Writers: We Don’t Want What We Should

…and we want what we shouldn’t.

The boom in self-publishing has created an army of author-publishers, and it has fundamentally altered the economic and literary landscape in the publishing world. Top indie authors are busy storming the ramparts of Bestseller lists and in some genres Indie titles are capturing many (if not most) of the top slots in sales rankings, reader ratings, industry buzz, and customer recognition. But as in most areas of entertainment and the arts, world-shaking success in self-publishing is both coveted and rare.

Whenever there is a sea-change in the culture, often those who are in the midst of that change find themselves operating in a new world with minds and desires trained and trapped in the old one. People find themselves torn between the desires and longings they’ve been taught to have, and their maybe irrational desire to see every vestige of the old order — even the things that really need to remain — torn down or burned to the ground.

Imagine printers after Gutenberg and the invention of movable type, going back to the scribes amidst incense and prayers to receive a stamp of approval before publishing a new book or tract, all the while wanting to burn down the booksellers for not carrying every single document that could possibly be printed, even if to do so would ruin the booksellers and destroy any mechanism for distribution and success the publisher might have had. This kind of dissociative identity disorder is actually prevalent, historically, in periods where massive technological or social change happens in a short period of time.

Today, many of the same authors who like to thrust a fist into the air and shout “down with all the gatekeepers!” immediately hit their knees and grovel at the feet of any of the old order who cast a wandering eye at them (and many who don’t.) It’s a strange time, believe me. I find that many author-publishers are screaming for things that are bad for them, and rejecting things that will only help all of us.

So, congratulations writers! KDP, Createspace, Smashwords, Draft2Digital, and a dozen other services and venues now allow anyone to publish anything at all. The greatest barriers to entry into the world of publishing are now gone. Anyone can publish, and with all of the tools available, an author can now produce and publish a book with the same quality of any legacy published title, and without all the expense or overhead. But now what? As expected, when the gates come down (which is a good thing) all manner of flotsam and jetsam come rushing in (which is a bad thing.) My son was making a joke about a children’s game called Fortunately/Unfortunately. One of the children would say, “Unfortunately my airplane is crashing.” The next child would say, “But fortunately, I have a parachute.” The next would say, “But unfortunately, I parachute into the middle of a battlefield.” “But fortunately I’m wearing a bulletproof vest.” “But unfortunately I’m shot in the head.” Etc. This is the way it is with publishing today. “Congratulations, anyone can publish.” The bad news is that anyone can publish, and therefore most self-published books suck, and readers often find out whether a book is really bad only after they’ve made the purchase. I’ve always joked that humans are the only creatures that, as infants, find out if something is good or bad for them by putting it in their mouths. There are great Indie titles out there and, for the reader, I believe the search for these quality titles and authors is definitely worth it. In my opinion, the great Indie books I’ve found are better (and often remarkably less expensive) than anything coming out of the mainstream publishing houses. For the reader, the risks are greater, and so are the rewards.

Now, a whole new dynamic is in play. In a marketplace awash with products, authors have to focus on finding a way to get noticed. They have to learn to focus on things that are often foreign to the artist… Discoverability, Marketing and Promotion, Branding — things business marketing majors in the big houses used to handle. All of these things are now the job of the author-publisher, and frankly most authors suck at this part of the job. It’s hard work. It takes a whole different skill set. And every author doesn’t think the same. Some writers think that if they write a brilliant book, perfectly edited, and packaged just right, it will sell on its own (possible, but not probable.) Other writers leave off taking the time to learn their craft and improve, thinking that the product isn’t the main thing, and marketing and promotion will take up the slack where quality is lacking. Some don’t even know the difference. Sometimes this leads the author to pine for the old days when the writer would (as Hemingway said) sit at the typewriter and open his or her veins to produce a book, then photocopy dozens of copies to be stuck in envelopes and sent to strangers who may or may not look at it sometime in the following year. Authors hate the slushpile, but often they hate hard work and responsibility even more.

All the while most authors have this burning desire to be accepted by the old system — and often this desire is irrational. The Stockholm Syndrome is alive and well in the literary world today. I would even venture to say that to find an author not suffering under its oppression is pretty rare. When a viral form of insanity has taken hold in a population, sometimes only the outside observer can see the circular logic that has trapped the victims. I once met a lady who told me that she was a character in the Bible. She said she was the woman clothed in the sun who gave birth to the manchild of scripture. I told her — as nicely as I could — that I thought she was insane and that she needed to seek help. She told me that my response was exactly the proof that she needed, because if she were the woman clothed in the sun, then she could expect everyone to persecute her. Circular logic. A similar, though maybe not as dramatic, insanity often grips authors. They want to be published more than they want to be read. They want fame more than they want to sell books. Some become professional submitters, not publishing on their own because of their hope that one day one of the gatekeepers is going to like and accept their work. Wanting so bad to be published, that they never publish. This despite the very real likelihood that by seeking the traditional route they would almost certainly — if they ever did get a publishing contract — sell fewer books and reach fewer readers than they ever would have if they’d self-published. Before you balk at that, think about it. Most writers are never going to be mainstream pubbed anyway. Never. Just like I’m never going to play in the NBA, and neither is my son. So even selling a handful of books through self-publishing is more than they would ever sell any other way. And despite the cherry-picking and whistling through the graveyard that goes on in most of these discussions, I believe it is far easier and more prevalent for a good writer to make a living wage being an indie only or hybrid published author, than it is for them to do so through mainstream publishing alone. The millionaires and paupers on both sides like to throw away the middle and argue over the top or bottom few percent on either side of the fence, but when it comes to the ability of a virtually unknown author to make enough money to live and work and provide for a family by writing alone, I am certain that there are more Indies and Hybrids accomplishing this than there are mainstream pubbed authors. According to most of the information I’ve read, and the dozens of authors to whom I’ve spoken, the “average” mainstream pubbed advance is $5,000 (and set to decrease, it seems.) And many of these authors sign contracts with non-compete clauses that limit them to publishing one — on rare occasions two — books a year. The average mainstream published book, I’m told, actually sells (not how many are printed, but how many actually sell) a little over 6,000 copies in its lifetime. A staggeringly low amount when you consider what a lot of Indies — Indies most people have never heard of — are selling in a single month or a year. A very telling article by YA author Wendy Higgins hit the publishing world like a tornado a few weeks ago, but was subsequently removed from Wendy’s blog (by force I would gather) and was even expunged from Google’s cache. In that blog post Wendy very honestly exposed how little money most traditionally pubbed authors really make. It was like that brief moment when the same cat walked by twice, evidencing a glitch in the matrix. Or maybe someone gave the world a brief glimpse behind the curtain, just for a millisecond, exposing the great and wonderful Oz.

But no matter how bad it is (and how dreadfully bad it is still going to get,) authors still want it like oxygen — that validation from the industry. With all the facts in hand, many of them would rather sell fewer books, engage fewer readers, and make less money if only it means that the scribes will wink at them and let them in to the nicest parties. Publishing is not unique in hosting this bizarre phenomenon.

And authors do not only make dumb decisions about their future and their viability in the medium. They also want things that are really bad for them, and they don’t even think to want things that would help them tremendously.

Yesterday I read a Facebook post that linked to a not-at-all humorous (but wholly ridiculous) article satirizing the book marketing company Bookbub. I won’t link to it, because it was pretty poor and not really deserving of the traffic. Without even trying to explain the misguided and failed attempt at humor, the gist of the article was that Bookbub — a company that allows authors to purchase advertising space in their very selectively vetted and targeted email blasts — is somehow a criminal enterprise that (for some unknown reason) refuses to take huge sums of money from authors whose books are being excluded for no logical reason at all. There were additional charges brought against Bookbub in the article, all equally as ridiculous. The most evident accusation is so patently wrong and absurd that if it weren’t faintly veiled in the garb of satire, it would be libelous, but then the accusations just get worse from there. That Bookbub is somehow in cahoots with the mainstream publishers to keep out Indie writers (unless your name is Hugh Howey, of course), that Bookbub doesn’t accept books that aren’t being given away for free (preposterous and wrong), that Bookbub considers paid reviews when vetting books, but disregards legitimate reviews (ridiculous and stupid), and that Bookbub is irrationally considering what their customers want when they choose books to feature, rather than forcing their customers to see the books that self-pubbed authors want them to see. Full disclosure: I am not a household name, not a mainstream pubbed author, do not make millions of dollars, and do not have any sway or insider contact with Bookbub at all. I have submitted paid ad requests to Bookbub somewhere around ten times, and my books have been featured six times. The times that my ads have been turned down, I received something extraordinary that I was not owed… A clear explanation as to why my ad was not accepted. On three of those four occasions when I was turned down, the mistake was mine because I had not carefully read their submission rules. On one occasion — a proposed ad for a non-fiction book — I was turned down with only the bare explanation that the book was not something that fit what they were doing at the time. They didn’t owe me any explanation at all, but they offered one anyway, and I was grateful. I don’t think slandering a business that is doing a great job for a lot of unknown writers like me is funny, nor do I think it is good for Indie writers to applaud the proposed destruction of a valuable venue for the sales of books. The author of that article may claim that she was not proposing the destruction of Bookbub, but make no mistake… if Bookbub ran their business the way she wants them to, they’d run themselves out of business. That’s a fact.

The thing is that this Bookbub issue is just an example. Don’t focus too much on it, because it is just a symptom of a deeper problem. It is a way to see what is wrong with what writers say they want. And it is not an arbitrary example. I’ve heard writers attacking Bookbub and other entities and services that they see as “elitist” in forums and author boards for many years. There are a few facts we need to acknowledge here. Writers, including the writer of the silly article attacking Bookbub WANT to use the Bookbub service. She wouldn’t be mad for being turned down unless she really wanted to be accepted. Authors want to use the service because it works. In my last Bookbub feature (In December — my book FUTURITY), during the run of the Bookbub feature, I sold over 1,300 books across all venues served by Bookbub during the window of time the book was featured. At one point I sold over 1,000 e-book copies of FUTURITY in just under eleven hours! And despite the false accusation made by the writer of the attack piece, my book was not offered for free. Those 1,300 books were sold for money. It’s true. This for a book that had once sold pretty well, but that was selling only fifty to one hundred copies a month in the months leading up to the December feature. The point is that Bookbub works. But this isn’t an article defending Bookbub. It is an article examining how the things authors say they want, would destroy the very mechanisms that exist to give authors an opportunity to succeed. This author who wrote this article attacking Bookbub… what does she want? That’s easy to figure. She wants to sell books and to be discovered by a lot of new readers in a short amount of time. Bookbub is one of the very few outlets open to self-pubbed authors that actually accomplishes what this author says she wants. There are other services out there, and some of them work to varying degrees, but I’ve tried a lot of them with mediocre to awful results. What this author is really upset about is that Bookbub has found a system that works… that keeps their reader/customers engaged and clicking on the books that Bookbub chooses to feature… and that the system naturally MUST vet out most of the books that apply. It must. The author sees another gatekeeper keeping her away from success, but in reality she should see a valuable service that necessarily vets out most of what it receives in order to make sure that the outlet continues to work for writers and readers. If Bookbub did what the author implies that she wants — accepting every work that is submitted, regardless of quality, and with no proprietary system of vetting books and meeting the needs of their reader/customers — what would happen? If they just took in every book that had an author behind it offering to pay… what would happen to Bookbub’s success rate? And what exactly would the author be paying for? Isn’t that what a lot of the competing services do? And isn’t that, perhaps, why those services do not work? We applaud the advent of self-publishing, and the route to publication that removes the gatekeepers, but do we really want to burn down the stores and venues and businesses that might help us to succeed without the gatekeepers? Do you realize that what the author says they want is exactly the worst thing that could possibly happen to Indie author-publishers?

Every street basketball player and kid who can dribble wants to play in the NBA, at least for a moment they want it. Why? Because that is where the best players are. That is where the money and fame is too. But why is the NBA so elitist? Why can’t everyone who wants to do so just go out and play in the NBA? Because if that happened, and if everyone got to play, no one would pay to watch it. The money and fame would go away. The prestige would disappear. The business would die. There would still be great players, and a lot of people would play just for the love of the game, but the mechanism that makes the game watchable for the average viewer would go away. Indie basketball already exists and has always existed. There are smaller leagues and foreign leagues, and semi-pro, and church leagues. But no one is insisting that the NBA just accept anyone because to do so would be asking the NBA to destroy itself and go out of business.

Now there are some fundamental ways the NBA and publishing are different. The publishing world could learn something from the NBA, MLB, and the NFL. I’ll get to that bit a little later… maybe in another blog.

Where is the “Easy” Button?

I was at Worldcon in San Antonio this past summer. It was my first one, and it was a blast and I learned a lot. I’m really new in this business and I want to learn how it works. I went to a few discussion panels, and one that I visited was a panel on selling film rights and options. There were five or six panelists and they were discussing how they ended up selling the film options to their published works. As each panelist told their story, a pattern emerged. Also, I noticed that as each panelist told their story, the patience of many of the indie authors in the audience grew thinner and thinner. Many of them were there to find out the system. The trick. They wanted to know where the “Easy” button was. One panelist told how her books had first been picked up by a mainstream publisher. Then she told the story of how a famous director ended up finding out about her books. It turns out that he had showed up at his barber without an appointment and needed to blow an hour waiting to get his hair cut. So he went down the street to a bookstore and saw her book and picked it up. His people called her people and bam!, a film/TV option was sold. I could hear the crowd deflate. Wait a minute! This is not a magic solution! This is not what we are looking for! You just got lucky! This is what you’re telling us? You’re telling us that in order for us to sell options to our works we have to get lucky?!?

After several of these stories (and many of them were eerily similar,) a man in the audience put up his hand. “So it seems that each one of you either got lucky, or got some other weird break that led to you selling your film rights! How does this help us? We need to know HOW to do it!” He wanted an “easy” button. He wanted a system that would always work, every time. But what would that be like? If someone published the secret to selling film rights, which author would not do it? Everyone would, wouldn’t they? A woman in the audience said basically the same thing, “This panel isn’t helpful because if you’re just telling us to ‘get lucky’ then that doesn’t help.” On the way out I asked that lady the question that had been in my mind when the other man was speaking. I said, “If there were a mechanism that would guarantee that your film options would sell, would you use it?” She said, “Of course.” I shrugged. “Me too.”

I don’t think she got the point. If everyone did it, it wouldn’t work. As an aside, this idea that everyone who has succeeded in the business somehow got “lucky” or that anyone who succeeds is immediately an “outlier” and thus their opinions don’t matter and the lessons they have learned don’t apply, is ridiculous and I hope to deal with that in another blog post soon.

But seriously, what would the film world be like if there was a guaranteed system for the sale of film rights? Think about it. The movie business is already pretty awful right now, and opinions may vary, but I hazard to say that the prospect of producers in Hollywood buying every single property that is out there would destroy the value and prices of the properties. The people seeking to sell rights would find a market that is unattractive and unprofitable and not worth the trouble.

The fact is that none of those panelists was “lucky.” Sure, some things worked out for them in a pretty extraordinary way, but in this business it is hard work that puts the author in the right place at the right time so that extraordinary things can happen. Sure, the director found her book in a bookstore while waiting for a haircut, but the book was in that bookstore. So the secret is this, if you want to sell film rights, just get your book in every bookstore in America so that a director can accidentally find it. Problem solved. As for me, I’m not in any bookstores, which is a whole other kettle of fish. I’d like to solve the problem of getting unique and deserving Indie titles into bookstores rather than go around trying to burn down Hollywood for not letting me in. We want what will hurt us, and don’t want what could help us.

Another aside. Yes, bad books sometimes sell, and good books don’t. That has always been true, and it has been true in every field of endeavor. The fact is that it is not generally true. It is not generally true that in self-publishing, the best books go undiscovered. That is usually only true if the author has failed in the ancillary parts of his or her business that involve getting the book out to the public.

What Authors Should Not Want

Here are some things that I think Indie authors should not want. You should not want standards to be lowered. You should not want businesses who market and promote books to stop excluding books that they feel are not going to do well in the market. That is their business. If you think their decisions are stupid and that they are hurting themselves and their bottom line, then start your own email marketing system. Do it better. You already have an attractive system that allows you to produce a book with the utmost in quality. Improving that quality and desirability is your job. You should not want companies like Bookbub to lower their standards. Improve your book. You should not want Hollywood to buy every title. You should not want there to be an “easy” button. You should not want to become successful by dragging other authors down. You should not want a system where crybabies, whiners, and chronic bedwetters are speaking for you. You should revel in the difficulty that success requires, so that when you make it, there is something unique and deserving that merits what people pay to receive it. And in reality, with self-publishing as easy as it is, if any service, award, business, or venue is not worth what it claims, then you don’t need it.

What is Success? And Who Defines It?

A year ago this coming weekend I wrote a satirical book lampooning some things that I think needed to be lampooned in publishing. I wrote the book in under thirty hours as a part of The Kernel Magazine’s #NaNoWriWee (National Novel Writer’s Weekend). The contest itself was a joke about #NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writer’s Month, and the publishers encouraged comedic entries, so I decided to take them up on it. The whole thing was absurd. The contest I mean. The supposed prize was an e-book only contract with a major publisher in England. Who in their right mind would think an e-book only contract is a good deal? A print-only contract? Now you’re talking… sign me up, but I can already publish an e-book for free, and in every venue wherein a mainstream publisher can publish. What was the benefit? A few thousand bucks (or quid) advance in exchange for selling the rights forever and losing all creative control of the book? Absurdity upon absurdity. So I decided to lampoon the whole thing. I contacted Hugh Howey (then on the upsurge in the heady explosion of the WOOL phenomenon) and asked him if I could use him as a character in a book I wanted to write. He laughed and told me to go right ahead. I wrote my book about zombies who were on the loose in London, but the thing is… they were only eating good writers. I titled my book #NaNoWri War Z: Hugh Howey Must Die! Since then, the title has shortened and has become just Hugh Howey Must Die!

I made the book as meta as it could possibly be. I wrote it in less than 20 total hours of actual writing, and I set the action IN the competition itself. The story takes place during that #NaNoWriWee weekend. So, in the book zombies were eating good writers, and writers, in turn — some of them — were out seeking to be eaten just so they could be validated as good writers. The zombies refused to eat bad writers at all. So these writers figured that the only way they could get this validation was to go out and look for zombies and hope to get eaten. Forget that they would be infected and become the undead and their careers would be over. Writers were willing to do things that were really bad for themselves and their careers in order to achieve this validation, no matter how ridiculous and shallow it turned out to be. I turned in the story and had a good laugh. I wondered if it was possible that the publishing industry would be willing to laugh at themselves (it turns out that they are not.) Then, rather than wait for the winners to be announced, I self-published my little book. That was the point, after all. I sold nearly 1,000 copies before the magazine could even announce the winners, and over 1,000 copies in the first thirty days! If you like a meta commentary on the some of the follies of writers and their views about publishing, be sure to check out Hugh Howey Must Die! What happened to the winners of the competition? Who knows? Maybe they were eaten. I never heard from them again. Haven’t seen their books either. I’m pretty sure that HHMD had more readers, and has made more money in the past year than the book that won publication. I can’t prove that, but I’d definitely bet on it.

Things Writers Should Want

So we’ve talked about what writers should not want. But what should we want? Writers should want better contracts that don’t limit their ability to self-publish, and to publish more often. Writers should embrace the success of some of the smaller publishing houses who are writing more writer friendly contracts. This means that we should push for and embrace more project only contracts — contracts that would be good for both publishers and writers — rather than settling for legacy style book deals that no longer achieve what writers really want.

Writers should want to say no to contracts that give them an empty feeling of accomplishment while filching their rights forever, keeping them from making a living wage, and in the end will have them selling fewer books to fewer readers for less money.

Writers should want more outlets for their books. We should want some mechanism for getting more Indie titles (even if there is pretty harsh vetting involved) into bricks and mortar bookstores. We shouldn’t ask for an open-door policy, in fact, we should embrace a difficult selection process. And this change doesn’t take any big uprising or social revolution. The right company could get the ball started here. There are huge profits out there to be made for some company with the pull and the bargaining power to make this happen — some kind of Bookbub entity that would focus on getting highly vetted and popular Indie print titles into bookstores. We should want more independent bookstores to live up to the true meaning of their creed, and to set up sections for locally and regionally produced Indie books. Stop bitching about Amazon and compete. If you are crying about Amazon and how tough it is to be an Indie, and then you are only stocking the top twenty mainstream pubbed books out there, and a bazillion literary fiction titles that nobody reads and no one wants (along with trinkets, skateboards, and rental DVD’s) then you really aren’t that Indie, are you? Grocery stores — even the big chains — are learning that setting aside a section for foodies, stocking more artisanal products, dealing with local growers and producers, etc., is increasing their profits. It makes good business sense whether you like hipsters or not. Good food is not a fad, despite whoever is into it at the moment. You don’t like artisanal cheese? Fine! Great! No problem. The store also carries Kraft slices. But isn’t it better to have a choice? Bookstores need to learn this lesson. E-books are not going away, but bookstores can compete if they offer something other than the same junk I can find in the airport. If the local bookstores — bookstores that are evidently struggling — within 120 miles of me would stock my books, and engage me in using my voice and platform to bring customers into their store, I think they would sell more books. In fact I know they would. I think if they did with this with all the Indies in their region, they’d sell more books. I know there are self-pubbed authors who go into bookstores and try to get a copy or two put in there on consignment, but I’m talking about changing the culture in how these stores think. We should want to do that. This means we should be hoping for more POD machines in bookstores so instead of clerks telling 8 out of 10 customers “we don’t have that book but we can order it” (why would anyone ask a bookstore to order a book when it can be ordered online… from a tablet or smart phone… from the store… and delivered to the customers house within two days for free?) the bookstore can say, “we’ll have that to you in a jiffy. You can take it home today.” Would the customer pay a few more bucks to wait ten minutes while the book is produced right there and then? I would! You would too. No one is asking bookstores not to carry fifty copies of the latest, hottest title. But what if a small bookstore, without carrying inventory, could sell a copy of just about any book anyone ever asked for? POD gives bookstores an opportunity to compete with anybody — even the Internet, because however hard Jeff Bezos is trying, I still can’t get my favorite Indie title delivered to me the same day from Amazon. Same day service — for the moment — is only something my local bookstore can provide. If they take advantage of it now, then perhaps they’ll make a customer who will stay with them later.

We should want more Espresso type book printers in coffee shops and small book shops. We should want innovation in the way that books are produced and delivered, rather than trying to destroy businesses who are our only hope to reach more customers and to achieve our dreams.

We should want Hugh Howey put in charge of Harper Collins (and all of the other publishing houses)!

Hugh would know how to get more good books for sale in more venues. When our books are available in more venues, and in the ways that new readers want to receive them, and WHEN readers want them, the probability for success goes way up. I have a greater opportunity to get “lucky” when a TV producer finds my book if I have more books out there with more people reading them and talking about them. You see the way that works?

So what is it that the NBA, MLB, the NFL and other professional entertainment entities are doing right? What are they doing that mainstream publishing (including agents) should be doing? Two words… TALENT SCOUTS. I have more to say about this crazy idea, but I’ve already gone long. I’ll save that for another blog post.

The market itself is red hot. More people are buying books, and more people are reading them than ever before. Readers are looking for gold, and many of them are looking for that gold that hasn’t been sifted through a crumbling system that has a tendency to search out and reward what was hot a year ago and to punish and eliminate innovation or any brilliance that is out of the mainstream. I have said before that if you listen to agents (“I want to know who the antagonist is in the first eight paragraphs!”) War and Peace would never be published today. I don’t think there is an agent or publisher out there today who would touch Hemingway’s first (and best) books with a ten-foot pole. They’ll say they would, but prove it to me by what they are publishing now. But readers rejoice! Those books would still be published today, and more likely than not readers would find them being published by an author/publisher as an Indie title. That’s just my opinion, but I believe I’m right.

Indie writers have the greatest opportunity ever to find success. Greater than has been offered to any writers in all of history… at least since Gutenberg. And no one has to trot off to the scribes for permission to publish either. Our opportunities for success will be immeasurably improved if we start wanting the right things, and stop wanting the wrong things.

Peace,

Michael Bunker

Michael Bunker is a bestselling author, off-gridder, husband, and father of four children. He lives with his family in a “plain” community in Central Texas, where he reads and writes books…and occasionally tilts at windmills. He is the author of several popular and acclaimed works of dystopian sci-fi, including the WICK series, The Silo Archipelago, and the Amish/Sci-Fi thriller Pennsylvania, as well as many nonfiction works, including the bestseller Surviving Off Off-Grid. Michael was commissioned by Amazon.com through their Kindle Worlds program to write a serial in the World of Kurt Vonnegut. That book is entitled Osage Two Diamonds, and it debuted on Dec. 17, 2013. Michael was recently interviewed in a Medium.com article that will give you more background and insight into his life and works… http://bit.ly/17YbE63.