two hilariously contradictory views on the publishing industry

Pat Rothfuss: Why I love my editor…

Penelope Trunk: How I got a big advance from a big publisher and self-published anyway

OK, they’re really only “contradictory” inasmuch as Rothfuss is impressed by and grateful to his publishing overlords, whereas Trunk is full of mockery and scorn. And of course they emphasize different things; Rothfuss basically lived in poverty and squalor until he hit the big time, whereas Trunk has been super-successful in a few industries and spends her life thinking about how businesses succeed and fail. You might not necessarily expect a fantasist who lived on ramen for most of his life to have the same priorities as a kick-ass entrepreneur. (I worry that I’m painting Rothfuss as a schlub or a failure here; that’s not my goal. Penelope Trunk is not likely to write anything, ever, that hits my heart as squarely as THE NAME OF THE WIND. Which, by the way, is not except possibly in the broadest sense “what people [were] looking for.” I think people are most affected by things they didn’t know they wanted until they had them. I would never have sought out a contemporary British comedy of manners, but MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND is one of the ten best books I’ve read in the last ten years. And I’ve read a lot of really good books in the last ten years.)

I don’t think I’ve ever read a traditionally published author say anything but (apparently sincere, and quite warm) good things about their publishers. But fiction authors probably don’t know as much as Trunk about marketing, and they’re probably happy not to know; it isn’t professionally useful for them. There are at least some genre authors who could use their blog as a sales platform the way Trunk is doing it, but most of them owe that capability to traditional publishing. (Exceptions: John Scalzi, Amanda Hocking, E. L. James, Howard Tayler, presumably others.) I do still wonder why no one’s run the numbers and jumped ship, though. Maybe because they figure there’s no going back? But how can that be right? Maybe DAW wouldn’t take Pat Rothfuss back if he scorned them, but someone would. That’s not true for a midlist writer, obviously, and then I guess the interesting question is whether a midlist writer has less or more to gain from jumping ship.

I wonder if it’s down to the view of the craft. Penelope Trunk doesn’t need to spend all her time writing to produce a good book — in fact, she’d better not; she has to demonstrate success in and leverage insights from some non-writing field to give her books any credibility. But, for a fiction writer, any time not spent writing is time not spent honing a craft that is at least mythologized to be incredibly exacting and time-consuming. (I sometimes wonder about this. Then I realize how crappy I was five years ago, when I started writing THE DANDELION KNIGHT, and how much better I am now, and how good I’m still not.) And, for fiction writers, writing is all they’re selling; it’s not a summary of insights from some other accomplishment, it’s just itself. Anything Penelope Trunk learns about marketing, or accomplishes in marketing, is both useful for itself (in part because she already knows a lot about marketing) and potential book material. Anything Pat Rothfuss learns about marketing is maybe useful for itself, except that he already has the services of specialists who know more about it than he does, but he can’t use it in the book — unless the last Kingkiller installment takes a seriously sharp left.

I sure would like to hear more on Norman Spinrad’s self-publishing experiments. But I worry that no news is bad news there.

“publishers will have to survive on so-called mid-list books”

Norman Spinrad has some very interesting speculation about the future of publishing. “Interesting” because he actually seems to be reasoning fairly closely about it, and about different authors’ niches in what’s to come, and deriving conclusions at variance to what I tend to hear. I think this is the nut:

Let’s say you’re a major best-selling author on the Steven King or Danielle Steele level. You’ve just finished a new novel without a contract because you’re rich enough not be need an advance to finance the writing of it, but you’re greedy enough to want to make as much off it as you can. Who isn’t?

Let’s say that it’s far enough in the near future so that ebooks are roughly half the book market. Let’s say that a hardcover would go for $30 and an ebook for $10. Let’s say you took a big advance from a publisher at the cost of agreeing to that 25% of ebook sales. To make the calculation simple, let’s say the novel sells a million hardcovers and a million downloads. At 15% of $30, you make $4.5 million on the hardcover. At 25%$ of $10, you make $2.5 million off the ebooks. Total take $7 million.

But what if you sidestep the traditional publishing industry and self-publish for $10 an ebook at 70%? That’s $7 million on a million ebook sales alone. And you still own the paper publishing rights. Can you not then make a deal for those volume rights alone with a publisher for a lower advance or even no advance and still come out way ahead?

The top ten or twenty best-selling authors won’t need publishers. They can hire a computer geek to do the setting up for a grand or two and another grand or two for the online “cover art” and that’s it. They’re already brand names, and in the ebook age, national net pr would be relatively cheap and easy to buy from hired guns.

Advances? Who needs your stinkin’ advances, Random House and Simon & Schuster?

The answer, of course, is most everyone else…

This is backwards from the way most people I’ve encountered are thinking about it — the CW in my field of view, for the little it’s worth, is that the big authors will stick with the publishers because it works for them, and the little people will write on spec, self-publish, and occasionally make it big. Spinrad’s analysis is nice because he’s considered the economic incentives of the giant authors, which (by his numbers) are considerable, and assumed that the little people want to be working writers, not flailing amateurs. (He’s also articulated a role for e-publishing in the context of the sub-mid-list, books that earn reliably but slowly; read the essay for that.)

It’ll be interesting to see how the incentives play out with the best-sellers. I’ve definitely heard big-name authors gush with gratitude about their publishers, so Spinrad’s take on the economic incentives may be eccentric; on the flip side, I haven’t actually seen a big-name author seriously try to monetize a soup-to-nuts self-published ebook. If Neil Gaiman or Stephenie Meyer or someone does this and makes out like a bandit, that could have serious ripple effects. But publishers might adapt rather than turning to the midlist. Spinrad seems quite confident that publishers have nothing to offer a best-selling author. He may be right; the author’s reputation is presumably his or her biggest asset, and no publisher owns it. Yet, anyway. Publishing companies might respond by tightening the terms of deals for promising lower-tier authors, the ones who have an incentive not to self-publish on his model. I’m not sure how tight, and how far into the future, those deals could extend and still be legal. But it seems like the sketch of an alternative approach.

More later, maybe.

the [hero|startup|explorer] & the [king|giant|exploiter]

Looks like the permalink URL for this post is pretty hilarious. Oh well.

Anyway, I just finished reading THE HERO AND THE KING: AN EPIC THEME, by the late W. T. H. Jackson of Columbia, which basically talks about how most European epics involve a conflict between a king, who’s a powerful guy with a lot of responsibility for and influence over society, and a hero, who’s a powerful, mobile, ambitious guy who threatens the king’s power. Of course, the book immediately starts in on how the various epics complicate this dynamic, especially the ones that are influenced by romance and/or Christianity, and also the ODYSSEY, in which Odysseus is of course both hero and king — but, you know, I don’t know this field, and presumably it’s not ridiculous for the famous works to be the ones that are formally groundbreaking in ways that less enduring ones weren’t, and it’s hard for me to deny that the problems of succession and the trajectory of a king’s power are preoccupations of these works. In any case, it’s a nice way to organize all this important literature that I haven’t read, and there seems to be a sizable kernel of usefulness to it. And, you know, I keep up with Paul Graham, who’s a startup evangelist, and I read this Slate article about how trustbusting of tech companies is basically slower and less effective than Darwinian market forces. And one of the preoccupations of cognitive neuroscience and AI, just to keep the whiplash coming, is figuring out a mechanistic account of action selection — how an agent might allocate its actions to maximize resources. A standard tradeoff in this sort of work is between exploration and exploitation — once I find a source of resources, how long do I sit on it and mine it before I go looking for new ones?

So anyway, all this business about heroes and kings and startups and giant companies got me thinking that these succession dynamics might be a response to natural explore-exploit dynamics. A given king, or a given company, has a certain set of advantages, around which him/it adapts him/itself. That adaptation to exploitation, though, renders it inflexible (famously so in the case of big companies). At some point, the king or company will have mined all the advantage available — or, if not all of it, will have at least mined enough of it that there are greater efficiencies to be gained elsewhere. But the adaptation to exploitation has made the king or company unsuited to do new things. So in comes a usurping hero, or startup, with a new set of advantages tailored to the efficiencies currently available. The actual dynamics in business are presumably just as varied as they are in epic; sometimes the hero unseats the king, sometimes the king co-opts the hero, sometimes the hero screws up and flames out. But the basic dynamic of conflict between establishment and usurper determines succession is a constant.

Put that way, maybe it’s not all that interesting an idea. I guess the interesting part, if there is one, is the idea that it’s hyperspecialization that accounts for the king’s rise and fall, the company’s boom and bust. The weakest part of the analogy, at this point, is the idea that a given king arises because he has a set of advantages that he can mine, and that those advantages run out. You might be able to make the case for a bloodline (or, more easily, for a political party), but the problem with hereditary succession is regression to the mean — it’s unusual that a person is strong and smart and driven enough to usurp a kingship, and so it’s likely (though not certain) that his descendants won’t be as strong or smart or driven as the usurper was. And then you start thinking that, well, the skills necessary for usurpation probably aren’t the same as those necessary for a good kingship anyway, and does the ability to usurp bear any relation at all to the ability to rule…

Well, so the idea’s got some problems. But at least it’s off my chest and on yours now. Ha!

losers must die in full view, part II

I try to avoid doing too much linkblogging, but this was unavoidable. From Sudhir Venkatesh, via the Freakonomics blog: Thugz on the Bailout

… they laughed when I said the government should prioritize the punishment of senior management. In the words of Shine, the elder statesman of the group, “You have to be real careful when you mess with folks at the top, because when the war is over, you’ll need these guys real quick. Ninety-nine percent of people just doing what they’re told — you couldn’t find half a brain among all of them. But the ones with the brains — don’t let them go.”

I was deeply upset by this comment. In fact, I thought A.I.G. Chairman Edward Liddy might have been communicating with Shine.

“You got to be kidding me,” I said to Shine, my blood boiling. “Have you been watching the news? These guys are the ones who created this mess. You don’t want them to hang?! Whatever happened to the law of the jungle? Whatever happened to letting people take the hit for their behavior? Isn’t that what your world is all about.”

Portis, 42 years old and with a six-year grand larceny prison sentence under his belt, answered for Shine. “There’s two kinds of brains you need to run a good business. Sometimes you need “Sleepy Heads.” You know, the ones who pick up the money from the crews; the ones who make sure everyone got ammo; the ones who just do their job, don’t cause no trouble. Then you need bona fide Killers. The Killers like watching you bleed to death while they are eating a plate of ham and collard greens. You understand?”

sole-mate.com

I’m never going to do this, so someone out there should do it and send me royalties:

My wife has feet of slightly different sizes; shamefully, I forget which is bigger. This is not so rare, but it’s poorly accommodated by shoe providers in this age of standardization; only expensive shoe stores will let you buy two differently sized shoes at a cost less than the sum of the pair. What she really needs is a sole-mate — someone with similar taste in shoes, who has the opposite pattern of sizes. That way, they can buy two pairs of shoes, each take the appropriate ones, and split the cost. Someone local would be best, but that might not even be necessary. Why isn’t there a social networking service to pair up sole-mates? (Someone may be thinking of it, or at least waiting for someone else to think of it — people are sitting on both solemate.com and sole-mate.com.)

There are a couple of kinks to be worked out here, of course, the most obvious being that sole-mated pairs have to work out a policy for returning the shoes in case one likes them and the other doesn’t. The more interesting meta question, though, is to what extent can niche social networking be profitable? So far, successful social networking services have been those that attract the largest number of people possible (Facebook, MySpace, maybe Livejournal); a sole-mate networking site is intrinsically self-limiting. But maybe you could grow the service out from sole-mates. Presumably there are other areas in which people need someone with complementary attributes; if your washing machine is broken, maybe you want to find someone with a broken dryer so you can save on a matched pair? There have to be better examples than that. Complementary.com and complementarity.com are taken, but complement.com is free for the ganking…