I don’t know what is going to happen to print publishing. People in publishing take publishing very seriously, probably because in order to get their jobs, they had to kill a lot of good, creative people who did not take publishing very seriously.
Miracle, babe, shhhhhh about all the people I killed to get this job!
(But really you should go read the whole thing.)
Blank looks from everyone, always.
Not just a small press problem, sadly.
Source: lifeinsmallpresspublishing
So, people ask me this sometimes, and I appreciate that they want me and Peter and Jon to get maximum paid for the records we make. And it is true that we’ll get the biggest cut from sales at shows, because those copies are copies we buy directly from the label. However, I am every bit just as happy and in fact in some ways happier to take a slightly reduced cut if you’re buying from your local record store, which is almost doubtless scrambling to survive every day, or from a cool mailorder, or directly from the label if the label does mailorder.
I make a little bit of a big deal about this because more people than me need to get paid for the stuff I do to happen. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about labels and publishers as if they were hurdles to be cleared, obstacles to be circumnavigated. I can’t speak for anybody else’s experiences, though stories of label skullduggery abound, and shame on such labels. But my personal experience in independent music is that the people releasing Mountain Goats records aren’t “The Label.” They’re my friends, and they’re also almost all musicians themselves. They are people who share exactly equivalent praise or blame for the music I make, because you wouldn’t have heard it without them, by which I mean without their support and nurturing and faith I would never have made the music in the first place. So while I’m, again, grateful that people think of my well-being, it’s my opinion that the people who make the music available - especially independent labels, especially independent stores - deserve your patronage, and it’s 100% ok if I have to sell a few more records at retail to make as much as I’d make selling them at shows. I don’t do what I do in a vacuum. Without the labels that put out my stuff and the stores that stocked it and the people working in the stores who told people browsing to maybe check out the Mountain Goats, I would almost doubtless not even own a guitar right now. I’d be a nurse somewhere in California, and I’d write poetry in my downtime. Which would also be a good life, because every day above ground is a good day, unless you’re getting shot at, it sucks to get shot at, but you see my point
In case you’d forgotten, John Darnielle is the classiest of all class acts.
Literally my entire life in the sales department. OH THE NEW NEIL GAIMAN NOVEL, HIS FIRST IN SEVEN YEARS? YUP, READ THAT FOUR MONTHS AGO.
Galleybrag.
EXCEPT I DO GET TO GO.
See you in February, Nashville.
(stop the presses people, unicorns exist: DudeInPublishing)
If these two crazy kids don’t get together then I don’t believe in love anymore.
(via dudeinpublishing)
Source: lifeinpublishing
So the final volume in Ally Condie’s MATCHED trilogy came out today. The last book, REACHED, is a great ending to an excellent series, and I think very highly of both the series and its author.
All the pre-publication reviews have been great, and the initial Amazon user reviews were awesome, too. But then this afternoon, I noticed the overall rating for the book had dropped from five stars to four entirely because of a single one-star review complaining that the e-book is more expensive than the hardcover on Amazon. (Edit: The review has been deleted.)
The hardcover of Reached retails for $17.99. The kindle edition retails for $10.99. As you will notice because you are great at math, THE E-BOOK IS FAR CHEAPER THAN THE HARDCOVER.
But Amazon discounts the price of the hardcover. They discount it so much, in fact, that they LOSE MONEY on every sale of the hardcover. Why do they do this? So that you will buy your hardcover books at Amazon instead of at a bookstore, and then you will get used to buying things from Amazon, and then you will start to buy far more profitable items that are less steeply discounted, like a Mini Tractor for Your Kid or Kim Kardashian’s Perfume or E-BOOKS. Publishers cannot control this discounting.
So an Amazon user writes a 1-star review of a book they haven’t read to blast the publisher/author for making the hardcover cheaper than the e-book. But in fact neither the author nor the publisher did any such thing. It is not Ally Condie’s fault that Amazon wants to lose money on her books.
Obviously, if you don’t believe that an e-book is worth $10.99, then you shouldn’t purchase one. But it’s wrong to see pricing as a simple competition between print and e-book.
In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.
John Green for President!
John Green for Ambassador to the Non-Publishing Industry Public. Oh wait, he already is.
Source: fishingboatproceeds
From Amy: “Seeing your facebook posts in relation to self-publishing today, i’m very curious as to why you seem to be so upset when continuously you encourage self publishing of other media. Just look at Vlogbrothers itself. In fact, you addressed this in Hitler and Sex. What about all of the amazing musicians that DFTBA Records picked up. The internet enabled these people to get out there and start something big. Why are books not okay?”
I haven’t sorted my feelings out, and I may be inconsistent/wrong. But to be clear: I did not intend to attack or criticize self-publishing itself. Many great books are being self-published, and that has been the case for centuries.
I wanted to criticize Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, because I felt that in his introduction of the new kindles, Bezos repeatedly peddled the lie that a book is created by one person, and that therefore a book’s author should be the sole entity to profit from the sale of the book. (Aside, of course, from Amazon itself.)
Bezos and Amazon are consistent in their promotion of this lie, because it encourages the idea that the publishing landscape today is bloated and inefficient and that there is a better, cheaper way to do it—a way where all books can cost $1.99 with most of that $1.99 going to the author. Readers and writers both win then, right?
Well, no. Because the truth is, most good books are NOT created solely by one person: Editors and publishers play a tremendously important role not just in the distribution of books, but in the creation of them. Without my editor, there would be no great perhaps in Looking for Alaska, no Augustus Waters in The Fault in Our Stars, and no Agloe, New York in Paper Towns. Without copyeditors and proofreaders, my books would be riddled with factual and grammatical errors that would pull you out of the story and give you a less immersive reading experience. Publishers add value, and lots of it, and without them the overall quality and diversity of books will suffer.
There is lots of room in this world for indie publishing, and I’m excited about all the reading opportunities that the Internet has given us, from blogs to fan fiction to direct-to-ereader novels. But comparing publishing to music or TV is really troubling to me, because people listen to a lot of music: In an average week, I probably listen to 200 songs. I probably watch 5 hours of television or YouTube. But in an average week, I read one book (and that puts me on the far end of the reading bell curve among Americans). Given how few books are read—perhaps 500 million a year—the current publishing landscape does an astonishingly good job of making sure there are plenty of books available to a wide variety of audiences. There are books about little people who survived the Holocaust and the Islamization of the Uzbeks and how to swing a golf club.
My fear is that if there are only two or three voices in the publishing retail landscape—say, Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon—that diversity will dramatically decrease. Only a few dozen books a year will be available at large retailers like Wal-Mart; the rest of literature will exist only in the kindle store. Those books will have difficulty being discovered, because there are so few readers and so many titles. (You are starting to see a similar phenomenon on YouTube right now, actually, but in publishing it will be far worse, because it usually only takes a few minutes to watch a YouTube video.)
Here’s my concern: What will happen to the next generation’s Toni Morrison? How will she—a brilliant, Nobel-worthy writer who doesn’t have a huge built-in audience—get the financial and editorial support her talent deserves? (You’ll note that there’s no self-published literary fiction anywhere near the kindle bestseller lists.) Amazon will have absolutely no investment in that writer, and they won’t need to. Over time, I’m worried this lack of investment will hurt the quality and breadth of literature we actually read, even if literature remains broadly available.
So my issue is not with self-publishing. My issue is with Bezos profiting from this false narrative that an Amazon monopoly will benefit both readers and writers. In truth, I don’t think it will benefit anyone. In the long run, I don’t even think it will benefit Amazon, because if they succeed in destroying publishers, the quality of the books they sell will suffer, and even fewer people will be inclined to spend their evenings reading.
Yes. YES.
This is the nerdiest academic publishing t-shirt you have ever seen.
I know some nerds on twitter that need this.
Buying this for the entire digital team at work.
Source: jennyjennybobenny
Who’s that hanging out on the Publishers Weekly deals list today with her first acquisition, you say?
Seriously, this book is going to be the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life. Check out Bob’s blog for a taste of adorable things to come!
Across the Universeauthor Beth Revis posted this on her main blog today, advice from her fellow 2011 debuts about being a newly published writer. I had to LOL at how many people were all serenity prayer, “Don’t stress over what you can’t control!” That’s because it’s SO TRUE. File that under “Great advice nobody will ever take.”
I have a note card pinned to my bulletin board at work that I’ve seriously had since I worked at Thomson Learning, a textbook publisher that doesn’t even exist anymore!* It says:
Welcome to publishing—nothing makes sense!
and
It’s not life or death; it’s just publishing. [Said by my buddy Kristina]
To that I add something my old boss Wiley said to me once:So much about this business, if you don’t laugh, it’ll just make you miserable.
We’re all just muddling through.
*Well, it does, but it has a different name.
All excellent slogans. I really like something my boss said the other day: “There are no ambulances in publishing.” Like, we may be running around to get a cover approved as if we were rushing to the hospital to reattach a severed arm—but not really.
This is all so true - my boss’s catchphrase is “Relax - they’re just children’s books!” But I really really love “Welcome to publishing - nothing makes sense!”
Source: annajarzab
We couldn’t resist making one.
THHHEEEEEEEEERE THAT IS!
Source: quirkbooks
The more I think about the latest Amazon outrage, and filter through my lack of shock, then my sadness at my lack of shock, then my sadness at my sadness of my lack of shock, the thing that really bothers me is that Amazon seem to be obsessed with making decisions that make people angry at them. Which seems like a terrible way to run a business. Which bothers me because I really want to fix it, even though this is a company which is so actively trying to put me out of work that I would not be surprised if its next move was to issue bounties for the still-functioning brains of actual human booksellers. It seems like it would be easy for them to make a few quick changes, spin every accusation that people throw at them, and become bullet-proof. To wit:
If they started collecting sales tax and, hell, even donating to local charities? (They can even do it Pepsi Refresh style and get a sick amount of free advertising out of it!): “Amazon has been grateful for our years of providing tax-free shopping to our loyal customers because it allowed us to grow into the company you know and love today. But it’s time for us to start giving back to the communities that we care about. We don’t just want to provide the books on your child’s desk. We also want to help fuel the bus that gets them there.”
If they allow Kindle users to download ebooks from any retailer?: “Amazon is so confident in our device and the seamless Kindle reading experience that we’re happy to allow our readers the freedom of choice. We’re proud of what we’ve created and we think you’ll choose us.”
If they take the exclusivity requirement away from Kindle Direct Publishing?: “Amazon has been excited to help foster the careers of an incredible number of independent authors. But we’ve decided that it’s in the best interests of all readers for their work to be as widely available as possible.”
(I don’t think they need to address the unionization issue, since nobody else is.)
I do read the comments sections on the Internet, so I know there are a lot of people who like Amazon and what they do, and do not consider these to be bad business decisions. But the dominant media narrative, at this point, seems to be: “Amazon Is Large Company That Screws Over Little Companies And Is Allergic To Paying Taxes, Possibly On Purpose Though It Is Hard To Tell. News At 11.” There are plenty of corporate citizens that do Amazon-like things all the time and avoid that sort of labeling, because they make other business decisions that cover them over. Given that, I can’t understand why Amazon just makes the bad ones unabated.
This is why I am always wary of the full-scale attack that so many people level against Amazon, aside from the fact that it is exhausting. As a company, they could turn the tables on the hundreds of WHY AMAZON SUCKS blog posts with one well-written press release. I don’t want to make lists of the reasons why Amazon sucks because I feel like I’m handing them a blueprint for rehabilitation.
Many people want so, so badly to like Amazon, and many people already do. (See: comments sections on any article talking about Amazon.) Any effort they made towards making the world a better place would be embraced wholeheartedly by consumers and publishers, who mostly, when it comes right down to it, just want things to be convenient and cheap. If Amazon started reversing any of their more unsavory decisions, they might lose money in the short-term, but I think they’d end up making more money in the long-term, by cementing the loyalty of an entirely new set of consumers who always sort of want to buy things from Amazon, and sometimes give in and do, but feel guilty about it. I am sure Amazon knows that this description fits a great many people.
I think that this frustration comes in part from my envy of their reach. I do envy anyone who sells books who has that sort of audience. As much as I love my job, I sometimes wish I was Pennie Clark of Costco. She has this amazing thing called “Pennie’s Pick” that runs in the Costco newsletter each month. She picks a book every month and thousands of people buy it and read it, no questions asked. Can you imagine how a hyper-local bookseller like myself might crave that sort of influence? Ahhhhhh, I can think of so many books that I wish I could expose to that size of readership, and which deserve that many readers! There are a lot of great things about a small business, but any book proselytizer worth her salt is always going to think about what life would be like with more parishioners.
This access to readers must be why these bad decisions irritate me. Amazon have access to more readers every day than I have seen in ten years as a bookseller, and they piss their goodwill away foolishly and, most unforgivably in an era of shortening attention spans, continue to drag yet another ten, twenty, thirty, forty inches of newsprint away from discussing actual books, and whether this one or that one are good and fun and worth reading. This is, all assertions to the contrary, an incredible time for books. There are so many good books coming out right now we could each double our reading time and still not find room for all of them, and that’s not even taking into consideration the wealth of classics on which we are perched. And instead of talking about them, we are talking about Amazon and whether they are nice. Again.
At this point I am thinking one or all of the following must be true:
- The company culture at Amazon is in some part developed on the back of a scrappy underdog mentality that can only, given their current dominance, be furthered by deliberate business decisions that allow the company to feel like a misunderstood victim
- The marketing department has hard data showing that given the general miasma of free market exhortation in modern political discourse, consumers respond enthusiastically to offers that deliberately and overtly screw over competition, in large enough numbers to make any negative press a moot point
- This is all part of an elaborate campaign to make decisions that compel Amazon’s competition and detractors to come out in numbers ruing their predatory and unethical practices, which given the reactive nature of the Internet will give Amazon’s defenders endless chances to label the detractors as old-fashioned, elitists, nostalgia-hounds, and/or Luddites, further cementing the “Amazon vs. the world” brand story
- Amazon has studied the possibility that they could make more money long-term by gaining the loyalty of customers who would be swayed by more ethical business practices, but has also realized it wouldn’t be worth the investment
Oh, never mind, I just feel so tired of all this. I was tired of it years ago. Aren’t you tired, Jeff? Can’t we all just take a nap? Or maybe just lie on the couch and read awhile?
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