A question of editing

One of the most consistent pieces of advice you’ll see about how to create a good (e)book is: make sure you get it properly edited. I have to agree (and I say that as an author who is currently in the process of re-releasing her ebooks because they needed to be re-edited). I also say that as a reader who is intensely irritated by mistakes in published works, however the book is published.

I’ve come across many professionally-published (including traditionally-published) books that have errors in them. Spelling mistakes, grammar errors, missing or incorrect punctuation, clumsy wording… all these things make me want to take a red pen to my pristine paper book and post it back to the publishing house. Once in a book I can forgive; I understand that the book was created by fallible humans, but even that is disappointing. More than once? Come now. I expect more for my hard-earned money.

I’ve read books where there’s an error in pretty much every chapter. Recently, I had to put a book down because it was so clumsily edited that the story was ruined for me (and it’s a rare thing for me to abandon a book once I start it). The poor editing was tripping me up so often that I kept losing track of the story; it constantly threw me out of the flow of the narrative and I wasn’t engaged with or enjoying it at all, so there was no point in progressing with it.

The quality of the editing is a sign of care. If a writer cares so little about the presentation of their work that they’ll release it with multiple errors, should I care deeply about it as a reader? If they have been careless on this front, how much can they be trusted to take care of other aspects of writing? Will my tiny trust be betrayed?

Writing should be invisible: this is what I believe writers should aim for. The mechanical aspects of writing are things that writers care about; readers care about story and character and getting caught up in this wonderful thing you’ve laid out before them. The more I notice the writing, the less I’m involved in the story. (Note: literary fiction can be an exception to this, but I’m talking about the mechanics of writing – spelling, grammar, ‘the basics’ – rather than technique, like metaphors. Even in literary fiction, the mechanics of spelling things correctly and using the right punctuation is important.)

I’m the sort of person who notices these things, and they grate. They spoil stories for me, though the extent varies widely depending on how many mistakes there are. I know I’m not the only one; most, if not all, of my writer friends say the same thing. As a professional (technical) writer and editor, I weed these things out as part of my daily work and with a measure of professional pride. Mistakes reflect on my abilities and skill in my job, and they reflect badly on the company I work for if they should reach our customers, so it’s important to me to make sure my work is as clean and correct as possible.

It’s a fact that it’s harder to edit your own work than it is to edit someone else’s. You’re too close to your own work to pick up the errors; your mind fills in gaps and smoothes off rough edges too eagerly. It takes distance and discipline to edit your own work well!

With the web serial, it’s not always possible to catch everything before I publish a post. This is part of the price I pay for writing it on the fly and editing it entirely myself (with no gap between writing and editing). I have accepted that there will be the occasional error and I fix them up whenever I (or my readers) spot them (and I’m glad to say that they are only occasional!). I also plan to edit the stories thoroughly before they’re published as ebooks, so I’m not overly concerned if there are minor typos at the moment.

However, I can’t tell you how mortified I was to realise that there were errors in one of my ebooks. I’m currently having an independent editor go over all of my books so that I can release fresh, more correct editions (which should be free for those who have already bought the ebooks). I wish now that I’d taken more care before releasing the ebooks, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

This is why I’ve had an independent editor go over the Apocalypse Blog ebooks. This is also why I’m looking at starting up an editing service, to edit others’ work and offer them the professional look and feel that readers expect from published works. I believe I have a lot to offer in this area.

I love stories. I love making them shine as brightly as they can, and getting the mechanics of the writing correct is just one way to help that along. So just as soon as I get all my stuff together, I’ll put myself out there as an editor for hire, and see if I can’t improve the quality of ebooks everywhere, one corrected typo at a time.

Independent vs Traditional Publishing: Kudos

(Part of the indie vs trad series.)

Kudos is like happiness: a slippery fish to catch. It’s a fluffy one to consider, but I’ll try to break it down here as best I can. Some time ago, I wrote a post that compared traditional and self-publishing, and their relative legitimacies, and I’ll be building on that here.

Common Attitudes

There’s no doubt that being traditionally published is a reliable way to prove to the world hey, I’ve made it as an author. You tell people you’re a published author and they’ll automatically think that you mean ‘in a traditional deal with a publishing house and now I have shiny books in every store you can shake a wallet at’.

There’s a level of respect that comes with it, because of all the gatekeepers you had to get past in order to get your precious manuscript out of your sticky hands, through a printing press, and onto a shop floor. As if writing the book in the first place wasn’t hard enough.

Meanwhile, self-publishing is still seen in many eyes as cheating, lazy, and the sign of a bad writer. It’s the last resort of writers who couldn’t get a publishing deal (that is, who weren’t good enough to get one). Self-published books are second-rate, bad quality, unedited wank someone decided to shove out into the world to make a few pennies and drag down the good name of literature everywhere.

True or not, this is what common opinion seems to be. If you tell someone you self-published a book, a little crack appears in their mental image of you. (If you tell them your novel is vampire romance with fairies and BDSM, that image will probably shatter entirely.)

However, this is changing. As self-published books become more common and more people read them, these attitudes are being worn away. Many readers state that they don’t look at the publisher when they’re browsing for books, so if a book looks professional, they may look at it without even realising it’s self-published.

Definition of Success

For a traditionally-published author, this is pretty simple: getting the publishing contract is a definition of success. If you tell people you’re a published author, there’s an immediate assumption of success; after all, your book was good enough to be accepted by a publishing house. That must mean something. (I’m not saying this is true; this is the common assumption and reaction.)

There are other ways for traditionally-published authors to succeed – for example, with bestseller status – but let’s focus on those initial assumptions for now.

For a self-published author, having a book out in the world doesn’t mean success. There are no gatekeepers to get past, so no yardstick to prove that your work is actually any good. There are also the assumptions I listed above about how terrible the book must be if you had to publish it yourself. For a self-published author, success is defined not by being published (because anyone can do that), but by sales. If you can say you’ve got respectable sales, or better yet a breakout, then you can rise out of the usual morass of self-published wannabes.

In a chat with a published author, I was asked what my sales were like. When I said that I was selling over 100 books a month (this was a little while ago before the drop-off), I was met with surprise and respect. It’s better than a lot of traditionally-published books sell in a month.

So you can be seen as successful as a self-published author, but the onus is on you to prove it. No-one’s giving respect away for free.

Literary Lists and Awards

Historically, this has been the sole domain of the ‘properly’ published author (by ‘properly’, I mean traditionally-published, of course). The occasional self-published book that poked its head above the parapet of bestseller lists was quickly snapped up by a traditional publisher and validated.

Now, self-published books are making their way into the bestseller rankings on respected literary lists all by themselves (and authors are willingly turning down traditional publishing deals). They’re hitting #1 on Amazon and the New York Times lists. Runaway ebook hits are not unheard-of. Self-published books are proving that they can hold their own among the readership with their traditionally-produced brethren.

More than that, they’re winning awards. Not many, but the pressure is rising and one day the tide might turn the other way. Self-published books are clawing their way up to an even footing with traditional books; it’s a way off yet but I believe things are moving in that direction.

No doubt, there will still be literary awards who will always refuse to look at anything but exceptions in the world of self-published books, if any at all. But how long can they hold back the tide? Only time will tell, and right now, the patterns tell us which way the wind is blowing.

What does this all mean? It means that things are not even yet. Self-publishing simply doesn’t have the kudos that being traditionally published does. One day it might, but you’ll have to be patient (or battleworthy or very lucky) to get there. You have to be a huge bestseller in the self-publishing realm to be able to sidle into anything like the same position in people’s heads.

The real questions: how important is kudos to you? How willing are you to demand respect as a published author?

There’s still a part of me that would like the kudos of being traditionally published. I think that’s my own prejudices speaking, and even I know they’re outdated. I’ve tried to make peace with it and I do enjoy being self-published, but in this literary journey of ours, it’s one of the trade-offs that I had to make. And it’s one I’d make again.

Next up: Not sure! What would you like me to cover?

Books From Our Backyard

Every year, the Queensland Writers Centre (QWC, my state’s writing association) produces Books From Our Backyard, a catalogue of all the books released in the last year by Queensland authors. If you live in the state and have a book published – whichever way you have it published – you can submit to be listed in this catalogue.

Last night, the 2012 edition of the catalogue was launched, and I was pleased to have two books listed in it: books 2 and 3 of The Apocalypse Blog. They’re listed alongside traditionally published books and other self-published books, in a field of over 170 authors.

It’s one of those things that makes me realise that hey, I’m a published author now. I’m standing up by those who have been ‘properly’ published, and for once, I felt like an equal rather than an amateur with aspirations. After all, I’m selling books and reaching into readers’ lives and minds.

The speakers at the launch were even kind enough to call out the self-published authors and include them in the congratulations that were being given to the authors in the catalogue.

It feels like a step. It feels like a barrier being eroded. I’m in the process of tidying up a traditional vs independent publishing post about kudos, and maybe this will give me a reason to revisit the thoughts in there. Maybe it’ll shine a new light on it. At the least, it offers some hope or proof that maybe things really are changing.

It was a lovely evening, though I knew surprisingly few people in the room. It was great to feel included, involved, and proud to put out leaflets advertising my books among the examples laid out on display.

Now word of my work is reaching out through new channels. Will it gain me more readers and sales? Well, I hope so. And now I have a bunch of leaflets that I need to find a home for; perhaps the library or a big bookstore will put them out for me.

I feel accomplished. Now, I should line up my next ebook release, and see if I can make my entry in next year’s Books From Our Backyard even better.

Independent vs Traditional Publishing: Big houses getting bigger

(Part of the indie vs trad series.)

If you’ve looked around the internet on this subject, you’ll probably have heard of the Big 6. That is, the Big 6 publishing houses in the industry. You may also have heard that two of them are merging: Penguin and Random House.

Is this a good thing? From what I have seen, no. Not for the industry and not for authors. (See Smashwords’ blog post from back in December 2012 for the indie view on this (scroll down to #16), and the interview with published author Michael Levin on the BBC’s World Business Report on 5th April (start at 6:10).

A merger of this kind requires permission from organisations that ensure competition is preserved in the markets. The US was first to agree to the merger back in February; the EU followed suit more recently. No-one seems concerned that two such big movers in the industry combining into a publishing megalith will create a monopoly, and this fact in itself it very interesting to those of us looking into publishing.

Tellingly, the EU report had this statement: “…the new entity Penguin Random House will continue to face competition from several large and numerous small and medium sized publishers.” In the realm of third-party distribution and sale of books, it found “…the parties have low market shares and that many alternative suppliers for book production and third party book distribution services remain active….”

Nope, not concerned about a monopoly at all. And honestly, I’m not worried either. As Michael Levin so succinctly put it: “When you take one company with a failed publishing model and you take a second company with a failed publishing model and you merge them, you have a very big company with a failed publishing model.”

So it doesn’t sound good. They’re not doing anything new or different, despite the changes in the market around them, and this is the crux of my problem with traditional publishing. I see so much change in the publishing industry, all the time, so much that I have no chance of providing anything close to a decent commentary on this blog. I’m simply not equipped to keep up (this post is woefully late with this news). But I try to hit the highlights.

Worryingly, the actions of the big houses only seem to be heading in bad directions for both authors and the industry as a whole. Why? Well, settle in and I’ll attempt to explain my position.

For authors, it’s not a good move because the new Penguin Random House entity will continue to operate as it always has. I did a whole post on Marketing not so long ago, and what authors should be able to expect from a traditional contract. However, according to Levin (who has been published by all of the big houses), the Big 6 only give real marketing support to their top 1-2% of books. Each new book is a new brand, and a new cost for them.

Their top 1-2%. You fought to get a publishing contract with an awesome publisher, and your book might be in bookstores for 3-4 weeks before it gets pulled, because it’s not selling, because it wasn’t marketed. As a first-time author, you’re lucky if you get much of an advance as well, so your chances of making money from your work or becoming a known name are very slim.

I’m a pretty cynical person when it comes to politics and corporate activity, but this is worse than even I imagined.

So they’re not doing their authors any favours. But how does this impact on the industry as a whole, I hear you ask? Well, if books that are good enough to be published are being treated in this way – barely marketed, and pulled from shelves for poor sales, and generally not sold all that well – then those are good books that are being removed from the market and the kind of publishing where they might have thrived.

Here’s a radical (and rather scary thought) for you: the Big 6 could be reducing the overall quality of the books on the market.

Be careful, my friends. Be very careful. Penguin Random House is making a land grab on a sinking city, and it doesn’t seem that they realise it’s standing on quicksand. Its business plans look shaky at best; as Mark Coker sums up: “None of [their proposed] moves help authors at a time when authors want more support from their publishers, not less.”

The traditional publishers seem to be sandbagging their operations against the tide of small and independent publishing. Are they making the right moves? From what we can see so far, no. It’s more of the same stuff that’s driving authors into the wide-open arms of independence. Even the monopoly committees agree that the moves they’re making won’t give them a huge advantage in the marketplace.

These are all things to keep in mind if you’re considering a traditional publishing contract. It’s a warzone out there.

Next up: Kudos

Independent vs Traditional Publishing: Availability

(Part of the indie vs trad series.)

This isn’t about where your book is available: I’ve already talked about distribution. This post is about when your book is available: how long it takes to get it to market; how long it stays there; and when it goes out of print.

As with most of these discussions, control is pretty straightforward: indie authors maintain control and decision-making rights, while traditionally-published authors are slaves to the whims of their publishing house. But in order to get an idea of what it means and how important this is to consider, let’s break it down.

Time to Market

This is not something that a lot of people consider when thinking about publishing, but it’s an important element in the publishing journey. All the advice I’ve seen on this subject agrees that the shorter this time is, the better. Readers need to be fed early and often.

Time to market includes all the time you spend after finishing your book until the time it first appears on sale and people can buy it (or pick it up for free). This is important in the current reading climate because readers are hungry for books. If they read one of yours and like it, they’re likely to look for more. If they have to wait a long time for the next book, they might forget about it (and you!) and move on. Frequent releases also provide additional bumps in sales for your other books, so are a good way of keeping your name popping up in front of readers’ eyes.

In self-publishing, it’s possible to keep this time short. Editing and cover design tend to be the variables that push this time out the most (and you shouldn’t skimp on these), but with coordination and focus, this can be streamlined. Formatting (particularly for ebooks) can be a fairly quick job, and publishing on the major platforms is quick and easy. From there, they take a day or so to go live (maybe a week to reach every sales shelf, depending on the distribution network updates). This whole process can be anything from weeks to as short as a matter of days.

Self-publishing print books (excluding POD) takes a little longer, as you have to wait for proofs, approvals, and the actual printing to be done. POD (print on demand) incurs a delay for proofs to be sent to you and approved, though some stores may let you skip this step (however, it’s good practice to check your proofs, so it’s not advisable to skip it).

In traditional publishing, the story is very different. First of all, you have to find a publisher to take you on. This can mean months or years of writing letters and synopses, submitting, being rejected, submitting some more, and waiting for that delicious contract offer to appear. It can mean going through all of this to get an agent, and then waiting for the agent to secure a publishing contract on your behalf (a lot of advice will tell you that this is actually the best way to go, but I won’t go into the reasons here).

There is an indeterminable time here that is impossible to judge. One thing it is never is quick. Even authors who have already published under a traditional contract have to go through this process, though they may be able to short-cut the submissions and go straight to their publisher (it’s not unusual for different series to be published with different houses, though), and they should already have an agent.

But let’s assume that you get that contract offer, sign the d0tted line, and hand over your completed manuscript. From there, a year’s delay is normal. The editing process takes a long time and your book has to be scheduled to fit in with the publishing company’s printing press commitments. That means that everything else they are publishing is affecting your book’s fate. There are also market reasons that might delay your book: a publisher might hold your book back so they don’t release ten books about steam trains in the same season and glut their own market; or they might want to hit a particular school holiday with that new wizard series. You have no control over this.

It’s unusual for a book to be released within a year of being signed (and the completed manuscript submitted by you). It’s not unusual for it to stretch out longer than that. Series are a little different; sometimes, a publisher will release instalments in a series close together. However, they’re likely to want them completed and submitted from you well in advance. Months is the norm here.

The real questions: how important is speed to you? Are you willing to wait?

Withdrawal and Out of Print

What about the opposite end of your book’s life? What about that point when it is stripped off bookstore shelves (real or virtual) and consigned to literature history?

With ebooks and POD, this need never happen. There’s no physical stock taking up money or space anywhere, so your book can live on the virtual shelf for as long as you like (if you have self-published and retained control, of course).

Paper books, however, commonly go out of print. Whether self- or traditionally-published, at some point, someone is going to stop keeping that stockpile. Storefront space is a premium and costs money, and bookstores will only put out books they can sell.

In fact, bookstores will send surplus stock back to the traditional publisher if it isn’t selling well enough to justify the cost of the storeroom and shelf space it takes up. This is usually a matter of weeks after the book’s release; your book has a very small window (3-4 weeks) to grab sales before it is consigned to the ‘failure to be returned’ pile. If it sells in that time, the stores might retain a couple of copies for its shelves and only return the surplus bulk. Otherwise, it’s back to the source with all of it.

The publisher must then decide whether to try another big push with the book (this is rare); usually, they will slash the price and sell it off through clearing houses and discount stores. The next step in the process is to stop printing any more of the book and to let it fall out of print when the bookstores have run out of whatever stocks they decided to retain.

Traditional publishing contracts should all have a ‘return to author’ clause, which means the contract (specifically, the publisher’s license to your work) ends after the book has been out of print for several years (usually 3-5, I believe). For books published electronically under a traditional contract, ‘out of print’ is usually defined as sales below a certain threshold. It is important to understand what out of print means to you and your work, so you understand your rights.

Traditional publishing relies on big-bang sales at the beginning of a book’s life. Self-published authors can take more time about it. Some of the data being gathered on sites like Smashwords are showing that sales patterns for books are not driven by their release date. Some books have a slow boil and break out later; others have a big bang and then tail off; others still do a mix of these things, swinging up and down wildly. Even better, there are things that an author can do to help lift their sales (I’m in the middle of that process myself) and rejuvenate a book that has been out for a while. But this all means that the book has to still be out in the stores for readers to buy.

The real questions: do you care how long your books are available for? Do you have faith that a publisher will handle your book the way you want it to?

Personally, I like having a book with sales that are continually ticking over, and I like being able to release (and re-release) editions whenever I want to. I’m not waiting on anyone’s timetable except my own. This suits me and I have a few plans to use this to the fullest advantage.

Traditional publishing has its advantages, but I don’t think that availability is one of them.

Next up: Big houses getting bigger

Amazon’s slice of fanfic

You may have heard about Amazon’s latest stride into the fiction publishing world: Amazon Kindle Worlds. This is the new service that allows writers to publish and receive royalties for fanfic written in the worlds of publishing houses that have signed up and given permission.

Wow, that sounds great! Fanfic writers can now get permission to publish and they get paid, too! How awesome is that?

Not as awesome as it sounds.

I’ve been watching the reactions to this subject for a few weeks now (while I waited to get some time to write this post up), and overall, the feeling I get about this is unsettled.

Terms of the Deal

Let’s start here and see what the Kindle Worlds page has to say about the deal you’re signing up to if you decide to publish your fanfic through this shiny new service.

The main draw of this service is the fact that you get paid for your fanfic, so let’s take a look at the money stuff:

• The rights holder gets royalties from your fanfic. This is fair enough; you’re using their intellectual property, so they should get a slice. How much they get is unstated. Note, however, that Amazon has signed up publishing houses, not writers; I have to question how much the authors of the original work will actually get out of this (if anything). That’s likely to depend on their particular deal with their publisher, but it’s worth being aware that you could be lining a publisher’s pockets, not your favourite author’s.
• Royalties are paid at the lower rate of 35%. This is the worst self-publishing/ebook royalty on the market (that I’m aware of), and you’re nailed into it here. No choice. This is a continuation of Amazon’s policy of pushing authors towards the 35% royalty rate.
• Worse: for short stories (5,000-10,000 words) are paid an even lower rate of 20%. The reason? Amazon’s credit card fees. Bullshit. They don’t buffer other small item prices for this reason and there’s no excuse for putting it on ebooks. I’m concerned about what this will mean for writers publishing through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) – are they going to expand this new, crappier level of royalty to those books, too?
• No control over pricing. Amazon does it all for you. A good thing? That’s up to you, but I don’t like that they’re taking this control away from the author. This is seeming more and more like a traditional publishing deal, and not in a good way.
• Royalties are paid on net, not gross. That means you get a percentage of the profit on the ebook, not the sale price (so, after Amazon’s expenses have come off and potentially even the rights holder’s royalties too). There’s no clarity about exactly what they’re taking off before it gets to ‘net’. This is different to all others ebook deals that I’m aware of. Even traditional publishing deals give you a percentage of the ticket price, not the profit, because the publisher’s percentage is supposed to cover their costs.

So it’s not a great fiscal adventure. Amazon are pretty much reaming you as much as possible while presenting a passable deal. Okay. But something is better than nothing, right?

Let’s keep looking and see what else is going on here. Time to examine copyright stuff:

• You own the copyright to any original elements you put into your story. Characters, events, etc. (The copyright of the original work/world you’re writing in remains with the rights holder.) Seems fair enough on the surface. Except that you don’t get any choice about what happens to that copyright, nor any chance to capitalise on it.
• Amazon gets full, exclusive license to your story and all its elements for the life of the copyright. What does that mean? You cannot sell or use that copyright anywhere else. Ever. (The life of copyright is your lifetime + 70 years.) You can’t publish your story anywhere else, not even for free on your website. You can’t use any characters from that story in another story anywhere else (but you could use them in another story on Kindle Worlds). You can’t use them in a screenplay, or make pictures out of them (so fanart of your original character is a no-no). You see where this is going?
• Amazon or the original works owner can use your copyrighted material and you will get nothing for it. So if they pick up and use that shiny idea you had, you get a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling but not a cent of the money from those movie franchises, or book sales, or anything else they might choose to flog to the masses. Hell, if another fanfic writer likes your ideas, they can ‘build on them’ (read: use and abuse) however they like, and get crappy royalties through Kindle Worlds for them, too.

As publishing deals go, this sucks balls. This is the kind of deal that, for original works, everyone in the business would be telling you to RUN RABBIT RUN, and the fact that this is fanfic doesn’t change that in the slightest. John Birmingham said that pretty much (only with more words and some helpful examples of what this all means), and John Scalzi wrote an unsettling post about it, too. The OTW (Organisation for Transformative Works, who work largely in the fanfic space) had a similar reaction to this deal.

So, it’s a deal with crappy (no) rights attached and a pretty poor financial recompense offering. Not the best publishing deal.

But is that all that this program will do? No. This is the first time fanfiction has been legitimised in this way and there are many rumblings about the potential ripples it will cause.

Fanfiction Impacts

Whoo-hoo, they said fanfiction is okay! We’re allowed to write it and make money from it! That’s a good thing, right?

Well, only if you write the kind of fanfic they’re looking for. Not too graphic, not pornographic, no cross-overs, and only written in the worlds they have licensed.

But what about the rest? There are fears that writers who choose not to publish through Kindle Worlds, or who want to continue to offer their work for free on mainstays of the fanfic world like fanfiction.net, will suddenly get cracked down on.

Fanfic has long fought to be allowed to exist without fears that the rights holders will object to their use and misuse of copyrighted material, and it seems that only in the last few years, free fanfic has been allowed to flourish relatively unmolested. It has become acceptable (as long as the fanficcer isn’t making money off it), or at least tolerated. The exceptions to this are increasingly few and far between.

Should Amazon choose to enforce its newfound ‘world’ licenses, they could crack down on free fanfic and start that fight all over again. They’d be completely within their rights to do this. This is not to say that they will, but it’s a distinct possibility (and considering how money-grabbing they appear to be, it wouldn’t surprise me or many other commenters on this subject; it is a common fear).

Of course, I suspect that would blow up in their face. They’d enrage the fanfic community and authors would turn away from the Kindle Worlds program in droves (at least, I hope they would!). But just because it’s stupid, doesn’t mean they won’t do it anyway.

In another vein, will the KW program reduce the amount of free fanfic available for readers, because writers are all going to go get paid for their writing? I doubt it, if only because of the restrictions on it. Fanfic is all about the freedom to do whatever the hell you want, and there will always be those who want to write outside the boundaries of the program. For example, the ‘no porn’ restriction will keep the slash in the unofficial venues where it currently exists. And I’m sure there are plenty of writers who just won’t want to go the KW way.

Also, I have to ask, is there a big market for people paying for fanfiction? How likely is it to pull readers away from free fanfic? (I’m not convinced that it’s entirely the same audience.) Are fanfic readers likely to pay the prices that Amazon is going to charge?  These aren’t questions I can answer yet.

Authorised/Tie-in Fiction Impacts

Authorised books in licensed domains already exist; this part isn’t new. Some writers make their living writing tie-in novels in copyrighted worlds they don’t own, like Doctor Who, Star Wars, Warhammer, and so on. How will this affect them? Will this legitimised form of fanfic replace these authorised lines of novels?

I would like to doubt it, but it will depend on how the rights holders consider this new program. Could KW be a cheap, low-fuss way for them to get spin-off novels done? Yes. But the fanfic options are, by nature, not canon, not edited, and not vetted. Quality and content will vary widely. One would hope that the right holders of big chains like Star Trek, etc, would want more from their lines. But how likely are they to care that much? Would they just pick and choose the fanfic offerings they like and put on a stamp of a approval, and call it good?

John Scalzi sums it up perfectly: “If I were a pro writer who primarily worked in media tie-in markets, I would have some real concerns.” Yup, me too.

The Author Side

What does this mean to authors producing worlds that might tumble under KW’s banner? Well, I’d keep an eagle eye on your publishing contracts and exactly what rights you’re signing away. You may not get a choice in being part of the program if you hand those reins to a publisher. Previously, authors may not have worried too much, assuming that those particular rights would have been used for authorised tie-in-type material. Opening it up to fanfiction, however, is a different kettle of fish.

Should you be negotiating with your publisher on these grounds, specifically? Yes, if you care about it, and if not, for the fiscal side of things. It’s definitely something to keep in mind if you’re looking at a publishing contract. If you’re not sure, get advice!

For those who already have contracts, you may be open to this program already. It’s probably worth checking with your agent/lawyer/publisher (again, at least for the fiscal issue, if you don’t care much about the fanfic itself).

And it’s not just traditional publishing that is affected. There’s also talk of this option being available through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which I’ve used to publish the Apocalypse Blog ebooks on Kindle/Amazon. I could license fanfic in the AB world! Yay?

Personally, this whole thing makes me uncomfortable. I don’t think I’d want to sign those particular rights away (even for tie-ins). I’m a bit jealous of my babies that way*. From what I’ve seen, I don’t want any part of KW, from either side of the deal. As nice as it might be to make a bit of money that way, I couldn’t in all conscience support such a program. Too many skeevy parts for my liking!

Over on the Web Fiction Guide forums, there has been an interesting discussion about most of these points, too, between writers of various types of web fiction. It seems that a lot of authors have a view about Kindle Worlds.

This is touching many people and I am concerned about many of its knock-on impacts. It seems to me that Amazon has made an unsettling move that could set the scene for more action in the e-publishing world that won’t be good for creators. It is part of a larger, disturbing pattern in Amazon’s shaping of the publishing of Kindle ebooks.

Back at the beginning of the year, Smashwords predicted that Amazon will be kicked out of the number-one ebook seller position. Increasingly, I hope that this is so, for the sake of authors everywhere. In the meantime, I will be watching the KW situation with curiosity, from way over here where it won’t touch me.

(*Note: This doesn’t reflect my attitude towards free fanfic; that’s another post entirely, but the short version is that I don’t object to it and would be flattered if someone did it in one of my worlds.)

Amazon: enemy of the short story

I came across a post recently about Amazon cracking down on short Kindle ebooks. It seems that they are asking authors of ebooks less than 2,500 words to expand or remove their work. Here’s a copy of the email that was sent to one writer:

Hello,

During a quality assurance review of your KDP catalog we have found that the following book(s) are extremely short and may create a poor reading experience and do not meet our content quality expectations:

(Name of Short)

In the best interest of Kindle customers, we remove titles from sale that may create a poor customer experience. Content that is less than 2,500 words is often disappointing to our customers and does not provide an enjoyable reading experience.

We ask that you fix the above book(s), as well as all of your catalog’s affected books, with additional content that is both unique and related to your book. Once you have ensured your book(s) would create a good customer experience, re-submit them for publishing within 5 business days. If your books have not been corrected by that time, they will be removed from sale in the Kindle Store. If the updates require more time, please unpublish your books.

(original source)

My first reaction is one of exasperation and disgust. This is an arbitrary and stupid ruling; short stories under 2,500 are perfectly valid, so why crack down on them?

However, it’s not as simple a subject as it first appears. The comments on both of the links above are interesting. Let’s break it down into who seems to be making the comments (paraphrased by me; my comments in italics):

• Readers:
  • Good, it’ll stop people from publishing chapters and releasing them as ebooks. (Wait, who is doing this? Why? See next.)
  • It’ll stop people from publishing serials they never finish and charging people for each episode/chapter. (First, I’m surprised that authors would serialise this way – there are services out there that are designed specifically for serials, and KDP isn’t one of them. Second, this measure won’t stop that. 2,500 words is not a maximum length for a chapter; I know many serial writers who post more than that per episode/chapter, and I frequently go over that limit on my own serial (which is not published this way). Also, no-one is forced to buy installments, so is serialisation through KDP really the problem here? (Note: serial != series.))
  • I can’t filter out short books from search results. (This is something Amazon needs to fix; it’s a failing in the store, not the products on its shelves.)
  • A trilogy isn’t a collection of 3 ‘books’ that are under 20 pages each. (I agree, but this minimum length isn’t going to change people trying to do this.)
  • It’ll stop authors releasing each short story individually, and then collecting them together into a cheap anthology at the end, ripping off customers. (Releasing individual books/stories and then releasing an omnibus or anthology for cheaper than the individual parts is a long-standing sales technique, and unlikely to change. If it bothers you, then wait for the collection at the end.)
  • Short stories under 2,500 words are valid, and longer than some magazines publish (and pay for).
  • Page counts for ebooks are not always present and their reliability is questionable. I don’t know what I’m buying. (Again, Amazon needs to fix their store. This annoys me, too!)
• Writers:
  • Self-publishing has revitalised the short-story genre, but now they’re stopping it.
  • I’ve had good sales and reviews with my short stories.
  • I only ever release anthologies because I think selling individual stories will annoy readers.
  • Having a bigger library (more books) is better for an author’s sales than a small library. (This has been stated in many sources of advice on self-publishing, too.)
  • There is a short story category available in Amazon, so authors can already classify their books appropriately. (But apparently it’s not being used properly, or it’s not obvious enough to customers.)
  • Amazon is going after porn/erotica.
  • Yay, Amazon is going for quality. (Quantity does not equal quality! Should authors add fluff to short stories to bump it over the wordcount line? Should they add in extra filler around the story (acknowledgements, etc), so that it looks longer than it is? How is that going to improve the quality of the product or customer satisfaction?)
  • It will unclutter the marketplace, which is full of 2,000-word books people spit out. (Better search results and store mechanics would also help with this.)
  • Other forms will also be affected: poems, articles, in-depth product reviews.
  • I’ve never had an objection to the length from readers.
  • I hope they don’t apply this to children’s books.

Phew, that’s a lot of opinions (and I only looked at the first page of comments on each post). But each of them have their points, and we have to boil it down further before we can get to what’s really going on here.

What is the problem that Amazon is looking to solve? A poor customer experience. From the morass above, this seems to be caused by:

• Customers unable to predict what they are buying. What they end up with is not what they expected, and this makes them angry and upset.
• Customers unable to find the kind of ebook they’re looking for. If they buy anything at all, what they end up with is probably not what they wanted, which has the same effect as the point above.
• Ebooks not being complete stories, but parts of stories or individual chapters.

Amazon is attempting to fix these problems by restricting the wordcount of the content and claiming it is for ‘quality’. I said it above and I’ll say it again: quantity does not equal quality, so having quantity as your yardstick is automatically a flawed measure.

None of the responses I have read have gone into the quality of the product. The biggest problems seem to be about reader expectations and ebook searchability. Basically, the packaging and presentation of the ebooks in the store, rather than the actual content. Amazon is both the publisher (they’re going after authors who have published through KDP) and store in this case, so their responsibility is twofold.

Here’s what I think Amazon should be doing:

• Make purchases more predictable. Customers are not getting what they expected, and that’s a labelling issue. There are several ways Amazon could tackle this:
  • Add wordcounts to ebook listings. This is the simplest and most straightforward thing they can do. They already have access to this information (otherwise they couldn’t target short books on a wordcount basis); all they need to do is display it on the ebook listing in an obvious way. Take a look at Smashwords’s store for a good example of how to do this.
  • Categorise ebooks according to length. This could be as simple as having wordcount bands and attaching it to the listing as a label, so customers could easily distinguish between short stories, novellas, novels, epics, and collections. Obviously, this would only apply to fiction, but it’s a step in the right direction.
  • Add the ability to mark a book as a collection, rather than a standalone story.
• Improve searchability. Customers must be able to find the sorts of things that they’re looking for. If they want epics only, they should be able to search for that. Search results should also include all the pertinent information a customer needs to locate the right result for them, which includes length.
• Get rid of page counts on ebooks. They’re meaningless and backwards, and usually incorrect. Apparently they’re also missing in many cases.

Here’s what I think Amazon shouldn’t be doing:

• Cracking down on wordcounts. This is a completely artibrary measure that is more likely to have adverse effects to the ebooks on sale, because:
  • Authors are being encouraged to pad out their short books with additional material. This means that they’ll add random content to get over the wordcount line and not extend the story itself, which means that the core customer issue isn’t addressed at all (they’re still getting a very short story for their money). Or, worse, it means that they’ll pad the story out, and reduce the quality of the story the customer is buying.
  • Authors may choose to release only collections instead. This reduces the number of overall offerings, and will negatively impact sales.
• Demanding ‘complete stories only’. I was of two minds about this, but the more I think about it, the more I think a measure like this wouldn’t be feasible. There are a couple of ways I think this would be detrimental:
  • Completeness is very subjective and therefore very hard to police. How would you distinguish between legitimate parts of a series of stories and parts of stories? One reader’s satisfying ending is not the same as another’s. Authors will always claim the story is finished. I can feel the arguments brewing already.
  • Authors would be encouraged to hide serialised works to avoid being rejected as an incomplete story. This negatively impacts customer predictability, as again they’ll end up with something other than what they had expected to buy. Customer happiness will go down, not up.

But Amazon aren’t the only ones who can affect this matter, and I think that’s important to recognise. There are also things that authors should be doing:

• Label your ebooks clearly. Amazon’s information is insufficient? Then add the pertinent stuff to the listing yourself. Help your readers by making your ebooks as straightforward and predictable as possible (as a purchase, not as a plot!). The next time I add or update a listing on KDP, I’ll be putting wordcounts into the product description.
• Label your ebooks honestly. Readers do not like being misled or lied to. I don’t care if you think that tricking someone into buying your book is awesome, because hey look, more money for you; you will piss off the readers and then Amazon will go and do something stupid. Like come down on wordcounts.
• If you’re releasing a serial, be obvious about it. Very similar to the honesty point above. Readers will get pissed off if they expect a complete story and are forced to shell out more money because you’ve only actually given them a part of it. Again, if you annoy the customers, you risk forcing Amazon to crack down on serials and cut off this avenue for you entirely. Alternatively, use a serial service, like Kindle Serials, Jukepop Serials, or Tuesday Serial.

Authors, I think we all need to step up and help in this situation. Not by writing longer stories or padding things out to appease Amazon’s arbitrary ruling, but by keeping our audience in mind. And I think we all need to remember that even if we give customers the information they need, they won’t necessarily read it. A good friend of mine publishes dark adult humour with cutesy covers, with obvious warnings that it is full of swearing and not a children’s book in the description, and she still gets reviews that say ‘omg, so much swearing!’ and ‘I was horrified when my child read this!’. But let’s try to reduce the chance of this happening.

Because when ebooks first became established on the scene, I was witness to the rush of enthusiasm that came over writers. Part of its beauty is that size doesn’t matter: the freedom from the contraints of physical print meant that there was no minimum length to make the cost viable, and no maximum before the book became too unwieldy or physically impossible. You can publish a one-page poem or a 1,000-word short story, or a million-word epic, and it’s all the same in the electronic world. Making money (and even a living) from short stories and poetry suddenly became viable, when it was very difficult before.

This is why the restriction by Amazon makes me shake my head and roll my eyes. They’re moving backwards. They’re missing part of the awesomeness of ebooks, when what they should be doing is capturing it and showing it to the readers who want to spend their money on it. As a result, everyone loses out: Amazon, authors, and their customers.

Let’s try for something better, people.

Independent vs Traditional Publishing: Contracts

(Part of the indie vs trad series.)

I’ve already written about creative control and services, and the trade-offs that are made when you choose a publishing route. But something came to my attention recently, so let’s talk about contracts and what you should expect from them.

This ‘something’ was a flurry of blog posts about the new scifi/fantasy e-publishing imprint of Random House publishers: Hydra (along with sister-imprint, Alibi). Particularly, their publishing contracts, and the blog posts in question were not enthusiastic or, in fact, positive in anyway. In John Scalzi’s words, “This is a horrendously bad deal and if you are ever offered something like it, you should run away as fast as your legs or other conveyances will carry you.”

Bold words. On reading the terms of the contract, however, I’m inclined to agree with him.

In short, the main points are:

• No advance. The author is paid royalties only. This is very unusual for a publishing contract (and incredibly objectionable for most).
• Author pays for all services. The ones I listed in the table on the services post? It’s the same – and possibly worse – than the self-publishing options; the author bears all the cost. If there’s a paper book edition, the author pays for the printing costs, too. The publishing house is simply providing all the services, and you are tied in to paying for their services. You don’t have any control over what services are done/used or how much they cost; you are, in effect, the publishing house’s customer. Which means they can make a profit from you. On the plus side, it comes out of your royalty, rather than being an up-front cost to you (this is an incredibly small plus).
• Publisher retains all copyrights for the term of copyright. That’s longer than your life span (usually life +35 or 70 years). As Writer Beware points out, there’s no information about whether the rights might revert to you if the book goes out of print, but as this is primarily aimed at e-publishing and ebooks don’t tend to go out of print, this is a huge red flag. Very precise wording is required to give you any recourse to reclaim the rights to your work.

What does all this mean? It means that this is a vanity publishing contract, not a traditional one. It has all of (and possibly more than) the restrictions of a standard traditional contract but none of the benefits. The chances of an author actually making any money off the book are incredibly small, unless you’re lucky enough to have a runaway bestseller (and how often does that happen, really?).

In a traditional publishing contract, the publisher invests in your book. They put their money where their mouth is and take a risk on you and your work. This investment is part of why they’ll work so hard to sell your book; they have to recoup their costs before they make a profit. For Hydra (and contracts like theirs), there is no risk. All of the risk is taken by the author and it’s the publisher who is making money hand over fist before the creator sees a single cent.

In a deal like this, it is entirely possible for you to never get paid for your work. Meanwhile, the publisher is making money off every sale. This is known in the trade as ‘Hollywood accounting‘, and is a known way for publishing houses to basically scam creators.

Naturally, Random House has come back and refuted the negative vibe that these contract terms are generating. You can read the open letter from RH’s Publishing Director on Publishers Weekly and Writer Beware. They are pitching it as an awesome new style of partnership between an author and a publisher, in which everyone wins and fantastic new stories are released into the wild to skip through the literary daisies.

Bollocks. I know spin doctoring when I see it, and this is no partnership. The investment and risk is one-sided and I see no benefit for a writer to sign this contract.

To be fair (and I always try to be fair), apparently Hydra is willing to negotiate the terms of this contract. Better and more palatable deals can be made. However, as Scalzi and others point out, the fact that they’d try to offer a writer such a contract is appalling in itself. It preys on new and desperate writers, particularly those without agents (who would be all over a contract like that) or experience in the business.

What’s interesting is that Random House have realised that their spin doctoring isn’t working. They have taken the (very loud and nearly violent) criticism from various sources (including those I’ve linked to), and they have changed the contracts. There is now a (slightly-)revised ‘profit-sharing’ contract and a (more) ‘traditional’ contract on offer. Are the contracts better? Yes. Are they good enough?

Honestly, I don’t think so. There are still very tricky spots in those contracts and I’d be incredibly nervous about straying too close to them.

Kudos to Random House for listening to feedback. But they still have a long way to go before these contracts are anything approaching reasonable for an author to put their time and work into.

What does this mean in terms of traditional vs independent publishing? Well, whichever way you go, be very careful about what contracts you’re signing. Even as a self-publishing author, you have to sign deals with distributors and retail vendors.

Don’t know how to tell if a contract is reasonable or not? Any good writer’s organisation (SFWA, RWA, QWC, etc) will have facilities available to its members and they should help you to look over any publishing contract. For non-members, there’s often advice on their sites for free (but I’d highly recommend becoming a member, for this and other benefits). It’s really important to understand what you’re signing away and the long-term implications it might have for you.

Next up: Availability

Flagging sales

The Apocalypse Blog ebooks had a good year in 2012. After Book 0 went free, sales rocketed on Amazon and I started to get cheques through every month. Colour me one happy writer, actually being paid for the fiction that I share with the world.

However, the end of 2012 saw a dip in sales on Amazon. In January, they fell even lower. I started to get incredibly concerned – had the books saturated its audience? Had they had their day? Was I looking at a sad decline, until I was getting only a sad dribble in sales, from now unto forever? I was doing nothing different, so what made the difference?

Curiously, in February, the sales picked up again. Not back to their previous levels, but certainly looking brighter than before.

Also interestingly, my sales through Smashwords (and its distribution network) stayed roughly the same, maybe increasing a little (it’s harder to track these ones, because it requires consolidating a lot of disparate info, and I’m still working on the spreadsheets for this. A financial genius I am not).

For the funsies, here are some graphs of Amazon sales to show you the patterns I’m talking about. Let’s start with the overall sales revenue figures:

You can see pretty clearly here what happened when Amazon price-matched Book 0 and made it free: in March, the sales shot up. Note: this is sales revenue, so this is the effect it had on the paid-for books!

You can see the summer holidays pretty clearly in that one. The graph only covers the period from after the book went free – before then, it was just 1 or 2 sales per month. Let’s forget about those early months.

This is what the sales of the paid-for books look like over the same period. Interestingly, the pattern is quite different – summer seems to have been a bumper time for buying books. Books 2 and 3 sell roughly the same amount, so the knock-on series sales seems to be pretty reliable; if they get past Book 1, they’ll buy all of them. I think I like this pattern. Also, you can see the hike around August where I dropped the price of Book 1 to $2.99 (from $4.99). Another spike. Hello, sweet spot.

To make some of the implications and patterns a little more obvious, here’s the two graphs above merged into one:

The sales of free vs paid books is almost completely inverse. Curious pattern! I wonder why this is, especially as I would have thought that the knock-on from the free teaser into paid series would have been stronger. Apparently, this is not the case. Why? Hard to say. Perhaps the teaser is a little too much of a teaser? Some food for thought.

What’s pretty undeniable is the drop-off towards the end of 2012. It’s not a nice trend. On the upswing now, but for how long?

And here is the Amazon ranking chart from October until today (sadly, they only brought in Amazon author rankings in October, so I don’t have figures from before then, and the individual book ranks are currently broken):

You can see the drop-off through January, but considering there was a steady drop-off in sales after October, the ranking is pretty erratic. If the average rank per week is taken, it’s a bit easier to see:

The ranking changes don’t seem to match the actual sales figures, which is a bit interesting. However, the overall downward trend exists in both sales and ranking figures.

So my first question is: why the change? It’s a little hard to fathom, but it could be due to a number of factors, such as:

• The time of year. I’ve noticed some patterns with sales around holidays, but I don’t have any historic data to compare it to, so this one is hard to be sure about. However, post-Christmas slumps are not unknown.
• Amazon’s overall sales performance. Very hard to verify, but the author ranking patterns above should give me a clue, as it reflects my sales against other authors and books on Amazon. The mis-match between sales and ranking puts me in mind of the predictions made on the Smashwords blog that Amazon will start to lose market share this year as other online bookstores begin to take over in this space. So at least a part of this trend might not be related to me or my books at all.
• I haven’t released a new book for a while. Much of the advice I’ve seen about self-publishing and e-publishing say that readers are voracious and a good way to stay in their line of sight is to release new ebooks fairly frequently (every few months or so). The longer I go without releasing something, the more I fall out of sight? Seems plausible.
• Reviews and ratings. I consistently get 4- and 5-star reviews on Amazon, and most other stores (where I have any ratings at all). The reviews are largely positive and encouraging. However, there are some stores where my books don’t have any ratings at all, and that’s a problem I should tackle.

So what can I do about it all? Should I do anything at all? I have a few options, so let’s take a look at them:

• Do nothing. I could put it down to market vagaries and the time of year, and ride along in my merry little boat, hoping the tide will swell back in my direction. As tempting as this might be, I’d rather try a few things first.
• Release some new books. I have plans in this area for the upcoming Starwalker project. The usefulness of frequent releases is part of why I want to release the short stories as individual books: I don’t have to wait for them all to be finished before I can release them, and I can space out the releases to keep interest in my work.
• Release another Apocalypse Blog book. As much as I’d like to do this (in no small part due to the requests I’ve had to continue the story), I don’t have time in my current schedule to write a fourth book. It would take probably a year to come up with a fourth book, by which point the ‘catching interest’ element will most likely have passed me by. It might happen one day, but it’s not at the top of my list right now.
• Rejuvenate the existing Apoclaypse Blog books. There are a few ways I could do this: small changes that might make a big difference.

That’s the big picture. Releasing new ebooks is in the pipeline but it will be a while; there’s a lot of work to do there. They won’t be in the AB series, but hopefully it’ll pop my name up on readers’ lists and I’ll get some knock-on sales. In the meantime, I can look into doing something to jog the existing ebook sales. Smashwords had an interesting post on how to rejuvenate flagging book sales, and I’ve got a few things in the works that should help, too:

• Fresh edit and proof of the manuscript. This is underway and I’m hoping to have a new edition of the ebooks available soon. This is mostly removing typos, not rewriting sections.
• Make Book 1 free. I’ve been pondering whether I should do this for a while, and the strong feeling I’m getting is ‘yes’. It’s a great way to hook people into the series, and the success that followed Book 0 going free is proof of that.
• Lower the price of Books 2 and 3. Similar to the point above. It’s mostly about removing potential barriers to sale. At the least, I’ll probably lower Book 2 when it becomes the first paid-for book in the series. They’re long books, but more sales net me more benefit than higher per-book profits do.
• Redo the product descriptions for the books. This might freshen up the listings, and maybe sharpen the message for readers. I’ve learned things since I released the ebooks, so there could be improvements made here. Make sure it’s pinging all the right areas for the audience I’m trying to reach.
• Get new covers. This one is tricky, because it will (or at least could) cost me money. Also, I have a deep love of the current covers; they’re so pretty. However, they don’t scale terribly well (particularly to thumbnails), and it might be possible to get something better and more eye-grabbing. Open to options here. Maybe just a re-imagining of the current look? Should I shoot for four distinctly different covers, instead of recolourings of the same one for that ‘matched set’ vibe?

It’s not a lot of work, so I might as well get moving on it. Changing the prices takes all of ten minutes (though the change of Book 1 to free will take a few months to ripple through to Amazon, if Book 0 is anything to judge by). I’d like all of the changes to hit at once – to maximise the impact, rather than dribbling it through – so somehow I have to coordinate all of those changes. The covers are probably the trickiest to get done, so perhaps I’ll kick that off sooner rather than later.

As if I needed any more balls to keep in the air. At least it keeps things interesting, right?

Wish me luck and better sales. Oh, and don’t forget to tell everyone you know to buy my books! Thanks! 😀

Independent vs Traditional Publishing: Royalty and Pricing

(Part of the indie vs trad series.)

Here’s the bit that everyone is interested in: the bottom line. What you get to take home from your book sales.

This is a two-fold subject: what price is set on your book, and what percentage of that price comes to you as the author. These together feed into the profit you are likely to make, and there are some trends that are worth keeping in mind.

Pricing

Price matters, for many reasons. Remember, as an author, what you get is a percentage of the book’s price, not a fixed return. The price tag can also influence reader expectations and perception of the story.

As with so many of these posts, control rests with the self-published author. Whether you’re going electronic or paper, you get the final say about what your book’s price is. You can offset your costs or not; it’s up to you. Print-on-demand (POD) publishers will usually restrict you to the cost as a bare minimum, and some stores won’t allow you to list books as free (Amazon, I’m looking at you), but for the most part, you’re free to manipulate it however you wish.

When going traditional, however, you have no input. Your book price is determined entirely by the publisher (and sometimes the store). You have no control over promotions or offers. When a paper book isn’t selling and it is returned by the bookstores, publishers usually mass-reduce the price to get rid of the stock.

On the other hand, traditional publishers should know where to pitch a book’s price in the market. They are, after all, in the business of making money from sales. So it seems like they know what they’re doing. Doesn’t it?

In the ebook realm, traditional publishing has come under fire because they tend to price their ebooks over the odds (and in some cases, above the paper book price). They consistently price above the ‘norm’ for ebooks, and Smashwords did an interesting analysis of the effect that this has on sales (and the knock-on to author profits). The analysis shows that lower ebook prices not only net increased sales, but significantly larger returns for the author.

The real questions: do you trust the traditional publishers to do what’s best for you and your book? Do you want to maintain a hand on the reins when it comes to price? Do you think you can manage your book well enough to do what’s best for it?

Royalties

Okay, so you have an idea about how much you care about controlling your book’s price. But what does that really mean when it comes to the money in your pocket?

With traditional publishing, you’re looking at 10-15% of the book price for paper and ebooks. Out of this percentage, you have to pay your agent, if you have one (usually 10-15% of whatever you get). The publisher’s portion of the book price goes to cover the costs associated with your book (check out the Services post for more on this), the publisher’s own costs and commission, distribution, and retailer commissions.

With self-publishing, royalties are usually 50-80% of the book price. The rest goes to distributors and retailers, who work on commission, and a publisher to cover the printing costs if you’re doing paper books. The norm is 60-70% for ebooks, though Amazon has a 35% royalty level (which they’re pushing authors towards, but that’s a rant for another post), and the highest I’ve seen is 85%. Self-publishing paper books is usually lower than this (I don’t have exact percentages, but the printing costs are a big chunk of the price and the profit is whatever you price above that cost).

As with all things in publishing, it’s not always as simple as it looks. When it comes to paper books, a traditional publisher’s distribution network and marketplace presence is likely to net you a lot more sales than self-publishing. I don’t have figures to compare average take-home rates – I’m not convinced they exist, because I don’t know what a ‘typical book’ would look like for realistic comparison – but chances are, traditional publishing is going to win out on the net profit here (for authors, that is).

For ebooks, it’s a different story. The distribution available to self-publishing authors means that the reach can, potentially, rival traditional publishers. Again, check out the post on the Smashwords blog about pricing and returns, and the effect on profitability. The disparity in the royalty rates means that self-publishing authors get a lot more than those signed with traditional publishers at the end of the day.

The real question: which royalty rate is going to get you the best returns?

Personally, I lean towards the self-publishing side in the ebook realm. Traditional publishing is still floundering in ebook stores and they have a lot of lessons to learn from before they’ll be as effective as they could be there. This is the area where an indie author can shine; and they do.

Next up: Contracts