line.

. . . .

As an artist in today’s society, you are responsible for your own successes and failures. Do your best to capitalize on the former and survive the latter. You won’t always make the right choices, but now, at least, you have choices. And that’s a very, very good thing.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch