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Cory Doctorow Discovers Why Publishers Get 90% and Authors 10%
When Cory Doctorow launched his Publishers Weekly column a few months ago, we wondered what publishers could learn from him as he chronicles his efforts to self-publish a book. Our conclusion? Everything.
However, his latest article suggests that there's something that he can learn from publishers. It's that publishing is an exceedingly complex communal enterprise, one that relies on a surprisingly fragile network of interdependencies. As in the famous proverb about losing a war for want of a horseshoe nail, the difference between success and failure of a book may have to do with extraneous factors such as the cost of gasoline or a strike at a paper mill. Some of those factors may seem preposterous, but preposterous or not they can render us totally helpless when they bring the progress of an enterprise to a dead halt.
That seems to be the bitter lesson Doctorow is learning, a lesson that anyone with more than half an hour of experience in the publishing industry knows all too well. An example is typesetting, and Doctorow's frustration with a delay has him talking to himself. "I completely failed to note that any delays in the typesetting would grind the whole process to a halt. No galleys, no proofs of the printing process, no chances to experiment with the small-scale printing, not until the book is in a print-ready form. Let that be a lesson to you, Doctorow: job one is typesetting, period."
"All these logistics remind me of why I'm a sole-proprietor freelancer," he concludes. "I hate managing people. I hate critical paths and project management. And I suck at it. None of this is a surprise. I knew that these details would be the hardest part of the self-publishing job, and it's been made harder because pretty much everyone is working for free or cheap as a favor, so I can't call them up and demand results."
Here's the thing. Managing people, critical paths, project management are what publishers do. They do it every day, and most of the time they do it very well. But, unlike Doctorow, they seldom get people to work free or cheap as a favor. They have to pay salaries and rent and warehousing and printing and shipping as well as advances and royalties. Which is why, as we stated in our title, publishers get 90% and authors get 10%, and they're entitled to it.
Yes, there is an alternative - do what Cory Doctorow is doing. But hopefully he has gained some respect for how the other half lives. "Hell," said Jean-Paul Sartre, "is other people." But other people do occasionally serve a useful purpose, and publishing books is one of them.
Doctorow, whose brash and sometimes subversive-sounding publishing strategies have made him a folk hero to his fans and generated intense controversy in the mainstream publishing community, has laid siege to the very ramparts of that community by wagering that he's at least as good a publisher as they are. Maybe, even, a better one. And he's thrown down the gauntlet in the industry's very own trade publication, Publishers Weekly.
Doctorow describes his undertaking as an experiment. The book is a collection consisting almost completely of reprints of previously published stories. It's called With a Little Help and it's his third collection. "It will," he declares, "be available for free on the day it is released."
"Free" notwithstanding, what he hopes to accomplish is, simply, to make money publishing his book, or at least not lose any. He will achieve this by using the same contrarian (or at least counterintuitive) tactics that have succeeded with previous books, including giving them away.
How will we know if the experiment is a success or failure? Doctorow will chronicle it as it unfolds in a monthly column for PW, the first of which appeared in the October 19th issue. His entertaining article is a canny template for a publishing program that utilizes both print and digital media. Of course, this is something that every traditional publisher is trying to do, but here's the problem with every traditional publisher: they're all hobbled by a brick and mortar mindset (and overhead) that makes it impossible to achieve what one determined individual can do - at least, one bold and determined individual named Cory Doctorow. Though he acknowledges lots of help from his friends, he also, obviously, holds with Rudyard Kipling's observation: "Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne, He travels fastest who travels alone."
Doctorow's template for success includes:
Low overhead: My capital expenditures have to be as low as possible. In the ideal world, every object I make available will either cost nothing to produce or will be physically instantiated only after it has been ordered and paid for.
E-book: free, in a wide variety of formats: I have always released my books in three formats (text, HTML and PDF formatted for two-column portrait printout), and my readers have always followed up by converting them to an astonishing long tail of other formats for their preferred readers.
Audiobook: free, in a wide variety of formats: I've always taken great pleasure in reading my works aloud. I've done 150-plus installments of a podcast of me doing just that. But I'm no pro. However, many of my friends are pro voice actors, and I've called on them to each record one of the stories from the book.
Donations: whatever happens: I have never solicited donations for my works before, despite the urgings of True Believers who would like to see my publisher cut out of the loop, because I wanted to be sure my publisher was in the loop. This time around, I'm the publisher, so let's see what people are interested in giving.
Print-on-Demand trade paperback: $16 (approximately; price TBD) Lulu.com produces beautiful books, objects that look every bit as good as the Lightning Source trade paperbacks that Ingram will sell you, provided you know what you're doing when you design them. A designer, I am not. But John Berry, who designed my essay collection, Content, for Tachyon, is.
I'm also offering a custom-cover package for people running events or giveaways: for a setup fee (I'm thinking $300, but that's not fixed in stone), I'll sell you as many copies at Lulu's cost as you'd like with your own cover on it.
Premium hardcover edition: $250, limited run of 250 copies:My office is in Clerkenwell, in London, close to several artisanal binders and some damned fine printers. My favorite binder is the venerable, family-owned Wyvern Bindery, which has agreed to bind a fine limited edition of With a Little Help for £20 a copy, in quantities of 20.
Commission a new story: $10,000 (one only):I probably underpriced this, but it's too late now. The idea was to give my readers the chance to commission a story to be added to the collection at a later date—thus benefiting from an additional burst of publicity and possibly selling a second copy of the “expanded edition” to people who wanted to get the compleat text.
Advertisements: TBD: Since the paperbacks are print-on-demand, and the electronic files can be trivially modified, I'm going to sell a single ad unit on a time-limited basis: a half-page, or 500 pixels square, or five lines of text (depending on the image), at a price to be determined, in month-long increments.
Donations of books: TBD: Since the publication of Little Brother in spring 2008, I've run a donation program for my books wherein I ask librarians, teachers and people who work in other “worthy” institutions (halfway houses, shelters, hospitals, etc.) to put their names down for free copies. I publish this list online and mention it in the introductions to all the digital copies of the works.
Doctorow sometimes seems to have a chip on his shoulder, and some skeptics will try to knock it off. In fact blogger Michael Stackpole has spilled gallons of e-ink to do that very thing, including calling Doctorow a "snake-oil salesman" and his experiment "rubbish". Entrenched establishmentarians will also try to take Doctorow down. That would be a mistake. They would be far better off studying his strategies and learning from them, something he makes easy to do with his wit and articulateness. I wish him not only to not lose money but to make a bundle. Maybe that will take the starch out of some publishers that are not just stuck in the last century but are proud of it.
When Cory Doctorow launched his Publishers Weekly column a few months ago, we wondered what publishers could learn from him as he chronicles his efforts to self-publish a book. Our conclusion? Everything.
