Bankrupt!

If you haven't yet heard, mes auteurs, Borders Group has filed Chapter 11. While this means a lot of things for the industry, I'd like to follow up on Monday's post and list just a few potential changes/repercussions you might see as authors.

In unimpeachable Bullet-O-Vision™:

· Borders will continue to operate. As I explained on Monday, Chapter 11 bankruptcy doesn't necessarily entail liquidation. Although Borders plans to close many individual stores, the chain itself will still do business while under bankruptcy protection. This means you can still buy books there and, just as importantly, your books can still be carried there.

· Borders will likely be even more cautious about investing in midlist authors. While their new loans from GE Capital will allow them to finance, among other things, the purchase of new stock, Borders is not in any position to gamble. They're likely, in my opinion, to skip more midlist titles than usual and to only spend their money on names they know they can sell. This will be exacerbated by the aforementioned store closings.

· Publishers may offer lower advances, especially on midlist titles. The industry has depended on Borders as a major market for new titles. If the publisher can't trust Borders to take a sufficiently large number of copies of a given title, this will factor into their profit and loss statements. As a result, they may advance less money to authors in order to increase the odds that any given acquired title will earn out.

· Electronic titles will probably be largely unaffected. Borders was quite the Johnny-come-lately to the e-book scene, and as a result their sales in that sector are dwarfed by their competitors'. Further, even if their sales were a large subset of the market, brick-and-mortar store closings wouldn't really affect their ability to distribute titles electronically via their on-line storefront.

· Local author events may be canceled. Fewer stores means fewer venues for readings, signings, &c. Towns in which Borders is really the only bookstore will, as you might imagine, be the most affected. You can switch to buying books on-line if your local Borders store closes; not so with author events. At least, not yet.

A lot remains to be seen, however, so I'll post periodic updates on Borders' bankruptcy filing and its impact on the industry as events unfold.

There's Broke and Then There's Broke

Before we get started today, cats & kittens, I'd like to point you to a rather fantastic interview conducted by Alexia Chamberlynn with yours truly. You can learn more about her on her website, and you can learn more about me right here.

Speaking of learning!

In case you didn't hear and/or do not follow me on the Twitters, Borders Group is set to declare bankruptcy this week. What does that mean for the publishing industry and you, authors/consumers?

It can mean one of two things, depending on what bankruptcy paperwork is filed.

Under Chapter 7, Borders would essentially undergo liquidation. A trustee is appointed to figure out how best to disburse and redistribute assets and property to creditors (the people to whom the business owed all that money). Once the process is over, the business is no more. Kaput. Gone.

Because I have no insider knowledge of the situation (and couldn't share it with you even if I did), I can't really sketch out the details of Borders' case for you, nor can I describe what a potential liquidation for them would look like. All I can tell you is: it's the least desirable option from the industry's perspective.

In the event of Borders' complete dissolution, a lot of their former business would redistribute to other retailers (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, independent bookstores), but a certain fraction would just be lost.

Under Chapter 11, however, no trustee would be appointed on Borders' behalf, and they would continue under their own steam as "debtors in possession." A Chapter 11 filing would enable them to reorganize the company while under the protection (and supervision) of the court, which may include (but is not limited to) securing new financing/lines of credit and shedding underperforming stores or departments.

They would also benefit from what's known as an "automatic stay," meaning that creditors would be unable to collect from Borders during the term of their restructuring.

Borders could potentially continue operations largely unhindered and then emerge from bankruptcy in a few months or years (Kmart did this about ten years ago), and while their current stock would (as in a Chapter 7 filing) basically be rendered valueless, they could begin trading on the NYSE again under a new listing if and when they officially emerge. Sort of like a phoenix emerging from the ashes, only with a major brick-and-mortar chain bookstore instead of a bird and a pile of debt instead of cinders.

In short: bankruptcy isn't necessarily the end of Borders. There still remains a lot to be seen.

The Death of (Another) Format (Rerun)

One more rerun from the PMN vaults. Enjoy!

Episode: "The Death of (Another) Format"
Originally aired: Monday, August 9th, 2010

A couple of months ago, I mentioned my belief that e-readers will quickly make large print paper books obsolete. After careful analysis, mes auteurs, I'm comfortable predicting the death of another format (although I think this one will take much longer): the mass market paperback.

For those not familiar, the mass market paperback is that chunky, newsprinty $4 to $8 paperback you find in airports and grocery stores (in addition to traditional independent and chain bookstores). It's especially popular with genre fiction (fantasy, mystery, romance, science fiction). Historically, they've sold well because they're cheap, lightweight, and don't take up a lot of space; not many people buy them to display on bookshelves or coffee tables.

E-books are already relatively cheap, and they have no weight and occupy no physical space at all. As the cost and heft of e-readers steadily declines, there will be (in my opinion) no reason to buy a mass market paperback rather than an e-book, and I think this will lead to the format's demise.

A lot of people are currently worried that e-books will kill the hardcover, but I find this relatively unlikely. Hardcovers have been status symbols and conversation pieces for centuries, if not millennia. People like having bookshelves full of hardcovers. They like having them signed. They like physically perusing a library rather than flipping through a list of titles on a screen. For these reasons (among others), I think hardcovers will survive the conversion to e-books, although I certainly expect print runs to be reduced and POD to become a more tenable option for smaller publishers.

As for the mass market paperback: granted, the lendability factor will definitely keep it alive for a few more years, and it will probably take decades beyond that before the second-hand market begins to fold. As soon as solid lending or renting protocols are established by the e-book industry, however, I don't see any reason why consumers would rather have a physical, low-quality paperback than a non-physical, high-quality e-book. Can you?

This is Why You Always Meet Your Deadlines (Rerun)

Meetings abound this week, mes auteurs, so I'll be posting reruns today and tomorrow. Enjoy!

Episode: "This is Why You Always Meet Your Deadlines"
Originally aired: Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

In case you hadn't heard, Yahoo! sports columnist Adrian Wojnarowski (say that three times fast) has been sued by Penguin Books for failure to meet his deadline regarding a book about former North Carolina State University basketball coach Jim Valvano. The original manuscript delivery date? August 1, 2007.

Wojnarowski was originally offered a cool $400,000 (of which he received $140,000), but his repeated delays caused Penguin to reduce the total advance to $325,000. Now, over three years later, they've canceled the book and are taking Wojnarowski to court to recover the $140,000 they already paid him.

I wish I could say this kind of story was uncommon, but honestly, the only unusual aspect is the filing of a lawsuit. Books are delayed by months (sometimes years) all the time, and failure to meet deadline (sometimes more than once) is not unheard of. I think, however, that publishers' patience is particularly short in the midst of the recession, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were to become even less lenient about missed deadlines, particularly for books bought for six- or seven-figure advances.

The reasons for delays can range from author laziness to the publisher's disapproval of various drafts (that is, sending them back for rewrites) to changes in current events that warrant substantial revisions (generally affecting only nonfiction). Remember, too, that most advances are cut into pieces: often one installment is paid on signing, another on receipt of the manuscript by the publisher, and occasionally a third on or around the date of publication. If you're getting $400,000 and you've already gotten $140,000 just for signing a piece of a paper, one can see how your motivation might be temporarily shot.

That said: this business is slow enough as-is, so as début writers who always want to make the best of impressions, it's in your collective best interest to get your manuscripts and revisions delivered on time. Always be professional, always be on time, and always ask your agent or editor if you have any questions about deadlines, timelines, or any of the other myriad -lines to which you might be subject.

Books Without Borders?

Happy 2011, mes auteurs, and a big thank you to all the guest posters from the last seven days. You guys rock.

But alas and alack, faithful readers, it's not all sunshine and lollipops in the land of publishing. As you by now surely know, Borders is (still) in trouble.

On the last day of 2010, BGP announced it would be delaying payments to vendors (i.e. not paying publishers for books). This caused some publishers to stop shipping them books, and Borders' stock tumbled (insofar as one can tumble from under a dollar per share) as a result. After a low of $0.83/share, it's trading at heavy volume at a shaky $0.88/share. Borders' market capitalization hasn't budged much from $60 million (that's "million" with an "m"). For reference, Barnes & Nobles' (BKS) is $930 million and Amazon's (AMZN) is $82 billion ($82 thousand million).

After two top executives resigned, Borders management traveled to New York City for a meeting with major vendors, which (one assumes) included the Big Six publishers that comprise Borders' largest source of books (and therefore income). Borders is apparently asking publishers to convert delayed payments into interest-bearing debt while simultaneously trying to renegotiate their loans with GE Capital and Jefferies Group. In short: they're out of cash and trying to find a way to keep the doors open and the lights on.

With staff apparently being advised to seek employment elsewhere, however, I don't think that's going to be much longer. In my opinion, Borders will be lucky to survive the month, much less the first quarter. They're strapped for cash and straining their relationships with suppliers, and it would be the understatement of the year (granted, it's early yet) to say they're poorly positioned for the ongoing digital shift in publishing: their website is inferior to their competitors', their continous couponing and deep discounts don't seem to be slowing the decline in their sales, and without a dedicated e-reader, they're nowhere near in league with the Kindle or the Nook.

That said, gentle readers, I'm afraid (barring divine intervention or acquisition by another company) Borders is more or less finished. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and (to a lesser extent) Apple will be left to determine the future of publishing when the dust from BGP's fall clears. I can only hope some of those empty storefronts become independent book stores.

What about you, meine Autoren? How would the demise of Borders affect you and your reading habits?

NaNoWriMOhNotAgain

It's that time of year, mes auteurs! Small flaming gourds, people extorting you for food on your very doorstep, and ghoulish apparitions in the night can only mean one thing: NaNoWriMo is (almost) here.

In case you're not familiar, NaNoWriMo (or "National Novel Writing Month") is a project created by Chris Baty just over ten years ago that dedicates the month of November to writing novels: simply, if you compose 50,000 words between 12:00 am on November 1st and 11:59 pm on November 30th, you "win." And who doesn't love winning?

I wrote about NaNoWriMo last year and got an interesting array of comments and responses. Many were to disabuse me of the notion that a large number of NaNoWriMoErs send queries regarding their 50,000-word mss (hint: 50,000 words does not an adult novel make) to agents, thereby contributing to the global surplus of form rejections. And perhaps they were right; if you, dear readeurs, are any indication, virtually nobody does this.

And yet people do do this. For every few people NaNo-ing just to have fun, or to get a start on that novel they've been putting off, or just to see if they can do it, there's probably someone (based on the anecdotal evidence in which I've been awash for the past few years) who just queries with what they've got. Or, I imagine, sometimes just sends the whole ms along, since if their mentality predisposes them toward sending unfinished/inadequate work to industry professionals, they're probably not super good at following directions (i.e. query before sending a partial or full).

This is a bit of a muddled post, meine Autoren, so in kid-tested, mother-approved Bullet-O-Vision™—

What I am saying:

· NaNoWriMo is fun, entertaining, and a good way to get yourself writing on a regular schedule.

· While this is neither Chris Baty's nor NaNoWriMo's fault, the project encourages a lot of terrible writers with too much time on their hands to churn out dreadful Frankensteinian monsters with which they proceed to pester literary agents, editors, friends, and family. Being literate does not make one a good writer. Not everyone is or can be a good writer. Sad, but (à mon avis) true.

· Granted, a lot of these people are probably writing terrible novels anyway, but anything that encourages them further gives me heartburn.

· Just because you can write 50,000 words that more or less make sense in a month does not mean you're cut out to be a writer.

I realize I'm very much preaching to the choir here.

What I am not saying:

· That NaNoWriMo is terrible. (Because it's not!)

· That you shouldn't participate in NaNoWriMo. (Because, if you've got the time, why not?)

· That you shouldn't use ideas/passages/chapters written via NaNoWriMo in future works. (Good ideas are good ideas!)

· That you should submit the entirety of your NaNoWriMo work to agents. (See above!)

· That no one has ever sold a novel they wrote during NaNoWriMo (but the numbers are small indeed).

What think ye, gentle readers/writers/viewers/collaborators?

Personalities and Professionalism

Every once in awhile, mes auteurs, I post about the little dos and don'ts of interacting with agents: what to say and not to say, how to go about saying it, asking appropriate questions without driving your agent up the wall, &c, &c. After having read Bill Clegg's Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man, however, I must ask: what kind of behaviors would you and wouldn't you tolerate from your (hypothetical) agent? How far would you go to preserve your working relationship?

If you haven't read Clegg's memoir, allow me to summarize: for reasons that aren't made entirely clear, Bill Clegg decides to throw away his relationship with his family, flagrantly cheat on his live-in boyfriend, and abandon his career (deserting his pregnant business partner and dozens of clients in the process) so he can blow through $70,000 worth of savings smoking crack. (He relapses or drops out of rehab more than once.) Clegg portrays himself as not very nice and not overwhelmingly intelligent, though he does (pre-crack binge, at least) sound funny and fairly charming. That aside, however, he sounds like someone of whom I wouldn't even want to be a friend of a friend of a friend, much less someone I'd want to work with. (Full disclosure: I have never met Bill Clegg in real life.)

Here's the kicker, though: after he finally cleaned up his act, Clegg—who never actually apologized to the the aforementioned abandoned business partner—didn't seem to suffer at all from having burnt nearly every bridge he had. He not only got a pretty cushy job with William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, but even got many of his former clients back. Clients he had abandoned with no explanation so he could smoke a bunch of crack, drink liver-brittling amounts of room service vodka, and have sex with $400/hour prostitutes.

Granted, this is far and away an outlier in the Realm of Recorded Agent Behaviors, but I think it warrants attention not only because of Clegg's high profile, but because of the relative lack of professional repercussions he seems to have suffered.

This might be an easy one, but prithee, inform me: would you have gone back to an agent like Bill Clegg if you believed (s)he were the best fit for your work and/or would get you the best deal available? What would and wouldn't you tolerate in a relationship with your agent?

This is Why You Always Meet Your Deadlines

In case you hadn't heard, Yahoo! sports columnist Adrian Wojnarowski (say that three times fast) has been sued by Penguin Books for failure to meet his deadline regarding a book about former North Carolina State University basketball coach Jim Valvano. The original manuscript delivery date? August 1, 2007.

Wojnarowski was originally offered a cool $400,000 (of which he received $140,000), but his repeated delays caused Penguin to reduce the total advance to $325,000. Now, over three years later, they've canceled the book and are taking Wojnarowski to court to recover the $140,000 they already paid him.

I wish I could say this kind of story was uncommon, but honestly, the only unusual aspect is the filing of a lawsuit. Books are delayed by months (sometimes years) all the time, and failure to meet deadline (sometimes more than once) is not unheard of. I think, however, that publishers' patience is particularly short in the midst of the recession, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were to become even less lenient about missed deadlines, particularly for books bought for six- or seven-figure advances.

The reasons for delays can range from author laziness to the publisher's disapproval of various drafts (that is, sending them back for rewrites) to changes in current events that warrant substantial revisions (generally affecting only nonfiction). Remember, too, that most advances are cut into pieces: often one installment is paid on signing, another on receipt of the manuscript by the publisher, and occasionally a third on or around the date of publication. If you're getting $400,000 and you've already gotten $140,000 just for signing a piece of a paper, one can see how your motivation might be temporarily shot.

That said: this business is slow enough as-is, so as début writers who always want to make the best of impressions, it's in your collective best interest to get your manuscripts and revisions delivered on time. Always be professional, always be on time, and always ask your agent or editor if you have any questions about deadlines, timelines, or any of the other myriad -lines to which you might be subject.

The Death of (Another) Format

A couple of months ago, I mentioned my belief that e-readers will quickly make large print paper books obsolete. After careful analysis, mes auteurs, I'm comfortable predicting the death of another format (although I think this one will take much longer): the mass market paperback.

For those not familiar, the mass market paperback is that chunky, newsprinty $4 to $8 paperback you find in airports and grocery stores (in addition to traditional independent and chain bookstores). It's especially popular with genre fiction (fantasy, mystery, romance, science fiction). Historically, they've sold well because they're cheap, lightweight, and don't take up a lot of space; not many people buy them to display on bookshelves or coffee tables.

E-books are already relatively cheap, and they have no weight and occupy no physical space at all. As the cost and heft of e-readers steadily declines, there will be (in my opinion) no reason to buy a mass market paperback rather than an e-book, and I think this will lead to the format's demise.

A lot of people are currently worried that e-books will kill the hardcover, but I find this relatively unlikely. Hardcovers have been status symbols and conversation pieces for centuries, if not millennia. People like having bookshelves full of hardcovers. They like having them signed. They like physically perusing a library rather than flipping through a list of titles on a screen. For these reasons (among others), I think hardcovers will survive the conversion to e-books, although I certainly expect print runs to be reduced and POD to become a more tenable option for smaller publishers.

As for the mass market paperback: granted, the lendability factor will definitely keep it alive for a few more years, and it will probably take decades beyond that before the second-hand market begins to fold. As soon as solid lending or renting protocols are established by the e-book industry, however, I don't see any reason why consumers would rather have a physical, low-quality paperback than a non-physical, high-quality e-book. Can you?

You Ain't In It For the Money

From this week's New Yorker:

[Rod Blagojevich's] wife, Patti, ate a tarantula in a contest with the actor Lou Diamond Phillips in Costa Rica for the reality show "I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!" The couple explained that they needed the money.

May you never need money so badly.

All joking aside, mes auteurs, it's important for you to realize that you're not likely to make a ton of money with your writing. It is, in fact, unlikely that you'll even be able to quit your day job; only a vanishingly small percentage of working authors earn enough from their writing alone to support themselves. While it's nice to dream of a six-figure advance and a house in the Hamptons, sadly, that's probably all it'll ever be: a dream.

If you're a serious writer, you're not in it for the money. You're in it because you love writing, because you believe you're good at it, and because you believe your story deserves to be told and read. Sure, it's nice to be paid for something you love and are good at, but you'll probably have to do at least one other thing (something you may not love, or possibly even be good at) to make ends meet.

No one ever said it was easy being a writer. Paying work isn't guaranteed; you may end up being paid for writing you don't particularly want to do; you probably won't get paid a lot to do it. Them's the breaks.

However!

If you're at least comfortable with said day job, you can view your writing not only as a hobby, but as a potential (though relatively small) source of income. Extra money for something you love doing is a pretty nice bonus, even if it's only a few thousand dollars. Sure, it's hard work to finish a manuscript, send out a million queries, secure an agent, get a deal at a house, and help shepherd your book through the publication process, but if you truly love writing and publishing novels, you'll see it through. If not, you're not cut out for this business and should probably hang up your pen/keyboard.

The point, meine Autoren, is this: do this because you won't be happy doing anything else, not because you want to be the next James Patterson or J.K. Rowling (as nice as that'd be).

The Future Will Be Better Tomorrow

Last week, the inimitable Nathan Bransford wrote a post about the future of publishing in which he envisions a switch from the current "top-down" model (i.e., books are funneled through publishers to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff) to a "bottom-up" model (i.e., everyone and his mom who wants to publish a book will publish that book—electronically—and consumer demand will do the separating for which publishers are currently responsible). In case you missed it, we had a #blogduel over the issue on Twitter. I'm calling it a draw. For now.

First, I agree with Nathan that as e-books come to comprise more and more of the market, electronic self-publication will become more popular. I also agree that this "sudden deluge" is, in fact, already here, and that it's not going to substantially impact anyone's reading or book selection habits. At least, not yet.

I disagree with Nathan on the point that these extra books will continue to float around in the ether forever without impacting your reading experience (much as all those physical books you never think or care about do). Without an organizing force or infrastructure behind them, I don't think the e-book market will self-regulate any more than than Internet discussions or chat rooms do. The e-book market needs the equivalent of threads and moderators, otherwise I think the loudest (not necessarily the best) voices will win out and the consumer will have a difficult time finding material that, for lack of a more tactful turn of phrase, doesn't suck.

To be fair, there is sort of an organizing force already at work in the book world (p- and e- alike), and that's the consumer review/word-of-mouth. I do think that consumers, by reviewing e-books and participating in a system that rewards well-received books and does not reward garbage—or at least, material considered unsalable by the majority of people—will be able to give a semblance of order to the electronic market. To be honest, though, that's only part of the equation.

A recommender system relies on participation from members, and while I'm certain there is no shortage of people with opinions on the Internet, there are some genres and topics that are more likely to draw reviews than others. Additionally, the more niche the topic of the book, the smaller the audience and the fewer reviews, meaning a bad review or two by an unhinged reviewer could sink an otherwise promising title.

As in the physical book stores of today (rapidly becoming the physical book stores of yore), I think there's going to have to be an organizing force on the part of the larger publishers; that is, a system by which they use their extensive marketing budgets to ensure that their titles are given prominent placement in electronic venues operated by companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google. A system that is already in place in the physical book store and beginning to grow in the analogous electronic environment. That is to say: co-op.

In short: I think Nathan is generally right about the future of publishing, but I think any kind of democratization implied in the "infinite book store" is illusory (though it's totally possible I inferred a kind of democracy in Nathan's vision that isn't there, and if so, I apologize for having misunderstood). Yes, the electronic book stores of the today/the future are/will be orders of magnitude larger than the stores of today, and yes, they will be full of a lot of great books and a lot of crap. I think that future depends on better methods of differentiating the two and communicating that information to the reading public.

Terms to Know: Lead Title

All books are created equal.

Some books are more equal than others.

When publishers talk about a lead title, they're referring to a book (often, but certainly not always, by a début author) that they believe has the potential to blow out in terms of sales. These aren't the books by established hot shots or memoirs/self help books by celebrities; these are those front-of-store, gotta-read titles that seem to erupt out of nowhere. But nay! They do not appear ex nihilo, cats and kittens, but rather, they are built and designed: they receive six-figure marketing budgets, co-op dollars, aggressive publicity, additional sales materials. In short: the works.

Now, to be fair, it's not possible to engineer a bestselling title without the reading public's participation. A Big Six publisher could throw millions into marketing and co-op and not come anywhere close to breaking even if the consumer doesn't participate (i.e., purchase the book). That said, we all (as consumers, anyway) are much more easily manipulated than we would like to believe, and there is a direct correlation between the amount of money, time, and energy that a publisher puts into a book—a lead title—and that title's performance in the market.

Some lead titles flop terribly. Most, I think, break even, depending on the amount of money sunk into the endeavor. A few (far more than the average for books in general, but still not a huge number) become major bestsellers, and I'm inclined to believe they wouldn't have had they not had the big budgets and know-how of a large publishing operation. When the publisher pays for those big stacks of books at the front of Borders or Barnes & Noble, lines up interview after interview with major media, and advertises in magazines and locations you're likely to read and frequent, aren't you going to pick up that book and at least read the dust jacket? That's half the battle, friends: getting you to pick up the book. The publisher believes the content is enough to win the second half of the battle (getting you to bring the book to the register), but first they have to spend enough money to make it easy for you to find.

Not all major titles are/were lead titles (Harry Potter—the early books, anyway—being a good example), but classifying a book as such is a way of allocating funds and marking which books are believed to be wildly successful before they even ship out to stores. Is it fair? No. Is it practical in this industry? Absolutely. And by no means are the non-lead titles of the world doomed to failure—they are, as I said, "equal"—but they're not as equal as the titles that receive substantially larger investments of time, money, and effort, and the odds of their doing as well sales-wise is very slim indeed.

Death of a Format

As we progress further into the Most Glorious Digital Age, mes auteurs, I can't help but feel that some book formats and practices are going to be made obsolete. Now, before anyone gets started with "Kindle-this" and "iPad-that," I'm not suggesting that 1.) these changes will render print books in general obsolete, or 2.) these changes will be specific to any one e-reader, company, or file format.

They are as follows: large print and audio books (as they currently exist) are goners.

Large print books are going to fold relatively soon simply because e-readers offer something that physical books don't and can't: resizable font. If the characters on your Kindle or Sony Reader or iPad or what have you are too small to read, you can zoom in; no such luck with a paperback. And as more and more older folks begin to adopt electronic readers, the market for paper-and-ink large print books will continue to dwindle. Eventually, everyone who used to read large print books will have either converted over to e-books or will have died, leaving only those who grew up with electronic books as the norm.

How long will this process take? Beats me, but I know that large print book sales have been on the decline for a few years now and their profit margins are shrinking. I'd be surprised if large print books are still sold by major New York publishers five years from now.

Audio books are a different animal altogether: they're not being directly threatened by e-readers like the Kindle or the Nook, but their audience is dwindling as libraries (major customers in the audio market) are closing and downward pressure on pricing in the music industry means fewer and fewer people are willing to shell out $40 or even $50 for an unabridged audio book.

In my opinion, the future of the audio book lies in the paid download (à la the iTunes store model or a subscription model like Amazon's Audible). As we move away from physical media for everything from books (Kindle, iPad, Nook) to music and movies (iTunes, Audible, Netflix's "Watch Instantly"), I think the physical, compact disc audio book is going to go the way of the dodo. Unlike the print book market, which will actually continue to thrive for awhile in the YA and children's segments (chiefly because most parents can't or won't by a $200+ device for accident-prone children to read on), audio books haven't taken hold with that demographic because its constituents either haven't bought a CD in years or are unsure as to what CDs actually are.

What do you think, gentle readers? Am I right or am I right?

The [Your Name Here]'s Daughter, Revisited

I've covered the topic of The [Your Name Here]'s Daughter (a.k.a. The [Adjective] Wife) before, but as the trend (to my continual consternation) continues, I figure it bears revisiting.

Publishing is fraught with trends. This is for two reasons: one, would-be authors (who are also readers) see successful books and want to write similar books in the hope that they will also be successful, and publishers (who always want The Next Big Thing™) see successful books (either theirs or their competitors') and want to publish similar books in the hope that they will also be successful. (It's a vicious cycle.) Unfortunately, only a small percentage of these books catch on and become bestsellers, the rest fail to earn out their advances, authors and publishers everywhere are confused, and the process begins again when a new trend starts to catch on.

I generally advise you, gentle readers, not to play the trend game because 1.) the trend will likely be exhausted by the time your book comes out, and 2.) even if it isn't, there's no guarantee your book will be one of The Chosen Ones that readers everywhere simply MUST HAVE. Which trends in particular do I think are nearing their ends? Well, I'm glad you asked.

· The [Your Name Here]'s Daughter/The [Adjective] Wife. Archetype: Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. I recently mentioned my personal grievances with this trend to a colleague, who simply responded, "Yeah, but The [Your Name Here]'s Wife sells!" (The trend, not any title in particular.) Which is true! At least, it's true for now. As the market becomes saturated with this particular variety of women's fiction, however, I think more and more consumers will turn elsewhere for new reads.

· Vampires/Werewolves. Archetype: Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. No, really. Authors who have already established themselves as brands with this subject, like Meyer or Charlaine Harris, can pretty much continue to write vampire novels until the turn of the century. You, who are just starting out, do not have this luxury. Vampires and werewolves will always be cool, but they won't be as cool as they are now for a long time. Putting werewolves in space or making vampires fallen angels will not increase their coolness. Trust me.

· Mash-ups. Archetype: Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. More or less the exclusive province of Quirk Books, this relatively short-lived trend probably won't survive long after the publisher's release of Android Karenina later this month.

· Anything based around the world ending in 2012. Archetype: Too many to count. As you might expect, this trend will cease to be cool on or around January 1st, 2013.

While I don't want to tell you what to write, you might notice that the women's fiction and YA crowds are well-represented here. This means (as usual) two things: first, they're bigger markets, so you're more likely to sell a greater number of copies if your book succeeds, and second, they're bigger markets, so there's a lot more competition. O, the cruel double-edged sword of publishing!

Incidentally, it also might mean we need a few more non-YA bro-oriented books out there. Just saying.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Based on yesterday's (entirely unscientific) poll, mes auteurs, it seems that while the majority of you read some combination of the various genres I listed, the most popular categories seem to be fantasy, literary fiction, mystery, and science fiction. I also strongly suspect that YA/children's would have had a strong showing had I set up the poll properly.

Back in the depths of the recession, I theorized that fantasy (read: escapism), YA/children's (read: people will continue to spend money on their kids, even if they don't spend money on themselves), and romance (read: happy endings) would continue to do well, and based on my own research, that seems to have been the case. What I find interesting, however, is that book sales are down year-on-year across the board (with the possible exception of Amazon, who insists on reporting "media sales" without explaining how those data break down among books, movies, music, &c).

There are a lot of theories as to why this is the case, and a correspondingly large number of questions that need to be answered before any of those theories can be backed up (I hesitate to say "confirmed"), altered, or discarded. Among my questions: while dollars are down, are units necessarily also down? (If fewer hardcovers are being sold, it's possible that overall sales dollars can decrease while the number of units sold can stay the same or increase.) Are e-books being taken into account? (I have a feeling they aren't.) Are all retailers being taken into account? (Chains like Wal-Mart and Sam's Club don't report to sales aggregators like Nielsen BookScan.) And so on.

What are your theories, gentle readers? I'm not necessarily calling for hard data, but I'm curious to know what you think is going on. My hunches are as follows:

· A lot of these sales figures are based on reports by BookScan, which (as mentioned above) does not capture the entire market. (Estimates currently range from 70 to 75%.)

· Dollar figures from 10-K reports for individual businesses are helpful, but don't generally (as far as I know) break down sales by product; Amazon (and, to a lesser extent, Borders and Barnes & Noble) sells a huge number of non-book products. To anyone with greater knowledge in this area: definitely post a comment.

· Units and dollars are probably both down, but I think these reports are only for physical books; e-book sales are up year-on-year, and are almost certainly going to continue this upward trend over the next several years. This is why the debate over e-book pricing (and, by extension, e-book profit margin) is so heated.

To the comments!

Terms to Know: Non-Compete Clause

Continuing my recent trend of contract-related content, today's post focuses on another aspect of the standard book publishing contract: the non-compete clause.

Those of you who have read Agent Kristin's blog may already be familiar with this clause (she's written about it here and, more recently, here). For those of you who haven't, it's like this: book publishers want to protect their interests in their authors, and the non-compete clause is an effective way of ensuring this.

Under the NCC, an author generally can't reproduce any material from the book named in the contract, since doing so would damage the publisher's sales or infringe on their newly acquired rights. Example: if Fancy Pants Publishing acquires your book, 99 Ways to Defeat A Ninja, and you try to have High Fullutent Press publish an excerpt, or a graphic novel version, or some such other work that incorporates material from the first book or competes with FPP's sales, you're in violation of their NCC.

Kristin's second post (above) raises an even more interesting issue, one I inadvertently touched on in Monday's post: namely, that if your agent has withheld e-rights (or graphic novel rights, or any other subsidiary right), the language of the newer NCCs may prevent you from exercising those rights with other companies. If Fancy Pants Publishing has your hardcover and trade paperback, they're not going to want to see you reduce their sales by publishing the graphic novel and e-book with High Fullutent Press.

Now, in the case of Styron, the contract language was too old to include e-book rights, so I imagine the NCC in that contract/those contracts isn't broad enough to include e-books, either. But if your agent specifically withheld e-rights after 1995 or so, the NCC language may be new enough to allow publishers to invoke it to prevent you from publishing your e-books elsewhere. Food for thought, at any rate, and I again invite any agents in the house to weigh in on this... well, weighty issue.

Prithee, Inform Me: Kindle or iPad?

Spurred by this New Yorker article detailing the ongoing battle between Amazon and Apple (read: the Kindle and the iPad, the status quo and the agency model), this week's Prithee, Inform Me focuses on the two most high-profile e-reading devices on the U.S. market.

Prithee, inform me, dear readers: do you own a Kindle or an iPad? If so, why one and not the other (or, if both, why)? If not, why not? Do you see the Kindle and the iPad as catering to different markets, or do you think they're both vying for the same readership and only one can emerge victorious?

Have at it!

Exceptions, Rules, Et Cetera

Happy Tax Day, mes auteurs! I hope you've settled your debt with (or gotten your refund from) Uncle Sam by now, but if not... well, if not, what are you doing here? You should probably be filing your taxes or something.

Now, regardless of whether I'm talking about self-publishing, the chasing of trends, or the industry in general, there are always going to be exceptions to the "rules" I discuss. (I do my very best to distinguish between "rules" set by industry convention and "rules" I suggest to try to help you out.) Yes, there are self-publishing success stories like Oscar Wilde and William Young (the dude who wrote The Shack). Yes, there are people who write runaway bestsellers by trend-chasing or writing silly mash-ups or publishing a bunch of pictures of cats in stupid outfits. These things, regrettably or not, do happen.

However, they are the (often exceedingly rare) exception(s) that prove the rule(s).

There's an interesting phenomenon I learned about many a year ago while working in a psychology lab at Ye Olde College, and that's confirmation bias. In keeping with psychology/psychiatry's practice of giving fancy names to things everyone already knows, confirmation bias simply refers to the (often unconscious) act of selecting information that confirms theories you already hold. If you are writing a teen vampire romance and believe that it is ultra awesome, you will probably gather information to support that theory, even if the preponderance of data indicates otherwise; this applies to everything from ideas about self-publishing to political and religious beliefs. I'm just as guilty of it as anyone else.

The number of successful authors is, relative to the general population (or even the population of living writers), vanishingly small. The number of successful self-published authors, regardless of how august or prosperous those authors are, is far, far smaller. Just because William Young or Christopher Paolini went on to great success (via traditional methods, by the way) after self-publishing only proves that it is possible, not that it is likely (in the same sense that a lottery ticket earns you the possibility of winning, not the likelihood). This applies to anything in your life that you want to do but for which the shots are long: publish a bestselling teen vampire romance, win a gold medal in the summer Olympics, become CEO of a major company. The odds are longer for some of these than others, and certainly factors beyond luck are involved, but you have to understand that just because someone tremendously talented, hardworking, and/or lucky managed to do it does not mean there is even a decent chance you can do it, too. It just means there's a chance.

Now, I don't mean to discourage you. And to be straight with you, the odds are long in this business whether you write about vampires or alcoholic fathers, whether you self-publish or embrace the traditional agent-querying model. All I can do is try to give you a feel for how those odds change depending on the choices you make, and to encourage you to write the best book you possibly can. You may have to write more than one novel before you're published. You may have to write more than twenty. Whatever you do, stay committed. It's a long road to publication, and there are no shortcuts. There are some paths that are less thorny, though, and with any luck, I'll be at least of some help to you in finding them.

Don't Go Down That Road

For those of you who haven't seen Pet Sematary or the South Park episode that references it, I am comparing self-publishing to reanimating the dead: sure, it sounds cool (especially if you've run out of other options), but 99.9% of the time it's not a good idea. (Whether or not self-publishing will get you murdered by zombies remains to be seen.)

In Monday's comments, akashina asked what I thought of an author's opening his or her own press to publish his/her books, and how this might compare to self-publishing via large companies like Lulu. While I do think that going with a company like Lulu is the lesser of two evils, there are a number of caveats attached.

First, I strongly suggest that you not self-publish unless your book is not intended as a commercial endeavor (i.e., you don't expect anyone beyond your friends and family to read it), you're catering to an extraordinarily small niche audience (e.g. people who want to learn how to make vegan, gluten-free cupcakes using only ingredients available in North Korea), or you intend to simply disseminate it for free on the Internet (in which case, why not just save your money and make a .pdf e-book out of it?). While it's true that the traditional publishing model screens out a fair amount of good, salable material, it also screens out the most abominable garbage you've never seen. The quality of self-published material is, on average, unequivocally far inferior to the quality of traditionally published material. Almost without exception, every writer benefits from a good editor.

Second, I can't stress this enough: you should not self-publish out of frustration or the belief that your book is "too good" or "too smart" for the average agent or reader. Most people are not as good writers as they think they are. I'll reiterate: if you've done literally everything humanly possible to publish your novel in the traditional sense and haven't even gotten a nibble (no requests for the full MS, no personalized rejections, nothing), it's probably not very good. Keep working, keep learning, and write a better novel.

Third, if you are dead-set on self-publishing, I recommend you do your research and go with a company like Lulu that specializes in this sort of thing. While self-publishing via an outside party can signal to industry professionals that you're (potentially) impatient or overly confident of your abilities, it at least earns you the opportunity to have your work showcased in a somewhat professional manner (and we do hear the very occasional story of a self-published novel being picked up by an agent). Opening your own press to publish your work (and no one else's), on the other hand, will not only be perceived as the height of hubris and ignorance of how this business actually works, but will probably cost you far more money than a basic Lulu-type package (assuming you actually shell out the money to do it right). A $9.99 domain name and a bunch of .pdfs of your novels available for paid download does not a professional press make.

In short: if you don't have a very good reason for self-publishing, don't do it (at least not in print; the e-book revolution may change things in the next five or so years). If you feel you must self-publish, do it right. Printing your own material without anyone else's help—no editors, no publicists, no marketing directors, no advertising budget, no nothing, nada, zero, zilch—is not only likely a tremendous waste of your time, but your hard-earned cash, as well.

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

Due to a minor crisis, PMN won't be updating regularly for the next couple of days. Not to worry, fair readers—everyone is currently fine—but I appreciate your patience as I work to get everything straightened out and this, your preferred source of publishing-related content*, back on track.

Thanks!




*Not based on fact, scientific or otherwise.