F*ck You, ESPN! Unsolicited advice to people I don’t know on a situation in which I’m not involved

So, Grantland is dead. ESPN played a Halloween trick on us all by sticking a knife in the heart of the home to the majority of the organization’s best quality work. Grantland, if you didn’t have the pleasure, was a sports and pop culture website founded a few years ago and led by former ESPN writer Bill Simmons. It featured unique, long-form journalism and story telling from a deep and varied stable of quality writers. Simmons himself recently joked during one of his newly launched independent podcasts that Grantland had 18 of the 23 best writers employed by ESPN. From where I’m sitting, it was less a joke than a statement of fact.

I’ve been a sports fan for most of my life, and as such, ESPN attracted me with its 24 hour coverage during a time when the alternative was some box scores in a few pages of the local paper. It was Sportscenter, in particular The Big Show days of co-anchors Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann, that really hooked me. But as they got more successful, things fell apart between them and the network, and everyone eventually moved on. Sportscenter and ESPN carried on, but a void was created and, as I’ve seen over the ensuing years, a pattern of trouble between the network and it’s top-level talent seems to have emerged.

Grantland brought me back into the fold. Every day, there were multiple quality pieces of writing across a wide range of subjects thrown out into the world. For a sports fan like me, hungry for analysis deeper than the basic stereotypical columns and studio shows that proliferated the sports media landscape, it was a godsend. Writers like NBA aficionado Zach Lowe, the great NFL duo of Bill Barnwell and Robert Mays, pop culture superstar Wesley Morris and, of course, Simmons himself, with his lengthy, footnote laden and often simultaneously insightful and funny pieces, made Grantland a home for the discerning and knowledgeable sports and entertainment fan.

And then there were the podcasts. I’d often spend hours with the Grantland staff, soaking up Lowe’s NBA chats on his Lowe Post (I’d forever listen to Lowe and former NBA head coach Jeff Van Gundy chat about the weather and what they had for breakfast) Barnwell and Mays’ three-times-a-week Grantland NFL Podcast, the spectacularly irregular and hilariously funny NBA After Dark podcast with Chris Ryan, Juliet Litman and Andrew Sharp, former NBA player Jalen Rose and David Jacoby always giving the people what they want on their Pop The Trunk podcast, and Simmons’ BS Report were must-listen material in my house, among many others. That’s all gone now, thanks to some of the most bone-headed corporate decision making I’ve seen. And believe me, I’ve been privy to some spectacularly poor choices.

To be fair, it’s not totally gone. It appears Jalen and Jacoby’s show will continue on ESPN radio. Simmons has moved on with his own independent podcasts, an unnamed and vague “future editorial project” for which he hired a quartet of former Grantlanders, including Litman and Ryan, as well as an HBO show slated to start next spring. And ESPN has said they plan to shift the sportswriters like Lowe, Barnwell and baseball writer Jonah Keri to other platforms under their umbrella. So help me, if they stick those guys behind their Insider paywall, I’ll fucking flip! I love those guys and I’ll do whatever to support them but I’ll be damned if I’m giving so much as a penny to an organization that disrespects both its audience and top talent like ESPN has here.

There are several lessons here, I think. But before I start, let me say I have absolutely no direct knowledge of the financials, the terms of anyone’s contracts or any specifics of the internal power struggles outside of the few tidbits that have come from former Grantlanders. These are my opinions and observations based on what I’ve seen both in watching what was a beloved website crumble and what I’ve seen personally in similar situations. By similar, I mean isolated products under a somewhat disinterested corporate parent who are, themselves, beholden to an uber-corporate giant. The scale of my experiences is smaller than Grantland/ESPN/Disney, but the dynamic is eerily similar. Here goes:

1. ESPN’s management is disrespectful and unprofessional.

Bill Simmons found out he was fired on Twitter. The vast majority of the Grantland staff found out who his replacement was also on twitter. The axe on Grantland fell via press release, blindsiding nearly everyone involved. This is Management Professionalism 101 stuff. ESPN has a duty to the people it employees and to leave them twisting in the wind, discovering details crucial to their futures over social media rather than being informed by their employers is disgraceful. And when it happens multiple times over a period of months, well, can it be any clearer they just don’t give a shit about you? It shows how little they value the people under their umbrella. They’re assets, chess pieces to be shuffled around on the whims of the suits. It’s more important to the company that their employees be kept as much in the dark as possible so as to prevent their ability to prepare if things go badly south. The suits are protecting themselves by screwing people who should be trusted allies. Working for those kinds of people is simply not worth it. Unless you enjoy having to watch your back 24/7 lest somebody jab a knife in there when you’re not looking.

How an organization treats people matters, even if you’re not the one currently getting shafted. It’s a “there but for the grace of god” thing. If they’re willing to treat someone in their employ this way, they’re also willing to treat you the same, if circumstances dictate. If you find yourself working for someone who fucks other employees over, even if you’ve gotten nothing but gold-star service, get out. Maybe you’ll be lucky and never have that target on your back. But most likely, it’s only a matter of time and elements outside of your control before they get around to you. Do yourself a favor and don’t give them that chance.

2. Contracts matter. Always have an exit plan.

I know it seems a bit counter-intuitive to prepare to leave a job before you’ve even got it, but in my experience, failure to do so adequately is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen people make. That non-compete matters more than you realize. Trust me, you really don’t want to find out how much more when it’s too late to do anything about it. Much like the Grantland writers left behind in ESPN’s employ, you can find your legal binding to a place outlast both why you were hired and the people who hired you. I cringed when I saw that statement from ESPN about repurposing those former Grantland staffers. Been there, done that. Never, ever again.

I do not envy them. There’s a small chance this shift will turn out well for them and an overwhelming one that it turns out poorly. I don’t wish the level of bitterness and misery I’ve seen in similar situations on my worst enemy, let alone some of my favorite writers. ESPN apparently has a policy that none of its talent can appear on outside platforms. Can’t guest on a Fox Sports podcast, for instance. This is asinine. A policy that exists for one reason, they want your success and profile to be entirely dependent upon their platforms. It’s a means of controlling your career (and minimizing your ultimate value). It saves them money at your expense and gets you to keep yourself in check.

Grantland was different. As such, writers like Lowe and Barnwell have built broader positive reputations than would otherwise have been possible from within ESPN-proper. I can almost guarantee that wherever “The Mothership”, as ESPN likes to call itself, sticks them, it’ll minimize the broader appeal and presence they’ve created. Without knowing the terms of their respective contracts with the network, my (completely unsolicited) advice to them would be to move on. Hopefully, they have the contractual ability to do so. You may never have more positive leverage to land a gig you actually want than right now. You almost certainly won’t if you allow yourself to be thrown in as an add-on to other network properties. This looks like a “use it or lose it” choice. Not a simple one, by any means, but one that comes with huge regrets if you fail to pursue it.

3. Grantland is gone. And it’s never coming back.

Every so often, if you’re lucky, you’ll fall into a situation where the right people and the right circumstances will converge with where you are at the time to create a truly unique and rewarding work experience. You can’t predict when one will appear, nor when it all gets taken away, often very unexpectedly on both counts. Once you’ve been through that, it leaves an indelible mark, becoming somewhat mythologized in your own memories, and of those you were in it with.

But when it’s gone, it’s gone. You can chase all you like; seeking out similar-looking gigs, joining up with some of the original cast for new things; but you won’t get what you had back. You may well find other good people and places and situations. But they’ll all be different. Sorta like a first love, you recall it more fondly, at least in part, because you didn’t have the history or experience to understand it as it was happening. Now you do, and as a consequence, you won’t be blazing as many new paths so much as backtracking over more roads already traveled.

Whatever roads the former Grantlanders travel, it behooves them to not chase that Grantland feeling. Simmons new things won’t get you there, writing for ESPN’s other things won’t either. And neither will going to a different platform at another company. Nor founding your own independent thing. All of those options have positive potential outcomes, and could each produce something good, rewarding. They also each carry risks, possible downsides that can’t be ignored. But if you’re looking to replicate the unique thing you just experienced, even subconciously, whatever you do is always going to seem lacking in something. Let yesterday go and let the next thing be what it will.

4. Deal with corporations on a risk/reward basis. Don’t be the one taking all the risks while they get all the rewards.

What seems pretty clear from Grantland’s history is that ESPN both didn’t understand what it had and either didn’t bother or didn’t know how to properly market it. All this talk about the financials relating to the site is really more an indictment of ESPN than Grantland itself. After all, what good is this huge corporate sales infrastructure that’s so demanding of profits if it doesn’t adequately service or exploit quality content at its disposal?

As a fan and outside observer, I was often surprised how little actual promotion ESPN gave Grantland. I would’ve thought, given the audience Grantland garnered, that would be something ESPN would want to push. But here’s the crux of the situation for modern day creatives. Sure, Grantland could have blown up, made the folks working there some nice coin and turned a good profit at the end of the day for The Mothership. And probably not even covered the bill for the rights to a third rate college football bowl game on December 18.

ESPN, and so many of our major media corporations, are in another stratosphere financially. They need billions of dollars every year just to pay the rights fees for the games they broadcast. A comfortable profit for an offshoot like Grantland is a rounding error. So they allow it to exist, until they don’t, but will almost never give it much more than the bare minimum of resources. In their view (the mega-money view) there’s no upside of consequence.

So consider, you’re working for something you believe in, for a company who neither believes in you nor adequately supports what you’re doing. You have three choices; quit, stay and ride it out until they pull the plug, or bust your ass even harder to make up for the resources you’re not being given. I’ve done all three at one time or another and, frankly, the first option is the best one. Riding it out is just sad and depressing; like watching a loved one waste away from some debilitating disease. Doubling down on your effort is self defeating. You’re putting in a ton of work and resources of your own all so the company who withheld those needed resources can reap all the rewards if you’re successful. Maybe, you’ll get some recompense in future considerations. Likely, not much though, if at all. One thing is for sure, when it comes time to cut the check, they’ll find some reason to downplay your success.

So if that’s where you find yourself, move on. Find somewhere you can choose option three and actually be appreciated and rewarded for the results. It’s not going to be where you are, a place that has just demonstrated a tendency to do the exact opposite. Happiness isn’t found in security. Hell, in this kind of business, security doesn’t exist anyway. Working the corporate thing has to be a quid pro quo. It advances your career while advancing their interests. When it turns to advancing their interests at your expense, and it inevitably will, it’s time to get off the treadmill.

5. What to do, what to do…

Given that several Grantland staffers have already simply up and left into new jobs elsewhere, some even to Simmons unnamed whatever, I’ll presume the contracts of those remaining don’t have any kind of onerous, restrictive clauses. Unless, of course, they’ve signed something new very recently. Again, I have no idea, just a presumption. But assuming that, I’d quit before I got shuffled off to some other thing without my consent. Then I’d try to hitch on with Simmons. I know I said don’t chase Grantland, but that’s not why I’d go that way. Simmons is smart, he has connections, he has an upcoming HBO show to raise his profile. And most of all, he’s motivated. Unless I’m way off base, he’s likely pissed off and will channel that with no little consideration given to shoving his future success straight up ESPN’s ass. No, you can never get back what you’ve lost. But you sure can burn the fuckers who took it from you.

But most of all, I’d better understand what I didn’t the first couple times I went through shit like that. You’re not simply an employee of the publication you help produce. Nor simply one of the corporation that owns that publication. You’re an individual. This is your career at stake, not theirs, and act in whatever you feel is in the service of that end. I would better understand that the company, despite how they may behave, doesn’t make the talent. The talent makes the company. ESPN has lost sight of that.

R.I.P. Grantland. You will be missed.

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron

Anatomy Of An Unnecessary Remake

*Spoiler Alert! I’ll be discussing detailed plot points about the 2015 film remake of Poltergeist below. You’ll have less chance of spoiling your lunch if you read it here than actually watching this nausea-inducing trainwreck*

Very few things annoy me more than when Hollywood decides to chase the money and crank out a remake of a beloved classic film (your definition of beloved may vary). With the current climate of reboot and rebrand and repeat going on today, this problem has become an epidemic, and the casualties are mounting. Just look at poor Patrick Swayze, may he rest in peace. First, Chris Hemsworth headed an horrifically bad and unnecessary remake of the Swayze/Charlie Sheen brothers in arms classic Red Dawn. That’s been followed up by a terribly unimaginative re-do of the Swayze/Keanu/Busey surfing bank robber epic Point Break. Now with more X-treme! I must’ve missed when we time warped back to 1997.

And to top it off, there’s news that the Swayze/Sam Elliott ass-kicker Roadhouse is getting redone, starring women’s UFC superstar Ronda Rousey. No offense to Rousey (please don’t beat me senseless) but that’s the trifecta of picking the bones of a great career many of us recall very fondly. At least Ghost is safe. Wait, what? Oh, for fucks sake!

With this cavalcade of awfulness going on, I thought I’d dive into the deep end and subject myself to another one of these hideously unnecessary money grabs, Poltergeist. I’m going to watch it now and pause every so often to throw up my thoughts on the 2015 remake of the classic 1982 horror film (and I do mean throw up. I may vomit). This is about as clear an example of an unnecessary remake as there is. Generally, a film I consider unnecessary is one who’s original is strong enough (and in some cases, recent enough) that a remake has only the possibility of ending up an inferior film. So, Poltergeist? Check and mate on that.

The original Poltergeist is certainly not perfect. Aspects of it are dated to the point of incomprehensible to some younger audiences. The national anthem playing before the channel signed off late at night and switched to static comes to mind. And the special effects used at the time can sometimes be a bit clunky, like the guy peeling his face off in the bathroom mirror. But if cheesy effects and inconsequential dating is the reason you’d want to remake this movie, you should really go back and watch it again because I think you missed the point.

The 1982 version was written (mostly) and produced by Steven Fucking Spielberg at the height of his Spielbergian powers in the early ’80s. It was directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame (another of his films to be victimized by an unnecessary remake), and starred Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams and that creepy little girl who played Carol Anne (who even more creepily died filming a later sequel). The new version is directed by Gil Kenan who, according to IMDB, is known for some shit I’ve never heard of. It stars Sam Rockwell (who I’m totally cool with. Moon was awesome! ) Rosemarie DeWitt and some non-creepy dark haired girl whose character’s name is no longer Carol Anne. It’s Madison. *sigh*

“Don’t go into the light, Madison,” just doesn’t have the same vibe as Zelda Rubinstein’s soul searing, and slightly country-fied, “Carol Anne!” But then, there’s no Tangina in this new version, anyway. *double sigh*

Well, here goes. I’m going to hit play and watch some, then comment when the mood strikes.

20 Minutes In…

After making it through the opening setup, my previous reservations have become full-on annoyance. Gone is the entire subplot between Craig T. Nelson and his boss. Shouldn’t matter much though, because it was only the entire proximate cause of the haunting, and by extension, the plot. No big deal. The unscrupulous boss, who moves the headstones from a graveyard, builds his houses right over the bodies then convinces his top salesman and family to move right into the model home, all the better for his sales, is out.

That moment near the end, standing on the hill beside the next graveyard his boss wanted to build atop, when Nelson realized what he’d done, and that all of their paranormal problems had been caused by that man’s greed and callousness, that’s gone too. Sam Rockwell’s boss is now a faceless John Deere exec who laid him off, causing the family to downsize for money reasons. Why change that original relationship? Now, they’re just another in a long line of hard luck horror movie families who got a little too good of a deal just when they were desperate for one, with inevitably ghastly consequences.

So not only is this an unnecessary remake, it’s now dumbed down an integral plot point from the original. The payoff in this one for why the house is haunted better be good, but I’m not sure how they can improve upon what they’ve already discarded.

Oh, and #thishouseisclean?!?
#fuckoffwiththat!

40 Minutes In…

So the abducting the little girl part is roughly the same only without any of the tension of the original. It’s almost as though the screenwriter said, “you know how this goes,” and gave us the cliff notes version in an extended montage scene. That’s an inherent problem with unnecessary remakes, particularly of well known originals. The audience already knows all the beats. A skilled filmmaker can sometimes use those audience expectations to their advantage. Or not, lest we forget the Khan debacle.

The result is the tree that attacks the boy loses its stoically ominous nature, the clown is barely creepy at all (quite an accomplishment to make a clown like that not frightening) and Madison’s “they’re here” gets mumbled out of necessity by a little girl who looks like she hasn’t slept in a month rather than Carol Anne’s welcoming, drawn out version that made everyone’s skin crawl. Again, how do you improve upon what doesn’t need improving? Don’t bother asking the makers of this film because they don’t seem to know either.

Apparently, the family does still live in a house where the developer moved the headstones of a graveyard but left the bodies. The parents find out at a dinner party. But now, it’s no longer a direct betrayal but something that happened long in the past and has become idle rumors for the snotty well-to-do. The movie also further reinforced the family’s money troubles with an extended “credit cards are overdrawn” scene, as well as some convenient condescension from other dinner party guests. The money angle makes sense as justification for how the family got into this situation, it’s just less original and much less interesting than its predecessor.

Another point of annoyance for me so far, as if I need one, is the lack of levity in this version. The supernatural happenings are all unambiguously evil. There’s none of the playfulness of the kitchen floor scene from the old film. It’s dark throughout, from the tone, the setting, the characters; it’s all skirting the edge of darkness all the time. Even Rockwell, who I generally enjoy, has descended to being irritating to the point where I just wish one of the others characters would tell him to shut the hell up. There’s no happiness present to be ripped away from the family like in the original. It’s just a group of people suffering bad on top of bad. It’s almost masochistic. Speaking of which, onward I go.

One Hour In…

How can I put this? The part about the paranormal investigative team is just like the original only less. The people are thin imitations, the pace of the film sped up to the point it’s sacrificing characterization, even the supernatural moments are slight, less complex variations of what we’ve already seen. The dad drinking and hallucinating about throwing up a worm(s); the ghostly apparition that floated downstairs/ghostly shadow that drifted upstairs, the anecdote by the cameraman about only seeing objects move with time lapse photography thrown in his face, a table leg/tennis ball goes into the upstairs closet and out the downstairs ceiling, covered in goo. One beat after another, all the same and all playing like somebody ticking items off a checklist. It’s almost as if this movie were filmed from a numbered outline rather than an actual screenplay.

There’s not a single element of this film so far that’s improved upon (or even matched) it’s original presentation. It seems to be simply a sequence of events that, taken on its own without the original film as a frame of reference, might well be incoherent. I can’t wait to see how it ends!

One Hour 15 Minutes in…

Ok, wow. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no Tangina in this version. But apparently, Captain Quint from Jaws was available. And what do you know, he happens to be the ex husband of the science team leader! Don’t you just love convenient symmetry?

We also discover that remote control drones can send back crystal clear picture from the underworld. That’s a nice feature. And the cemetery the developers built over was huge, as evidenced by the mounds of writhing corpses all over the place in limbo. How two children managed to evade all those thousands of desperately grasping limbs and escape remains unclear.

Which brings me to another change, the mother didn’t save the girl this time, her brother did. In fact, there’s little suggestion beforehand that the mother go at all. Now the film has taken bites out of both parents; the dad’s an unemployed loser who can’t support his family and the mother is a flighty (she’ll get to that novel someday, I’m sure) helpless bystander.

Mercifully, it’s almost over. I’ve still got the “surprise” after the faux ending to come. See what I mean about knowing all the beats?

The End

Awful. Just awful. Points, though, for when the poltergeist flipped the minivan and dragged them all back into the house. That may have been the only genuinely cool moment in the entire movie. This time around, Captain Quint leaps into the abyss to lead the lost souls into the light, apparently by blasting the roof off the place. The house doesn’t completely implode, however, and Quint appears to survive, somehow, much to relief of his ex wife. That may be the most unrealistic thing to happen. Most people’s exes would likely be thrilled to have theirs swallowed up in a cavern of tormented souls, I would think.

Even the little bit of humor at the end didn’t work as well as the original, when Craig T. Nelson wrapped the movie up by wheeling the hotel TV out of their room. In this one, the family is house hunting again and run away when faced with a house having similar characteristics to their last one. How a broke, unemployed couple fresh from a demolished house they just bought can afford another one so soon is a bigger mystery than the poltergeist itself. You might want to check, but I’m reasonably sure homeowners insurance doesn’t cover ghosts ripping your house apart from the netherworld. Probably need a separate rider for that kind of coverage.

If they hadn’t spent a goodly portion of the first 45 minutes beating us over the head with the family’s money troubles, this scene might not be so terrible. As it is, I suspect the family simply took up fucking with realtors as a hobby rather than actually having the resources to buy another house, especially a bigger and better one than what they just demolished. It smacks of the screenwriter trying to be cute at the expense of consistency.

Overall, this was terrible. Basically the same movie as the original, only worse in every respect, often spectacularly so. But that’s not surprising. There was no reason for this movie to even be made. If you’re interested in watching a film that shits all over the far superior original (and Terminator Genisys isn’t available) by all means, give this a shot!

With Hollywood continuing to crank out little or nothing but inane reboots, comic book movies or some combination of both, the only question I’m left with is how long until tech gets truly affordable enough to kick off a genuine independent film revolution? It’s coming, sooner than later, no doubt. And when it does, it’ll benefit greatly from an audience likely desperate for some new material for once, thank you.

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron

Pay per page? Get Outta Here With That Nonsense

The following is my response to Amazon changing the payout terms for Kindle Unlimited borrows from a 10%, regardless-of-length full payout to a pay-per-page standard, as well as my response to the responses.

“Starting in July, if you’ve been loading the system with bits and pieces instead of full-fledged work, you’ll be getting paid for bits and pieces.”
— Porter Anderson from Thought Catalog

Hear that, writers of short works? Those of you who, apparently, are not quite full fledged? See what the industry thinks of you? You’re only worth bits and pieces compared with the vaunted novelists. You’re being thrust back to your rightful place on the pay scale, and you only get that begrudgingly.  A bit of an unfair characterization of Anderson’s words and meaning? Sure. But that comment is also characteristic of many, many more like it. Short works are a racket. You’re gaming the system. What you’re doing isn’t fair. This is a common sense return to sanity.

Even Hugh Howey got in on the act:

“What we should celebrate is that short stories will no longer earn the same amount as a novel, especially since the 10% threshold was much easier to reach on a short story. That system just wasn’t fair. The new system is a vast improvement.”
— Author Hugh Howey

A vast improvement for writers of long-form works who stand to grab a much larger portion of the proceeds. In other words, a vast improvement for the people who are not you. Just the fact that it’s not you is even cause for celebration. Feel the love yet? Another unfair bit of assumption? Certainly. Howey has written some short works himself, and I don’t think for a second he’d want to do anything to knowingly harm any writers. But you see enough of this baked in bias against the short form, you begin to realize how ingrained it is. Even many other writers who work short will fetishize the position of the novel in the hierarchy somewhere above you, if not in stature, than certainly in monetary terms. You might even be doing it yourself right now. It’s everywhere. Peruse the articles and comments on every one of the links here and drink whenever you see some variation of “fairness” or “level playing field” used in describing the new pay scale. I dare you. If you can make it through all of them still lucid enough to read, you many need to have your liver checked out soon. Or join a 12 step program.

As for the suggestion that it was so much easier for short works to reach that 10% threshold, it’s assuming a direct one-to-one correlation of the value of a page relative to the work. Is one page in Kafka’s Metamorphisis (53 pages long in mass market paperback length) truly equivalent to one page in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1,424 pages) in effect, import to the story and impact on the reader? Strictly proportionally speaking, there’s 27 pages in that Russain doorstop for every one in Kafka’s “pamphlet”. Isn’t it fair to presume that each page of Kafka’s tale must necessarily have more bearing on the overall than one which has nearly half it’s total length per page to stretch out? (Incidentally, all the page counts I use in this piece will be MMPB for ease of comparison. It’s not perfect, but close enough for my purposes without having to decipher Amazon’s standard page length algorithm. You know, page length for the stuff appearing on a device that doesn’t have actual pages?)

Short works aren’t short novels. It’s a different form entirely, with a different structural makeup and it’s own unique set of characteristics. Was it fair that Leo would have to get a reader through 140 pages while Fraz had only to reach 5 to trigger a full payout? Why not? It’s the exact same relative percentage of the story at hand. And we are talking about stories here, right? Because for a second there, it seemed like we’d veered into suggesting monetary rewards based on the volume in an imaginary container. But  then, that would be silly.

But not so silly if you’re of the mind that the short form is an inherent lesser to the long form, based on the sheer weight of it alone. It doesn’t matter if the underlying story is more effective at it’s own aims. They might even both be equally effective, yet the novel is still granted superiority, more deserving of increased compensation simply because it’s longer. It’s an idea that’s enticing to side with, I agree, if we’re talking about an actual physical book, and all the accompanying costs of producing and distributing one. For an infinitely replicable digital file of near insignificant size displayed on a screen,  however, that complicates things. And if we discount reader bias having been conditioned in many ways to expect more volume at a higher price with, say, a totally digital, essentially a la carte subscription service for a flat rate monthly fee, well, then, we’ve now removed any semblance of a price-based purchase decision from the equation. What we still have, though, are the stories themselves, each in their own forms, existing in much more even economic conditions than maybe ever before. The presumption of the novel’s sheer length deserving additional reward is not quite so clear cut as it may at first appear.

Is there such a natural superiority to longer form work? After all, it is longer. There’s more room in there, so it must generate more value, right? Well, here’s some expert testimony on that subject:

“We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length…as it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simple cessation in reading, would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external or extrinsic influences–resulting from weariness or interruption…by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel.”
— Edgar Allan Poe from a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales

Yup, that’s American literary treasure Edgar Allan Poe stating his opinion that the novel’s length is actually a detriment to the story not an advantage. What would Poe think of this new pay scale being implemented by Amazon? I suspect it would be enough to send the lord of horror screaming off into the night. This from the man who basically invented the form, as well as a handful of fiction genres many of us work in to this day. His words just might carry a little weight, don’t you think? And not in “the story needs to be the size of a cinder block to engender fair compensation” sense.

So what brought about this alteration of pay by Amazon? In their own words:

“One particular piece of feedback we’ve heard consistently from authors is that paying the same for all books regardless of length may not provide a strong enough alignment between the interests of authors and readers.”
— statement from Amazon

Here’s how I put it in a tweet immediately after reading of the change:

“WTF does length of the work have to do with anything? Just some whiny ass novelists bitching on wanting paid extra for their fluffed up nonsense.”

and this one:

“Pay by the page? In a fucking ebook? Sure, that’s not some backwards ass nonsense to appease a bunch of overly verbose squeaky wheels.”

I was a bit annoyed, apparently. But Amazon’s own words say basically the same thing. Many complaints from writers that equal pay for stories doesn’t align with their interests. “My story is longer than yours so I deserve more money for that factor alone.”  Sure, they were a tad more polite about it, but whatever. Writers of long form work didn’t like actually being on a level playing field in an open market based on nothing but the story itself. I can’t really blame them. That’s never been the case at any point in any of our lifetimes. This brief period of Kindle Unlimited has been the only time short works have existed in absolute parity commercially with long works that I have ever seen. And writers of long works didn’t like it one bit.

To borrow a concept from the social justice crowd, I’m calling this “novelist privilege.” They’ve had advantages (largely based on nothing more than cost effectiveness for printing and distribution) for so long that they don’t even see them as advantages anymore. And whenever something comes along to actually counter those advantages, we get a bunch of complaints about how unfair it all is, quickly followed by numerous characterizations that the previously disadvantaged class is somehow stealing what’s rightfully theirs. It never crosses their mind that, all this time, they may have been the ones unfairly siphoning away resources from others. Don’t even get me started on poets, writers of children’s books, novellas or non-fiction reference works. You folks are getting shafted by this just the same, if not worse. To be fair, you non-fiction reference folks were getting boned by the old system, too.

So what happens when you point this out? Here’s a comment I left on The Passive Voice the other day in response to all this talk of “fairness”:

“Except it’s not leveling the playing field. It was level. This is slanting it back in favor of novel length work, a trait that been SOP in publishing for about 75 years now, if not longer, and largely originating in the cost effectiveness for printing certain length stories, something that should have little or no bearing on a digital subscription service. Not to mention, pay per page? That’s regressive and backward thinking, in my opinion. I would argue with your statement that a writer deserves to be paid more for a longer work. Do you pay extra for longer songs? Do you pay a premium ticket price for a longer movie?”

This illicited a couple responses, needlessly to say, none of which were in an any sort of agreement. Here’s one:

“This is comparing apples to oranges to ask about long songs or movies. For decades, writers have been paid more for longer stories. Short stories were sold in collections or in magazines which effectively reduced the royalty per story, and then with the arrival of ebooks, a short story has almost always been priced lower than a longer novel, meaning the author earned less…Before KU, writers of short stories were almost always paid less than writers of longer works. This is a return to something along those lines.”
— Nirmala, commenter on The Passive Voice

No, I’m not comparing apples to oranges. The commenter is the one comparing apples to slightly different varieties of apples and calling them oranges. A differentiation, as pointed out here on the Dear Author blog that is becoming more irrelevant by the day. Of course, that piece also included some consternation on what this “means for the book” and a couple of thinly veiled shots at short works as being gimmicks. I’m telling you, this stuff is everywhere.

Other than that, this response basically consists of little more than saying, “You should be paid less because you’ve always been paid less.” Let’s try this one on the equal pay for women advocates. I’m sure they’ll find that reasoning very compelling. Ten minutes worth of human history should be enough to invalidate any arguments based on the premise that we should simply continue doing something because that’s how it’s always been. Especially considering that what we’re discussing here is the pay scale in a digital only subscription service for written works that’s only existed for one year. Always seems to have gotten a lot shorter. Here’s a good example of the destructiveness in that kind of thinking

“Much of that ‘standard’ (publishing contract) language has been around for years thanks to institutional inertia; as long as somebody signs an unfair clause that favors the publisher, the firm has no interest in modifying it. But even contracts negotiated by agents and lawyers often include longstanding ‘gotchas’ that live on only because ‘it’s always been that way'”.
— from the Authors Guild Fair Contract Initiative preview

This may be the first time I’ve ever quoted The Authors Guild and not immediately followed it up with some concerns for the collective IQ in that group. But it just goes to show you, conditions change around us every day. Because it’s always been is no answer at all. It’s the “because I said so” of responses for folks with no actual comeback.

For a more pointed response, Hugh Howey then gave his thoughts on my point:

“Wait. So writing a novel takes the same amount of time as writing a short story? No, this system is far more fair than the old one. If it takes me 6 months to write a 100K novel, and it takes you 6 months to write 10 10K short stories, then we should get paid the same per page (or time spent reading), not per item.”

When did I say anything about the time it took to write a story of any length? But since he brought it up, I’ll bite. The Goldfinch, rather famously, took eight years to write. Is he implying that Donna Tartt deserves eight times the compensation for one read that another author who penned an identical length book in just one year deserves? And what if it took me six months to perfect just one 10,000 word short story (different form of writing, remember)? Poe himself was rather famous for pouring over every word of every story over and over and over again, to get the desired overall impact described in his own words above. That takes time. Or better yet, is this a suggestion that a novelist who finishes a book in two months should only be entitled to 1/6 of the pay per one read that a novelist who took a year to write a similar sized one? It’s a moot point anyway because, even with this new change in pay terms, the time spent writing the work is totally irrelevant to any ultimate compensation, only its length.

I already addressed the same pay per page point earlier. It presumes a false equivalency of the value of one page amongst a variety of very different story forms. All pages are simply not created equal. Howey also mentions time spent reading as a metric deserving additional pay. Set aside for a moment that one page of a short story may be “worth” 10 pages (or more) of a longer work in impact on the reader. Under the new terms, Amazon doesn’t care how that time is spent. They’re payout is the same if the reader goes through one 500 page novel or ten 50 page short stories. Their only concern, and the driving impetus behind this change, is complaints from longer form authors unhappy with their stories competing on an even keel with other story forms. The time spent reading now matters to Amazon only in its totality, not its granularity. And where are all the complaints from readers? What I’ve seen is a lot of authors complaining that readers might not like it, but little or none from actual readers with those issues. Amazon’s own words reference only the complaints of authors. Silence on any such concerns from readers.

Under the old system, a short work and a long work would trigger a payout once a reader passed precisely the same percentage of the story itself, however long that story is. But now, 1/500 of a novel generates the exact payout as 1/50 of a short story, using a 500 to 50 page comparison basis. That constitutes fairness? Not from where I’m sitting. In fact, the only point I’ve seen to defend this is simply the longer work deserves more pay because its longer. Even taking into consideration that authors only get paid for what is read, that same 50 page short would need five different full reads to reach the same compensation as one person who only read half of the 500 word novel and couldn’t even finish it. How’s that fair again, in any other consideration than sheer, context-less volume?

Let’s do a little experiment. Stephen King’s The Stand checks in at a whopping 1,472 pages (I’m using the expanded version because that’s the one I actually read). By the way, I think they call it The Stand because you can use to stand on and reach stuff on high shelves. What could I have read that equals what King would get from one read of that monster? The Maltese Falcon (196 pages), Lord of the Flies (208), The Haunting of Hill House (174), And Then There Were None (208), I Am Legend (159), Animal Farm (140), Fahrenheit 451 (179) and War of the Worlds (224) combined would trigger exactly the same total payout by Amazon of The Stand. King’s bloated apocalyptic mess would generate the exact amount that Dashiell Hammett, William Golding, Shirley Jackson, Agatha Christie, Richard Matheson, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and H.G. Wells would have to share amongst themselves.

Let’s go a little further. Are you a Sci Fi fan? It would take six mysteriously appearing replicants of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris to equal one Stand. You would need seven wicked somethings coming this way for Bradbury’s dark carnival tale to get equal pay to King. It would take 13 trips up the Congo for Conrad to reach the heart of pay equivalency with The Stand. The horror, indeed. If short stories are more your thing, Shirley Jackson would need 122 tickets for her masterpiece 12 page short The Lottery to pay out the same as King. Or how about Poe himself? He’d need nearly 150 Houses of Usher to collapse in on him just to equal the pay generated by one read of The Stand. How, in the name of all things good and holy, can a system like this possibly be described as fair? Are we seriously going to argue that one page taken from any of the above mentioned works is so equivalent to one page of King’s that it should be the end-all determining factor in how compensation for written work is doled out within this platform?

I’m not arguing for the relative merits of any of the above stories, nor the relative demerits of King’s. These are a variety of works I have read fully, at one time or another. Taste is totally subjective. Any reader could make a list like this based upon their own personal taste and still, I think, reach a similar conclusion. Per page pay is nonsense that directly benefits writers of longer works above all others, for no other reason than length. Even if readers don’t finish the longer works they start, it still takes multiples of full reads for writers of short works just to catch up with compensation for partial reads.

I’ve read quite a lot over the past few years from many independent writers of novels about how old school publishers simply don’t like competition to their stories on a more level playing field. Apparently, so it seems, neither do a great many of them.

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron

A Piece Written For Free About Writing For Free

Should you write for free? That’s a question that bounced around the blogosphere this week. My immediate reaction was, “Hell no!”  But the more I thought about it, I kept coming up with situations and examples where it made perfect sense to do so.  Basically, my “Hell no” has morphed into an, “it depends.”  More than that, I realized it always has been.  I can’t even begin to offer a realistic estimate of the volume of writing I’ve done over the course of my life. Suffice it to say it’s a helluva lot.  For a sizable portion of it, there was a check involved on the back end.  But for a great deal more, there hasn’t been a payoff in direct monetary terms.  And you know what, I’m totally cool with that.  

This discussion suffers from elitist syndrome.  By that, I mean, there’s a certain subset of people who managed to finangle their way into regular paydays from strictly writing.  Not many, mind you. Nor have there ever been, but let’s not allow an accurate depiction of history to interfere with today’s doomsaying meme of the moment.  First, though, it’s instructive to ask what kind of writers are seeing their incomes decline like this? The answer, basically, is writers whose primary income streams depend on corporate media companies. Let’s review what’s happened in the past few years. There was a massive recession, the worst of any of our lifetimes so far. There was a giant disruption in their business model, which led to both the creation of an entirely new class of digital products and distribution and the emergence of viable alternatives to publishing and distribution that doesn’t go directly through them. They’ve not been receptive of these technological improvements, largely choosing to err on the side of protectionism for print. And when they do go after the digital dollars, they’ve created an industry standard for severely underpaying writers on this much higher margin product.  Given these circumstances, why is it in the least bit surprising that many writers who choose this path as a primary revenue option are seeing diminished returns? It’s entirely predictable, in fact.

There’s also the question of value. There’s a routinely trotted out theory that self published writers giving their works away for free or selling them for a pittance devalues writing.  But consider, if your finely crafted professional work can be so simply and easily swapped out by the work of what you consider inexperienced amateurs, maybe it’s not them devaluing the work at all. Maybe it was the rare set of circumstances that created the long-prevailing (and now broken) scarcity model that allowed you to over-value the work. Maybe you’re just not that special now that we’re in an environment where genuine choice has become a real factor.

Does that mean you should write for free? Well, it depends. If you’re writing for a major media company, fuck no, you absolutely should not. Under no circumstances. If the question is should I write for the Huffington Post in exchange for exposure, my answer is, if you’re looking for exposure, you should just stroll out into a blizzard in your underwear. It’ll be much quicker. The Huffington Post is a scam, a shop set up with the intent of not paying for content. All the better for their bottom line.  To hell with those kinds of folks.  But if you want to contribute something to some fringe website on some subject you know about, someone who isn’t exactly rolling in money and not backed by a mega-corp, why not? Maybe you care more about your ideas on the subject getting out there than if the purveyor of the platform can afford to toss a c-note your way. The idea that directly selling your words is the only path to success or achievement is perhaps the most narrow definition of being a writer I’ve ever seen.

It also seems to be the one adhered to by our friend Roxanna Robinson, the head of the Authors Guild, who did little to distinguish herself during the Amazon/Hatchette battle. A stance some people, me included, feel actually contributed to the declining revenues for writers that have their knickers all in a twist. But I’ll get to that later.  Robinson is the head of a professional trade group of writers, so it makes a certain amount of sense for this to be her position.  It doesn’t make it the right one. And it puts more than a little strain on her claims that they’re open to any and all writers when their principle position is one that basically only applies to an extremely small subset of writers.  

What I find interesting is that, way back in the pre-internet stone age, as a young writer just starting out, the accepted practice was to submit to small press magazines, most of which paid nothing at all or in copies, if you were lucky. The theory was build up your resume, as it were, with publication credits to make your query letters more attractive in the hopes of working your way up to small paying publications, then possibly to well paying ones.  But it all started under the presumption that your initial forays would be largely unpaid. And that says nothing of the numerous journalistic enterprises and the value of doing unpaid internships there in landing actual paying positions. Again, newcomers expected to work for free. If Robinson is arguing that these practices are exploitative, then I’m in total agreement. But somehow, I suspect her complaints are more geared toward the writers who now choose to avoid this particular set of trenches altogether.

You see, back when I was a relative newcomer, the submission gauntlet was more controlled. The scarcity that physical costs of production created inhibited most end-runs to the process, so a clear hierarchy became delineated on the “proper” way to strive for success as a writer. A path, mind you, that required a helluva lot of free work just to attract the attention of someone who might be willing to consider paying you at some point.  The difference now, though, is instead of the corporations benefitting from all this free labor, it’s the audience who’s benefitting. That is a direct threat to their tiered labor structure, and it’s exposed a pricing scheme that is built upon a crumbling foundation of scarcity.  Oh, wait. I’m sorry, I forgot.  It’s all Amazon’s fault.  Free labor is horrible, unless, of course, it’s our buddies expecting you to toil away unpaid. Then it’s called paying your dues.  But if your free labor isn’t benefitting our pals, or worse yet, is actually benefitting you directly in ways that don’t require their approval, then you’re a blight on the industry.

Robinson is right in some ways, Declining author incomes (in her particular wheelhouse) is a very real thing. I expect it to get much worse, with the increasing use of Agency pricing designed to steer readers away from digital and back to print.  That’s the theory, anyway. I expect it to be more a case of steering readers away from their digital stuff to other people’s digital stuff in the long term. The impact on print may be negligible, unless of course they do something stupid like tie the fate of their print and ebooks together while actively handicapping the more efficient, higher margin side. Whoops, too late.  

Robinson is correct to be concerned. It would have been nice had that concern shown itself last year when a group like the Authors Guild had a unique opportunity to apply some pressure to publishers while they were in the midst of freaking out that Amazon was going to end the world as they knew it. But instead, she happily fell in line with the publishers’ slanted viewpoint, maybe hoping they would see that loyalty as something to be rewarded later in some undefined way.  Well, you’re seeing the beginnings of what that loyalty earned her and the authors she helped lead down the garden path right now. Their publisher buddies, the ones they so willingly tossed their loyalty behind, are squeezing writer incomes to better their own. And now, thanks to their help, pubs have a level of pricing control in retail that, in my opinion, transitioned the threat level of their contracts all the way up to Defcon 1.    

It’s easy to point fingers at self published writers giving their stuff away for free. Low-hanging fruit, as the saying goes. But if Robinson wants to know why authors incomes are falling, she should look in the mirror. If anyone is guilty of devaluing anything, they are. She devalued author loyalty when she so blithely gave it away during a damn contract negotiation with a retailer. She devalued the writers she professes to represent by going all in with their support without extracting even the slightest bit of quid pro quo. She allowed the publishers to trot them out as the useful idiot to put a faux-cultural face on what was essentially a power-grab.  She did nothing at all to take advantage of the fact that they needed authors for that effort, and gave very little indication she actually recognized the situation for what it was.  She let her fear of Amazon drive them into a corner. Might as well have held their wallets open to the pubs and said, “Here, take what you like.”

And this is the best that advocates of “only write for money” can do? It’s a little disheartening. But should you write for free? There’s as many different paths (and different opinions on what constitutes success) as their are writers. That wasn’t the case not so very long ago. Free work by writers isn’t a new thing, something magically thought up by the internet demons to destroy vaunted cultural institutions. There’s always been an expectation that being a writer involves a certain amount of unpaid toiling to reach the point of actual paying work. All I can say is that you should strive to make certain, should you choose to do so, that unpaid toiling benefits you in some way. And despite what some of the well-heeled at what they perceive as the head of the writerly class might suggest, direct monetary rewards are not the end all, be all of the discussion.

So, should you write for free?  It depends.  What are you trying to achieve?

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron

Ghost in the Machine

Let’s talk about Zoe Sugg. Firstly, good for her. She’s built a huge YouTube following which has given her a great platform to work from in the future. Having said that, people like her need to be careful who they partner with. From all reports, she’s very happy with Penguin, so there’s that. (Amanda Hocking was very happy with her publisher after she signed her contract, too. Anybody heard from her in past few years?) But Zoe also had to take “a break” from the Internet and has gotten excoriated in some circles once it was revealed that the book was largely ghost written. She needs to realize none of that happens if Penguin/Random House weren’t being disingenuous with how they’ve billed and marketed the book.

I have concerns about the nature of her contract. Namely, if Penguin contracted and paid the ghostwriter, who actually owns the rights to the book? Zoe claims the story and characters are hers, but I really would like to see how her contract is worded. It may well be her story but the book itself is a work product bought and paid for by Penguin from someone else. Is it possible Zoe might never be able to get the rights reverted under any circumstances because she’s never had them to begin with?

It kind of got me thinking about something I wrote a while back speculating that a deep substantive editor who made changes to story and characters might have a copyright claim on those elements of the work. If the storyline and characters came from Zoe but a different writer fleshed out the actual work, wouldn’t that put Zoe effectively in the position of a substantive editor rather than the creator? If she, in fact, does have an inherent copyright claim on the work, how would it not follow that other substantive editors have one as well? Ultimately, it’s all in the contracts. I hope Zoe had a good lawyer.

However great she is at her YouTubing, and she’s clearly magnificent at it, she’s not a writer and doesn’t have a deep level of understanding of the nature of publishing. I expect she was told by Penguin that this is all good, it’s how it’s always done and don’t worry about it. Meanwhile, the PRH CEO is at conventions mouthing off about what a great storyteller she is and how great her book is while purposely avoiding any disclosure that she didn’t actually write it. Now 99% of the time, we expect celebrity books to be ghostwritten. But those books are generally all nonfiction. Doing this with fiction, though, is a different animal entirely. And if it is really “how it’s always done”, would PRH like to disclose how many other works of fiction they’ve published and marketed under famous brands that weren’t written by the person who’s name is in big letters on the cover? And pseudonyms don’t count. That’s still the person who wrote it, even under an assumed name. I don’t expect they will any time soon. Even James Patterson, however you feel about his book mill, openly discloses that he only writes a short outline and credits the actual author on the cover as the writer, not some vague “thank you for helping me” stuffed in the acknowledgements.

Here’s the thing; publishers have largely failed in their plan to harvest indie authors who develop large platforms and fan bases as a sort of “farm system” or “minor league.” So they’ve moved on the harvesting non-writers who have developed large platforms in other media and constructing books to fit the brands in question. It’s good business, and I’m not going to fault them for taking a swing at it. What I will fault them for is using those platforms to market fiction under the brand name when that person didn’t actually write it. It’s deceptive, in my opinion, and more than a little obvious as a cynical money grab. What I hope the Youtubers are doing is realizing that their platform is what the publishers want and that it gives them leverage. I sincerely hope they are using that leverage to get the best contract that suits them and protects their interests going forward. Because what’s not really debatable is that Penguin doesn’t care about the long-term viability of Zoe’s brand, only that they can capitalize on it right now. They aren’t going to protect Zoe or any of the others. That’s up to them to do so themselves. I really hope they both understand that and are acting accordingly.

Would it have been so difficult for Penguin to have put “Zoe Sugg with…” the ghostwriter’s name on the cover? Would it have undermined their marketing to acknowledge this was more of a collaborative effort than an independently written novel? I don’t believe it would have. Penguin clearly did or they would have disclosed it before the Internet sniffed it out and disclosed it for them. Maybe that’s a lesson here, too. Deceptive or misleading marketing doesn’t work anymore now that the entire world can fact check your ass in a couple of hours.

It’ll be interesting to see how the next YouTuber book is billed and marketed. At the end of the day, Zoe is moving product, and a lot of it. These YouTubers are independent, self-made people for the most part. I’ll be fascinated to see how that translates to long-term arrangements with publishers. My guess is it will go like the indie author thing went for them. Some successes and high profile signings early that will fade as the novelty wears off and the inherent conflicts between publisher and YouTuber business models start to manifest and the YouTubers realize there’s more money (and creative control/freedom) in it to do it themselves.

But for now, publishers may have finally found a group to whom their skill sets and added value propositions actually still attract; people with huge social media followings and zero professional writing skills.

One last point in all of this, the sentiment issued by this asshole:

“The book I am most proud NOT to have published (and most ashamed for my fellow publishers for signing up): Girl Online by Zoe Sugg…Zoella’s ghost-written confection, cobbled together from her dispiriting blog and her superficial life spent shopping and stressing about makeup. When there are so many great YA books and writers, it is horrible that such effort should be put into churning out an offshoot of a blog that is essentially about … nothing.”
Andrew Franklin Publisher, Profile Books

Get over yourself, already. And if your claim is that you wouldn’t have published this knowing the success it would find, I will call bullshit on that every day, and twice on Sundays. Today just so happens to be a Sunday, so that’s absolute bullshit. Bullshit, I tell you!

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron

Royalties, Oh Royalties, Wherefore Art My Royalties?

“It is our hope that Hachette, in light of the loyalty its authors have shown throughout this debacle, takes this opportunity to revisit its standard e-book royalty rate of 25 percent of the publisher’s net profits.” Roxana Robinson, president of the Authors Guild

So here we are. Hachette has a deal. Simon & Schuster has a deal. They have the pricing responsibility they wanted. Amazon has its “specific financial incentives” to compel them to use that power to price lower. Now we’ll get to see just how badly publishers want to institute a price-based windowing system for new releases (I’m setting the over/under on new release ebook prices at $16.99. And I’m taking the over.) But what did writers get out of this? I’m glad you (rhetorically) asked, because nobody else seems to be.

I’ve read all the coverage I can find and, as far as I can tell, the sum total of what writers got from this is that Hachette writers will have preorders reinstated and be back on two-day shipping. That’s about it. Oh yeah, there’s all the sales they lost during the past seven months. They’ve got that, too. There’s no Macmillan-like pool of recompense for those folks; no extra royalty payout for the damage done to their business. And they’ve got the hit yet to come from all those lost sales when their next contract rolls around. But at least, like the Robinson quote above, they’ve got hope that possibly Hachette (and others) maybe might take some time to reconsider their ebook royalty rates, if it’s not too much trouble. Because loyalty. My dog is loyal, but if I screw with his food, he bares his teeth and growls. I don’t screw with his food. Loyalty unrespected is subservience.

The blatantly obvious here is that anyone who thought writers would get anything but screwed on this was deluded. Especially after their authors interjected themselves into it in, bluntly, the stupidest possible way. They threw all their weight behind one side, not coincidentally, the side that needed them and they had leverage with, and asked nothing in return. Now we’re told they did it out of loyalty as if that’s some kind of honorable thing and not horribly misplaced naivete. Now we’re told authors are going to try to get better terms. My thoughts on that strategy were summed up nicely:

“What opportunity would that be? The one where they’ve settled up with Amazon, already have you all under contract at that standard, and don’t need to name-drop you morons in an obviously coordinated PR assault on a rival anymore? The opportunity to do a hell of a lot more than “hope they revisit the standard” was the past seven months when Amazon had Hachette over a barrel and the other publishers were all worried they were next.”

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s see what some publishing executives have to say:

“Speaking at a Society of Authors (SoA) panel on hybrid authors, Little, Brown CEO Ursula Mackenzie defended publishers from criticism by audience members that they now only take on books that will make money.

“Every book can’t make money,” she said. “There are careers we support for years…there are many books we publish lovingly where we don’t make money.”

Mackenzie said that publishers “are not taking a disproportionate part of the profit”, and that “no one benefits if publishers go out of business.” Little, Brown has a “fair rate for our e-books,” Mackenzie said.”

Good luck parsing the logic out of that one. “We publish lots of stuff that doesn’t make money, so we can’t pay you fairly for the things that do or we’d go out of business.”

That’s a helluva sales pitch. So even if I’m succesful, I’ll still be underpaid? Where do I sign up?!? This is the ultimate conclusion of the cultural enrichment argument. They’re not regular businesses, they’re a public good. So you can’t expect to be paid like a regular business. The company has to reap most of the proceeds so they can continue to underpay you to pay for all the stuff they produce that nobody wants. It’s all bullshit, of course, and pretty blatantly so. These are all huge, multi-billion-dollar publicly traded corporations. Do you think they’re shareholders are down with pissing money away in business-threatening chunks for culture’s sake? Or are they simply feeding you a line they know plays to your sensibilities to justify squeezing suppliers (you) to maximize profits?

Think about that last part for a minute. Just the idea of paying a better royalty rate caused her to pull the going out of business card. If you can’t even consider paying me a fair (or even just slightly higher) ebook royalty without it triggering fears of going under, does that make you more or less attractive to me as an author? You’re leveraged so thinly that fair recompense to writers can threaten the very existence of your company? What’s the upside for me to sign with you? A “quality” product no one buys or a product they do buy but I don’t reap fair reward for?

Now, of course, she claims to think their ebook royalty is fair, which is the problem. I don’t really believe she thinks that but enough of you do that they can continue to get away with pushing this nonsense. Here’s another:

“Questioned on author earnings, CEO Tom Weldon said that Penguin/Random House was always looking at how much authors were being compensated, but for the moment the 25% digital royalty rate would not be changed.

“Authors are, alongside readers, the foundation of our business,” he said. “We are always, always looking at our commercial arrangements with authors to make sure they’re fair and equitable. With e-book royalties, firstly and most importantly, the business model is as clear as mud. Rather than arguing about what slice of the cake we should distribute, we need to work out how big the cake should be.”

There you go, fair and equitable and the rate would not be changed. Get a load of that last sentence. We need to work out how big the cake should be? What the hell does that even mean? Is he talking about pricing? Is it a more ominous suggestion of further attempts at limiting the ebook market itself to a certain market share? Or even more ominously, is he talking not about how big the whole cake is but deciding how big the portion of the cake is that your portion comes from? The cake is a pretty big one, dude, I think portions are an appropriate topic of discussion at the moment. Look at how he phrased that, too: “Rather than arguing about what slice of the cake we should distribute…” They’re planning on keeping the whole damn cake and then deciding what tiny sliver they can afford to slice off for you. Do you need any more evidence that they see the proceeds from your book as “their cake”? Funny how they’re not waiting to work out how big the cake should be before touting the increased profits they’re reaping from this particular literary confection. But let’s not argue about it. Then they might actually have to address the issue rather than keep enjoying all that delicious extra cake they’ve got. Did you catch him wiping the crumbs from the corner of his mouth as he said “fair and equitable”?

Even the Author Guild itself admits the publishers have no will to even consider making a change in ebook royalty rate:

“Jean Craighead George’s original decision to publish an e-book edition (of Julie of the Wolves) with Open Road (which pays a 50% e-book royalty)—rather than with HarperCollins, her longtime publisher—was a principled rebuke of the major publisher’s measly 25% net e-book royalty. HarperCollins’s aggressive strategy (the publisher spent over $1.5 million to litigate a case that ended up being worth only $30,000) illustrates the importance to publishers of keeping e-book royalty rates at 25%.”

So if you already know this, please explain why you failed to do even the slightest bit of advocacy during the past year when the Big 5 in general, and Hachette specifically, were more vulnerable than they’ve been maybe in all of our lifetimes? You think it was a good idea to show unbridled loyalty to companies who, by your own admission, are being miserly with ebook royalties and intentionally underpaying your membership? Something you’ve been complaining about since, at least, 2009? That’s five years of talk with zero tangible results. Loyalty is a positive thing in some cases, but in this one, it’s high past time to bare your teeth. The question increasingly being asked, and rightly so, is does the Authors Guild have any teeth to bare? Instead of falling lockstep in line with the publishers, why didn’t you take advantage of this opportunity to make some progress? That’s what real advocacy is. What you’re doing is no different than what I do, talking. Only I’m not collecting dues or pretending I’m representing anyone’s interests.

Speaking of the blind leading the blind, here’s the Authors Guild meeting with members of Congress ahead of an upcoming review of copyright law:

“Executive Director of the Authors Guild, Mary Rasenberger’s speech was part of a panel co-hosted by the Authors Guild and aimed at giving the Congressional group a behind-the-scenes look at “a book’s passage from manuscript to marketplace.” The panel consisted of authors, editors, and publishers.

In her speech, Rasenberger focused on the “urgent state” of authorship today. “Even authors who made a living writing books for decades now need to find alternative sources of income,” she told the assembly. “This means they write less—and, in some cases, not at all. Fewer professional authors means fewer types of books that might take years of research and writing. These are precisely the kinds of books that further the knowledge and learning that copyright is meant to foster.”

Do you think her presentation of “manuscript to marketplace” included even a word about indies who skip the publisher involvement altogether? I don’t either. I’m certain it was a glowing testament to how essential publishers are, with writers and editors simply add-ons to the process, shepherded by their greatness. Maybe the urgent state of authorship wouldn’t be so urgent if authors had effective advocates. Maybe there wouldn’t be so many authors needing outside income streams if you did something about low royalties other than hope and talk. Don’t miss the loaded use of the term “professional” in there either. Who does this woman represent? They’ve done nothing about the royalty rate, they are dismissive of indies in presentation and implication if not in direct language. And they just came to heel when the publishers blew their dog whistles over the past few months, a time when they actually had some leverage to get something done. Amazon was practically begging them to do something. Is it any wonder publishers think they have you all locked down?

The question I’m asking is can authors get some real representation at these things? The only seat at the table we get is through groups like the Authors Guild, and sometimes that’s even less useful than having no seat at all. So what were they talking about at this congressional get together other than how crucial publishers are? Here’s the release from the committee:

“Great books, both fiction and non, have an incredible ability to capture our hearts and minds, taking us to another place or time with words on a page. Yet many of us do not think about the hard work and collaboration that goes on between authors, publishers, and many others to help take a book from manuscript to marketplace,” said Reps. Judy Chu and Howard Coble, co-chairs of the Creative Rights Council. “Together, this collaboration is at the heart of a $27.2 billion industry, but challenges like digital first sale, unreasonable expansion of fair use, and online piracy are threatening the livelihoods of the hard working men and women who bring these works to life. We are proud to have hosted this important panel in order to influence the conversation on copyright law as we continue moving forward.”

Notice authors is mentioned only once, in the context of the collaboration. Is it authors’ livelihoods they feel are threatened, because, as everyone should have already been expressly aware, the vast majority of traditional authors don’t have livelihoods from their work to be threatened. And that is in no way a recent development, rather a consequence of the industry’s very structure. So get ready for copyright law as publisher bailout (none of the benefits of which will even trickle down to the writers), coming soon to a congressional hearing near you.

It’s telling that both first sale and fair use were specifically cited as “threats”. Is this how the Authors Guild presented them? What exactly does Rasenberger mean by what “copyright is meant to foster”? First sale and fair use are both consumer rights granted by copyright (yes, consumers have rights under copyright law, too. Although maybe not for much longer if these folks are any indication.) How about we discuss life+70 that flies directly in the face of what copyright intended as a limited time of exclusivity for creators. It exists not for the benefit of creators, but of transferees (not mentioned there, by the way) so they can continue to profit from creators’ works for generations after their death. Or how about the fact that this standard has basically caused the public domain of recent material to wither and die (another element copyright law intended to be vibrant and available for both creators and the public).

But, alas, no. The “threats” here are like they are every time copyright comes up; the rights of consumers are given short shrift, if acknowledged at all, and the rights of creators are subverted, in direct opposition of what was intended, to protect corporate licensees’ profits. If you want to have a frank and open discussion of copyright law, let’s do it. But can we get someone other than the Authors Guild at the table please? I have no faith they’re even on the right side of these issues for authors and won’t simply fall lockstep in with publishers when push comes to shove (again). I’m sure they’ll talk a good game but when it comes time to pick a side to support, they’ll be right there with the publishers, no matter how much more ground creators and the public have to give up so Disney can continue milking Mickey Mouse in perpetuity.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe the Authors Guild, once it sinks in that their loyalty has gotten them squat, will finally break out the snarl and get down to the real business of business and stop validating the publishers’ “enriching themselves while underpaying writers is essential to culture” argument. And maybe pigs will fly.

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron

Protect Yourself: Some suggestions for writers in the age of Agency reborn

Now that the 100-Years-War between Amazon and Hachette has drawn to a close, writers can do what they should have been doing the entire time (and what many of us indies have been saying, repeatedly, over and over and over again the whole time): stop worrying about a publisher’s deal with a retailer and start worrying about your own deal with the publisher. And to kick off, here is an example of a way not to do that:

“Speaking on behalf of the Authors Guild, president Roxana Robinson called the end of the standoff ‘great news for Hachette authors.’ Robinson said it was ‘heartening to see so many writers rally to the defense of their colleagues’…Robinson said that while terms are said to be favorable to authors, the Guild has no way of knowing at the present time if that is the case.“

Bold emphasis added by me. Yup, great news! We don’t actually know that it’s great news or that the “heartening defense of colleagues” wasn’t actually a publisher-coordinated stroll down the garden path, but, hey, the war’s over and it looks like we won! The problem is that winning the war (if, in fact, that’s what happened. She just said they don’t know) isn’t the end, it’s winning the peace that matters now. Then there’s this:

“Robinson added that she hopes the ‘display of communal spirit played a part in bringing the negotiations to an end’ and ‘will prevent authors from being dragged into corporate disputes in the future.'”

Communal spirit?!? This is a high level, billion dollar corporate negotiation. Bezos and Pietsch didn’t burn one and sing Kumbaya to settle this. This is a serious business, sunshine, and you’re the President of a guild of professionals not a neighborhood bake sale. And this:

“‘It is our hope that Hachette, in light of the loyalty its authors have shown throughout this debacle, takes this opportunity to revisit its standard e-book royalty rate of 25 percent of the publisher’s net profits.”

Sweet Jesus! Tell me you’re not that naive. Loyalty?! What part of “billion dollar corporate negotiation” don’t you understand? You hope, in light of your “loyalty”, that they take this opportunity to revisit that standard? What opportunity would that be? The one where they’ve settled up with Amazon, already have you all under contract at that standard, and don’t need to name-drop you morons in an obviously coordinated PR assault on a rival anymore? The opportunity to do a hell of a lot more than “hope they revisit the standard” was the past seven months when Amazon had Hachette over a barrel and the other publishers were all worried they were next. The only opportunity you have now is for them to laugh in your face. Again. Just like they’ve been doing ever since you first started saying “we hope (insert publisher here) will rethink the 25% of net standard” back in fucking 2009! Hope is nice and all. Effective action is a little more useful. And you just pissed away a great opportunity to get something real done for authors in exchange for loyalty and hope. Good job, good effort. In other author news:

“Douglas Preston, who founded Authors United, said he was ‘relieved’ to hear about the agreement…he hopes that in future disputes between Amazon and publishers, ‘Amazon will never again seek to gain leverage by sanctioning books and hurting authors.'”

Of course he’s relieved. But guess what, Doug? Now you can’t blame Amazon for not discounting your books anymore. That’ll be your publisher doing that. And you’ll possibly be getting paid even less per high price book now than than you were before. Congrats on the big win! This guy’s a joke. Hachette’s only business with Amazon is selling books through them. The only leverage Amazon has is those books. Not only will they do it again, anyone in their position would as well, including the company he just spent six months shilling for while pretending to be a man of the people.

So, given the fact that the leadership caste of authors is woefully lacking, (my Dad would say “useless as tits on a bull”) here’s a couple things I’ve noticed about the state of things and a couple helpful suggestions.

1. 25% net ebook standard isn’t going anywhere

Despite Robinson’s hopes and dreams, I see no reason to believe this is even on the table. In fact, I’m suspicious this supposed price control of ebooks publishers are getting now won’t be used in ways that minimize author compensation and/or manipulate reversion clauses to retain rights they’d otherwise lose. I’d be willing to bet that if, by some chance, we see publishers willing to go up en mass, it’ll be because they’ve already gotten back twice as much by manipulating the revenue underlying the percentage. They have no reason to change in this respect and all the authors who showed their blind loyalty only reinforced their position. Here’s Penguin/Random House CEO Tom Weldon on the matter:

“Questioned on author earnings…Weldon said that PRH was always looking at how much authors were being compensated, but for the moment the 25% digital royalty rate would not be changed.”

And in this tweet from Porter Anderson about Weldon from Futurebook 14:

“Tom Weldon says that on the whole, the average royalty is 17-18%, so 25% on ebooks carries some logic.”

Nope, not gonna happen. But I’m sure your loyalty will be rewarded in other ways, like consideration in your next contract…

“Simon Lipskar, president of the literary agency Writers House, whose clients include a number of Hachette authors, welcomed news of the agreement. ‘Our writers have been suffering terribly because their sales have been significantly diminished as a result of this dispute,’ Mr. Lipskar said. He said it was possible that there would be long-term consequences for some authors because of diminished sales when it comes to negotiating new contracts.”

Oops, nevermind. Have a look at The Bookseller’s Digital Census:

“More than half (51.2%) think (ebook royalty) rates should be the same as for print books, but just over a third (36.6%) think they should be higher, and the rest (12.2%) lower.”

As our friend Mr. Weldon helpfully pointed out above, print rates are already lower than ebook rates. That means that 63.4% of publishers who responded to this census think 25% of net on ebooks is too high. The other 36% said higher than print, which they already are. It doesn’t say 36% think they should be higher than the current standard. In short, you’re not getting any movement on this without some major leverage. The kind of leverage AG and AU just gave away for loyalty and hope. Aww, isn’t that just precious? Too bad this isn’t a Nicholas Sparks novel. Come to think of it, you’ll be lucky if they don’t cut these rates. If somebody gave me 2 to 1 odds, I’d lay a c-note right now on that being exactly what will happen.

2. Authors could get really screwed on these new agency type deals

Here’s Michael Pietsch, Hachette CEO, explaining why I think this will be the case:

“Importantly, the percent of revenue on which Hachette authors’ ebook royalties are based will not decrease under this agreement.”

No, that percentage will decrease in the new standard terms in their contract language resulting from this agreement and in the contract riders you all are about to get between now and when this agreement takes effect in a couple months or so. All I know is that when a large corporation is assuring you about percentages, it’s total dollars you need to be looking at. When you read a missive from a large corporation, it’s not what they say that matters. It’s what they don’t say and how they go about not saying it. All he’s saying here is that the percentages they’re calculating your royalties on won’t change under this agreement. He’s not saying they won’t change under your agreement with them or saying your revenue itself won’t decline. There’s a second more subtle issue here too. He’s conflating their deal with Amazon to their deal with you. I’d say on purpose. One of my main complaints with the author response to this dispute was that many of them showed a lack of understanding about who was actually responsible for what to whom under these contracts. Odds are, the publisher likes it when you don’t know and will try to keep it that way.

So what does Amazon have to say about this?

“We are pleased with this new agreement as it includes specific financial incentives for Hachette to deliver lower prices, which we believe will be a great win for readers and authors alike,” said David Naggar, Vice President, Kindle.”

Specific financial incentives for lower prices? The prevailing wisdom is that means a tiered, KDP-like system with a lower cut at higher prices. But then Pietsch’s statement to their authors would seem to contradict that, but for two things. Without seeing an actual Hachette contract, we don’t how he’s defining what that “percent of revenue” as. And, as I mentioned above, the phrase “under this agreement” is problematic. There’s also another option; perhaps instead of creating a tiered system with lower rates at higher prices, this is the opposite; higher rates at lower prices. That would satisfy both Amazon’s claim of “specific financial incentives” and Hachette’s claim that revenue the author’s cut is based on isn’t decreased. Or it could be something else altogether.

My concern is the capacity Hachette (and presumably S&S) now possess over retail pricing. Publishers have shown before they’re willing to leave specific financial incentives on the table (the Apple collusion was a worse deal for them than they already had). They seem hellbent to protect the print market at all costs. Whatever those financial incentives are, they’ll leave them sitting on that table, at the very least as a windowing action for a hardcover release, to suit those ends. As an aside, you may want to check on print discount clauses in your contract and see how many of those constitute your hardcover sales. Jacking up your ebook prices to restrain sales of a format that pays you more to encourage discounted hardcover sales that pays them more (and, not coincidentally, you less) is a decided possibility here. Look out for it.

There’s an underlying assumption that if, in a vacuum, print and ebooks were allowed to compete unrestrained by and irrespective of the other, that ebooks would take sales away from print. But remember, it’s an assumption. One that hasn’t really been born out by any hard evidence, at that. But it’s the basic assumption being used to justify current thinking in ebook pricing by most publishers. The ebook must be priced high enough that it doesn’t cannibalize hardcover print sales. The higher yield on an ebook sale doesn’t matter in this context. To you, though, it sure as hell better matter. We don’t even know for sure that, if allowed to compete organically, ebooks would even cause the damage to print they claim. They’re really two separate entities; different presentations, different cost structures, different primary sales channels, even a different audience to a significant degree.

Now I do think print sales are going to decline, probably dramatically, but it won’t be ebooks causing it. It’ll be the loss of brick and mortar shelf space from the influence of online commerce, and related elements. By using price to emphasize one format’s sales over the other, they’re inherently handicapping sales of the format that, even at miserly trad rates, pays you better relative to cost to the reader. You often hear how authors make more on a hardcover than an ebook (something true largely because they’re under-paying you on the ebook) but consider, with the hardcover sale, your readers have to basically drop another $10 so you can earn an extra $1 in royalties compared with the ebook. That’s not good for anyone but the publisher and, maybe, the book stores. And it’s clearly their preferred option, one they now, reportedly, have even more power to put into action.

So what can you do to protect yourself and make certain you don’t fall into this trap of what I’m certain will be declining revenues? Well, I have a few suggestions.

Stop selling ebook and print rights as a bundle

I’ve suggested in the past that writers who’d like to prevent their publisher from handicapping one format to benefit another have a simple means of doing so; don’t sell both print and ebook rights as a bundle to the same entity. They can only coordinate if they have full rights to both. Don’t give it to them. Another option would be try to separate the contracts; go for totally separate deals for print and ebook rights. And when I say separate, I mean it; separate contracts, separate advances, separate royalty structures, reversion clauses for each independent of one another (with no pesky non compete provisions than would stop you from using reverted rights elsewhere for one if the other didn’t revert). In this way, the publisher couldn’t link the two formats, they’d have to fully exploit both formats, not limit one to prop up the other without risking losing the one they’re limiting.

Publishers will tell you they need all these rights so they can spread costs across all formats and maximize revenue with dynamic pricing. Linking two sets of rights with such divergent cost structures will inevitably lead to one getting the short end to favor the other. If publishers won’t go 100% on both, you lose. Don’t give them the option to do so. Make it clear if they want both print and ebook rights, they have to exploit both to the fullest, not prioritize one over the other. Publishers will say that supporting bookstores is crucial to them and justifies hamstringing digital. For them, maybe. For you, not so much, especially in the long term. Separate accounting and reversion clauses is one way to create a barrier that prevents them from prioritizing one over the other. A better way is don’t sell them both to the same publisher.

Will publishers do this? On the whole, hell no! So the shorter answer here is probably “self publish”.

Refuse to accept any 25% of net contracts

In the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, just say no. The 25% of net standard is far too low. If they won’t budge on it, take ebook rights off the table. If that’s a deal breaker for them, so be it. Grow a pair and walk away. Taking a bad deal is not better than no deal at all. You will regret the bad deal later. The Authors Guild can talk all it wants about loyalty but that’s not going to get any movement on this. Only actual pressure will. The Guild obviously doesn’t have the will to bring that pressure to bear. As for Doug Preston, who makes his money on big advances and willingly admits he’s not one who watches his sales, he had a lot to say about how crucial advances are in his various AU missives but jack shit to say about royalties. There’s no help coming from there and his band of jolly, powerful, influential writers, either. If 25% of net is going to go up, the only way it’s happening is if writers individually simply hold the line and refuse to sign over their rights for that price.

Will publishers be amenable? Almost certainly not but there are some who might. So, again, self publish is probably the shorter answer here, too.

Refuse to sign any life of copyright contracts

If you must sign on with a publisher, having a hard deadline they must produce in is probably a good idea. I like the notion of a five year contract. You can work in provisions for renegotiation or what have you, but if publishers want to keep control of the rights, make them actually have to pay for that privilege. As it stands now, publishers are basically paying you nothing for lifetime control of your IP. There’s not one tangible thing in these contracts that would change if they had a 5 year limit rather than forever plus 70. You’re throwing in lifetime control for essentially free. Stop it!

These kinds of contracts do exist and are becoming more common with smaller publishers. The big guys though, they treat your IP like the girl who doesn’t want you but doesn’t want anyone else to have you either. Once they get your signature, they’ve locked your IP in a box where anyone making money from it will have to go through them for the rest of your life. They’ll squat on your rights before they risk giving up on them and you finding success elsewhere. But you have to be willing to walk away, which again likely means self publish.

Watch those fuckers like a hawk

If the first three suggestions here don’t play out, which is entirely possible, there’s always a compromise. The great American philosopher Meatloaf said it best, two out of three ain’t bad. You’re likely not going to get everything you want, but you can get something better than what we have today, something you can live with. Life is all about compromise. Just don’t compromise yourself in the process.

But if you do end up signing on the dotted line, you must watch what they do with a fine tuned eye. Start tracking your books on every platform you can think of, compile data on how they’re being priced, when and where. Compare any sales data (and monies) you get from them with your own data. Get an idea of exactly where your sales are happening and how that relates to how they’re being priced. More than that, scour your contract and make certain you understand exactly what each format actually pays you (and them) and work that into your data. Basically, pay close attention.

Now what to do if you actually find something screwy, like sales being pushed to formats that pay them better and you less? I’m not sure what recourse you have, especially if you’re on a life of copyright deal. Probably none. But just showing them you’re aware of what’s going on can have a positive impact. A car mechanic has a more difficult time padding their bill when a customer comes in showing knowledge about what the problem is and what the costs to fix it should be. Publishers aren’t stupid, they adhere to the adage “You can screw all the people some of the time, or some of the people all the time, but you can’t screw all the people all the time.” The more you present yourself as educated and aware, the better your chances of avoiding the pitfalls that get those who toil in willful ignorance.

Does this sound like a lot of work just to keep a company you should trust to do right by you on the clear path? Yes it does. Will publishers appreciate you being a pain and questioning their actions? Most definitely not. But honestly, you should be doing this stuff already. The only person who’s always going to watch out for you and your interests is you. Don’t ever forget that.

Of course, you could be devoting all that time you’re spending to double check them by self publishing, but what do I know? I prefer not to get ripped off in my contractual dealings. Maybe you don’t mind about that. Do you? Prove it.

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron

The Case For Why Writers Need Publishers

Um…
Well, maybe…
I suppose they could…
They might…
Huh.

The End.

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron

A Trip to the Library’s Used Book Sale

My haul from the library used book sale this morning.

This weekend is the Fall used book sale at my local library here in scenic Chestertown, Maryland. They have these sales twice a year, Spring and Fall. They set up a large room with hardcovers and trade paperback books piled high on a series of tables, lined up on shelves surrounding the room with more piled three rows deep underneath the tables. The hallway outside the room has another set of tables packed two layers deep with mass market paperbacks, and also has the piles of books underneath each. It takes a couple of hours to properly browse the available material. And you can’t beat the prices!

Some writers and publishers have a love/hate relationship with used books (mostly hate). I’m not one of them. It’s love all the way. If not for the availability of used books, I wouldn’t have read half of what I have in my life and the number of different authors I’ve become fans of would be demonstrably smaller. Some may not like it but when you consider none of those books are there for sale without someone having bought it full price first (or discounted as the publisher wants), all I can say is get over it! You want to know where discoverability happens? It’s right here in this room full of books so cheap as to nearly be free. It’s also why discoverability with digital is more problematic and why free is uncomfortably (for them) popular among readers; no used market to speak of.

I spent my hour this morning browsing and finally headed out with a bag of nine books that, in total, set me back roughly three times the price of the cup of coffee I bought at Royal Farms on my way home. The notion that cheap nigh-on free books is some new development from the Internet is absurd. This kind of sale has been going on for longer than all of us have been alive. It just wasn’t trackable in the ways digital is. And it’s always been a beneficial component of the industry, not a detriment. “Cheap books are good for business” is not an idea Jeff Bezos invented, despite what some would have you believe.

There are a few things I took away from this morning’s jaunt, more than just the new bag full of books I needed like a hole in the head. With a little mortar, I’m pretty sure I could build a summer home out of my to-be-read pile alone.

1. Traditional publishing produces a lot of crap

You hear this a lot about indies but, man, glancing through stacks of the stuff that’s been “properly vetted” by the great tastemakers only makes me snort louder every time I hear someone say how indispensable they are to quality literature. I don’t have any particular moral judgment on this, just try not to be the pot telling the kettle it’s too black, please.

2. Lit Fic doesn’t have much of a secondary life past first sale

I’ve been going to this sale for four years now and one of the interesting things I’ve noticed is that you see the same types of books over and over again, year after year. Something with a windswept field and a sunset on the cover, inevitably with the phrase “From the NY Times Best-selling Author” scrawled across the top, titled “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” or some such inexplicable thing. The cover blurb sounds like a story my uncle would try to tell about his troubled life, after Thanksgiving dinner and one too many shots of Southern Comfort, before I get so bored I have to fake an excuse to leave the room. These books never move. They were there four years ago and I don’t doubt they’ll still be there four years from now. Even for a buck, they can’t get them to walk out the door.

3. Nobody keeps the books from the long-time mega-bestsellers

The place is filthy with them! Nearly every table is overflowing with Pattersons and Turows and Kings and Crichtons and Clancys. And not just one of each, dozens of copies of the same books, mostly all pricey hardcovers. It makes me wonder if those books were actually bought by the readers who donated them or were given as gifts. The churn rate on high dollar hardcovers evident there just seems out of place. Who drops $25 on a book then dumps it on the library? These authors may be selling large numbers of these books but nobody’s keeping them. They’re disposal entertainment. And a damned expensive version of it at that. Again, even at $2 per hardcover, these books never move.

4. Newer, short series bestsellers are an exception

There was a half a dozen copies of the 50 Shades trilogy books combined there. There was one copy of the first Hunger Games book and that’s it. There were four copies of the Twilight series books in total. There were a grand total of zero copies of any of the Harry Potter books. No George R.R. Martin, either. People are keeping those books in ways they aren’t with either literary or mass market best sellers. I’m not sure what that means, but if I had to guess, it may speak to the completionist mentality of many readers relating to a concise several-book series that doesn’t stretch on forever into 16 or 17 volumes.

5. Romance is another exception

Nora Roberts was another mega seller whose books overran the place. The difference, though, is that they move. Nobody’s buying the Pattersons but most of Roberts’ books will be gone by Sunday. I’ve watched it happen in the past where an entire table of Roberts and Danielle Steele books that are there on the opening day are picked down to bare bones by closing. The Turows and his ilk, though, end up clustered all together, with the previously mentioned best selling lit-fic, as nearly everything else around them is picked clean. Romance seems to have the same level of churn going on but they also seem to have a vibrant life after the first sale that the mega-sellers don’t.

Now, let’s discuss price. I walked out of there with six mass market paperbacks, one trade paperback, one hardcover and one paperback that was a half-inch taller than a regular paperback. I added up the cover prices of all nine books. It was $94. I paid $5.25. That’s roughly a 95% discount. Not bad. The question, though, is would I have bought any of these books at full price? The list price on all the paperbacks was $7.99. The weird taller paperback was $9.99. The hardcover was $24.95. The only one that seemed reasonably priced to me was the trade paperback of Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy containing all three books. It was just $10.95.

The answer is that, no, I likely wouldn’t have paid those prices except for that one book. The hardcover of Joe Hill short stories looks cool and I’m excited to read it. I wouldn’t pay $25 for it. I don’t like Dean Koontz to speak of but I’ve always been morbidly curious about his Frankenstein series. There’s zero chance I’d pay the $24 list price for the three volumes but for 75 cents? Hell, I’m in on that. The Matheson and Straub books I may have gone up a few dollars on cover price and bought nicer trade editions but I wouldn’t have dropped $8 a pop on these versions, either. Ender’s Game was a lark that I couldn’t pass up for a quarter. I just saw the movie and, while it was no great shakes, it did make me curious about the book.

Which brings me to the last book I picked up this morning. Yes, I bought a Doug Preston book. I’ve never read anything he’s written (outside of his Authors United blustering. I really hope his fiction stylings are way better than that), so I’m curious. The description sounded interesting, so I thought, “What the hell? I’ll give it a go.” There was another one of his books there that sounded interesting, too. But it was a hardcover and hardcovers were $2 and I just didn’t want to pay that. (I can hear the screams of “entitled” now.) The reality is that I have no idea if I’m going to like his work. For a quarter, it’s a no-risk proposition. For $2, it’s a slightly less than no-risk. But $2 bought me that aforementioned cup of coffee. And, yes, I’m saying that fleeting cup of coffee was more important to me this morning than trying one of his books. That’s life. Get used to it.

If I read that book and enjoy it, the dynamic changes. I don’t question dropping the $2. Hell, I might even buy one (or more) new, depending on how much I like this one. But none of that happens if I don’t have access to this book for a negligible sum. At the last book sale in the Spring, I loaded up, getting about 25 books of all different stripes. Since then, there have been six new book purchases by me as a direct result of those buys. That’s six sales that would not have existed otherwise. Preston’s odds of getting me to buy one of his books new is virtually non-existant without the super-cheap used variety available to experiment and check out the lay of the land, as it were. His odds of me turning into a fan may be slim in any case, but they’re non-existant if my only choices are list price or small discount.

Even if his ebook version was $5.99, I’m not buying that. I wouldn’t pay $2 for one of his hardcovers. If the book I bought today was priced at $6, it would still be on the table where I found it. If those are my only options (or my cheapest options) he has precisely zero chance of turning me into a full paying customer. Here’s my concern with ebooks: no used versions at miniscule prices means it’s either the library or some random chance someone gives me one. Publishers have gouged libraries with exorbitant ebook prices and overly restrictive licenses. That option isn’t as viable as print either. You want discovery for ebooks to be better? Stop handicapping it. Libraries, used books for slightly above free and sharing between readers is where most discovery happens. You may think it’s bookstores but odds are most shoppers are “discovering” something there they already knew about. Discovery in that sense is more surprised to discover something you actually want is there in stock.

You can’t have things both ways. You don’t get the benefit of people putting in the legwork to discover your work and expect them to pay you for that discovery. Like most worthwhile pursuits, the back end is where the money is. I get this one for a quarter today, he may well get 5 or 6 sales over the next few years at store prices. Get rid of this one, and he gets nothing.

Cheap bordering on free books that have no direct revenue link to publishers or writers are an essential component to discovery. If we just keep progressing with ebooks as we have (and they continue to replace mmpb’s) with no used versions, limited library checkouts and prices higher or comparable to a mmpb, that discovery problem is only going to get worse. And it’s going to start to carry over into print, too, from fewer used paperbacks available like what I bought today. Subscription services can possibly mitigate some of that, but only if the catalogs are basically unlimited and the service itself isn’t too expensive or restrictive. But then, we might also be running a real risk of replacing sales with subscriptions rather than supplementing and supporting them as used books and library borrows do now. If we keep pretending books have some innate value while ignoring how, where and why the people buying them were first turned onto your work, and where they developed their notion of its value, trouble will continue to ensue.

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron

The Two Memes of Destruction

So I’ve reached a point of not being terribly concerned about the people who are still siding with Hachette. Especially after Simon & Schuster has done what’s been touted as the impossible, quickly and painlessly reaching a deal with Amazon. It’s reportedly an Agency-type deal too, and, in my opinion, that makes what Hachette supporters have been saying look even more suspect. I know, I know, we don’t have specifics on the deal. It could be a bad one, S&S could have panicked. Or Amazon could’ve given away the farm to them (the smallest of the Big 5) to put more pressure on Hachette knowing S&S can’t share details without running afoul of Uncle Sam. That’s all possible. But I return to a theory I pointed out a while back. This fight isn’t because Amazon is trying to destroy the world one publisher at a time, Hachette may just have badly overplayed their hand by picking a poor strategy. A strategy, by the way, that needed it’s writers to lose their asses for going on six months now to be effective. Sweethearts, those folks. I’d like to think that what we’re seeing here is evidence that the Big 5 might be diverging a bit. S&S cut this deal quickly and quietly. The same S&S that had a knock down, drag out with Barnes & Noble not long ago. Harper Collins is firing up it’s own sales channel and offering *gasp* to pay writers higher royalties for sales through it. (How much higher and whether it’s sufficient is another discussion entirely.) There’s continued rumbles around various parts of Random House suggesting there’s serious discussions going on about whether to ditch DRM in some way. All these are good signs. The DOJ’s actions may have had the unintended side effect of disrupting the regular cartel-like coordination of these companies far deeper than simply in their dealings with Amazon. We may be entering a period where the Big 5 function as five totally separate entities, and that alone would make what the DOJ did worthwhile, not to mention the tens of millions readers got back after being ripped off by the illegal collusion. That was pretty cool, too. It may truly be a brand new world. Or so I hope, anyway.

But if you’d like to continue to support them, have at it. It’s your funeral. Something Patterson said recently about this being like a religious war rings true. I’m not sure why he thought it was appropriate or anything short of insulting to portray traditional supporters as terrorists. Hey, I disagree with you all quite a bit and I’m not even going there. And he’s on your side! I think many of you are misguided, confused, uninformed, stuck in a past that’s always been more myth than reality, yada, yada, yada…but I don’t think you’re jihadists. No word yet on whether Hachette is promising it’s writers 72 virgin customers for writing an Amazon hit piece, you know, suicide bombing their own credibility. It’s just ridiculous. And now we’ve got a once and future king-maker agent (so he hopes) comparing Amazon’s distribution system to ISIS. That one’s too inexplicable to even criticize. Seriously, could someone give me any clue to what the hell that means? It’s like he just picked the most negative term in the news that day. “The Big 5 offer ebola like contracts!” Two can play at that game.

But one aspect of the religious war narrative does make sense. Those folks are either true believers where facts or logic don’t apply or they’re the leaders pulling the strings of the true believers to serve their own agendas. I’ve seen it said that indies are behaving like zealots but that perceived zeal comes from, you know, actually having options now in an industry where we largely had none. The irrational arguing is mostly from the traditional side. We might be loud and angry but we also tend to have arguments that don’t Involve simply shouting at people who disagree with us “you just don’t know how publishing works” without actually explaining what they mean by that or refuting the point made that led to it. Probably because they themselves don’t really know (or want to publicly admit) how publishing really works, preferring the myth to the reality. That does seem to be an increasingly common response-type. The converse of that is the people who argue with reasons in support for their positions. I won’t always agree but I’ll always respect someone who put some thought behind what they believe, not just trot out more myths, half-truths and nonsense like Paul Krugman.

Implying that Amazon is some kind of a right wing propaganda arm because Paul Ryan’s book was available but a negative biography of the Koch brothers was restricted? Did it occur to you that Amazon wants to sell books, even during the dispute? That you and I might think he’s a clueless asshole, but Ryan’s book has a virulent tea party audience that will actually pay good money to read his nonsense? And that a Koch brothers biography may be a fantastic book and important subject matter but if the only people likely to buy it are the 12 remaining Michael Moore fans and a small subset of the folks who drive a prius and want to have the book on their coffee table so they can look socially conscious to dinner guests, why would they give it extra attention that other Hachette books aren’t getting during the dispute? Besides, haven’t you heard? Amazon tells the DOJ of a Democrat president what to do and Bezos hangs with Obama. Don’t you recall the hell the President caught for touring an Amazon warehouse and daring to say nice things about them fairly recently? But then, Krugman writes for the New York Times. Maybe he simply had to fulfill his quota of negative articles about Amazon for the quarter, and if he could toss in a little of that liberal/tea party brouhaha, all the better for click bait.

What you often see is people describing publishing as a system so incredibly complex that outsiders can’t possibly understand how it works. More than that, it’s complexity requires special exemptions from even the most basic market forces. In this world, Amazon is a monopolist, indies are simultaneously pawns used to destroy publishers and junk merchants that are devaluing books and destroying literature, and publishers are the ones defending the world from the evils of competition, innovation and progress one overpriced ebook at a time. The problem with this is that the system isn’t really all that complicated, nor difficult to understand. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll find most of that complexity is an invention of the publishers themselves, or some elaborate combination of the arrangements they’ve made with distributors and retailers. Tried and true. Make a simple situation appear impossibly complicated and reinforce your position in the chain because writers and uninitiated outsiders believe they can’t possibly navigate these choppy waters or understand why things are done this way without publishers to handle that for them. That the publishers are the ones creating the chop is often overlooked. In any event, it’s bullshit. Write a book, publish a book, sell a book. It’s not complicated in the slightest. It’s not easy, mind you, but it’s not quantum physics or nuerosurgery, either. In that sense, they’re a bit like credit card service agreements, so much complicated fine print that what really is a simple circumstance becomes shrouded in confusion, which is then used to great effect to obscure the unsavory things going on in the margins.

With that in mind, here are the basic fallacies of the Seven Deadly Sins of anti-Amazon bullshit:

1. No one is “buying” ebooks. They’re licensed, not sold. You probably should understand the difference.

2. Hachette does not have a “right” to force a retailer to price like it wants against that retailers’ will. They have to successfully negotiate for that. Just ask S&S.

3. Amazon does not have a monopoly (or monopsony) on books, ebooks or anything else. They’re big with a lot of influence, no doubt. But a monopoly, they’re not. And no one has been able to point to any kind of statute that says they are.

4. Authors are not being targeted by Amazon, Hachette is. And those authors made themselves part of Hachette when they signed their contracts. Those things are usually binding folks, and they have consequences. That’s why you should read them first.

5. The only people guilty of antitrust violations are the publishers, not Amazon. Just ask the DOJ. But if Doug Preston says so then, hey, what do a bunch of antitrust prosecutors know anyway?

6. Not giving perks to a company you don’t have a contract with is not censorship, boycotting, sanctioning, disappearing or anything else other than hard-nosed business. And it’s not even that hard-nosed. Real hard-nosed business would have them booted out of Amazon’s store entirely. Plus, here’s a point of basic business relationships that no one has mentioned, giving perks to a company you don’t have a contract with just might piss off the ones you do.

7. Publishing is a cut throat industry that runs on hard market principles not fairytales perpetuated by a privileged class paid well enough to look the other way while their author brethren are ground under its wheels.

I understand why the agents, the publishers and the big money writers are fighting this. Their arguments are faulty but their motivations are obvious. They’re trying to stop the gravy train from pulling out of the station. Of course, they could just turn around and see the new high speed rail line that’s bringing in better, more efficient gravy trains every hour on the hour. No one in the industry is in a better position to take advantage of that than they are. But like Plato said, it’s easier to keep watching the shadows on the wall than to turn around and step into the light.

What I don’t understand are the writers who aren’t amongst those groups, the ones still on the outside looking to get in or the ones on the inside who can’t get out of the muddy, horse-shit coated courtyard and into to castle. Why are they supporting a system that’s feeding off of them as the foundation for everyone else getting paid? I’m thinking there’s a confluence of two memes that have always been destructive but is becoming more apparent just how catastrophic they can be.

One is “I Just Want To Write” which endorses pushing the business side of your career away, delegating it to “professionals” so you can focus on writing and cashing the checks. The other is the “Crucible Of Rejection”, the odd fetishization of struggling through years of being told no to get inside those gates. For some on the outside, it’s always the next query that’ll be the one that works. All they have to do is tweak their book a little and they’re in. Any day! Can’t walk away now! The myth tells us that adapting to this rejection forges us into better writers. The truth is it forges us into writers better suited to their commercial purposes. There’s a huge difference. For the more fortunate, they’ve gotten in, but the business specifics are totally in the hands of their publisher and their agent. They don’t know what’s really going on, and it’s not so easy to burn that bridge after celebrating your persistence and years of work to get there, even if there bears little resemblance to what you thought it was. It’s hard to walk away after you’ve put in that kind of effort. Even harder when you’re not getting accurate information and what you are getting is coming from people who have agendas of their own they’re trying to fulfill irrespective of their contractually obligated responsibilities to you. How many publishing contracts come and go quickly and quietly without the author even knowing what was done for the book, what happened and why?

All I can say to those folks, speaking from my own experiences with publishers, if you think you’re starting to smell some duplicity, look to the people in your own backyard before you start sniffing out the guy across town. It’s far more likely to be coming from nearby. The stench is coming from inside the house!

I suspect these memes, and their blinder-producing results, are why you see the argument made so often that books aren’t like other products, or books aren’t widgets or what have you. You don’t have to defend what you’re advocating as feasible in the market or financially viable if you throw the baseline of actual business sense out with the bath water at the earliest possible convenience. Perhaps the most ridiculous argument I’ve seen springboard lately is the idea that publishing isn’t profitable or profitable enough that anyone outside these current set of publishers would be interested in it. Part of that argument is an implication that these pubs are being altruistic by staying in it themselves. It’s total nonsense. My entire working experience across two decades conflicts that point. You also generally see that argument being made by someone who’s collecting a huge check courtesy of the industry. Publishing is, has been and will continue to be, in various forms, an extraordinarily profitable industry, with or without this particular set of publishers, writers and retailers.

Every time I see that line of thought, I can’t help but automatically assume the person speaking has no real-world argument to make, just more pixie dust and fairy tales. It’s kind of sad, too, that they’re “concern” for culture is coming during what is far and away the best time for communication in the history of civilization (no exaggeration). It’s never, at any point, ever been easier or cheaper (right down to free) to get anything you want to say out to anyone you want to say it to across virtually the entire globe. I think that shows the lie in their argument. It’s all about money to them and nothing else. To be clear, that’s a perfectly fine position to take, just don’t bullshit me with cultural concerns when it’s your paycheck that’s driving the argument. If we remove the commercial aspect altogether, it’s still the greatest time in mankind’s entire history if you’re trying to get your words and ideas out to the world.

That’s what I would offer for writers to take away from this. Open your eyes and take a look around. There are opportunities emerging everywhere every day. What we can do today and the numbers of people we can reach is truly amazing, unprecedented in human history. If you get so wrapped up in worrying about Amazon, you’ll miss it. Don’t get hung up on the whines and howls of folks who are just pissed that the world moved their cheese. You want a career in writing? Go and take one. Dump the bullshit memes of the past and get down to actual business, the kind those memes and the folks who propagate them have blocked writers from pursuing for decades going on a century.

Don’t make the mistake of previous generations of writers and think any of these people are your friends. Amazon’s not, nor is Barnes & Noble, nor any of the 2,000 small bookstores. They offer opportunities in various forms and shapes and sizes. But just like the opportunities publishers offer, they come with a cost. If you don’t know that cost, one day, a hefty bill may come due. And don’t weep for the agents and publishers, either. They were never your friends, though they liked to imply as much while they kept you ignorant of everything except the one act you do that directly makes them money. All they want is your book and the less you are involved past that, the better for them. Don’t wait for one of those assholes, whether they hail from a publishing house, an agency or a retailer, to come down from on high and grant you the keys to the kingdom. Odds are, you’ll be dust in your grave long before that ever happens. Requiescat in pace.

Dan Meadows is a writer living on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Follow him on Twitter @watershedchron