The Summer Slowdown

Your queries have been met with silence. Your agent has inexplicably vanished. Your editor has departed for parts unknown. What gives?

The answer: it's summer.

The publishing industry doesn't exactly go into hibernation during the summer months, but it's fair to say that business slows down substantially between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Aside from physical production, everything winds down a bit: offers from agents, acquisitions from editors, &c, &c. It's sort of the calm before the storm of the holiday season (October through December).

If you're currently submitting a manuscript, don't be surprised if it takes longer than usual to hear back. Not only is there an industry-wide downtrend in acquiring new work, but the majority of publishing professionals take vacation during the summer months, meaning that at any given time a large percentage of available staff are out of the office. Even if your agent is around, if (s)he depends on his/her assistant to filter submissions and that assistant is in Cancún for the week, you probably won't be hearing back about your novel for at least that long.

My advice? Spend the summer writing. As I've mentioned before, I waste spend my non-publishing, non-blogging time as a poet, and since most literary journals and magazines are affiliated with universities, they either close submissions or are much slower in responding during June, July, and August. I take this time to recharge my batteries, burn a little well-deserved vacation, and write/rewrite in preparation for the autumn submission period.

What about you, mes auteurs? Are you submitting now? If not, how are you spending your writing-related time?

The Vanishing Advance

You may have been hearing about this from other publishing professionals or from fellow writers, mes auteurs, but in case you haven't heard, the average advance has declined a bit over the past couple of years. Much of my evidence for this is either proprietary or anecdotal, so hopefully there are a few literary agents or editors in the house to confirm the trend.

In case you're curious, though, there are a few reasons I think lower advances have been—and continue to be—the norm.

Belt-tightening. With forbidding economic indicators such as unemployment still high and talk of a double-dip recession floating around, editors and publishers have become much more frugal in terms of the advances they offer. Many have modified their P&Ls to reflect current sell-through and consumer habits, and decreased demand for physical books has resulted in decreased up-front cash for authors.

Publishing is a business, and we've got to try to make money on as many books as possible in order to stay in business. Speaking of physical media, another reason (à mon avis) for lower advances is:

The shift to electronic media. Because e-books don't face the same kind of supply chain/distribution challenges as physical books and are not returnable, it's easier for publishers to run P&Ls for e-books and to simply offer higher royalties than to stick with the advance model.

True, the vast majority of titles currently acquired are eventually released as concurrent physical and electronic books, but I don't think the day is long off in which a substantial section of the market will comprise e-only titles. Once that occurs, I think the idea of the advance will become even more antiquated; it's much easier to pay an author a fixed percentage of dollars earned in the more or less real-time environment of e-book sales than to bother with advances.

In fact, much (though certainly not all) of the work done by advances is obviated by the fact that:

Advertising and marketing budgets for e-books are often lower than for physical books. While a publishing house—particularly a large one—will pay the advertising and marketing costs for their lead titles, there are many midlist titles and titles published by smaller publishers for which the burden of lining up media and marketing falls squarely on the author. The advance is a way of mitigating this hardship; authors can use the money given to them by publishers to pay to promote their books (e.g. conduct book tours, create book trailers, and so on).

As advertising and marketing have become easier and cheaper—predominantly by way of social networking services like Facebook and Twitter—the cost of promoting books through these channels has necessarily also fallen. If publishers feel they can pay less money for the same commercial success from any given title, they absolutely will. Wouldn't you?

So that, dear readers, is my take on why average advances seem to be declining in this industry. It may be a relatively short-term reaction to the continuing economic uncertainty inherent in the recession, or (as I believe) a long-term reaction to the drastic changes that are occuring in the publishing industry as it transitions from physical to electronic media. Regardless of which, I think it signals an industry-wide recognition of the challenges the business is facing.

What do you think, gentle readers?

It Came From the Round Up

Friday round up, with Laura:

Welcome to Friday, friends and foes. Although Game of Thrones ended last week (boo), we only have until Sunday until True Blood starts (yay!). Some might go so far as to say that True Blood the show is better than the books. Having never read the books, I have to say I wholeheartedly agree. In other books-on-film news, J.K. Rowling launched Pottermore on Thursday. There were many oohs and aahs (and it may be that Rowling is a marketing genius), but I fall in the camp of, "WTF is Pottermore? This launch didn't explain anything about it, except that the HPotts will be e-books now. Hurray?

Listen. I don't like things that are confusing. I like to be told what YA is essential, how much I have to pay for events at indie bookstores, and where I can buy my newsprint scented candles. I don't want to have to use my own brain to find out that the new version of The Rules has perhaps the worst advice I've ever heard, or that there is irony when 50 Cent writes a book on bullying. How do I know if e-books come out too quickly? What are the different routes for selling a million copies of a self-pubbed e-book? I'm stumped, and kind of sleepy, and don't plan on thinking thoughts anytime soon.

Not wanting to think thoughts is, coincidentally, why so many celebrities put out kid's books. It's much quicker to write than a for-adults book (unless like Snooki, you have your ghost writer do the heavy lifting). On the flip side is the new Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly memoir. Collectively they are a Congresswoman, an astronaut, and survived a gunshot to the head. They are invited to my house in memoir form (or real form!) any time. Also invited to my house are more stills from The Hobbit, and my new favorite thing ever, a poetry book by Keanu Reeves. Bring it on, world.

That's it for this week—have a good weekend, and see you next time.

The Long and Short of It

Caveat: this post pertains more to those of you writing literary fiction than genre fiction, mes auteurs, but I do think there are aspects that writers of genre fiction may find enlightening.

So!

I'll be the first to tell you that short story collections don't sell well—it doesn't matter whether you've had short fiction in The New Yorker, it doesn't matter whether you earned your mfa at Iowa, it doesn't matter whether you're drinking buddies with the ghost of Flannery O'Connor—they uniformly don't sell very well. Often an agent will only take a short story collection from a promising new author on the condition that they also get his or her first novel.

However! The short story itself can be a way of grabbing an agent's attention, and getting yourself represented is half the battle. For example:

Publishing short stories lends you street cred. True, the agent is more interested in your writing than in your biography, but a biographical note that includes "Chester A. Author has recently published fiction in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker" will almost certainly catch an agent's eye. That doesn't mean (s)he will immediately sign you, but (s)he might decide to send a request for a partial rather than a polite rejection.

Literary agents read literary journals. I know a few (and know of several more) agents who regularly read literary magazines in search of new talent. The more you publish, the higher your profile.

Literary agents recommend writing and writers to each other. Even if your dream agent hasn't read anything in which you've been published, (s)he still has plenty of friends, colleagues, and friends of colleagues who may have. Remember: a huge number of new authors are signed based on recommendations rather than via queries culled from the slush.

Publishing short stories entails writing short stories, and writing short stories entails a ton of practice. It goes without saying, but if you've written enough to publish several short stories in reputable magazines and journals, you've put a fair amount of time and effort into your writing. I've said it before and I'll say it again: patience and discipline are worth more in this business than talent and luck (though you'll need some of the former and a lot of the latter).

There you have it, amigos and -as. So now, prithee, inform me: which magazines/journals do you regularly read or subscribe to? Where do you find new authors? Which authors or stories have you read recently that you loved, were excited about, or recommended to others?

In Fact, I'll Commend It Again

Television for Children Ages 8 – 10

Raunchy Late Night Comedies

Science Fiction/Fantasy with a Strong Female Lead


If any of this looks familiar, we'd probably be bros in real life: these are a few of the category recommendations Netflix has recently made for me. Whether it's via Netflix, Amazon, or our friends and families, recommendation is an undeniable and potent factor in our media consumption decision-making.

Now for the book-related part of today's segment! Some books I've recently been told I absolutely must read:

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Bossypants by Tina Fey

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

What's been recently recommended to you, gentle readers?

The Great Late Night Round Up

Friday round up with Laura:

Happy belated round up, friends and foes! It's late, but hopefully soon you'll hear Samuel L. Jackson reading you the sweet, sweet words: Go the Fuck to Sleep. If that's not your jam, you can preorder your copy of Pawnee by Leslie Knope, which I super want. Or you can grumble about the whole Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher thing. People are grumbling. (I am one of them. — E)

I've brought you a list of the top 100 nonfiction books, so you have something to read until the big Pottermore reveal next week. And you can read about Amanda Hocking before you can read her new books. Fun? Paper or ebook, she'll still need an editor. Let's hope one of her novels isn't a (gasp) fake memoir. The shock would send me off the edge, and make me in dire need of extreme survival books for my extreme sadness.

I'm full of information now, so mourn the death of first print, be jealous of the top Amazon reviewers who get swag, and see you next week!

Publishing Time

I was reading an article in The New Yorker awhile back by a foreign correspondent in West Africa who introduced to me the phenomenon of "African time." This consists of a much more relaxed attitude toward scheduling, punctuality, and time in general across many African countries than is traditionally found in the United States.

In case you're curious, there is such a thing as "publishing time," and it's similar in some respects. An editor might sit on an e-mail for two weeks even though it could be answered in five minutes; an assistant might take a week to read a partial even if (s)he could reasonably get to it in an afternoon; a marketing or sales manager might take several days to post materials to an internal website even though it could probably have been done much sooner.

A lot of this is the result of the kind of prioritization and reprioritization that is endemic not only to publishing, but to any major corporate enterprise—some projects just keep getting pushed back. Some of it, however, is due to the nature of the business.

Publishing—at least in general, and at least below the very top echelons of management—is not a fast-paced business, and the sense of urgency and desire for efficiency you might find in the offices of an investment bank or law firm don't generally exist, simply because publishing doesn't generally attract the sorts of people you often find in those fields. Couple that with the overworked staff of smaller publishers and the bureaucratic red tape of the Big Six, and it's no wonder you haven't heard back about that royalty check question you posed a month ago.

Publishing professionals are not inefficient or lazy, but a combination of multitasking/prioritizing and the culture of the industry means that it may take awhile for your e-mails to be returned, your manuscript to be read, your questions to be answered. Be patient, but don't be afraid to send reminders or request something a second time if your initial query is met with a protracted silence. We're not ignoring you, I promise! We're just busy. And a little strange.