Konrath on Patterson Deux

James Patterson, in an unprecedented act of good will, is giving $1,000,000 to more than 50 indie bookstores.

It's a generous act.

It's also a misguided one.

Last year, Patterson committed another misguided act, buying an ad in the NYT asking who will save our books, our bookstores, and our libraries, and then suggesting the government needed to step in.

He was wrong, and I explained why in great detail.

I'm going to quote Patterson from the recent NYT article, and from things he said on NPR, and show why he's wrong once again.

Patterson: We're in a juncture right now where bookstores as we have known them are at risk. Libraries as we've known them are at risk, publishers are at risk, American literature is at risk, as we've known it, and getting kids reading is at risk.

Joe: I agree legacy bookstores are at risk. They're at risk because people are buying their books online, and in different formats than paper. That doesn't equate to books becoming extinct. It indicates a change in customer preference, both where people buy their reading material, and what format they buy it in.

Libraries, like Bibliotech in Texas, are able to directly meet the new demand. For the link-lazy, this is what Bibliotech is doing:

Mission:
Provide all Bexar County residents the opportunity to access technology and its applications for the purposes of enhancing education and literacy, promoting reading as recreation and equipping residents of our community with necessary tools to thrive as citizens of the 21st century.

Through BiblioTech, residents of Bexar County will be able to access over 10,000 current titles through e-readers that they can check out to take home or read on the premises.  Residents will also be able to use their own e-readers or tablets to access the collection.  

BiblioTech currently has 600 e-readers, 200 pre-loaded enhanced e-readers for children, 48 computer stations, 10 laptops and 40 tablets to use on-site.  Additional e-reading accommodations will be made for the visually impaired.  

Am I the only one who wants to live in Bexar County?

So, no, I don't believe libraries are at risk. Nor do I believe American literature is at risk. Books are written by authors, who are able to self-publish. More American literature is available to readers than ever before.

Patterson: (Via CBS Good Morning) If we don't have good publishers, who is going to find the next Infinite Jest or To Kill a Mockingbird?

Joe: The readers, Jim. You know, the ones who have embraced those books and made them bestsellers.

Patterson: The government has stepped in to help banks, automobiles, anything where money is concerned, but nobody seems to care about books and our bookstores. And I'm telling you, American literature is in jeopardy.

Joe: Jim, once again you're conflating brick and mortar bookstores closing with books no longer being available. Amazon is a bookstore. Ebooks are books.

Asking the government to bail out a business model that is no longer attracting enough customers to support itself is just throwing taxpayer money away.

I like bookstores. I've visited over 1200 of them. I also liked record stores, and my 35mm camera, and renting VHS tapes. But I didn't call for the government to save Tower Records, Kodak, and Blockbuster when customers' preferences changed.

Books are still selling very well. Authors are doing well. Middlemen such as publishers and indie bookstores are no longer needed to fulfill the public need for books.

I understand that brick and mortar bookstores and publishers helped make you very rich. It's nice that you want to help them out. But stop confusing the trouble they're in with literature being in jeopardy. Literature is not in jeopardy. The way customers acquire literature is changing. That's all.

According to NPR, Patterson will give up to $15k to each store on his list.

Patterson: It ranges from Andover Bookstore, where a son and daughter wrote and their father hadn't had a raise since 1988. ... Children's Bookstore in Baltimore, they give books to schools and they want the kids to be able to keep the books. Book Passage out in California will do more book fairs with it. Little Shop of Stories down in Decatur, Ga., they're buying a bookmobile.

Joe: You're doing a nice thing, Jim. But is it a smart thing?

If a store has been having difficulty since 1988, $15k won't do much to help it. I don't want to be cruel, but perhaps it is time to pull the plug. No one owes anyone a living. My father was a small businessman who owned several shops. It was his dream, and his passion. Not all were profitable, and he closed the ones that weren't. That's how business works.

Giving books to schools is noble. I've donated a few thousand dollars to www.firstbook.org, giving books to children. But I also bought my grandchildren tablets for the holidays. Let them download the ebooks they want. Ebooks they'll own forever (unlike my childhood books, which were read to pieces).

And bookmobiles? Driving paper books around in a truck to sell to people sounds labor intensive and expensive. With a Kindle, there are no dead trees, no fossil fuels, a much bigger selection, and instant delivery.

Perhaps that's why ereaders far outnumber bookmobiles.

Again, I'm not trying to be mean here. But perhaps we should listen to what readers want, rather than romanticize the days of old.

Patterson: I just want to get people more aware and involved in what’s going on here, which is that, with the advent of e-books, we either have a great opportunity or a great problem.

Joe: If you consider ebooks a problem and are truly concerned about the future of bookstores, you could always refuse to release your work in ebook format, Jim. I'm guessing you earn more on ebooks annually than the $1M you're giving to bookstores.

If you consider ebooks an opportunity, and want to help children learn to read, I bet www.firstbook.org would accept a donation of 100,000 Kindles from you, loaded with all of your children and YA work. I bet that will get kids reading.

Patterson: I’m rich; I don’t need to sell more books. But I do think it’s essential for kids to read more broadly. And people just need to go into bookstores more. It’s not top of mind as much as it used to be.

Joe: Why do people need to go into bookstores more, Jim?

I love booksellers. I thanked thousands of them, by name, in the acknowledgements of my novel Dirty Martini. I've been to a bookseller's wedding. I've gotten more than my fair share of booksellers drunk.

Sometimes, when you love someone, you need to let them go. Life support can be crueler than just allowing nature to take its course.

With the advent of tablets and ereading devices, there is effectively a bookstore in every person's home. And those who can't afford ereaders can borrow them from libraries. Ebooks are cheaper, easier to read (backlights and adjustable fonts), are delivered instantly without having to travel anywhere, and a much wider selection is available on Kindle than in even the largest brick and mortar bookstore.

I tried, years ago, to help booksellers, showing them a plan on how to compete. Not one took me up on my offer.

I've mailed signed books to bookstores, for free. I've signed thousands of bookplates for bookstores. I've signed used books and galleys for booksellers (which they can sell by don't earn me any royalties). But those days are in the past, and nostalgia isn't a good enough reason to invest in an archaic technology.

You're a generous guy, and your heart is in the right place, but you aren't going to change customers' buying preferences by throwing a bit of money around. Bookstores won't be saved by your $1M, or by a government bail out. They'll continue to exist only if customers continue to support them. And customers are voting with their wallets.

If I were a cynical man, I'd believe this offer of yours is a PR stunt. $1M is a nice, large number, but you reportedly make over $90M a year, so this isn't straining you financially. So you make this donation, get a lot of press, and both publishers and bookstores love you for it, while you slyly resuscitate the meme that ebooks and self-publishing and Amazon are bad--zombie talking points that further the legacy agenda. As a former ad man, you know how publicity works. And at the end of your CBS piece, you hawked your newest novel. I bet all those bookstores you're helping will be selling more of your backlist than ever before. You've certainly incentivized them to.

Maybe that isn't the point, and you truly are worried about the state of American literature. But you mistakenly believe indie bookstores are somehow the guardians of it.

They aren't. Good books, and good authors, will survive without bookstores. In fact, more than ever before are thriving in this new environment.

Your agenda is wrong, Jim. If your main concern was getting kids to read, and making sure American literature survives, there are much better ways to spend $1M. Like gifting Kindles to needy kids, or running your own book club or imprint. I believe these are just flowery talking points for your ultimate agenda, which is to make sure paper continues to remain the dominant format for your books.

See, you have a huge advantage over me in paper. Your books are available everywhere, often heavily discounted. You don't want to lose that advantage, because on Amazon, you and I have the same amount of shelf space. Naturally you want the status quo to continue, because it has made you wealthy. Of course you want as many outlets for your work to exist as possible.

Because if more and more bookstores close, and more and more readers switch to ebooks, all of that shelf space real estate you once owned becomes worthless. If spending $1M and doing a media tour helps bookstores stay around a bit longer, you're directly helping yourself.

There's nothing wrong with that. But let's tell it like it is, and drop the "save literature" and "it's for the children" talking points.

BTW, I predicted this in 2011. One day, Jim, you will be self-publishing your new release as a $2.99 ebook. The bookstores that still exist might complain, but when they're no longer a viable revenue stream for you, you'll go where the money is. Like any smart businessman does. Of course, that will also mean abandoning your publisher, but that's fodder for another blog post.

You can't stop technology. You can't change customer preference. And you're not going to get caught on the losing side of a revolution.

Eisler - Publishing is a Lottery & Konrath - Publishing is a Carny Game

Barry Eisler: Over the weekend, I gave one of the keynotes at the terrific San Francisco Writers Conference.  The framework of the talk (Surfing the Waves of Change) was broadly similar to a keynote I gave last year at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference; for the main ideas, here’s a guest post Joe kindly let me post here, and an article I wrote for the Guardian.

One of the key updates in the talk I gave at SFWC had to do with bullshit—specifically, the prevalence of bullshit being peddled by various fixtures in establishment publishing.  This was natural enough, because in just the last month or so quite a few publishing insiders have grown sufficiently concerned about restlessness among the peasants that they’ve ventured into the provinces to try to head it off.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that industry analyst Michael Cader, literary agent David Gernert, literary agent Robert Gottlieb, literary agent Donald Maass, industry analyst Mike Shatzkin, and Kensington Publishing CEO Steve Zacharius have all seen fit to engage some of the arguments that are both cause and consequence of the revolution in publishing (“Authors Guild” president Scott Turow, unsurprisingly, remains in hiding, perhaps because he senses how he would come off if he tried to respond to his critics).  Along these lines, I was encouraged that one of the SFWC founders, literary agent Michael Larson, felt compelled to take the stage immediately following my talk to try to rebut some of its substance.  I think this level of dialogue is unprecedented in publishing and will be enormously healthy for the industry, and I salute all the insiders who’ve elected to engage even though I disagree with much of what they’re saying.

In addition to bullshit in publishing, another theme of my talk was that publishing is a lottery, but it was only after Michael’s rebuttal that I realized I could have been doing a better job of integrating that notion with my points on bullshit.  Here I’d like to talk about why, and to make that connection more explicit.

One of the things Michael pointed out was that my thoughts on the benefits of self-publishing don’t apply to everyone (I certainly agree with that, and hope I made clear that I don’t believe there’s any one-size-fits-all publishing solution).  After all, he said, ask Stephen King if he wants to self-publish, and King would almost certainly say he would not.

I thought about that point afterward.  And then I realized—respectfully, because I really like and respect Michael—that it was bullshit.

Now, by “bullshit,” I don’t mean untrue.  In fact, I think Michael’s point very likely is true: while Stephen King has in fact dabbled in self-publishing (he even said, “My friends, we have the chance to become big publishing’s worst nightmare”), this was a while ago, and today, given the treatment he gets and the money he makes within the legacy system, I don’t think it’s terribly likely King would be attracted to self-publishing (though potential fame and fortune aren’t the only considerations an author might have in mind when trying to decide which publishing route makes the most sense).  Regardless, note the following:

First, the “but don’t you want to be Stephen King/James Patterson/Nora Roberts/J.K. Rowling” meme is widespread and frequently deployed by the publishing establishment.  For some examples, just click on any of the links in the second paragraph of this post.  More often than not, it strikes me as much more of an article of faith than a deliberate dodge, and knowing Michael, I believe he was referring to it sincerely as the former, not the latter.  But it certainly is widespread, and for this alone it’s worth addressing.

Second, the meme implicitly acknowledges that publishing is indeed a lottery (unless anyone advancing this meme would also argue that Stephen King-levels of publishing mega-stardom are in some way guaranteed or foreordained, neither of which would be a logically or empirically easy proposition).  This implicit acknowledgment is of course, in my opinion, not at all bullshit, because as you know I do believe it’s extremely useful to conceive of publishing as a kind of lottery.

But despite the kernel of truth, and despite the useful implicit acknowledgement, the meme is still bullshit (and all the more insidious as a result).  I would even argue that “Stephen King!” has become one of the two primary dodges of the legacy industry (we’ll get to the second in just a bit).  Here’s why.

First, let me briefly explain why publishing is, in fact, a lottery.  It’s simple.  Hundreds of thousands of authors play it, and only a very few of them win.

Some people object to the analogy because they say it ignores the hard work of authors and publishers.  But hard work demonstrably does not guarantee success.  If it did, then those hard-working publishers would produce nothing but massive bestsellers.  After all, don’t they work hard on all their books?

Of course, hard work (and a variety of other factors) can influence your odds of success in publishing, which is why it pays to work hard.  But the ability to influence odds doesn’t makes something not a lottery.  In fact, I can tell you how to instantly double your odds—double them!—in a regular lottery.  Just buy a second ticket.  Congratulations, you just influenced the odds dramatically.  Is it not still a lottery?

No matter how talented you are, no matter how hard working, no matter how awesome and committed your publisher might be, statistically you are far more likely to lose the game of publishing than you are to win it.  This isn’t a bad thing.  Nor is it good.  It’s just the nature of the beast.  You could argue it’s the nature of life itself.  Our job is to do what we can to influence the odds, but it’s foolish at best to argue the odds don’t matter, or don’t even exist.

Okay, now you’re trying to decide whether a certain lottery is right for you.  Whether it’s worth playing.  If someone was encouraging you to buy a ticket, and that person wouldn’t talk about anything other than the potential monster payout, would you feel you were receiving accurate, complete, and useful information?

Or might you sense something was missing in the presentation?

Look, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a lottery.  Whether to participate in one is a personal decision.  But to make a good decision, an informed decision, you need three data points, not just one.  These are:

1.      What is the potential payoff?

2.      What are the odds of achieving that payoff?

3.      How much will a ticket cost me?

Two quick hypotheticals to illustrate the point.

Lottery #1:  This lottery offers a million dollar payout, a one-in-two chance of winning, and a ticket that would cost you only a buck.  A one-dollar risk in exchange for a 50% chance at winning a million dollars.  Who wouldn’t buy a ticket to a lottery like that?

Lottery #2:  This lottery offers a million dollar payout, a one-in-ten-million chance of winning, and a ticket that would cost you ten thousand dollars.  You’d have to have a hell of a lot of money, and a hell of an appetite for gambling, to want to play in a lottery like that.

The same big prize, but two very different lotteries—one sensible for almost everyone, the other insane for almost everyone.  And if the people promoting them gave you only that one piece of information—a One-Million-Dollar Prize!—while concealing the odds and the cost, how could you know what you were getting yourself into?  How could you make an informed decision?

Well, you couldn’t, of course.  It’s enough to make you wonder why the people peddling the legacy-publishing lottery only want to talk about Stephen King.

So here I’d like to talk about the aspects of the lottery that establishment types tend to omit (for what it’s worth, again, I don’t think these omissions are for the most part deliberately intended to mislead.  I think they’re more commonly caused by well-intentioned people having been so long and so deeply embedded in a system that they’re unable to grasp its actual contours.  A classic case of missing the forest for the trees).

First, let’s stipulate that the legacy publishing purse is not a myth.  It’s real.  J.K. Rowling became a cash billionaire in the legacy lottery.  I remember reading somewhere that James Patterson makes over $90 million a year.  The richest purses in the legacy lottery are almost obscene.

But now it’s time to talk about the odds of you being the next J.K. Rowling.  How many authors are there who achieved anything like a comparable level of fame and fortune in publishing?  We can quibble over the details, but in general I’d say there have been maybe a dozen in the history of publishing.  Though I’m happy to broaden the definition of mega-success and up the number of mega-winners to, say one hundred.

Now we have to measure those one hundred winners against the hundreds of thousands of authors who have tried to get into the legacy system and been unable to do so, or who have secured a legacy contract only to see their book underperform and their contract canceled, or their publisher otherwise decide not to do another book with them and cut them loose.

Okay, a hundred big winners; hundreds of thousands of losers (and some hundreds winning lesser prizes, which we’ll talk about in a moment).  Now we’re getting some sense of the odds.

Please note that I’m not saying these odds should make anyone either embrace legacy publishing, or flee from it.  Different people have different objectives, different appetites for risk, different inclinations.  There really is no one-size-fits all.  But regardless of differences, no one can make a sound decision about a lottery without information about the odds of success, and developing that information is all I’m trying to do here.

Finally, let’s talk about what that legacy ticket will cost you.

First, it’ll cost you your rights, which someone else will own control for at least a very long time and in all probability forever (have a look at a typical legacy-publishing page-and-a-half, nine-point font, opaque-as-the-Dead-Sea-Scrolls reversion provision, and you’ll eventually conclude that the gist of it is “You will never get your rights back, ever”).

Second, it’ll cost you time-to-market.  Most legacy books don’t see daylight until a year after manuscript delivery and acceptance.  Many take much longer.

Third, it’ll cost you a huge margin in digital.  Legacy publishing typically pays authors 12.5% of the list price of a digital book.  Self-publishing pays 70%.

Fourth, it’ll cost you control over pricing, packaging, marketing, branding, and all other business decisions.

Fifth, it could cost you a good deal in conference and associated travel fees, as you fly from one writing convention to another trying to meet editors and agents and get them interested in your manuscript.

And those are the unavoidable costs, the innate costs.  You pay these costs even if you win.  That’s the way a lottery works.  There are also the risks:  risks of crappy covers, risks of embarrassingly bad titles, risks of cargo-cult bios, risks that overall your publisher, upon whom you will be relying almost completely, will fail to do its job and will destroy your books chances as a result, and maybe destroy your career in the process.

But it’s also absolutely true that in exchange for those costs, the risks might be avoided and you will become the next Stephen King.

It’s also true that becoming the next Stephen King isn’t the only payout promoted by the legacy industry.  There’s also the possibility of good conceptual editing, line editing, copyediting, proofreading, cover design, packaging, promotion, marketing, and paper distribution.  Note that I say “possibility” of these things.  They are not guaranteed, neither contractually nor empirically.  The notion that “You write, we’ll expertly take care of everything else” is the theory of publishing, the publishing ideal.  It is not usually the reality.  The promise of receiving expert editing, awesome cover design, crack marketing, wide paper distribution, etc., is itself one of the things that makes legacy publishing a lottery.  Some people get it.  Most do not.  Conflating the theory of legacy publishing with the reality of legacy publishing is another central deceit of the industry.

Now, to be as fair as possible, let’s expand the idea of what constitutes a winner in the legacy system still further.  In general, I’d define it as the ability to make a living writing full time.  But even that might be an unreasonably narrow definition.  We could broaden it still further:  the ability to make enough money from your writing to pay some bills and to occasionally take a nice vacation somewhere.  It wouldn’t be J.K. Rowling nice, but it would still be nice.

Well, wouldn’t it be useful if the legacy industry could share some of that information, too?  You’d think they’d want to.  “Hey kids, not everyone gets to be the next Nora Roberts (but you might!), but lots of people get to quit their day jobs and write full time, or at least get to use their winnings to make car payments and periodically buy a vacation in Hawaii.”

But they never talk about any of that.  What you hear instead is only, “Stephen King!” and “We’ll take care of everything but the writing so you won’t have to worry!”

Look, if I’m full of shit on all this, then why don’t legacy publishers share the data?  If the story of their lottery really is so enticing, why not let us see how it really works?  Why not talk about the odds, the risks, the costs?  What’s keeping them from anonymizing the last decade’s worth of data:  the range of advances; the number of books published per author; the number that have broken even for the publisher and the number that have earned out (these are not the same thing, and the suggestion that they are is another legacy publishing dodge.  Publishers typically start to make money long before the author earns out her advance—precisely because author royalties are so low).  For every entrant into the legacy lottery, what has been the purse?  The number of manuscripts legacy publishers reject at the door would also be useful to know, because if you realize you only have a one-in-ten-thousand chance of even being able to play in the legacy lottery, you might rationally decide not to waste years trying (part of the cost of a ticket), and to start playing the self-publishing lottery immediately instead.

An intern with decent spreadsheet skills could do all this as a summer project.  Why hasn’t it happened?  If everyone really is a winner in the legacy lottery, why doesn’t New York get this story out?  Wouldn’t authors just swoon for it?

(Steve Zacharius did say in his exchange with Joe that he would “try to find answers to some of these questions,” but I don’t think he’s gotten back to anyone since then…)

Yes, that was a rhetorical question.  Because if authors were presented with the actual data—not just the purse, but also the odds and the cost and the risk—many of them might rationally decide they liked the self-publishing lottery better.  New York understands this.  So instead what we get is “Stephen King!” pixie dust tossed in our eyes, and all the rest omitted.

As long as establishment publishing is only willing to talk about the biggest winners in publishing, and as long as they deliberately continue to suggest that the ideal of legacy publishing is in fact the widespread reality, without also being willing to talk about the odds, the costs, and the risks of legacy publishing, you are being bullshitted.

Now, am I suggesting that legacy publishing is a lottery but that self-publishing and Amazon publishing are not?  Of course not, and in fact I’ve repeatedly referred to the self-publishing lottery throughout this post.  Let’s go into a little more detail now, first for self-publishing, then for Amazon.

What is the high-end payout of the self-publishing lottery?  So far, it seems to be in the low seven figures annually.  What are the mid-range payouts?  Hard to say, though over 150 KDP authors sold over 100,000 books in 2013 and certainly many more than that are for the first time making car payment and periodic vacation money.  Other benefits include a dramatically higher per-unit digital royalty; significantly faster time-to market; and control over all aspects of your books and business.

What are the odds?  Long.  Again, I’m not aware of any solid data on this, but my impression is that even getting the lower-end “car payment and vacation” money payout has statistically speaking got to be a thousand-to-one shot.

What are the costs?  A few thousand dollars in upfront fees for editorial, copyediting, proofreading, cover design, and formatting.  There are few material opportunity costs, unless you had a legacy offer you decided to eschew in favor of playing the self-publishing game instead (and in fact, if your self-published book does well, that itself might lead to legacy offers.  You’ll also be acting as the CEO of your own business, with all the time commitment and aggravation such a role can entail (but note again that the notion that you’ll be free of such commitments and aggravation in the legacy system is a promise customarily unfulfilled—legacy ideal vs legacy reality—and that therefore having to manage your own business is generally not a material difference between the two systems.  For the most part, you can expect to be quite busy with the non-writing aspects of the writing business in both).  Because you keep all your rights and maintain full control over all aspects of your books and business, your risks are limited only to your upfront costs.

What about Amazon Publishing, which I think can best be understood at a high level as a hybrid—higher digital royalties, faster time to market, and more control over business decisions, like self-publishing; the promise of outsourced business tasks, corporate-level marketing, and higher ultimate payoffs, like legacy publishing, plus, possibly a decent-sized advance.  The odds of hitting at least the medium-level jackpot within the Amazon lottery (assuming you can get in—as in legacy publishing, a ticket in the Amazon system is not guaranteed) strike me as higher than those of the other systems, but as for my impressions of the other systems’ odds, this is largely anecdotal.

The costs include:  as in the legacy system, long-term and possibly permanent loss of your rights (in my experience, Amazon’s reversion provisions are far more sane and certainly less opaque than those of legacy publishing, but the thresholds for reversion are still hard to hit); opportunity costs, in the form of the even higher digital per-unit royalties you would make in self-publishing and the even greater business control you would have there, and in the form of whatever you walked away from if you were presented with a legacy offer, as well.  As in legacy publishing, there are no upfront costs with Amazon.  As with legacy, there is the risk your book will be poorly published and die (though from everything I know firsthand and by knowing and talking with dozens of other Amazon-published authors, my sense is that this risk is statistically far lower with Amazon than it is in the legacy system).  On the upside, in my experience publishing with Amazon means the opportunity to work with a group of exceptionally smart, interesting, fun, innovative, risk-taking people, which I count as a benefit and one I haven’t heard of any Amazon author failing to receive.  On the downside, I would note that in my opinion and in the opinion of more than a few of my peers, Amazon legal is becoming increasingly corporate and legacy-like in its outlook and its practices.  It’s still not remotely as bad as what I’ve experienced in the legacy system, but the trends concern me and I hope Amazon will reverse them.

I also think it’s entirely fair to criticize Amazon for its own unwillingness to share more data about winners and losers within the Amazon system.  I would only note this possible difference:  in my experience, Amazon is so obsessed with secrecy that the company won’t disclose even data that I know is tremendously supportive of the value they offer authors, including the terms of their publishing agreements (though again, in some respects these have been getting more legacy-like; Amazon, why not keep playing to your strengths?), and including the details of some of their biggest publishing successes.  Knowing this, and being familiar with the impressions and stories of quite a few other Amazon-published authors, my sense is that Amazon’s reluctance to share aggregate, anonymized data about the details of its lottery are driven more by an innate (and, in my opinion, unfortunate) impulse for secrecy than by a desire to obfuscate, but you could reasonably draw somewhat different conclusions, too.

That said, note that when an author self-publishes, the legacy industry is cut out entirely.  Legacy publishers make no money on a self-published author’s books.  But Amazon does make money, by charging 30% for access to the KDP distribution platform.  In other words, legacy publishing is institutionally, unavoidably, financially invested in spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about self-publishing.  But Amazon makes money either way.  Draw your own conclusions.  You can draw similar conclusions about whatever biases I and other authors who are vocal about the revolution in publishing might bring to the conversation.  Say what you will, but I don’t think you can argue that my bottom line is dependent or even in any way affected by how other authors choose to publish their own books.  The truth is, I don’t care.  What I care about is that authors have good information upon which they can make the decisions that are best for themselves.  Can an establishment publishing insider who is steering you in a particular direction make the same claim of disinterest?

Overall, the biggest difference between the Amazon lottery, on the one hand, and the legacy- and self-publishing lotteries, on the other hand, is this:  Amazon’s unmatched direct-to-consumer marketing power.  Legacy publishing has virtually no such power at all, though to some extent it can buy such marketing by paying Amazon to do it for them (in self-publishing, your direct-to-consumer marketing reach will be even smaller).  If your sales are primarily digital, the paper distribution legacy publishing will offer you is relatively unimportant (it may even be less important than that), and legacy will be able to offer you almost nothing to market your digital books that you couldn’t have done yourself.  Whereas Amazon will be able to use its unmatched data on its own end-user customers, including direct email and on-site merchandizing, to market your book to an audience that is both huge (tens of millions of people) and targeted (people who demonstrably want to buy books).  In my experience, that kind of direct-to-consumer marketing power is worth a lot.  But will you get it?  Not everybody does, at least not in the same caliber, and the question of, “Yes, Amazon can promote the hell out of my book, but how much will they?” is part of what an author needs to grapple with when trying to decide whether the Amazon lottery makes sense for her.

I believe the biggest shift we’re seeing in publishing is precisely this:  the foundation of the industry used to be distribution.  Now that digital has broken legacy publishing’s lock on distribution, new publishing will be built on direct-to-consumer marketing, which is replacing distribution as the item new authors most need and will have the hardest time outsourcing for a flat fee.  Companies that can offer real direct-to-consumer marketing reach will be well positioned in the new world of publishing.  Companies that can’t will be in trouble.

Way back at the beginning of this post, I mentioned a second major dodge of legacy publishing.  Sorry it took a while to get to it.  It’s actually a more general category, of which “Stephen King!” is in part a specific subset.  What I’m talking about is the tendency of the publishing establishment to suggest, whether implicitly or explicitly, that all the benefits of publishing are in legacy and all the risks are in digital.  This dodge is ubiquitous—have a look at the links at the beginning of this post and you’ll see what I mean.  And now that you know about the dodge, I promise you’ll see it wherever an establishment publishing personage makes a pronouncement.  And you’ll be aware also that if someone is trying to have an honest conversation with you, that person will start by acknowledging that there are risks and potential rewards, costs and benefits, disadvantages and advantages in both systems.  Anyone who suggests or even implies otherwise is bullshitting you, whether deliberately or otherwise.

To sum up:  if we’re going to have a useful conversation, it helps to start by acknowledging that all publishing systems are lotteries.  After that, we have to acknowledge not only the systems’ different payouts, but also their different odds, different costs, and different risks.  Only now we can start to grapple with matching that framework with our own objectives, talents, skills, preferences, and personalities—overall, with our own unique circumstances—to make decisions that are likely best for us.

So what are some of the questions a writer trying to decide between the various systems might want to ask?  I would include these:

How much is the advance?  How much do I need the advance?  Do I think that with higher self-publishing royalties, I can beat the contract (to see what I mean with that concept, follow the last paragraph in this Daily Beast interview)?  If so, how long do I expect beating the contract will take?  How important is paper distribution to me, and how important is digital?  Am I in a genre like romance or science fiction, which are doing exceptionally well in digital, or am I writing something like a children’s book, in which for now I could expect relatively few digital sales?  How important to me is control over things like pricing and packaging?  How important is time-to-market?  How much do I like, and how good am I at, running my own business vs. outsourcing business management to someone else?  How much do I trust my potential business partner to manage things well?  How much do I hate what legacy publishers are doing today vs how much do I fear what Amazon might do tomorrow?  Which system gives me more personal power to influence my odds of success, and how important is that power to me?  Etc.  If you make a decision without asking such questions, you're making a mistake, at least in your process (though you can still get lucky in your result).  If you are asking these questions, then regardless of the path you choose, you're making an informed decision, and for you, the right one.

It really is interesting to consider the way New York tries to obscure the nature of the legacy lottery.  The prize is never other than Stephen King.  The odds are never other than that the reality you receive will always match the ideal you were promised.  The cost of a ticket is never mentioned at all.

A Martian might find an honest and transparent conversation about the nature of the various publishing lotteries so entirely obvious and commonsensical that s/he would find it hard to understand why the publishing establishment is so intent on avoiding it.  Of course, the Martian might not know about how long New York protested that their costs of digital book production were similar to their costs of paper production, when logic and just baseline common sense made such a proposition nonsensical (every single paper book a publisher prints and ships costs additional money, whereas the marginal costs of distributing digital books are zero).  The Martian might not know that HarperCollins recently confirmed what any honest observer already knew (and what Joe knew at least as far back as 2010), which is that indeed New York has been making far more money from digital books than from paper, and sharing far less with authors.  The Martian, in other words, might not know of New York’s demonstrated habit of, shall we say, dissembling (in fairness, if the Martian had ever seen a New York publishing contract or a New York royalty statement, the Martian would understand that obfuscation is one of the traditions Traditional Publishing most assiduously honors).

So come on, publishing establishment.  I know Scott Turow is too afraid to come out from under his rock and have an honest conversation, but I know not all of you are that cowardly.  Some of you have been engaging already, as I’ve noted, and, as also noted, I salute you for it.  Please, the comment section is yours.  Prove that I’m full of shit.  Share your data on payouts, odds, costs, and risks.  I can’t think of a better way, or a better opportunity, for you to prove once and for all that the legacy lottery is the best damn game in town.

P.S.  I know this is a long post, and certainly not my first.  I’d have liked to make it shorter because shorter would save everybody time (me most of all, because it takes longer to write these posts than it does to read them).  But I find it’s difficult to be brief when it comes to exposing bullshit.  Bullshit tends to come with a ready-made and already generally accepted superstructure that allows the bullshit to act as its own automatic abbreviation.  “Stephen King!”  “It’s so hard to get discovered in self-publishing!” (as though it’s easy and guaranteed in legacy, or in any other business, for that matter).  “When everyone can publish, there will be so much crap no one will be able to find good books!” (AKA, The Tsunami of Crap).  “Self-publishing is so much work, you’ll barely have time to write!” etc. are easy sound bites designed to play to people’s fears.  At a high level, they’re a lot like “Death Panels!” “Socialism!” “National Security!” and other such political propaganda that’s used to cow and manipulate the populace.  Using logic, evidence, and argument to assuage the fears ginned up by propaganda requires a bit more effort.  For more, I recommend Noam Chomsky on “concision.”

Joe sez: I was talking about publishing being a lottery eight years ago, before the Kindle existed. It's an apt analogy.

And while I agree with Barry that luck indeed plays a part, and it is important to know payoffs, odds, and costs, more and more I'm looking at the bullshit many legacy pundits are spouting, and their unconscionable contract terms, and I think of it as less of a lottery and more like a carnival game. You know, the ones where you pay for three chances to toss a hoop around a stuffed animal, or to knock down a pyramid of blocks with a baseball.

See, those games seem like they're easy. But they are heavily favored toward the carnival. That hoop barely fits over the stuffed animal. Those blocks weigh a lot more than they look. And don't get me started on how impossible it is to lob a quarter onto a small glass tray or get a ping pong ball into a cup only a millimeter wider than its circumference.

Legacy publishing trumpets its bestseller successes, tempting authors to be the next John Grisham or Lee Child, without explaining how goddamn hard it is to sell in those numbers (unless you're John Grisham or Lee Child). They talk about big names and big advances like anyone off the street could get them. They talk about how essential they are. They say that if you're good enough, you'll be rewarded.

I find this pervasive attitude analogous to a giant stuffed Snoopy doll that you have three chances to win for just $1. The Snoopy doll is no doubt worth a lot more than $1. It's hanging right there in front of you, practically begging for you to win it.

But the carnies can offer that doll for $1 because few ever win. The number of losers more than pay for the occasional winner.

And I believe, like the carnies, legacy pundits know this. But they never come out and admit it.

For example:

Kensington CEO Steve Zacharius: If you look at the printed NYT list, how many of the mega authors are self-published?  ….if indie publishing is as good as you’re all making it sound…..why do you think that the biggest and most successful authors in publishing don’t go this route? Why isn’t Nora Roberts, Patterson, Lee Child, etc….going this route?

Carny: Look at this gigantic Snoopy doll! You're a Snoopy fan, I can tell. Well, the only way to get this doll is to throw a ring around it, and you get three rings for just a dollar. Don't you want to take home that doll?

Legacy Apologist Mike Shatzkin: Unearned advances are a substantial part of author compensation. I know of one Big Five house that calculates that they pay more than 40% of their revenue to authors

Carny: People win all the time, and look what they win! Look how big that Snoopy is! I tell you, the odds are so good you'll win one that we're going broke here. This is our last Snoopy.

Agent Donald Maass: Authorship is a true meritocracy. (Sorry, it is.)

Carny: You're good at this game. I can tell. You're the best. And the best always wins. Give it a try, only three rings for a dollar. I'm sure you'll win that doll.

Agent Robert Gottlieb: Sometimes sharing opportunity with a publisher, wherever possible, creates greater opportunity for an author’s career.

Carny: You can't find a Snoopy doll like this anywhere else. We're the only ones that have it. If you want it, now is your chance to get it. Three tries for a buck.

Agent David Gernert: I am not a fan of self-publishing in general. It removes the gatekeepers from the process, and if we come to a point where every person in America who is writing a book can “publish” it, it becomes much more difficult for readers to find the good ones.

Carny: Knocking down blocks with a baseball? That game is rigged. And they don't have a giant Snoopy doll. Trust me, this is the game you want to play. The one you're good at, with the big reward. Just three rings for a dollar.

So you buy the three rings and fail to win the Snoopy, because the game is rigged, The odds were much harder than the carnies made them seem. But every so often--it is rare but it happens--someone wins a giant Snoopy worth a lot of money, and they only paid $1 for it.

But who really paid for that Snoopy? The one who won it? Or all the losers who didn't win it?

Who pays for the mega-bestsellers? Do they pay for themselves, and make so much extra that they also cover all the midlist books that lose money?

Or could the opposite be happening?

Let's do some quick and dirty math.

Phil the Writer gets a $5,000 advance. He sells 5,000 ebooks his first year at a Digital List Price of $6.99—a reasonable number for a midlist author. The publisher earns $2.62 per sale (selling to the etailer at 50% of the DLP and keeping 75% of net) or $13,100.  The author earns $0.88 per copy sold.  He's earned $4400—still $600 short of earning out his advance. So the publisher made $13,100, minus the $5,000 advance, so it actually earned $1.62 per copy sold.

Jack the Writer gets a $2,000,000 advance. He sells 1,000,000 ebooks his first year at a Digital List Price of $6.99—a reasonable number for a bestseller. The publisher earns $2.62 per sale or $2,620,000, and the author earns $0.88 per copy sold (assuming a 25% royalty—more on this in a minute) or $880,000—still $1,120,000 short of earning out his advance. So the publisher made $2,620,000, minus the $2,000,000 advance, so it actually earned $0.62 per copy sold.

In other words, in this scenario, it is arguably better for the publisher to publish a lot of midlist books that don't earn out instead of a huge blockbuster that doesn't earn out.

And how about those huge bestselling authors who make higher than 25% ebook royalties? That means an even smaller per unit profit for the publisher.

Of course, as the sales for both ebooks continue, the profit per unit increases. But some publishers offer advances so high they will likely never earn out, and they also offer some bestsellers higher ebook royalties.

So who is really paying for whom? If you were a publisher, would you rather have Jack the bestseller, or 400 writers like Phil?

Pundits like to say that legacy publishers—by offering advances and paying all the costs of publication—take all the risk. They're essentially giving authors an interest-free loan that never has to be returned even if the book fails to earn out.

But is this really the case?

I submit that the loan isn't interest free. In fact, the interest on it is huge; paying it back at 12.5% royalties takes a lot longer than the 70% royalties an author would make by self-publishing.

As I explained in a recent post fisking Mike Shatzkin:

If you were a genre author offered a $100k advance earning 12.5% royalties off of the digital list price (25% of net, and publishers sell to Amazon at roughly 50% off their digital list price), and your ebook is priced at $4.99, you earn $0.63 per ebook sold. You need to sell 159,000 ebooks to earn out your advance. And when you do, you're stuck with 63 cents per sale, FOREVER.

The same ebook, self-published, earns the author $3.49 per copy sold. If they sell 28,653 copies, they made the $100,000. Every copy they sell after that, they make 5.6x more money than they do on a legacy ebook.

Which seems like a better deal for authors?

And remember—even if the advance never earns out, the legacy publisher can still make money. The example of Phil the writer shows how.

And if Jack the writer had sold 1,000,000 ebooks via self-pubbing, he would have made $3,490,000, or $1,490,000 more than his advance (which he still hasn't earned out yet according to the figures I posted).

Isn't this looking more and more like a carny game where the publisher always wins? Especially when you include all the one-sided contract terms—non-compete clauses, next work option, term of copyright, etc.

Like carnies, publishers aren't in the business of losing money. They also aren't in the business of showing odds.

That's the distinction between a carny game and a lottery. Lotteries require the odds to be posted. Anyone who goes gambling has easy access to the odds in blackjack, roulette, and craps. It's simple math, and the gambler is aware of those odds.

With a carny game, the big fluffy Snoopy doll is hanging right in front of your eyes, promising itself as a huge reward for a simple ring toss. But the ring toss isn't simple, and the odds of winning aren't apparent. All you see is a big Snoopy—or a guest spot on Oprah and a #1 bestseller—without the carny or the legacy publisher actually telling you what your chances are.

As PT Barnum said, there's a writer born every minute.

Wait… I meant a sucker born every minute.

But as suckers, er… writers, we can arm ourselves with knowledge. We can share stories and read blogs and participate in forums and ask questions.

A few months ago, Brenda Hyatt updated her Show Me The Money! blog post, revealing average and median advances, royalties, and earn-outs for many legacy publishers. It's a must-read for any author considering a legacy deal.

It isn't up to me, or Barry, or anyone, to tell you what path to follow.

So why do Barry and I and many other authors blog about stuff like this?

Simple. Pain shared is pain divided. Joy shared is joy multiplied.

Share the pain. Spread the joy. Tell others what you've learned, good and bad.

And next time you go to a carnival, spend that five bucks on cotton candy, not on the ring toss. At least you'll get what you paid for.

P.S. A question that occurred to me after writing my bit was: If publishers are making so much less on bestselling titles, why do they keep offering huge advances?

I could think of a big reason: the long game.

The more copies a book sells, the less important an advance becomes because the publisher eventually absorbs it into total production costs. When enough copies sell, publishers are making almost the same amount on Jack's book as they are on Phil's book.

Carrie and Killing Floor and One For The Money and Along Came A Spider are first books (or first books in a series) by some mega-bestselling authors. These books continue to generate a lot of revenue, year in and year out, even though they no longer require marketing or advertising dollars. Backlist pays for the front list, in a sort of weird reverse-pyramid scheme. The old books front the costs for the new books until the new books become old enough to be money makers, which in turn pay for new books.

What a publisher makes next quarter is largely based on what they did years ago.

So a legacy publisher can afford to offer a 10 million dollar advance, because previous books by an author have shown, over time, to generate (or have the potential to generate) that kind of income.

There are also the instant hits, like Twilight and 50 Shades and Dragon Tattoo and DaVinci Code that also help to pay the bills.

A solid backlist and a few runaway hits, coupled with underpaying most authors with low advances and poor royalties, allow publishers to offer giant advances—even if those advances take years to pay for themselves.

As long as there is a steady supply of authors willing to accept what publishers are offering, the legacy industry will endure.

But 99.9999% of authors don't get the huge advance, just like 99.9999% of ring tossers don't win the giant Snoopy.

So what happens when authors wise up and realize they don't have to deal with publishers anymore?

Data Guy's nine-year-old daughter instantly understood what happens. She was reading The Passive Voice over her father's shoulder and said, "It's just like A Bug's Life. The ants are finally realizing they don't have to give the food they collect to the bullying grasshoppers anymore, while they starve."

Can't be more on the nose than that…

Legacy John Fisks Hugh Howey

Joe sez: There is a new www.authorearnings.com report by Hugh Howey and Anonymous Data Guy. This time they looked at the rankings of over 54,000 Amazon titles.

The data blew me away. But my imaginary Big 5 Pundit, Legacy John, wasn't impressed.

Legacy John: His data is all full of lies and nonsense and nonsensical lies. I want to do one of those fisting things that you do.

Joe: You mean fisking?

Legacy John: Where you take someone's post and insult him, line-by-line.

Joe: Actually, the sarcasm is only a by-product of debating poor arguments, faulty logic, and bad data. I use it to accentuate how shoddy and worthy of ridicule their points are.

Legacy John: Whatever. You say you'll let traditional publishers have their say on your blog, so will you let me fask Howey or what?

Joe: Sure. Have at it. I'm all about contrary opinions.

Hugh: One week ago, we released our initial Author Earnings report on the prevalence and breakdown of nearly 7,000 genre e-books on Amazon’s bestseller lists. We only looked at three categories of genre fiction. Since that time, our spider has been hard at work gathering data on a wider variety of titles as it probes deeper into the lists. This time, over 54,000 titles were collected, practically every book on every Amazon bestseller list.

Legacy John: It is widely known by those who know things that the Amazon bestseller lists represent less than 2% of all book sales. This data is all bullshit, and I've heard that Hugh steals cars from the poor and tries to run over the elderly and military veterans and the disabled. Also, he invaded Peru.

Joe: Do you have any sort of evidence to back up these claims?

Legacy John: The truth needs no evidence. 

Hugh: For you techies out there who geek out on methodology, the spider works like this: It crawls through all the categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories listed on Amazon, starting from the very top and working its way down. It scans each product page and parses the text straight from the source html. Along with title, author, price, star-rating, and publisher information, the spider also grabs the book’s overall Amazon Kindle store sales ranking. This overall sales ranking is then used to slot each title into a single master list. Duplicate entries, from books appearing on multiple bestseller lists, get discarded.

Legacy John: Bullshit! What kind of spider is smart enough to grab all that data? Insects have very small brains, and a spider couldn't possibly remember all of that. Plus, how could it pass that data along to Hugh? SPIDERS CAN'T WRITE OR TALK!

Joe: I'm pretty sure a spider is an Internet bot used for indexing information.

Legacy John: I'm pretty sure you lie about your sales, and are only popular because you got your start with the Big 6. You're just angry they kicked you out because your writing sucks.

Joe: That's actually not how it happened. If you read my blog--

Legacy John: No one reads your stupid blog, loser. Don't cry sour grapes to me because no one wants to publish you.

Joe: I sense a little hostility.

Legacy John: Can you sense me flipping you off? Because that's what I'm doing, right now, Konrath. And I'm going to Tweet that, too, and my six Twitter followers are going to RT and we're all going to laugh and laugh like a cool high school clique who laughs at others. Then we're going to take selfies combing our hair.

Hugh: As before, our spider is looking at a snapshot of sales rankings for one particular day — in this case February 7, 2014. Extrapolation is only useful for determining relative market share and theoretical earnings potential. Our conclusions assume that the proportion of self-published to traditionally published titles doesn’t change dramatically from day to day, and the similarity of this dataset, collected 9 days after the previous one, lends that assumption some support. By comparing successive reports over the coming months, we will be able to answer the day-to-day variance question more completely.

Legacy John: Snapshots! Now the spider can use a camera?! Give me a break.

Hugh: Of the ~54,000 titles sampled, ~11,000 (or 22%) were genre fiction. ~30,000 (60%) were non-fiction. ~900 (1.8%) were literary fiction. And ~10,000 (20%) were children’s books (young adult is not included in this last category). The preponderance of nonfiction in this sample does not reflect market share. Rather, it reflects the many hundreds of detailed Amazon sub-sub-sub-category bestseller lists for non-fiction (Health, Fitness & Dieting > Alternative Medicine > Holistic, for example), that make lower-selling nonfiction more visible to the spider than equally low-selling fiction.

Legacy John: Blah blah blah numbers blah blah blah data.

You know something, Howey? I got numbers too! Numbers like 17 and 3000% and 2.89/5 and eleventeen. Try to refute that!

Hugh: In order to better understand where and why this data differs from the three genre categories of our original report, let’s look at four different segments: Genre fiction, literary fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books. Here’s how daily unit sales and gross dollar sales divide up among them:
 Legacy John: I got pie graphs too, ya pinhead.

Hugh: As with our previous report, daily unit sales and dollar sales estimates are based on crowdsourced sales rates by overall Amazon ranking. Adjusting these sales rates does not greatly alter any of our conclusions, as all titles are affected. What these graphs represent, then, is a snapshot of Amazon bestseller rank—which has been observed to correlate neatly with daily sales figures—and price.

With all of genre fiction lumped together, the previous estimates of 70% market share still hold. Future reports will break these genres down further. The goal of this report is to look at all e-books, rather than a single subset.

Legacy John: That's not your goal. Your goal to to try to make me admit I've been treating authors unfairly. Which is nonsense. We care about authors. Lots.

As I sit here, typing this in my solid gold swimming pool on my waterproof Cray XC30, I can't help but think of all the authors I've nurtured. If it wasn't for me, those authors wouldn't be paying part of their grocery bill, twice a year, with what they make in royalties that we send them when we remember to. And without groceries, they'd starve, and if they starved, they couldn't write more books that pay for my jet fuel. So don't tell me I don't care.

Hugh: Genre Fiction (All Genres)

The roughly 11,000 genre titles from our 54K sampling look very similar to the previous dataset of Mystery/Thriller & Suspense, Romance, and Science Fiction/Fantasy. These 11,000 genre books now also include Action & Adventure, Horror, Historical Fiction, Erotica, and the like. Here is the breakdown of how these 11,000 genre titles were published, and we can see that including all genres has given a boost to small publishers when compared to our initial report:

This breakdown is very similar to our original report, with self-published authors commanding roughly the same share titles on bestseller lists as the Big 5 combined. Ah, but where on the lists are these books? By estimating daily sales according to rank on the overall list, we can get a clearer picture:

Not to belabor the point, but no matter how the unit sales by rank figures are adjusted, all titles are impacted equally, so the share of the pie remains largely unchanged. The above graph is a neat visual indicator of relative strength across Amazon bestseller charts. We can see that small publisher titles are well-represented on the lists but that the sales are relatively muted. As with our first report, self-published and Big 5 published genre works are roughly equivalent.

Legacy John: Genre fiction! Bullshit! Genre fiction is cultural wasteland devoid of any redeeming values, as evidence by this chart:

Hugh: Gross sales and author earnings come next, where we anticipated a fall-off for self-published authors as we included all genres, but we’re seeing just a few percentage points difference from our earlier report:
Legacy John: Ha! Look at your own data, Howie! We're making 55% of the money! Suck it!

Joe: That number represents gross sales. Authors don't care about what publishers earn. They care about how much they earn.

Legacy John: That's absurd. Authors don't care about money. They're clueless hobbyists, and should be kissing our asses that we might even consider publishing them in the first place.

Here's why those indie authors are doing so badly: They write crap. And there is so much crap, readers are drowning in it. Literally drowning. Last year there were 22,345 people who drowned to death reading crappy self-pubbed books, as evidenced by this statistic:

22,345

Bad self-pubbed writing also killed 124,928 puppies and kitties.

124,928

Without us gatekeepers to guard against indie swill, more will die. Quite possibly this many:

99,000,000,000,000,000,000

Do you want to be responsible for that many deaths? Do you, all you indie hacks?

Hugh: Again, because of the higher royalties for self-published works, this daily snapshot of earnings reveals indie authors as a group making more than traditionally published authors:

See our 11K genre spreadsheet at the bottom of the report for more graphs and the full data set. It would be a lot to include everything here. People can only take so much pie.

Legacy John: You can make "data" say whatever you want to using your "methods". But did you know that Amazon is evil and wants to take over the world so they can turn people into half-man/half-fish creatures called "mishes"? We'll see how much you like Amazon when you're flopping around on your sofa unable to breathe, gill-boy.

Now you had a bunch more worthless data and graphs, which I left out because they are easily refuted by Bookscan and the DBW survey and the USA Today Bestseller list and Bowker and Publishers Lunch and the AAR and the Authors Guild and The Guy I Met On The Bus Talking To Himself About Aliens and smart people like Mike Shatzkin who predicted that by 2021 there would be 101,979,020 bookstores in the USA.

101,979,020

Or maybe it wasn't Shatzkin. Maybe it was that bus guy. But that doesn't deny the fact that print books account for 130% of all book sales, and ebook sales are dying and will probably be gone by tomorrow. Saturday at the latest.

Also, Amazon is evil and gatekeepers are important defenders of culture and authors need us and self-publishing is only for stupid losers. But if those stupid losers make it big, we'll offer them contracts with deal points like:

Publication within 10 years of signing.
Maybe some sort of editing.
1/6 the royalties you can earn on your own.
7 free galleys!!!
Cover art you'll love, because you have no choice.
Rigorous, ongoing sodomy. Without lube. (We call this the "Love Room")

Hugh: Across the entire range of e-books, fiction and nonfiction, adult and children’s, genre and literary, indie authors make up a large slice of the overall Amazon pie. While indie market shares in bestselling nonfiction, literary fiction, and children’s fiction are still catching up with genre fiction—where indies already beat out the Big-5—indies have already made surprising inroads into those other categories, too. We see also that including all the other genres alongside the three top-selling categories of our first report did not appreciably alter the distribution of self-published titles across the lists. Once again, no matter how we tweak the relationship between daily sales and bestseller rank, the effect on all titles is more or less evenly distributed. That means the market share by publishing type holds steady. This can be buttressed by running more reports over time.

Indies All the Way Down

Let’s try something interesting. What if we ignore the top 1,000 e-books and look at the 49,000 titles that follow? By removing the most extreme outliers, we can see if the lists are top-heavy for traditionally published authors or if the most extreme self-published bestsellers are the exception as some claim. Frequently, self-publishing success stories are explained away as rarities. If this is true, once we remove the top 1,000 from consideration, we should see the needle move toward the traditionally published mid-list authors who are making a steady living further down the charts.

Here’s the top 50,000+ e-books again:

And here we have the same group of e-books but with the top 1,000 bestsellers removed:

It’s indies all the way down.

Once we look below the Top 1,000, indications are that the indie midlist is healthy indeed. Or it could be that we’re glimpsing the rising swell of tomorrow’s new Top 1,000. All of this remains to be seen.

Legacy John: There you go again, using your "data" to "prove" that "self-publishing" is a "better alternative" to "sodomy"--I mean "Signing With the Big 5".

Your data makes me laugh. What are you, Mr. Data? Do you have an academic background with advanced degrees in hard-science and engineering from MIT & Stanford and professional experience doing exactly this same kind of competitive analysis of App-store charts for leading game industry companies and online casinos?

Joe: Actually, that's exactly the background of Hugh's Anonymous Data Guy.

Legacy John: Oh yeah? Well, Amazon is evil and self-publishing is stupid!

Hugh: In Summary 

The picture emerging from relative ranking on Amazon bestseller lists is that self-published authors have captured a large piece of Amazon’s total market share, more than any other single publisher and often more than all five major publishers combined. Looking at daily sales rankings for 54,000+ titles reaches well beyond outliers and beyond even what might be considered midlist e-books.

Our next report will step away from Amazon for a moment. Our spider has been crawling up B&N’s waterspout. What we have discovered there surprised us. Stay tuned.

Legacy John: Once again, this was a big waste of my time. I don't even know why I bothered fasting Hugh and his so-called data. We had record profits this year, because we're taking such a big cut from clueless authors, and this gravy train is going to last forever because existence bias is a proven way to embrace the future. Authors are clueless and ignorant and naive and stupid and eager, and they'll keep begging for the crumbs we toss them no matter what contrary data or opinion is posted.

For every number Hugh has, I have a different, happier number. No one cares about Amazon's data, but they do care about the lofty state of quality literature that will only exist if people like me keep telling most authors how much they suck.

You suck too, Konrath. You're mean and rude and your blog posts are waaaaaaaay too long and all you do is yak yak yak about us vs. them and how right you are all the time. Oh, and thanks for letting me guest post. It's a wonder more legacy folks don't post here.

Joe sez: Thank you for your, uh, insights, Legacy John.

As for Hugh and Data Guy, congrats on another job well done. To show that self-pub domination of the market extends far beyond the top 7000 top ebook bestsellers on Amazon is a revelation, and you're to be commended for this Herculean task.

Legacy pundits may not value your data. They may ignore it. They may disparage it, and try to discredit it and you.

But authors are listening. You're revealing that a whole lot of self-pubbed writers are making a whole lot of money outside the legacy system. You're also showing a whole bunch of legacy-pubbed writers what they could be making if they struck off on their own. This is valuable, and appreciated.

On behalf of all writers, thank you Hugh and Anonymous Data Guy. And if you haven't read the latest author earnings report in its entirety, check it out.

Guest Post by Richard Fox

This post is for the soon-to-be author. I was just like you, until I hit that terrifying 'publish' button. It took me a long time to overcome the 'I can't' that was holding me back. I spent a lot of time reading Joe's blog, sponging off his knowledge and twiddling my thumbs until I overcame the resistance to finishing the book. I know there are lots of people who read his blog who were just like me, waiting for that final push to get it all done. My final push came from a comedy blog and the knowledge that success was possible as a self-published author (Thanks, Joe!)

What can I do to help the soon-to-be authors out there? Not much, I'm afraid. "Based on my experience," are the most terrifying words an Army 2nd Lieutenant can say to his Soldiers. I do feel like a 2nd Lieutenant again, I've got the authority (the book is published), but none of the credibility (the market hasn't decided if the book is any good). So here are a few things I've learned:

-- Write a detailed outline. My outline helped me see which characters did very little and could be combined/removed. My outline had three (three!) flashback sequences. I hate flashbacks, and because of the outline I saw that I could remove them all and turn them into a short story prequel for the novel. That short story became The Caliban Program. Plus, the outline showed me where I could combine characters and which slow chapters needed to be cut.

-- Write the book that only you can write and what makes you excited. I have a long list of novels I want to write, but I got excited about what became Into Darkness. I'm a two tour combat veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I could boil down those thirty miserable months into a  thrilling war novel. I can get more out of my time downrange than a bunch of war stories and a nagging case of PTSD. As a reader, I'm always interested when an author can draw on wartime experiences for their works. By my logic, perspective readers would be interested in an Iraq War novel written by an Iraq War vet. Yes? No? What is it that you, soon-to-be author, can write? You're the only person in the whole world that can tell that story! Get cracking!

-- Don't be in a rush to publish. When I finished The Caliban Program, Into Darkness was nowhere near done. A work-mate talked me out of putting the short story out months before the novel was ready, and he was right. It is a lousy tease to get someone interested in a story, then promise that story at some point in the future. If someone likes what they see in the teaser, the novel is available.

Do I still have lots to learn? Yes. The whole marketing angle is something I have to work on. My next book should come out faster and smoother. Independent Publishing is a tide that raises all boats and if you don't believe me go read what Joe says on this blog and Michael Bunker has to say.

Into Darkness is available now, and I enrolled it in Prime. Smart idea on the Prime enrollment? I don't know yet, I'm still learning.

Thank you, Joe. If it wasn't for your wisdom I don't know if this book would have ever seen the light. 

Thanks for showing me where I could aid Alzheimer's research and for the chance to darken your door with this blog post.

Stay Safe,

Richard Fox

http://somethingonthestaff.blogspot.com/

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Joe Sez: Thanks for serving our country, Richard, and thanks for the guest post.

I agree with your points, but I'd like to expand on one. No one should be in a rush to publish. But if you have something that's ready to go--even if it as a short story or a prequel--I advise you to publish ASAP.

I know it's hard to send your work off into the world. I know it could always be edited a bit more, tweaked a bit more. But the days of waiting for book release dates are in the past.

I can't think of a single reason, if your work is ready to publish, to wait. If it's a true teaser--meaning it's a cliffhanger without a beginning, middle, and end--try to make it free and say what it is in the product description. But if the story functions on its own, release it when it is finished, even if it is a prequel to a larger work.

Ebooks are forever. Every day you don't publish something is a day of sales and readers you missed. Maybe you'll find them later. Maybe you won't. Make your forever start as soon as you can.