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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.
How Lucky We Are That The Book Business Is Not Like The Movie Business!
Is the book business beginning to feel like the movie business? An article by the New York Times's Michael Cieply might reinforce the similarities.
Cieply reports that, unlike filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino who landed huge studio deals at the Sundance Film Festival, today's aspiring young movie makers have got to finance everything, investing in themselves on the speculation that lightning will strike in the form of financing and distribution by a major studio. As more and more authors throw in the towel in despair of landing a book deal with a big publisher, they are publishing their own books and underwriting every step from editorial to publicity.
Are there other ways to compare Cieply's description of the film industry with the current state of publishing? Let us count them, and to help you, I've taken the liberty of extracting some of Cieply's descriptions and substituting language that might reinforce the idea that New York is a lot closer to L. A. than a five hour flight on the red-eye.
The glory days of independent film [first novels], when hot young directors [authors] like Steven Soderbergh and Mr. Tarantino had studio [publishing] executives tangled in fierce bidding wars at Sundance [Book Expo, Frankfurt] and other celebrity-studded festivals, are now barely a speck in the rearview mirror. And something new, something much odder, has taken their place.
Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers [authors] playing the cool auteur [literary lion] in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker [major New York literary agent].
Here is the new way: filmmakers [authors] doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution [self-publication], marketing films [books] through social networking sites and Twitter blasts [social networking sites and Twitter blasts], putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges [maitre d's] at luxury hotels [chic publishing watering spots] in film festival cities [New York] to get them to whisper into the right ears.
The economic slowdown and tight credit have squeezed the entertainment [book] industry along with everybody else, resulting in significantly fewer big-studio [Big Publishing] films [bestsellers] in the pipeline and an even tougher road for smaller-budget independent [midlist books]. Independent distribution [Independent publishing] companies are much less likely to pull out the checkbook while many of the big studios [publishing houses] have all but gotten out of the indie film [midlist book] business.
Had enough? Oh, come on, how about one more for the road! This time, you fill in the right words:
“Everyone still dreams there’s going to be a conventional sale to a major studio,” said Kevin Iwashina, once an independent-film specialist with the Creative Artists Agency and now a partner at IP Advisors, a film sales and finance consulting company. But, he said, smart producers and directors are figuring out how to tap the value in projects on their own.
Richard Curtis Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.
I recently wrote about "gatekeepers", the cadre of tastemakers (editors, bookstore buyers, reviewers, critics, etc.) that guard the bastions of popularity against the clamoring horde of would-be's and wannabe's. It's hard to pin down just who these king- and queenmakers are, and even harder to get a clear idea of their selection criteria. The process is maddening and often cruelly arbitrary, like being rejected by the bouncer at a club whose admission policy is not posted: Is it your race? Creed? Gender? Height? Hair? Shoes?
I thought about gatekeepers when I read Motoko Rich's New York Times's article on the thriving author-subsidized publishing industry. It answers the question, What do all those authors do who are bounced from the club? Rich's answer? They start their own club. That is, they take their rejected books and publish them themselves.
Until very recently the phrase most often used to describe this activity was "vanity" publishing, but like most politically incorrect opprobria used in modern parlance it was necessary to find a gentler way to express the concept. Everyone seems to have settled on "self-publishing". Not only does that term spare the self-esteem of its practitioners, but it is also probably more accurate. For, when you read the astonishing number of people who elect the self-publication option, you say to yourself, Surely there could not be that many vain authors, could there? Well...
In her article Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab Rich points out that one outfit, Author Solutions, published 19,000 titles in 2008, "nearly six times more than Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, released last year." And it sold 2.5 million copies of all the books on its list. Rich also cites Blurb, a print on demand outfit, that published more than 300,000 titles in 2008 (not all of them subsidized by authors, clearly). Blurb's revenue has soared from $1 million to $30 million.
About this phenomenon, she says,
"As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster bestsellers, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs."
Author-subsidized books have always been with us, but how did the phenomenon go from sidetrack to mainline in just a few years?
Every literary agent can testify to the anxiety level of authors eager - all too often desperate - to see their work in print. Even a small agency receives dozens of queries and submissions daily, meaning somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 a year. Publishers did some math and discovered that the odds of finding a gem in the slush were about 20,000 to 1. They then measured the cost of maintaining a staff of first readers and factored in the time invested by senior editors reviewing the recommendations of te preliminary readers, and concluded that that gem would have to be a major and sustained bestseller just to recoup the cost of the search. So the publishers closed the door to slush and dumped the problem on literary agents.
But that didn't lower the odds - it just shifted them from one pair of shoulders to another, and when the rejection-to-acceptance ratio turned out to be about the same for agents as it had been for publishers, around 20,000 to 1, the conditions were ripe for an author stampede. All that was needed was a less expensive means of indulging one's vanity - er, excuse me: publishing one's own books. The late 1990s provided it in the form of such modern miracles as print on demand, photoshop software and other other cheap and easy production and graphics programs. The stampede began.
Only one element was missing: readers. Aside from immediate friends and family, readers proved a scarce commodity. Very few self-published books found an audience (and it is likely that even those who received or bought them never read them) Even fewer broke out of the vanity ghetto, and almost all that did relied on establishment gatekeepers to boost them onto the main track. Jill Priluck, in Slate, draws a very important distinction between merely finding readers and branding yourself: "The proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands."
But there are exceptions, and here's a passage from Motoko Rich's Times piece that caught my attention:
Michelle L. Long, an accountant who advises small businesses, published “Successful QuickBooks Consulting,” a guide for others who want to help businesses use a software package made by Intuit through CreateSpace a little more than a year ago. She said she had earned 45 to 55 percent of the cover price on each sale and had made $22,000 in royalties on the sale of more than 2,000 copies.
“A lot of this niche content is doing fairly well relative to the rest of the economy because it’s very useful to people who have a very specific need,” Rich quotes Aaron Martin, director of self-publishing and manufacturing on demand at Amazon.
Long's book genuinely filled a niche, and if, as futurist and publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin predicts, "the currentformat-specific publishing model must give way to an audience-specific one," there may very well emerge a self-publication business model that serves a real need besides the one so aptly captured by poet Emily Dickinson:
How dreary--to be--Somebody! How public--like a Frog-- To tell your name--the livelong June-- To an admiring Bog!
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.
