The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: Publishing

  • Online Publishing: A Quick Overview

    Selling your writing online is only getting easier. Low overhead, cheap startup costs and fast setup time means it’s easy to make money. However, it can be just as easy to lose money, and that’s because of piracy. I’m not going to get into the debate of corporate, pirate and indie interests here, but the fact is that piracy exists and, if you want to sell on the internet, it’s something you have to deal with.

    There are many ways to publish content online, all with different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to potential profit and loss. I’ve picked out four of the most common to see what their potential risks and rewards are.

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  • So Not Worried About This

    The question before me this week is about the future of publishing, and honestly, I couldn’t care less about the future of publishing [0].

    People are worried about the effects of Internet-mediated business cycle disruption. The thing about disruptive technologies is that they’re disruptive— they shake things up, move them about, force them to do the hokey-pokey when they’d really rather not dance. The people most likely to be hurt are those who are most invested in the old ways of doing things. They’ve built their business model on the tried and true and will not be moved, in the hope that past performance is a predictor of future success and all that. Above all, they want stability, predictability, and a steadily increasing cash flow.

    I am old enough to remember when the Internet was being hailed as the great bypasser of traditional gatekeepers (in this case, the publishers), giving artists the opportunity to market directly to the public. And to a certain extent, that happens quite a bit. You don’t have to get hired by a major metropolitan newspaper to get your opinions on the issues of the day in front of readers anymore— you just have to start a blog. You can turn your Nanowrimo novel into a .pdf or .mobi file and distribute it basically for free, and maybe even earn a few bucks in the process.

    But here’s the thing. Bypassing the gatekeepers— becoming your own publisher— has been happening for centuries. All you needed was access to a printing press/mimeograph/photocopier. You could create newsletters/fanzines/chapbooks to your heart’s content, in small press runs, at very low cost. And you could even make a few bucks selling them at the comic book shop/convention/paranoid conspiracy gun show. People still do that today. If you wanted a little more polish, you could hire or barter for editing and layout work, and pay for a hardbound vanity press edition. These days you set up a CafePress store or similar, and you won’t even have to clean out enough room in your garage to store boxes of books or haul them around in your trunk.

    What the publisher provides isn’t the physical (or these days, electronic) object. They don’t just stand between author and reader, collecting tolls. Publishers are middlemen, yes, but value-added middlemen. An author signs a contract (after reading it very carefully first, natch) that provides not only an audience for his work, but also quality control and marketing. The reader picks up the book expecting a certain baseline quality of story, grammar, and presentation. Furthermore, the publisher’s brand helps the reader find a book they’re likely to enjoy even if they’re not familiar with the author.

    That’s what a brand is, you see. A guarantee of a certain quality of a product line. You wouldn’t expect Proctor and Gamble, manufacturer of household cleaning supplies, to build a decent car, and you wouldn’t expect Ford Motor Company to know from a good horror story. So if you want a book about exploding spaceships or elves in the urban jungle, you’d buy something from Baen. If you want a steamy but traditional romance, Harlequin or Avon. And when you need to fall asleep easily with no nasty side effects, pick up something from Oxford University Press.

    There’s only one thing that matters, which is that writers want to make stories, and readers want to read stories, and somehow they’ll figure the rest of it out. Publishers of today don’t look a lot like publishers of 100 years ago, and certainly won’t look anything like publishers 100 years hence. I am fairly certain, though, that there will be some kind of middleman who helps the writer and reader find one another. Today it’s a publisher. Tomorrow it might be an expert system.

    [0] My opinion is privileged by the fact that I have no current intention of ever dipping my toe into the business end of literature, and especially not to earn a living at it. My fiction writing is a hobby and an exploration of art and craft. My nonfiction writing earns me a modest salary. My reading is wide-ranging and multi-sourced.

  • Dancing and Feeling Good About Publishing

    "The politics of moving, aha - If this message's understood..."
    “The politics of moving, aha – If this message’s understood…”

    Recently I sent my novel to a publisher for consideration. I try not to think about it too much but I’ve got my fingers metaphorically crossed they’ll accept it. The key is to keep expectations low.

    However, I can’t not think about the future. It’s sort of what I do.

    To do that, I think about the past and what I thought the future would be. At some point I (and a lot of others) thought sure that the future would be filled with chrome and jetpacks and flying cars. Even silly things like The Jetsons gave us ideas, like video phones and the three-day work week.

    In every version of The Future, there were things that were a lot the same as they were then, or now, if you prefer. There’s always food, almost always entertainment of some sort and always relationships. There are always corporations, too.

    Since I’m a writer, the particular corporations I’m interested in today are the ones that publish stories, entertainments. Like the one I sent my novel to.

    In the last thirty years, entertainment has changed dramatically. Gone are the 12”, 33 1/3 Long Playing records of my youth in favor first of cassettes, then CDs and now digital formats like MP3. Gone are the four networks and their summer rerun schedules in favor of first VHS, then DVD and now cloud-based streaming on smaller screens. Not gone, but certainly less prevalent are the bound books made of paper that are migrating to a computer cloud where one can read but doesn’t necessarily own anything any more despite paying for the privilege.

    Books in particular come in multiple formats: paper, audio, digital. Some are from major publishers, some from smaller presses and a great many more are self-published. (more…)

  • Ignoring Thunderdome

    I honestly spend very little time thinking about the future of the publishing industry. I find the blank page intimidating enough as it is, and I don’t need additional reasons to feel insecure about what I’m doing.

    I try to avoid news about who is merging with whom or what Mrs. Megapublisher’s stance is on digital rights because I know what would happen if I ever started down that particular rabbit hole. My eyes would be opened to a larger reality that would do nothing to instill confidence in my aspirations. In turn, I would feel the need to exhaustively search for as much positive news as I could, stories about how it’s not nearly as difficult to break in as I had feared.

    (For the record, I equate the difficulty of reaching and maintaining success in publishing somewhere on the order of surviving Thunderdome.)

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  • Publishing Revolution

    It will come as no surprise to anyone, but the Internet is upon us. And with the absolute freedom allowed to us with instant communication from anywhere to anywhere, it was only a matter of time before the literature began to flow. Printing and publishing is evolving in ways that will change everything, again.

    It is now easier then ever for someone to share their creative work. People are able to make something, and share it to everyone on the planet with a push of the button. A story can go from the imagination to a screen ten thousand miles away quicker and easier then ever before.

    I imagine that hundred’s of years ago, people must have had similar feelings when German’s started printing books at lightening speed. Gone were the days of hand-copying books in a monastery one page at a time. With the invention of the printing press, the publishing world must have been turned on its head.

    No longer were books a special privilege of the wealthy. Literature could be distributed to everyone at record paces. Information was no longer controlled by a few people in charge. There are a lot of similarities between then and now.

    With electronic publishing, the power is, in theory, given to the writer. No longer is the creativity of writers restrained by the whims of a handful of publishers. Much how the printing press gave access to the masses to the world of books, electronic publishing gives us access to works that would have never seen the light of day just a few years ago.

  • The Brave New Publishing World

    We stand on the edge of uncertainty. Publishing is changing, and for writers, that might as well be the apocalypse. The publishing industry as we know it is dissolving. The big publishers are merging, self-publishing and independent publishing have never had easier means of distribution. The writing world has changed.

    We should have known. It was only a matter of time. Publishing hadn’t changed much since the printing press was invented. Editors held the keys to the readers. If they didn’t want you to be read, you weren’t. Kate Chopin wrote the now-canonical novella The Awakening which stirred up such a controversy that she never had anything major published after and died a few years later. James Joyce had to rescue Dubliners from a fire after what seemed like the last interested publisher in Ireland decided to burn it rather than return the manuscript. Of course, both of those books found publishers willing to back them and became incredibly influential.

    Perhaps Chopin and Joyce would have turned to self-publishing if they lived in our era. Perhaps not. The path to publishing still isn’t easy, and while self-publishing gets you out there, really only gets you as far as the door, with no guarantee of readership.

    Still, it is exciting in many ways. For once, the readers, not the publishers, are the gatekeepers to a writer’s success, and that is an exciting thing for some people. Marxist literary theory believes that literature is a tool of bourgeois hegemonic control, because the bourgeois control the means of literary production, deciding what is read. One of the sparks for revolution, then, is the development of an alternative proletariat-based hegemony. Besides attempting to utilize terminology from my current class, I think it is interesting how the changes in publishing are going to affect everything from reading to writing to the very theories about the relationship between literature and society. Access to literature is no longer controlled solely by management in New York.

    The scary part is not knowing where I am going to land in this whole thing. I’ve had friends who self-published and had good experiences, better than some experiences of people who have had actual publishers. Then, there have been other friends who have basically gotten nowhere with it. Obviously, there have been stories of great self-publishing successes.

    My plan is to try traditional publishing, but I will probably be writing for the next sixty years or so. The very term “publishing” could mean anything by then. Still, the unknown can be exciting, and for those of us trying to make it as writers, the future of publishing is very unknown.