Me, Hugh Howey, and Legacy John on AuthorEarnings.com

Joe sez: Go and join the fun over at www.authorearnings.com if you want to see Hugh Howey blow the lid off of Amazon author earnings. To say it is a revelation is putting it lightly. 

I've also duplicated the entire report here, with comments by me and my imaginary Big 5 gatekeeper buddy, Legacy John.

Hugh Howey: It’s no great secret that the world of publishing is changing. What is a secret is how much. Is it changing a lot? Has most of the change already happened? What does the future look like?

The problem with these questions is that we don’t have the data that might give us reliable answers. Distributors like Amazon and Barnes & Noble don’t share their e-book sales figures. At most, they comment on the extreme outliers, which is about as useful as sharing yesterday’s lottery numbers [link]. A few individual authors have made their sales data public, but not enough to paint an accurate picture. We’re left with a game of connect-the-dots where only the prime numbers are revealed. What data we do have often comes in the form of surveys, many of which rely on extremely limited sampling methodologies and also questionable analyses [link].

This lack of data has been frustrating. If writing your first novel is the hardest part of becoming an author, figuring out what to do next runs a close second. Manuscripts in hand, some writers today are deciding to forgo six-figure advances in order to self-publish [link]. Are they crazy? Or is signing away lifetime rights to a work in the digital age crazy? It’s hard to know.

Anecdotal evidence and an ever more open community of self-published authors have caused some to suggest that owning one’s rights is more lucrative in the long run than doing a deal with a major publisher. What used to be an easy decision (please, anyone, take my book!) is now one that keeps many aspiring authors awake at night. As someone who has walked away from incredible offers (after agonizing mightily about doing so), I have longed for greater transparency so that up-and-coming authors can make better-informed decisions. I imagine established writers who are considering their next projects share some of these same concerns.

Other entertainment industries tout the earnings of their practitioners. Sports stars, musicians, actors—their salaries are often discussed as a matter of course. This is less true for authors, and it creates unrealistic expectations for those who pursue writing as a career. Now with every writer needing to choose between self-publishing and submitting to traditional publishers, the decision gets even more difficult. We don’t want to screw up before we even get started.

When I faced these decisions, I had to rely on my own sales data and nothing more. Luckily, I had charted my daily sales reports as my works marched from outside the top one million right up to #1 on Amazon. Using these snapshots, I could plot the correlation between rankings and sales. It wasn’t long before dozens of self-published authors were sharing their sales rates at various positions along the lists in order to make author earnings more transparent to others [link] [link]. Gradually, it became possible to closely estimate how much an author was earning simply by looking at where their works ranked on public lists [link].

This data provided one piece of a complex puzzle. The rest of the puzzle hit my inbox with a mighty thud last week. I received an email from an author with advanced coding skills who had created a software program that can crawl online bestseller lists and grab mountains of data. All of this data is public—it’s online for anyone to see—but until now it’s been extremely difficult to gather, aggregate, and organize. This program, however, is able to do in a day what would take hundreds of volunteers with web browsers and pencils a week to accomplish. The first run grabbed data on nearly 7,000 e-books from several bestselling genre categories on Amazon. Subsequent runs have looked at data for 50,000 titles across all genres. You can ask this data some pretty amazing questions, questions I’ve been asking for well over a year [link]. And now we finally have some answers.

When Amazon reports that self-published books make up 25% of the top 100 list, the reaction from many is that these are merely the outliers. We hear that authors stand no chance if they self-publish and that most won’t sell more than a dozen copies in their lifetime if they do. (The same people rarely point out that all bestsellers are outliers and that the vast majority of those who go the traditional route are never published at all.) Well, now we have a large enough sample of data to help glimpse the truth. What emerges is, to my knowledge, the clearest public picture to date of what’s happening in this publishing revolution. It’s a lot to absorb, but I believe there’s much here to learn.

The Value Ratio

I’m going to start with some of the smaller lessons to be gleaned from this data. We’ll conclude this report by looking at author earnings, but I don’t want that bombshell to drown out these equally important observations.

The first thing that jumped out at me when I opened my email was these next two charts, which our data guru had placed side-by-side. What caught my eye was how they seem to be inversely correlated:

On the left, we have a chart showing the average rating of 7,000 bestselling e-books.¹ On the right, we have a chart showing the average list price of the same 7,000 e-books. Both charts break the books up into the same five categories. From the left, they are: Indie Published, Small/Medium Publisher, Amazon Published (from imprints like 47North), Big Five published, and Uncategorized Single-Author.²

It’s interesting to me that the self-published works in this sample have a higher average rating than the e-books from major publishers. There are several reasons why this might be, ranging from the conspiratorial (self-published authors purchase their reviews) to the communal (self-published authors read and favorably rate each-others works) to the familial (it’s friends and family who write these reviews). But the staggering number of reviews involved for most of these books (over a hundred on average across our entire sample) makes each of these highly unlikely. As I’ve seen with my own works—and as I’ve observed when watching other books spread organically—the sales come before the reviews, not after. There are a number of more plausible explanations for the nearly half a star difference in ratings, and one in particular jumped out at me, again from seeing these two charts next to one another.

Note the shortest bar in one graph correlates to the tallest in the other. Is it possible that price impacts a book’s rating? Think about two meals you might have: one is a steak dinner for $10; the other is a steak dinner that costs four times as much. An average experience from both meals could result in a 4-star for the $10 steak but a 1-star for the $40 steak. That’s because overall customer satisfaction is a ratio between value received and amount spent. As someone who reads both self-published and traditionally published works, I can tell you that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between the two. Most readers don’t know and don’t care how the books they read are published. They just know if they liked the story and how much they paid. If they’re paying twice as much for traditionally published books, which experience will they rate higher? The one with better bang for the buck.

This raises an interesting question: Are publishers losing money in the long run by charging higher prices? Are they decreasing the value/cost ratio and thereby creating lower average ratings for their authors and their products? If so, this might have some influence on long-term sales, and keep in mind that e-books do not go out of print. What if in exchange for immediate profits, publishers are creating poorer ratings for their goods and a poorer experience for their readers? Both effects will hurt a work’s prospects down the road (a road with no end in sight). And since ratings on e-books also apply to the physical edition on Amazon’s product pages, this pricing scheme ends up adversely affecting the very print edition that higher e-book prices are meant to protect [link].

It is common these days to hear that the quality of self-published work is hurting literature in general. I counter this notion with one of my own: Pricing e-books higher than mass market paperbacks used to cost is having an even more deleterious effect on reading habits. Books are not only in competition with each other, they compete with everything else a reader might do with their time. Creating a poor experience is a way to lose readers, not a way to protect a physical edition or a beloved bookstore. And high prices are a quick and easy way to create a poor reading experience, harming everyone.

High prices are also a way to drive customers to other, less expensive books. Rather than serving to protect print editions, publishers are creating a market for self-published works. And harmful price practices is not the only way the Big Five are powering the self-publishing revolution.

Joe Konrath: "And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder. One of the four beasts saying, 'Come and see.' and I saw, and behold a white horse"

Welcome to the Book of Revelations.

The shadow industry of self-publishing now has a tiny bit of light shed on it, and it's blinding.

Many worried about the Tsunami of Crap, bringing down the overall quality of books. I countered that argument in 2011 using common sense. Now here are the facts to back it up.

But how will the industry react to this news? Let's ask Legacy John, an imaginary amalgam of gatekeepers created by me from the nonsense they continually spout.

Legacy John: This data doesn't reflect our own data. Readers are continuing to pay higher prices for what they consider to be premium material, and overall gross is what ultimately matters, not average reviews that are only differentiated by a fraction of a percent.

Readers recognize the imprimatur that comes from our brand, and will pay what we want them to pay. In fact, if we controlled the retail price, we could make them pay even more.

Joe: Uh, LJ. You tried that. It was called the Agency Model. And the DOJ filed suit for collusion. And you lost.

Legacy John: Listen to me! Readers WANT to pay more! Watch and see how the data confirms this.

Joe: Okay, let's watch...

Hugh: Next, we’re going to look at some sales numbers within these genre bestseller lists to see how underserving a high-demand market has resulted in the creation of a brand new supply of books.  

Listening to Reader Demand

The next chart shows the percentage of genre e-books on several Amazon bestseller lists according to how they were published:

The bestseller lists used were Mystery/Thriller, Science Fiction/Fantasy, and Romance. All of the subcategories within these three main genres were also included. Why choose these genres? Because they are the most popular with readers. Our data guru ran a spider through overall bestseller lists and found that these three genres accounted for 70% of the top 100 bestsellers on Amazon and well over half of the top 1,000 bestsellers.³ Future earnings reports will look at all of fiction⁴, but for now, we started with a simpler data set that captured the vast majority of what readers purchase.

What this chart shows is that indie and small-publisher titles dominate the bestselling genres on Amazon. We can clearly see that the demand from readers for more of these works is not being fully met by traditional publishing. Among the advice given to aspiring writers, you’ll often hear: “Write in the correct genre.” And here we see the sales-potential of that advice.

Looking back to the price/review comparison and also to the chart above, we can surmise that major publishers would be well-served by publishing far more titles in these genres and also by charging less for them. This is wisdom the indie community knows very well. Publishers must be tuning in, as prices began to decline last year [link], and publishers such as Simon & Schuster have announced new genre imprints [link]. Hopefully this data will help accelerate these trends, for the benefit of both the reader and the newly signed author.

Now take a look at this chart:

Again, daily unit sales are estimated by sales ranking, using publicly shared data from dozens of authors who have logged the correlation between rank and daily purchases (included among those authors are the two involved in this study).⁵ Some obvious things immediately jump out. The first is that Amazon has an incredible ability to market their own works, which shouldn’t be too surprising, considering it’s their storefront. We see from this and the previous chart that their 4% of titles command an amazing 15% of the sales. That’s impressive. It’s nearly 4 times the average unit sales volume per book. Now look at the Big Five, who with all their marketing efforts and brand recognition actually end up with pretty average per-book sales: a mere 1.2 times the overall average.

The other eye-popper here is that indie authors are outselling the Big Five. That’s the entire Big Five. Combined. Indie and small-press books account for half of the e-book sales in the most popular and bestselling genres on Amazon.

Joe: "Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword."

Legacy John: Why do you keep quoting scripture?

Joe: Because your ass is getting kicked in biblical proportions.

Legacy John: Maybe you and I are reading different data, but this is based on unit sales, not gross sales.

Joe: So?

Legacy John: Since we price our books higher than you do, we make more money than you do. And people are still willing to pay the prices we charge. So who's looking stupid now? If we charged $3.99 for an ebook, we'd be leaving money on the table.

Joe: Whose money?

Legacy John: Come again?

Joe: Whose money would you be leaving on the table?

Legacy John: Our money, of course. We make 75% of net on ebooks. Why would we want to lower prices?

Joe: Because authors are only making 25%, which translates to 12.5% royalties of the Digital List Price you set. Why do you think authors are going to continue accepting 12.5% when they can get 70% by self-pubbing, and also outsell you in units? Your average book price was $7.00, which means $0.88 goes to the author. The average self pubbed book price is $3.25, which means $2.28 goes to the author.

Authors make almost three times as much when they self-publish.

Legacy John: The data is cherry picked. It only counts a few bestsellers.

Joe: The royalties remain the same. On average, self-pubbed books earn authors more money, and with the genre bestsellers they sell more copies than the books you publish. I'd guess the long tail will concur, but we'll know when that data comes out.

Legacy John: Well, we can always lower prices. Then we'll outsell indies and make it up in quantity.

Joe: Do you really think if you lower your prices from $7.00 to $3.25 your sales will triple in volume?

Legacy John: It could happen.

Joe: Then why haven't you done this sooner?

Legacy John: We've lowered prices on select titles.

Joe: And those titles are no doubt included in this data. Know what I think? I think if you lower prices, you'll gain a bit in volume, but not enough to overcome the overall loss of income. On a $3.25 legacy book, the author only earns $0.41.

Legacy John: Why do you keep bringing up how much the author earns?

Joe: Wrong question. The question is, "Why don't you care how much the author earns?"

Legacy John: Look, we do more than simply push a button to publish books. We edit, provide art, proofread…

Joe: Self-pubbed writers can hire professionals to do that. For sunk, fixed costs that don't require giving up royalties for the term of copyright (death plus seventy years.)

Legacy John: We have whole divisions devoted to marketing, advertising, and publicity…

Joe: How do you advertise ebooks?

Legacy John: Excuse me?

Joe: I know you spend a lot of money on Amazon. According to the New Yorker, you have to give Amazon a percentage of your annual gross sales, from 5%-7%. That's what you pay for various Amazon promotions, right?

Self-pubbed authors pay Amazon nothing, and those in KDP Select get Countdown Deals and free days. Amazon-published authors also get these services (email campaigns, Kindle Daily Deal, Gold Box, banner ads, etc.) for free, and A-Pub pays a minimum of 35% royalties off list compared to your 12.5%. Do the promotional fees you pay Amazon come from your royalties, or off the gross so the authors have to bear the expense too?

Legacy John: Huh? I… uh…

Joe: As a self-pubbed author who made $1M last year, I paid about $10k in various promotions. About 1% of my income. Sounds like you're paying quite a bit to sell as well as you're selling. And that doesn't even include all the money you must spend through your marketing, advertising, and publicity divisions that do… what exactly do they do for your average author?

Legacy John: Well, we do print ads.

Joe: Uh-huh. How effective are those?

Legacy John: We're not really sure. And we've never tried to figure it out. 

Joe: Sounds smart.

Legacy John: We also get reviews.

Joe: I have 10,000 reader reviews on Amazon.

Legacy John: And we... we give away galleys and advance reading copies! Yeah! Because print is still 70% - 75% of the business, haven't you heard?

Joe: I've heard. But I've found that data to be lacking because it doesn't account for Amazon and the shadow industry of self-pubbing. 

Legacy John: Well, the data is true. It certainly is. Maybe self-pubbed ebooks cost less, and outsell our ebooks, and earn the author more, but the big money is still in paper.

Joe: Really? Let's look at some more data.

Hugh: Instead of feeling any sort of confirmation bias, my immediate reaction was to reject these findings. Surely they weren’t accurate. And so I complained to our magical data snoop that we were only looking at e-book sales. What percentage of the overall reading market does this represent? Our data guru said this was a question we could easily answer. You won’t believe what he found.

Everything You Know About E-Books is Wrong

The experts? They have no idea. It’s not entirely their fault; it’s just that the data they’re working with is fundamentally flawed.

You may have heard from other reports that e-books account for roughly 25% of overall book sales. But this figure is based only on sales reported by major publishers. E-book distributors like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the iBookstore, and Google Play don’t reveal their sales data. That means that self-published e-books are not counted in that 25%.

Neither are small presses, e-only presses, or Amazon’s publishing imprints. This would be like the Cookie Council seeking a report on global cookie sales and polling a handful of Girl Scout troops for the answer—then announcing that 25% of worldwide cookie sales are Thin Mints. But this is wrong. They’re just looking at Girl Scout cookies, and even then only a handful of troops. Every pronouncement about e-book adoption is flawed for the same reason. It’s looking at only a small corner of a much bigger picture. (It’s worth noting that our own report is also limited in that it’s looking only at Amazon—chosen for being the largest book retailer in the world—but we acknowledge and state this limitation, and we plan on releasing broader reports in the future.)

There’s a second and equally important reason to doubt a 25% e-book penetration number: The other 75% of those titles includes textbooks, academic books, cookbooks, children’s books, and all the many categories that are relatively safe from digitization (for now). Print remains healthy in these categories, but these aren’t the books most people think of when they hear that percentage quoted. E-book market share is generally spoken of in the context of the New York Times bestsellers, the novels and non-fiction works that are referred to as “trade” publications. If we look specifically at this trade market, it’s quite likely that e-books already account for more than 50% of current sales (some publishers have intimated as much [link]). Factoring in self-publishing and further limiting the scope to fiction, I’ve seen guesses as high as 70%. But that can’t be possible, right?

I asked our data guru if we could find out. Could we look at the bestseller lists and tally by format? Of course, we would be looking only at Amazon, which might skew toward e-books—but to reiterate, we are looking at the largest bookseller in the world, digital or print. To do a first study of this sort on a smaller distributor would be less than ideal. Still, keep this caveat in mind.

We analyzed the overall Amazon bestseller lists for several categories and used the web spider to grab the text description of format type: paperback, hardback, e-book, or audiobook. This is what we found:

Did the smelling salts work? Are you with us? It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100 best-selling books in these genres are e-books!

I know, right? Allow that to soak in for a moment, and then let’s look at author earnings. Here, we will see that publishers should cross their fingers and hope that the share of e-book sales increases rather than flattens. Because they are doing quite well on the backs of their authors. Major publishers are taking in record profits [link], but they aren’t the big winners to emerge from this report. Read on. The real story of self-publishing is up next.

Joe: Hmm. That kinda blows your "paper accounts for 75% of sales" theory all to hell.

Legacy John: That doesn't count all paper sales! That data is just looking at Amazon, not B&N or libraries or other places paper books are sold.

Joe: Last year Bowker estimated that online retail accounts for almost half of total book sales, and that 30% of that was ebooks. Now, I don't know where they got their data, because Amazon doesn't reveal it. But according to Hugh's data, of the Top 2500 bestsellers, only 5% sold on Amazon were paper.

I'm no math whiz, but your paper sales must be astronomical outside of Amazon. If that's the case, you certainly have nothing to worry about. Your robust paper industry will no doubt endure forever.

Or at least until B&N closes. I heard they just fired a lot of their Nook engineers. But that probably doesn't mean anything…

Hugh: Writing Doesn’t Pay?

This is a story that has been sensed by many. The clues are all around us, but the full picture proves elusive. It is being told in anecdotes on online forums, in private Facebook groups, at publishing conventions, and in the comment sections of industry articles. Authors are claiming to be making more money now with self-publishing than they made in decades with traditional publishers, often with the same books [link]. I’ve personally heard from nearly a thousand authors who are making hundreds of dollars a month with their self-published works. I know many who are making thousands a month, even a few who are making hundreds of thousands a month. But these extreme outliers interest me far less than the mid-list authors who are now paying a bill or two from their writing.

My interest in this story began the moment I became an outlier. When major media outlets began asking for interviews, my first thought was that they were burying the lead. My life had truly changed months prior, when I’d first started making dribs and drabs here and there. And I knew this was happening for more and more writers every day. But that inspiring story was being buried by headlines about those whose luck was especially outsized (as mine has been).

Before we reveal the next results of our study, keep in mind that self-publishing is not a gold rush. It isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. There are no short cuts, just a lot of effort and a lot of luck. Those who do well often work ludicrous hours in order to publish several books a year. They do this while working day jobs until they no longer need day jobs. This is also true of the writers earning hundreds or even thousands a month. Please keep this in mind. The beauty of self-publishing is the ownership and control of one’s work. You can price it right, hire the editor and cover artist you want to work with, release as often and in as many genres as you want, give books away, and enjoy a direct relationship with your reader. It isn’t for everyone, but you’re about to see a good reason why more authors might want to consider this as an option.

Here is what our data guru found when he used sales per ranking data⁵ and applied it to the top 7,000 bestselling genre works on Amazon today:

Looks good for the Big Five, doesn’t it? When it comes to gross dollar sales, they take half the pie. Remember, they only account for a little over a quarter of the unit sales. Also keep in mind that they only have to pay 25% of net revenue to the author. By contrast, self-published authors on Amazon’s platform keep 70% of the total purchase price.⁶  Let’s now look at revenue from the author’s perspective:

It’s a complete inversion. Indie authors are earning nearly half the total author revenue from genre fiction sales on Amazon. Nearly half. This next chart reveals why:

Blue represents the author. You can clearly see that for Big-Five published works, the publisher makes more than twice what the author makes for the sale of an e-book. Keep in mind that the profit margins for publishers are better on e-books than they are on hardbacks [link]. That means the author gets a smaller cut while the publisher takes a larger share. This, despite the fact that e-books do not require printing, warehousing, or shipping. As a result, self-published authors as a group are making 50% more profit than their traditionally published counterparts, even though their books have only half the gross sales revenue.

Before we move on, take another long look at this chart. Here you find everything that needs to change in the publishing industry. Readers and writers alike should take note.

A quick note on how we calculated author earnings for the Big Five publishers in the above graphs. These numbers are based on estimates of wholesale pricing for e-books (publisher’s net was modeled as 80% of Amazon price). That estimate could be off by 10% either way, but even if we adjusted it to assume a wholesale price of 120% of retail (which would mean Amazon is taking a loss on every traditionally published e-book sold), indie authors would still come out on top. Also interesting is the observation that for the top-selling genres, Amazon is currently making nearly as much profit from indie e-books as from Big Five e-books.⁷

It’s also worth keeping in mind that this graph ignores the long tail of publishing. We’re just looking at the top 7,000 genre e-books. This represents the most popular offerings from both self-published authors and their traditionally published counterparts, which makes it an extremely fair comparison. Other surveys have compared all self-published works to only those in the traditional route that made it past agents and editors. That is, they compared the top 1% of traditionally published titles to the entirety of self-published works. Looking at bestselling charts avoids that mistake. Here we have 7,000 e-books as they are selling on any given day, which also serves to move the discussion away from misleading outliers and into the more interesting midlist. Now let’s see how Uncle Sam feels about all of this.

Tax Brackets

We’ve seen that self-published authors are earning more money from genre e-books than traditionally published authors. But how much more? The next thing we wanted to do was estimate yearly e-book earnings for all of these authors based on their daily Amazon sales. We ran this report and put each author into one of seven income brackets. The results, again, were startling:

Indie authors outnumber traditionally published authors in every earnings bracket but one, and the difference increases as you leave the highest-paid outliers. But even these extreme outliers are doing better with their self-published works. The scale is difficult to see, but the breakdown of authors earning in the seven figures is: 10 indie authors, 8 Amazon-published authors, and 9 authors published by the Big Five. The much higher royalties and other advantages, such as price, seem to counterbalance the experience and marketing muscle that traditional publishers wield. This is something many have suspected to be true, but which now can be confirmed.

Of course, we still doubted this even after seeing the results. Our first thought was that top self-published authors can put out more than one work a year, while Big Five authors are limited by non-compete clauses and a legacy publishing cycle to a single novel over that same span of time. Indie authors are most likely earning more simply because they have more books for sale. Was this skewing our results? We ran another report to find out, and to our surprise, it turns out that only the handful of extreme earners have this advantage. Most self-published authors are, on average, earning more money on fewer books:

This suggests that the earnings discrepancy will grow greater over time, as self-published authors develop deeper catalogs. We hope to answer questions like this as we run reports every quarter to track shifting trends. For now, the full data set for this study has been anonymized by removing the title and author info, and is available for download below this report. By tweaking the values in the yellow areas of the spreadsheet, you are able to play around with the data yourself. Our aim here is complete openness and to invite community discourse. It is also worth remembering that all of our base data comes from publicly perusable bestseller charts, so there’s an added layer of transparency and reproducibility. The information was there all along; grabbing a useful quantity of it simply required someone like my co-author to come along and snag it.

Joe: So remind me again why I should take a legacy deal?

Legacy John: We, uh... we nuture.

Joe: Nurture how? With unconscionable contract terms?

Legacy John: This data could be entirely incorrect. We don't know exactly how it was acquired. No one knows how much we're actually making. There are other polls and surveys that show quite the opposite is happening.

Joe: Those polls and surveys don't include Amazon, where many authors, both legacy and self-pubbed, make the majority of their income. By the looks of these numbers, authors are much better off avoiding legacy publishers such as yourself. So I ask you, what do you have to offer authors? I'm guessing your paper sales don't account for much for the majority of authors you have under contract. The services you provide can be hired out for a one-time fee. The massive amounts you pay Amazon for marketing don't seem to have much effect compared to the tiny amounts the average indie author spends on marketing. Your royalties, and contracts, suck wheelbarrows full of ass.

Hugh Howey and his programming guru friend have just turned a bright light on the shadow industry of self-publishing, and revealed that the legacy industry is in Big Fucking Trouble.

 Legacy John: Neener neener neener! My fingers are in my ears and I'm not listening!

Joe: You never did. I've been telling you this shit for years. Does this sound familiar?

Publishers should stop trying to convince themselves and others that they're relevant, and start actually being relevant. Here's how:

1. Offer much better royalties to authors.

2. Release titles faster. It can take 18 months after a book is turned in to be published. I can do it myself in a week.

3. Use up-to-date accounting methods that are trackable by the author, and pay royalties monthly.

4. Lower ebook prices.

5. Stop futilely fighting piracy. Hint: all such fighting is futile. Piracy can only be made redundant with cost and convenience.

6. Start marketing effectively. Ads and catalog copy aren't enough. Neither is your imprint's Twitter feed. Especially if your author has more Twitter followers than you do.

That was from a post of mine from 2011. You've had years to figure this out.

Instead you spent those years colluding with each other, screwing authors, and thinking you were the invincible masters of your domain.

Oops.

Hugh: An Easier Choice?

Choosing which way to publish is becoming a difficult choice for the modern author. This choice has only grown more challenging as options have expanded and as conflicting reports have emerged on how much or how little writers can expect to make. Our contention is that many of these reports are flawed, both by the self-selected surveys they employ, the sources for these surveys, and, occasionally, the biases in their interpretation. Our fear is that authors are selling themselves short and making poor decisions based on poor data. That is the main purpose for fighting for earnings transparency: helping aspiring writers choose the path that’s best for them. A secondary goal is to pressure publishers to more fairly distribute a new and lucrative source of income. Operating in lockstep in offering authors only 25% of net is not just unfair but unsustainable, as more and more authors are going to jump to self-publishing.

Of course, self-publishing isn’t for everyone. There is no absolute right or wrong way to publish; the path taken depends entirely on what each author wishes to put into their career and what they hope to get out of it. But as marketing falls more and more to the writer, and as self-published authors close the quality gap by employing freelance editors and skilled cover artists, the earnings comparison in our study suggests a controversial conclusion: Genre writers are financially better off self-publishing, no matter the potential of their manuscripts.

Consider the three rough possibilities for an unpublished work of genre fiction:

The first possibility is that the work isn’t good. The author cannot know this with any certainty, and neither can an editor, agent, or spouse. Only the readers as a great collective truly know. But what we may simplistically, and perhaps cruelly, call a “bad” manuscript stands only a slim chance of getting past an agent and then an editor. To the author, these works are better off self-published on the open market. They will most likely disappear, never to be widely read. But at least they stand a chance. And those who fear that these titles will crowd out other books are ignoring the vast quantities of books published traditionally—or the fact that billions of self-published blogs and websites don’t impede our ability to browse the internet, to find what we are looking for, or to share discovered gems with others.

The second possibility for a manuscript is that it’s merely average. An average manuscript might get lucky and find an agent. It might get lucky a second time and fall into the lap of the right editor at the right publishing house. But probably not. Most average manuscripts don’t get published at all. Those that do sit spine-out on dwindling bookstore shelves for a few months and are then returned to the publisher and go out of print. The author doesn’t earn out the advance and is dropped. The industry is littered with such tales. Our data shows quite conclusively that mid-list titles earn more for self-published authors than they do for the traditionally published. And the advantage grows as the yearly income bracket decreases (that is, as we move away from the outliers). It is also worth noting again that self-published authors are earning more money on fewer titles. Our data supports a truth that I keep running into over and over, however anecdotally: More writers today are paying bills with their craft than at any other time in human history.

The third and final possibility is that the manuscript in question is great. A home run. The kind of story that goes viral. (Some might call these manuscripts “first class,” but designations of class are rather offensive, aren’t they?) When recognized by publishing experts (which is far from a guarantee), these manuscripts are snapped up by agents and go to auction with publishers. They command six- and seven-figure advances. The works are heavily promoted, and if the author is one in a million, they make a career out of their craft and go on to publish a dozen or more bestselling novels in their lifetime. You can practically name all of these contemporary authors without pausing for a breath. We all like to think our manuscript is one of these. And from this hubris comes a fatal decision not to self-publish.

Why is that decision fatal? Our data suggests that even stellar manuscripts are better off self-published. These outlier authors are already doing better via self-publishing, when compared one to one. Now consider that the authors with the greatest draw, the most experience, and possibly the best abilities, are not yet a part of the self-publishing pool. What will our graphs look like once more up-and-coming authors skip straight to self-publishing? What will they look like when self-published authors have a decade or more of experience under their belts? What about when more authors win back the rights to their backlists? Or when top traditionally published authors decide to self-publish, as artists in other fields are doing? [link] [link] [link] What will these graphs look like then? We look forward to finding out.

Joe: I love it that Hugh posed these questions already knowing what the answers will be.

Legacy John: Are the answers that gatekeepers are going to continue to reign?

Joe: I don't think so.

Legacy John: So... what do indie authors pay freelance editors? Do you give them $70k a year, a 401k, an office in Manhattan, and an unlimited expense account?

Joe: No, we don't. But if you send me a two page query letter, detailing your experience, I'll try to respond within 6-12 months. And don't forget that SASE.

Hugh: Final Thoughts

What is presented here is but one snapshot of the publishing revolution as it stands today. That revolution isn’t over. These reports can be run so long as books are ranked. Our hope is that the future brings more transparency, not less. Other artistic endeavors have far greater data at hand, and practitioners of those arts and those who aspire to follow in their footsteps are able to make better-informed decisions. The expectations of these artists and athletes are couched in realism to a degree that the writing profession does not currently enjoy.

Our ambitious goal is to help change that, but we can’t do it alone. And so we hope others will run their own reports and analyze our data. We hope they will share what they find and that this will foster greater discourse. We also hope publishers and distributors will begin sharing their sales figures. We expect many to disagree with our analysis. We expect flaws will be found in our reasoning and our sampling methodologies. Discovering those flaws will lead to better data, and we look forward to that process.

If I had to guess what the future holds, I would say that the world of literature has its brightest days still ahead. That we have come so far in such a short period of time is revealing. We take for granted changes in other mediums—the absence of that tall rack of CDs beside home stereos, the dwindling number of people who watch live TV, that missing thrill of opening a paper envelope full of printed photos. There will be casualties in the publishing industry as the delivery mechanisms for stories undergo change. There already have been casualties. But there are opportunities as well. And right now, the benefits are moving to the reader and the writer. Speaking as both of these, I count this a good thing. I marvel that there are so many who fight for higher prices for consumers and lower pay for authors, all to protect a legacy model. That model needs to change.

Publishers can foster that change by further lowering the prices of their e-books. The record margins they’re currently earning are certainly seductive, but taking advantage of authors is not a sustainable business model. Hollywood studios had to capitulate to their writers when a new digital stream emerged. Publishers will likewise need to pay authors a fair share of the proceeds for e-book sales. 50% of net for every author is a good start. If they do this, they will stop losing quality manuscripts, back catalogs, and top talent. If publishers nurture their authors and work hard to satisfy their customers, they will see those average ratings go up and sales increase. They will see more people spending time with a book rather than on a video game or on the internet. And then the entire publishing industry, as well as those who love to read and those who hope to write for a living, will benefit.

Joe sez:  In 2011 I wrote a blog called The End of the Bestseller. I said:

The Big 6 can't publish ebooks priced low enough to compete with me. They have fancy NY offices, lots of employees with benefits and expense accounts, and a whole industry to support.


With print, they know how to create a bestseller. They buy it.
They buy the real estate. They buy the advertising. They buy the discounts.
But in an ebook world, their money offers no advantage. They can't get more shelf space or a longer shelf life than I can, and they can't discount for less than I can.

The stranglehold NY publishing has had on the US, forcing people to read what they decide to make available, is loosening up. When given a choice, readers will buy books other than those vetted by NY. The Kindle bestseller lists prove this. My sales prove this.

And now, Hugh's data proves this.

If legacy publishers drop their ebook prices, I don't think they'll see a proportional rise in sales to make up for the lower price. Which means legacy publishers, and their authors, will be earning even less. And I doubt publishers will ever do this, because they'd be cannibalizing their paper sales even more, and paper sales are all their only monopoly.

If legacy publishers offer authors higher royalties, they won't be able to support their infrastructure, and authors still won't be earning as much as they do by self-pubbing.

The power has shifted. Gatekeepers aren't in charge anymore. Authors are. And authors can now reap the rewards the gatekeepers used to reap—a higher share of the profits.

No matter how you publish, it's still a lottery. I knew this back before the Kindle came out, and the Kindle didn't change anything. You have to get lucky in order to find readers.

But now there are no barriers to entry. It's a level playing field. You don't need to hope some gatekeeper recognizes your potential, and then hope they do a good job publishing you while they keep your rights forever under terrible contract terms and shitty royalties.

You don't have to let someone else gamble with your money. You can do it yourself. And this data proves that many authors are doing it themselves, and succeeding.

What path you choose is up to you. But one choice gives you full control, and the other takes all of your control away, without—according to these numbers—any benefit at all.

Legacy John: But you don't understand! We've been in business for decades! We know what the readers want! You can't do this without us!

Joe: We just did. 


Addendum Deux

The authorearnings.com website is now up and running again.


Even if you've read the info here, I encourage everyone to visit authorearnings.com and take the Author Survey and sign the Petition.

The New Role of Gatekeepers

I saw the following quote in the comments section of a blog:

Instead of keeping writers out, now the gatekeepers are desperately trying to keep writers in.

This struck me as such a wonderfully succinct and correct take on this situation that I wish I'd said it.

Recently there have been a spate of gatekeepers who have publicly posted their views on self-publishing. This is a relatively new phenomenon.

It's not that gatekeepers and those who benefit hugely from legacy publishing haven't voiced their concerns before. The leaked Hachette memo was a classic case of a publisher trying to convince itself it was still relevant. James Patterson's NYT ad  was a love letter to the gate keepers. Agent Richard Curtis didn't believe authors should self-publish. And Authors Guild President Scott Turow has said so many stupid things during his reign that fisking him has almost become a fulltime job.

But when Kensington CEO Steve Zacharius makes himself available for discourse, and big name agents like Robert Gottlieb, Donald Maass, and David Gernert make public statements about self-publishing, I can't help but speculate why they've finally come down off their thrones--after years of silence--to address the peasants they've lorded over for so long.

I believe it's fear.

I've tried to imagine the mindset of a gatekeeper. For decades, they were the king makers. All authors who wanted to reach readers had to get their approval and endorsement. We've all heard how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone with the power to make dreams come true. The legions who vie for your approval and sing your praises. The feeling of gratification when you sell an author's work, and of vindication when a book you represented becomes a big bestseller.

How can you not begin to buy into your own importance? Believe your own hype? Tens of thousands want to work with you, hundreds love you, everyone shows you respect.

Then, suddenly, you aren't necessary anymore. You're optional, not essential. And while the option of legacy publishing can provide some lucrative benefits (print distribution, major reviews, tours, publicity, possible bestsellardom) it also comes at a high cost that many forward-thinking authors don't want to pay.

So you find yourself defending your way of doing things, which has to be pretty shocking. Even more surprising, you have to contend with people who believe you're the bad guy.

How easy would it be to believe you were a force of good in the world, and it turns out the group you thought you were helping in fact were abused, exploited, and hated the experience?

Could anyone's ego accept that?

I think it would be difficult. So instead of accepting it, the old guard is rejecting it and clinging to the old way of doing things. Of course you would try to argue you've been right all along, that the old way is still relevant.

But your arguments suck. How can you defend against a free market system that evens the playing field and removes barriers to entry? How can you compete with 70% royalties and total author control? How can you justify your continued existence in an ecosystem where you're no longer needed, and more and more authors are realizing this?

First, you ignore it. Then you denigrate it. Then you begrudgingly accept parts of it, while publicly promoting your stance in order to sway those who don't know any better. You openly support those going down on the same sinking ship you are. Hey, we're still a billion dollar industry! We've always been here, and we always will be! The threat to our livelihood is greatly exaggerated!

Yet not a single gatekeeper can answer the simple question: Why do you think authors will keep submitting manuscripts to you, especially in the numbers you'll need to survive?

You do still have something potentially valuable to offer. And some authors still want that. But the cost you demand is high, and the risk is great. The industry is changing faster than you think, because the ways you measure success don't apply to the shadow industry of self-publishing. You don't know how much you're actually losing. You really believe things can remain the same in the midst of a tech takeover and an author revolution.

And it is, indeed, a revolution. We are witnessing a fundamental change in power.

The publishers and agents once controlled the industry. That was a classic seller's market. There was a limited supply of publishing slots, and a seemingly unlimited number of books to fill those slots. Publishers had a monopoly on distribution, so they could pick and choose the books that reached readers.

But it is now a buyer's market. Authors can choose to sign with publishers, or they can reach readers on their own. And readers have more choice than ever, not simply what the gatekeepers chose. Publishers went from being the only game in town, to having to justify their existence. They've gone from being the popular kid that everyone wants to befriend, to the unpopular kid who is losing friends by the thousands and desperately wants to keep the few they have left.

The friends they do have left are important. Big bestsellers. Prestigious award winners. Big brands with big platforms, like Turow and Patterson and Russo, who can command media attention and preach their path to success to newbies.

But this is a house of cards.

I see three insurmountable hurdles that legacy publishers are now facing.

1. More and more readers adopting ebooks.
2. More and more bookstores closing.
3. More and more authors leaving the legacy industry to self-publish.

Any of these three would be deadly. All three at once is catastrophic. But hurdles #1 and #3 are particularly deadly because:

Self-publishing is a shadow industry. 

There are no accurate surveys or polls to show how big it is, or how fast it is being adopted. Apologetics like Mike Shatkin downplay the threat. Perhaps some of it is denial, but I get the impression that many in the legacy industry are truly unaware of the breadth and scope of what is happening. It's like the old joke about the guy who was completely healthy until the day he dropped dead. There was a reason he dropped dead; he wasn't paying enough attention to his symptoms. Perhaps he'd been too distracted to notice them. Or maybe he didn't feel they were serious. But those symptoms were there, warning him he was going to die. He just didn't act when he should have.

If the legacy industry is whistling past the graveyard, or denying the threat, or simply doesn't see there is a threat, they won't be able to weather the revolution. Those that do will have no choice but to offer authors better terms, and allow authors greater power. Because authors once needed publishers, and now they don't. When you're no longer needed, you better make a damn compelling argument as to why authors should sign with you. And so far, I haven't seen any compelling arguments.

On a semi-related note, I've seen some remarks on Twitter recently, and just read an interesting post on Jim C. Hines's blog, that seem to believe this is an "us vs. them" pissing contest between self-publishers and legacy publishers. I'm not going to rehash it because I left several comments there, and I encourage writers to check it out.

What I'd like to see happen is for authors to make informed decisions while deciding whatever path they choose. That means learning as much as they can, setting appropriate goals, experimenting, discovering things for themselves, sharing information, and deliberately picking what is best for them.

We now have a choice on how we reach readers. Prior to self-publishing, there was no choice.

When gatekeepers spout nonsense to defend their way of doing business, some writers will agree with that nonsense because they aren't looking at it too closely, or because they want to curry favor with the gatekeeper, or because it aligns with their entrenched beliefs.

That can't last. Not as long as authors talk to one another.

When I blog about the bullshit that the legacy industry endorses, I do so to show how poor their arguments, data, beliefs, and contract terms are. The fact that bigshot legacy insiders are now speaking on public forums to voice their bullshit opinions about self-publishing is extremely telling.

But here's a question to ask: Why aren't any of these gatekeepers fisking me?

If they've committed the time to publicly state their positions. Why aren't they taking the time to dismantle my points, one by one, like I do so often with them?

I have an open invitation on this blog to allow any industry gatekeeper a chance to respond to me.

I've gotten no responses. Even though I'm 100% sure they're reading this.

Why the silence? If I'm full of shit, why not say so?

Can someone show me a single, compelling argument why the Big 5 are still necessary?

Anyone?

Fisking Donald Maass

Ah, class warfare. The royals vs. the peasants. The bourgeoisie vs. the proletariat. The establishment vs. the revolutionaries. The haves vs. the have-nots.

The gatekeepers spouting bullshit vs. the new breed of writers calling them on their bullshit.

I present literary agent Donald Maass from Writer Unboxed, author of Writing the Breakout Novel, currently $9.99 on Kindle and ranked at #25,065. 

Thank you, Mr. Maass, for posting your BS publicly so I may dissect it, line by line, exposing it for the utter crap that it is. Then after I wrote my responses, I asked Barry Eisler for his take.

Here's Donald... 

Donald: This month in keeping with our look inside publishing, I’m departing from my usual craft advice to give you my view of the new state of the industry.

I don’t see the new shape of things as many do: the twilight of the dinosaurs, the old-thinking Big Five print publishers staggering, falling to their knees and heading for extinction as they’re overwhelmed by a nimble army of small, warm-blooded mammals whose claws are the sharp, smart, flexible tools of electronic publishing.

Joe: I understand why you don't see the new shape of things, Donald. Neither did those in the travel industry. Or the music industry. Or the film camera industry. Or the network TV industry. 

Isn't is interesting how these billion dollar industries, when confronted with Expedia and Orbitz and Priceline (sorry Travel Agents)  and iTunes and Napster (sorry Record Company Executives) and digital photography (sorry Kodak and Polaroid) and cable TV, Netflix, and YouTube (sorry ABC, NBC, and CBS) also felt they had nothing to fear, until their market share evaporated before their eyes?

Within the past few years, one of the two major book chains disappeared, the Big 6 became the Big 5, the DOJ brought suit against many of the companies you regularly do business with (and the AAR stupidly defended), and ebooks have gone from idea to the increasingly preferable way readers buy media thanks to a new company that revolutionized the way books are sold.

But you don't have to see the new shape of things. You don't have to see the thousands of authors making more money than they ever could in the antiquated, archaic system you're attempting to defend. It isn't necessary for you, Donald, to recognize change. Change happens anyway.

Donald: It’s true that I’m a gatekeeper, a longtime member (to my surprise) of the industry establishment. But I am no worshiper of the old ways. Traditional publishing always was cost-heavy and inefficient. It’s a wonder that it worked. But the new electronic “paradigm” is not the glorious revolution that true believers would like it to be.

Joe: Well, you're right that it worked for publishers, and agents, and a few authors lucky enough to become bestsellers.

But for those countless midlist authors stuck with unconscionable contracts because they had no choice, and the multitude of authors kept out of the industry by gatekeepers such as yourself, it didn't work. It actually sucked wheelbarrows full of ass.

Your industry fucked the majority of writers it provided services for. And that same industry was built on the sweat, tears, toil, and blood of those very writers it exploited.

Have you actually ever listened to your clients' complaints? (Hint: Your clients are supposed to be the writers you represent. You know, the ones you sell your How To books to, giving them hope that they might someday, if they're lucky enough, follow the gatekeeper rules and get a shitty contract. You know the ones. They're the herd you describe below.)

I've never been a true believer in anything. I like data, and numbers, and facts, and persuasive arguments. I like experiments. I like logic. 

I like making money from my hard work.

And I've found that self-publishing gives me the opportunity to make more money than I ever did within the gatekeeping system. 

And I'm not the only one who knows this. Because others have data, numbers, facts, logic, experiments, and persuasive arguments to support them.

But why start listening to authors? They have their place. They're a lower caste, and only a few are appointed by the holy order of gatekeepers to take their place at the Publishing Industry Table, where they can make 8% royalty on mass market paperbacks. 

Donald: What’s happened instead is an evolution of the publishing world into a new class system, and like any class system it has winners, losers and opportunities. It’s a system that, if not recognized for what it is, will trap frustrated writers in a pit far more hopeless than the one they yearned to escape. Let’s start with a couple of cold-eyed realities.

Barry: Well, at least he’s recognizing that there’s a class system at work, even if he’s not able to see, or admit, who up until now have really been the lords and who have really been the serfs. I’m not sure this is progress.

Joe: It isn't.

Donald: First, e-books have not hurt the print publishers but rather have helped them. Especially in the recent recession, low-cost/high-margin e-books have been a bright spot. They’ve kept publishers profitable even as brick-and-mortar book retailing has shrunk and consumers have grown cautious. With the mass-market paperback pricing itself nearly out of existence, low-priced e-books have arrived (with help from the Department of Justice) to keep value-conscious readers reading. Of course, the difficult and expensive business of selling print books must still be faced but at least there’s some gravy to make the task tasty.

Joe: Indeed, ebooks have helped publishers. Even after the lame ass attempts at high prices and windowing and collusion.

Do you actually understand why ebooks have helped publishers, Donald?

Hint: Because publishers screwed the writers. Where were you when the lock-step 25% ebook royalties crept into author contracts? Are you currently fighting for better ebook royalties on behalf of your clients? Did you read my post ridiculing David Gernert for saying stupid things like you're currently saying?

Are authors an unlimited resource, like oil (ha!) to exploit for you and your industry? You continue to sell them books on how to succeed. You continue to do deals with the Big 5. It's easy to see what your agenda is.

My agenda? All of the information I provide, I give away for free. This blog is a public service to my peers. I don't take 15% for helping them. And I don't charge $9.99 for a Kindle book. Like your ebook Writing the Breakout Novel. Now, I may be missing something, but I don't see any breakout novels available on Amazon written by Donald Maass. But I'm sure your advice is good, even if you didn't take it yourself. After all, you've been so persuasive so far...

Donald: Second, the self-publishing movement has been a boon to the print industry. Far from being threatened, print publishers instead are now gratefully relieved of the money-losing burden of the mid-list. Like giant banks that have discovered that banking is boring and the real money is in gambling, big publishers are now free to focus on the high-risk/high-reward game of finding the next Twilight, Hunger Games, Game of Thrones or Fifty Shades of Grey.

Joe: Wow. Just wow.

Barry: He’s comparing legacy publishing behavior to the banking behavior that nearly destroyed the global economy? And he just described thousands of authors as a “burden” of which publishers are now “gratefully relieved.” Leaving aside the nomenclature, where will these authors go once their publishers have relieved themselves on — sorry, of — them?  Why doesn’t Maass want midlist authors to have options?

Joe: How many clients do you have, Donald? They're all huge bestsellers, right?

Wait... they're not? Do you actually represent (gasp!) some unwashed midlist writers?

Good to see you're in their corner, fighting on their behalf, rather than siding with the relieved publishers who no longer have to give your clients contracts.

Donald: Better still, because some authors are now—voluntarily!—willing to bear the expense and undertake the effort of building an audience by themselves, print publishers have the luxury of culling the prize cattle from the herd.

Barry: One unfortunate metaphor might be an accident.  Three begins to seem revealing

Joe: Ah, yes. All the dumb cattle, waiting to be culled from the herd.

I love this analogy because it perfectly encapsulates the unbelievable disdain you have for the writers that you parasitically leech off of to make your living. 

Of course, we all know the fortunately culled cattle get to retire to a long life of luxury and happiness.

Oh... wait. They're actually slaughtered, butchered, and eaten.

This is such an appropriate thing for you to say, and you are completely clueless why.

Donald: Even print-only distribution deals with a handful of successful e-published authors are terrific: easy pickings and effortless profit. Most authors are still knocking at the gate, too, since after all seventy percent of trade book sales are of print editions. In many ways these are good times for print publishers.

Joe: Have you spoken to those who got print-only deals, Donald?

I have. I've corresponded with many.

Here's an email I just got, name omitted to protect the victim.

"What I wanted to email you about, though, was how shitty this legacy publisher has been to me. I turned down a $1.5 million offer for my next books and became persona non grata. They stopped supporting the print version of the book they bought, just fulfilling orders by popular demand from bookstores, which still resulted in 1,000+ sales a week. They resent me, and they hope the book dies. It won't, because readers are demanding copies. I know another indie who did a major deal with them who can't wait for the contract to expire. These are evil fucks."

Donald, how can you actually believe that writers will continue to be culled? We talk to each other. We read each others' contracts. We know how much we can earn on our own.

And more and more of us believe the publishers you work for are, indeed, evil fucks.

You don't see the shape of things? Are you sitting in a corner with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears yelling "Neener neener neener!" so you don't see or hear what the rest of us do? 

Donald: Third, the self-publishing movement has produced gold-rush hysteria in the writing community. While not exactly a mass delusion, questionable beliefs have been widely accepted. True believers sneer at doubters. 

Joe: Great points. Can you show me?

Show me the mass delusion. I go to Kindleboards and see a lot of level-headed writers making money. Where are you looking?

Show me the questionable beliefs. Find something, anything, questionable that I've said. Or anything said by Barry Eisler, Courtney Milan, David Gaughran, Kris Rusch, Bob Mayer, or Dean Wesley Smith,.

Ebooks aren't a gold rush. I dispelled this years ago.

Gold is finite. Ebooks are forever.

Donald: So what is the real truth? High success at self-publishing has happened only for a few who have mastered the demanding business of online marketing. A larger, but still small, number of authors have achieved a modest replacement income from self-publishing. Growth from there will be hard for them, however, because wide print distribution still is needed. (Seventy percent of trade book sales are of print books, remember?)

Barry: Needed for what? This is the same argument Gottlieb made. These guys really seem to need to believe they’re necessities.

Joe: High success at self-publishing has happened only for a few?

As opposed to legacy publishing, right? Which is why every client you have is a #1 NYT Bestseller, and every author pubbed by legacy is rich.

A modest replacement income? How about actual money for the first time ever? Bill-paying money. Life-changing money. Full-time writing money.

I made $1 million last year, with no paper distribution. Why do these myths persist that writers need to be in print?

Perhaps so you can sell more How To books?

Perhaps so you can cull a few from the herd and make a killing while the others you rep get butchered?

Donald: As for the rest…well, the position of the vast majority of self-publishing authors is no better than it ever was, though probably there are fewer cartons of books in their garages. Consultancy to self-publishers is a new job category, however, and that has to be good for the nation’s employment stats.

Joe: You're apparently confusing vanity publishing with self-publishing.

Vanity is when you pay a disreputable service to print copies of your books, sell them at a high cost with terrible covers and editing, and let them keep the rights while receiving terrible royalties.

The only difference between predatory vanity publishing and Big 5 publishing is the author gets hurt a little more with vanity. Sort of like being beaten with a whip instead of beaten with a rod. 

Self-publishing is where authors keep their rights, control price, and get 70% royalties (instead of the 12.5% you get the majority of your authors). There's no beating involved. 

Did I clarify that for you?

Donald: Fourth, as I said, a new class system has arisen. Here’s how it breaks down:

Joe: Because the one thing this world needs is another way to divide classes of people based on subjective, prejudicial nonsense. 

Barry: Okay, let’s short-circuit this.  Leave aside Maass's obsession with dividing authors into classes, and his inability to see the real class distinction he is part of and supports: publishers and agents as royalty; writers as peasants. The real problem is with the analogy itself. Because when it comes to freight/coach/first, all that matters is whether you have the money to buy a ticket. But publishing is a lottery, not a sure-fire ticket you can buy if you just have enough money. Also, while there’s no reason to prefer coach to first class other than price, there are lots of reasons many authors seem to prefer self-publishing to legacy publishing — some because they’re making more money self-publishing, and others because they prefer the flexibility, control, and time-to-market. Something odd has to be going on in your mind if you miss differences this obvious and come up with analogies this incoherent.

Donald: Freight Class

Self-published authors and electronic micro-presses must haul themselves. While the means of production are easy and low-cost, the methods of marketing are costly either in terms of cash or time. Success is rare. The pleasure of being in control is offset by the frustration of “discoverability”.

Joe: I must interrupt the bullshit to point out, for the nth time, that this is EXACTLY THE SAME WITH LEGACY PUBLISHERS.

Success is always rare. That's why so few authors become bestsellers. And the frustration of discoverability is worse on a bookstore shelf when you have one book spine-out in section. At least on Amazon every author has their own page and can compete on an even playing field.

Donald: Online retailers are whimsical and ludicrously over-stocked, both barrier and open door. Lists, blogs, social sites and the like are plentiful but of only spotty help. Trusted filtering of self-published books may arise (watch the recent sale of Bookish to Zola, two recommendation sites started by—gasp!—publishers and agents) but don’t hold your breath. The real problem is that fiction at this level has trouble appealing widely to readers. It can sell when priced at $2.99, sometimes a bit more, often less.

Joe: There are over 100,000 books in a Barnes and Noble. Is that not ludicrously overstocked?

Donald, is it easier to search for books online using a mouse, or walk through aisles of paper books hoping they stock something that appeals to you?

Are you aware of the filtering systems known as customer reviews, bestseller lists, and also-boughts, that Amazon utilizes extremely well? 

As for appealing widely to readers... well, my sales increased by 800% when I got my rights back from my legacy publishers. And I work a lot less promoting now than I did when I was published by them.

Donald: Why? Let’s look at what characterizes Freight Class fiction. While the Kindle bookstore can be an incubator of innovative fiction, for the most part it is an ocean of genre imitations if not amateurish writing. Freight Class novels generally take few risks. Too often they rely on character stereotypes, heavy-handed plots, purple and obvious emotions, and messages and themes that are time-worn. Justice must be done. Love conquers all. Good vs. evil. Freight Class fiction can be easy to skim. Literary flourishes are few, cliffhangers are many. Genre conventions are rigidly honored. Characters are not motivated from within, for the most part, but instead are pushed into action by external plot circumstances.

Joe: First, I congratulate you on reading tens of thousands of self-pubbed genre novels to arrive at this conclusion. Kudos on being an objective arbitrator of quality. 

Second, anyone who has ever bought a legacy paperback they didn't like probably believes that those books relied on character stereotypes, heavy-handed plots, purple and obvious emotions, and messages that are time-worn. Which is why many bestselling legacy books have lower customer ratings than bestselling self-pubbed titles.

But what do readers know, with their subjective tastes? They aren't self-appointed gatekeepers like you are.

Donald: Coach Class

Here we find decently-written literary fiction and nicely-crafted commercial fiction that achieves print publication but sells best at trade-paperback level ($14.99 or so), or discounted in e-book form. Coach Class novelists support each other yet find it difficult to gain a foothold with the public. So-called “marketing” by their publishers is disappointing and, truthfully, can only do so much. Traditional tours (when they happen) accomplish little, front of store incentives are costly, and online marketing sometimes seems to consist of the hope that Amazon will do a price promotion. Coach Class authors, however, are professionally edited and get goodies like nice covers, ARC’s, and plenty of blurbs. Plus, their books are in bookstores, a big boost in visibility.

Barry: So far, Maass’s thinking exhibits two primary, and pretty obvious, flaws: one, he talks about the ideal of legacy publishing as though it were the widespread reality; two, he discusses challenges in self-publishing as though they don’t exist at least equally in the legacy world. In fairness, he’s not unusual in this regard.

Joe: Dammit, where will the herd of self-pubbed authors get nice covers, review copies, blurbs, and professional editing?

Oh yeah, we can outsource it. And we don't have to give the extra 57.5% ebook royalties to the publisher, forever, when they could be one-time sunk costs.  

But perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps I'm the only writer who ever got bad covers, zero blurbs, and lousy editing from my publishers. 

Am I? All you authors reading this, feel free to chime in.

Donald: What characterizes Coach Class fiction? Readable pages, appealing characters, clever premises, attention-grabbing plot hooks, a display of craft and art, emotional engagement, and themes that “resonate”…which is to say, that stir readers without greatly challenging them. Coach class fiction is less easy to skim. While characters can be motivated from within, their inner journeys can feel somewhat painless. Readers are “engaged” but don’t always feel deeply moved. Coach Class fiction sometimes borrows secondary characters from history or classics, retells other stories, or stretches into series that can become thin. Genre conventions may be borrowed or blended but essentially they are not violated. Coach Class is a moderately comfortable place to be, though one can feel stuck in one’s seat. Economy shocks can hurt.

Barry: I dunno. Some of this sounds like what Shakespeare did. Secondary characters from history and all that.

Joe: And this class of fiction is written by... wait for it...

Authors.

The same herd of authors who write ALL fiction in all of Maass's so-called classes.

Donald, every writer worth their salt realizes the benefits of a good editor. But we can find good editors on our own, and pay them hourly instead of forever. And it is writers who write the books, not editors. Show me a single editor who worked more on a book than the writer did, to warrant their huge royalty cut.

But you're already in a hole, so why stop digging?

Donald: First Class

The cream class gets a double shot of extended life in bookstores, both in hardcover and later in paper. Their books can sell well at $25 and live long in trade paper. For First Class authors, success looks effortless. Goodies accrue easily. Recognition is instant and wide. Sub-rights sell. Awards happen. Insulated from economy shocks, authors of this class never seem to worry about the industry. In interviews they talk only about their art and process. They mentor. Lines are long at BEA booth signings and readers are fiercely loyal.

Barry: It’s weird how he consistently talks about the price books sell for, not how much authors make from them.  Which I imagine is how publishers look at the world. Telling, that.

Joe: I had multiple printings. Then got my rights back, and made a shitload more money on my own.

If my "extended life in bookstores" continued much longer, I'd still be poor and depressed.

For every author mentored by the Big 5, thousands are bent over and abused. I had a longer signing line at BEA than James Patterson. It was flattering. I would have preferred his income. But, alas, I wasn't first class.

Barry: Yes, again, these guys never want to talk about the system’s losers. The whole thing is designed to hold out the winners as somehow the norm.

Donald: Why all that seemingly-effortless success? First Class fiction is characterized by memorable characters, unique premises, story worlds instantly real, plots that grip even when slow, gorgeous writing, and themes that surprise, challenge and change us. Not only do we read every word, First Class writing makes us whistle in admiration. Characters are not only likeable and self-aware, but also follow a singular destiny. First class novels shake our way of thinking, challenging us to see the world in new ways. They confidently break rules, may transport us to unlikely cultures and times, teach us things we knew little about, and always feel utterly unique. Each novel creates its own genre. First Class fiction is imitated but never matched. Its authors are revered and for good reasons.

Joe: Let us look at all the first class fiction currently on the NYT Bestseller List, and marvel at how it can be imitated but never matched.

Then let's come back to real life and understand that massive distribution is the reason for much bestseller success. 

I never got to compete with bestselling authors, because I never had their distribution.

Guess what happened when the playing field was leveled? Hint: I owe more in 2013 taxes than I made in five years of legacy royalties.

Donald: So, in which class are you? To which class do you aspire? Here’s the thing: In the real world, one’s class can be a prison. Politics plays in. The upper class can use its money to buy itself tax advantages, legal wizardry and gated communities that keep the rest out. Other classes stick together and stick with what they know. Revolution is rare, costs blood and doesn’t happen where minimal comforts are available.

In the world of publishing, though, it’s not like that. Authorship is a true meritocracy. (Sorry, it is.)

Joe: No, it isn't. Not even close. 

It's luck and visibility. It's hard work. Talent can play a part, but I know plenty of talented authors who got screwed, and plenty of authors with dubious talent who climbed to stardom. Apparently you haven't. But I bet if you opened your eyes, you'd see a few.

Barry: In a true meritocracy, luck would not be a factor. He’s describing what he wants to believe, not what remotely actually exists — not just in publishing, but anywhere in the world. I’d be curious to hear him name another “true meritocracy.” He can’t. There’s no such thing. Certainly not in publishing. In fact, he is now describing what is essentially a lottery as a meritocracy. This is a fascinating — and deeply dishonest — sales pitch: “Come one, come all, if you’re talented and work hard, you are guaranteed success!”

I don’t think he’s a deliberate huckster. I think he really believes these things, presumably because he badly wants to.

Donald: In publishing there is social mobility. As an author you can change your class, though of course it’s not always easy to do so. It takes education, time and effort. It means seeing yourself differently, having courage and violating the norms and expectations of your community. (One of the most common laments I hear is, “I got published…and lost a lot of my friends.”)

Barry: Think maybe he’s been reading too much Ayn Rand?

Also, have you ever heard of someone lamenting how he lost his friends when he got published? I haven’t. But maybe I hang out with the wrong class of cattle.

Joe: One of the most common laments I hear is, "How do I get my rights back?" 

Donald: Do things look different inside publishing today? Yes and no. There’s innovation all over the place but also for authors a picture more challenging than ever. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Inequality is vast. But change doesn’t require billionaire money buying elections. You don’t need a phony revolution. You can change your class by yourself, right at home, one keystroke at a time.

Barry: Sounds increasingly like the one percent blowing smoke at everyone else. “Yes, you plebes are worse off than ever and getting poorer every day, but why would anyone want to change a system where every now and then a miserably poor person gets to become one of the super wealthy first cream class?”

I’m not saying there are no winners — huge winners — in legacy publishing. I’m saying it’s dishonest (or, more charitably, delusional) to talk about the winners and not to talk about the losers. Or to otherwise pretend the winners are remotely the norm.

Joe: I've noticed some of the rich aren't getting as rich, and many are making more money than they ever did.

This isn't a phony revolution. This is an actual change of power. That power is going to where it should; to the people writing the goddamn words that support the entire industry.

Writers need a way to get their work in front of readers. In the past we had to go through gatekeepers like you.

Not anymore. Thankfully.

Donald: I’ve exaggerated the above for effect, obviously, but in a lot of ways that’s how the industry looks to me now. How does it look to you?

Joe: Honestly? It looks to me like you have an unearned sense of entitlement, and that you're frightened for your future so you spout nonsense to cover up for your obvious insecurity. You're deluded, or lying, or evil. But you aren't making sense.

Barry: Well, it looks at least in part populated by navel-gazing stuffed-shirt MOTU wannabes pontificating a slick line of bullshit to the underclass they’re concerned is starting to develop an unwelcome understanding of how the system really works, along with the tools to walk away from it — the underclass of which they pose as champions. Since you ask.

Joe: As a literary agent, you have an opportunity to help authors. Helping them doesn't mean selling them How To books. It doesn't mean genuflecting before the legacy industry that made you rich.

It means taking a hard look at what is actually happening, and acting accordingly.

You aren't doing either. You're spreading bullshit. And shame on you for it. I haven't read your How To books, Donald. But are you sure they don't belong in the fiction section? Because if they're anything like this nonsense I can't imagine them being helpful.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, way back in the 1990s when I was getting rejections for my writing, I did get one from the Donald Maass Lit Agency. Here it is:

So perhaps my overly harsh attitude is simply resentment toward the fact that Mr. Maass never culled me from the herd because I wasn't First Class, even though the book he rejected went on to earn me over $100,000.

But what really irks me is that this rejection letter hawks his book The Career Novelist. 

Maybe it's just me, but using SASEs as a way to advertise your How To book to authors you rejected seems, well, yucky. I wonder how many authors bought it, then wrote him back leading with, "I read your book, Mr. Maass, and followed it to the letter." How many of those authors went on to become career novelists?

As I said, I've always known publishing is a lottery. The harder you work, and the more you learn, the luckier you may get. Authorship isn't a meritocracy. But what do I know? I'm just a small, warm blooded mammal with sharp claws, grateful I have fur because it is getting awfully cold since that meteor hit.

Guest Post by Chris W. Martinez

On quivering Bambi legs, I step out into the world of self-publishing for the first time.

I have one novel, 18 Twitter followers, 78 Facebook followers, and about as many readers of my blog. Your aunt's uncompleted Google+ profile probably has a greater online presence than I do. And yet I am thrilled for the future.

Why? Not only because of my lunatic-gluing-magazine-cutouts-of-eyeballs-to-his-walls fervor for writing fiction, but because of the invaluable guidance and inspiration I've gotten from folks like Joe Konrath, Barry Eisler, and David Gaughran.

The generosity and openness of their advice is a refreshing (and fitting) contrast to the country-club exclusivity and impassivity of so much of the legacy publishing world.

A Rube Goldberg chain of events and circumstances brought me to Joe's blog as I worked on my first novel, SAVANT (now $2.99 on Kindle). Barry and I "met" in the comment section of journalist Glenn Greenwald's former blog at Salon. I was an avid commenter there, Barry let me know he enjoyed my political and legal observations, and we exchanged the occasional email.

I mentioned I was working on a book and he pointed me to some writing resources on his blog and Joe's. At this point, I had exactly zero knowledge of publishing; I was still just trying to get my head wrapped around completing an entire novel—one with, like, lots of chapters and characters and subplots and stuff.

The first time I visited Joe's blog, I read it into the night. His experiences and insights, delivered with refreshing honesty and bluntness, were profound revelations to me.

After reading all that, I barely had the stomach to query agents when the time finally came to publish my manuscript. Still, I coveted the sense of legitimacy, the Seal of Institutional Approval from all those literary big shots with Manhattan addresses. For a short while, at least.

I understand the importance of a good hook, but the query death march felt far bleaker than just distilling my full-length novel into a snappy pitch.

Before me towered a crumbling edifice, and at its portcullis I was commanded to obey every jot and tittle of Ye Olde Rules of Submission, whereupon the thing I had so lovingly crafted for years was tossed onto the Slush Pile, a vast lagoon of hopes and aspirations subject to milliseconds of judgment from jaundiced 20-somethings so overburdened with submissions that they could only take to Twitter every two minutes to preach to their thousands of writer followers that Thou Shalt Not Use This Type of Sentence Structure, or Why Hath Ye Proles Sent Me Yet Another Story of a Disfavoured Kind, or I Just Allowed an Author Through the Iron Gates and It Wasn't You TREMBLE BEFORE ME.

Ok, maybe it wasn't quite that dramatic, but you get my drift.

I think I made it through, at most, 20 queries before I decided I was wasting my time. After all, even if I did get an agent, this would likely mean several more months trying to get the attention of a publisher, all just to do 99% of the marketing myself, under unconscionable royalty percentages, nonsensical pricing, and restrictive contractual terms.

I abandoned the query process without a second thought, but still I felt intimidated by the prospect of self-publishing. Much of the appeal of latching onto an agent and a publishing house came from the promise they would hold my hand as I went through the daunting business of refining, packaging, and distributing my book for the first time.

But now, with so many resources out there for independent authors, instead of one hand holding mine through the process, I have a hundred.

Having made my decision, I returned to Joe's blog and reread the annals of his steady march toward independence. On Barry's suggestion, I read Be the Monkey for an added shot of courage and wisdom. Then I discovered David Gaughran and his indispensable Let's Get Digital guide, which I still consult daily.

Who knows, maybe if I had kept querying I would have gotten an agent eventually, and that agent would have gotten me a traditional publishing deal, finally granting me that glimmering Seal of Institutional Approval. I've always believed my novel is good enough for that, and I still do. But indie options, incentives, and support systems are strong enough now that even a neophyte like me has little reason to go through the nuisance of knocking on the clubhouse door for months on end, begging to be let in.

If not for folks like Joe, Barry, and David, I probably would have thought I had no other choice but to keep knocking. From the bottom of my heart, I thank them for the advice and encouragement they've so generously and openly shared so that other independent authors might flourish as greatly as they have.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to find that the champions of a more democratic approach to publishing are similarly egalitarian with their hard-earned knowledge and experience.

I shouldn't be surprised, but I truly am grateful.

Chris W. Martinez is an attorney by trade, but few things give him greater satisfaction and enjoyment than writing fiction. He recently released his debut novel, SAVANT, and looks forward to writing many more stories in the years to come.

chriswmartinez.com

Joe sez: Congratulations to Chris, and I wish him huge success.

Way back before the invention of the wheel, there weren't any blogs about publishing. Now there are many, and writers are sharing valuable information with each other on an unprecedented level. Talking numbers, posting data, and publicly making gatekeepers accountable has made it easier for writers seeking information to make informed decisions about their careers. 

So it's a good time to bring up some guidelines for newbie authors. If you're considering publishing (in its many forms) you might want to take the following into account.

1. Seek out as much information as you can. The more, the better.

2. Establish your goals. Goals are within your power. Dreams are not. Finishing your novel by May 3 is a goal. Getting an agent is a dream. If you dream about getting an agent, your goal could be to research ten agents by then end of April, send out ten query letters, and visit a writing conference to pitch to three agents in person. 

3. Weigh the information you find appropriately. Are the arguments well presented? Does the data support the arguments? Who is offering this information? Is it someone who is successful? What is their agenda? 

4. Adapt, experiment, and always be willing to change your mind.

5. Understand that luck is an essential part of success, no matter how smart, talented, and prepared you are.

There is no right way or wrong way. We all have our own paths to follow. But my money is on those who educate themselves, understand what they want, and work their asses off. 

I haven't met anyone who has had any degree of success without working their ass off. This is a marathon, not a sprint. But that doesn't mean you take it easy, or even pace yourself. It means you give it your all, and keep giving it your all, no matter how long it takes.

So get going. The world isn't waiting for you, and no one owes you a living. But ebooks are forever, and the sooner you start forever, the better off you'll do.