Who Would Walk Away From 500 Thousand Dollars?

Apparently Barry Eisler just did.  Why did he walk away from this lucrative book deal with St. Martin’s Press?  Because he believes he will make more self-publishing in the long run, particularly on e-book rights.

Eisler is joining a growing number of authors who are walking away from legacy publishers.  The problem is that the standard industry contract only gives the author  a 25% royalty on e-books, which comes off after Amazon or Smashwords has taken their cut.  Then the agent takes 15% off that 25% and it works out that the author is really only getting 17% of the e-book price.

Why accept that little crumb when an author can sell their novel through Kindle and get a 70% royalty?  No agent or publisher required.  In fact, how can publishers defend such a huge cut when they don’t need a printing press, trucks or a delivery network for e-books?

Up until now they’ve claimed that branding can save their publishing model–that readers will flock to a legacy publisher’s books because there are too many lousy self-published books to sort through.  But the truth is that the internet has its own filters, like the book bloggers who have made Amanda Hocking the new internet writing star.

Publishers are not obsolete, but they need to embrace the future and recognize that things have changed for the better.  E-readers have more people buying books than they have in a decade, and this should be a good thing.  Desperate attempts by legacy publishers to keep e-book prices high in order to stall the e-revolution will fail.  Refusing to give authors a fair cut will cost them content and market share.

Eilser wisely draws a parallel to railroads in the 1950s just as the interstates were under construction.  The railroads thought they were in the railroad business, but actually they were in the transportation business.  Once large trucks became a viable option, many railroads folded.  The smart railroads adapted, combining trucking and rail, adjusting prices and expectations and finding the niches they could still fill.

Because of my film industry background, I’m reminded of Kodak and Fuji film back in the 90s.  Even a camera assistant like me knew that high definition digital video was coming, but Kodak thought they were in the film stock business and tried to fight the change by producing better and better film stocks.  They achieved some amazing things with their 800 ASA film stock, but it couldn’t stop the slide to cheap digital.

Fuji knew they were in the image capture business and went aggressively after the digital video business.  Their CEO got an award a couple of years ago for keeping Fiji successful through this upheaval.

I was in Kodak’s home town–Rochester, NY–in 2006.  It’s the only time that I’ve seen an empty ten-story office building.  I’m talking about a modern glass and steel office building.  Kodak did follow Fuji’s lead into digital and has survived, but it was gut-wrenchingly painful to watch, and a lot of hard working people lost their jobs in the process.

Publishers should be in the business of selling books, not pulped dead trees.  Some publishers will recognize this and adapt to e-books and thrive.  Others will go down.  It doesn’t have to be this painful.

Don’t Buy My Short Story — Yet

So I’ve been crushed by an old version of Microsoft Word.  I knew I had paragraph formatting issues with my short story, Burning Moose, when I first uploaded it for sale as an Amazon e-book, but I thought I’d solved the problem with the short story Railroaded by saving it as an .rtf and going back to a .doc before uploading.

It turns out that did nothing.  Railroaded was MS from 2004, the others–well, I think I wrote Burning Moose on a MAC SE that I bought used from CPused, a great store that has since gone under.  You get the idea.  Very old technology.

Luckily Smashwords has a 73 page manual on how to format your MS word document so that it will upload nicely as an e-book.   So here I go again.  I’ve uploaded a new version of Fire Retardant but it’ll take 24 hours to publish.  I’ll check it out when it’s up to make sure it’s good and then I’ll relaunch.

I’m pretty sure this is going to get easier to do as new programs are written to solve these little formatting issues.  In the meantime: at least I learned a lot about MS word today.

Fire Retardant Launch

Cover for Fire Retardant–a Sioux Rock Falls Short Story

Forest fires regularly sweep through Northern Ontario during the summer months, and if a town is in the way it has no chance.  In 1979 the town of Cobalt, Ontario near Lake Tamiskaming lost a good chunk, with only the church, a few homes and a decaying strip plaza spared.

Continue reading

Kindle vs Sony: Pricing Divergence

I note this morning that Amanda Hocking’s Switched (see post below) is for sale on Amazon Kindle for 99 cents, but on the Sony Reader Store’s front page it’s $3.99.  While that’s not a horrible price, it’s four times out of line.

I like my Sony e-reader, but I’m getting the Kindle app for my i-phone, and the e-reader will idle for yet another novel.

A Warning for Self-e-published Authors

I prefer not to simply publish links to other people’s content on this blog, but this warning from Amanda Hocking was aimed right at me.

She’s done what I want to do: e-self-published through Amazon and Smashwords, and she’s making thousands a month doing it.  She’s snagged an agent.  She’s making a good living as an author.

But she warns here that she knows another author, J. L. Bryan, who doesn’t sell as well even though he is a good writer and performs the same marketing moves that she does.

The warning is clear.  Even if the writing, promotion and cover are all great, your book might languish simply because you didn’t strike a cord, hit the right topic or simply didn’t appeal to the reading public.

It’s all a big gamble.  Just ask a traditional publisher.  Luckily with e-books, the upfront costs aren’t as huge as print books.

I am now a Canadian Publisher

There are lot’s of ways to get an ISBN number for self-published books or e-books, but I chose to go all the way and become a Canadian publisher.  Since I’m already co-owner of a small media company this turned out to be amazingly easy.

I simply went to the Public Archives of Canada and clicked on join CISS and filled out the form with my company information.  Now when I e-publish I can enter the ISBN with Amazon Kindle.

Why the big deal? Cause all kinds of tracking can operate with an ISBN.  The draw back?  As a publisher I’m now required to provide copies of all my publications to Collections Canada.  I know this is a good thing, having my words stored somewhere forever.  What can I say?  I just don’t like paperwork.  Weird for a writer.

Now to think of a title for my anthology of shorts, all those bridge painting stories that were published by Storyteller Magazine between 2000 and 2006 when they folded.  How about Tales from the North?  Too Rudyard Kipling?

Rebecca Senese Seizes the Day

Rebecca Senese and I shared a strange place in the history of Storyteller Magazine before we even met. I’d finally snagged the cover of Storyteller in the winter 2006 edition after many attempts, so my mother proudly purchased a subscription for every member of the family, including my aunt.

Unfortunately, I had decided that for my story White Metal I’d let construction workers speak like construction workers.  The F-bomb fell more than a few times, and Storyteller chose to stick it right in one of the teaser lines.  My aunt, horrified by the profanity, refused to even read her nephew’s story and instead carried on to read the next story in the issue, Brother’s Under the Skin by Rebecca Senese.

It was like pouring gasoline on fire.  My aunt, the very committed Catholic anti-abortion activist, read a story about parents who clone their murdered son and try to relive his childhood through the clone.  Boom!

Terry Tyo, the owner of Storyteller, got a nasty phone call demanding that he cancel my aunt’s subscription and never send her a copy of his sick magazine again.  Terry was gun shy of controversial stories for months.  Between us, Rebecca and I had rocked Storyteller’s world.

Now Rebecca is out to rock your world.  She read my first post about planning to e-publish all my out of print short stories, but she ran where I walked.  I’m still trying to pull together the other stories, get them up with Smashwords for the Sony and Nook, and put together my anthology.  But in the last two months, while I was off in another world, Rebecca’s done it.

I’d better hurry.  A year ago I was in the middle of the e-book revolution, now I’m playing catch up.  So watch here for more announcements and e-publishing.  First my Storyteller stories, then my contest winners, then my novel and then…write till I die.  I finally have a market, however humble.  It’s there for the bold.

The Writing World Doesn’t Stop

But I did.  I had to stop blogging until I’d got through a nasty job.  It’s done.  I’m back. But guess what?  The writing world moved on while I was away.  Borders has gone into chapter 11, and no one knows how many publishers and authors will get a financial hair cut in the reorganization, not to mention all those sales staff who showed up to locked doors.  Apparently hundreds of outlets will be closed over the next year.

Meanwhile Torstar, the company the produces Harlequin romances, is finding the recession and the adjustment to e-books a challenge.  The high Canadian dollar is killing their margins in American sales.  But don’t worry, they’re still making money and the e-book sales are rising steadily.

But better yet, tune in here tomorrow to find out who followed my lead into e-books and is now way ahead.

Back from The Dead

Last time that I worked in the film industry it was the year of the zombie films.  Well apparently the film industry is like a zombie: just when you think it must be dead it comes screaming back.

The monster that ate my life has hardly finished digesting, and now I find out it’s going to be a VERY busy year in film in Toronto.  My union knows I’ve been inactive for years and that I haven’t kept up with the new cameras, but at last week’s AGM many warned me that if you could say the word “film” in Toronto this summer you’d be working.

Great news, but not good writing news.  The film industry is the ultimate monster when it comes to life.  My favorite quote is from Hunter S. Thompson, who described the film industry as “A huge money trough populated by pimps and whores where good men die like dogs.”

Over the top?  Yes.  But when you work 14-16hrs a day, getting by on 4 or 5 hours of sleep, until Sunday when you just sleep all day so that you can start over again a 6:00 am on Monday, well, it makes for some interesting, sleep-deprived interactions on set.

It also doesn’t leave much time for writing.  If I’m going to keep this blog going, I’ll have to do it from on set with my i-phone.

So I’ve been warned.  Get my books to market before June, or wait till next year.

Who knows, maybe I’ll get a few new short stories out of it.

So Two Guys Walk Into Afghanistan…

The trouble with this is that one of them doesn’t have a compelling enough reason to walk into Afghanistan.  Author Michael Blair pointed this out to me when he was critiquing my novel, In a Country Burning,  three years ago at the Bloody Words Mystery Convention.  He also suggested I “pump it up a notch” for the first chapter and also speculated that I was too close to this novel and should just give it up and write something new.

Bummer.  I hate it when people are right, and I often wish I’d paid attention to all three of his comments.  I did pump up the first chapter quite a bit, and comments from Fogel and other readers now describe it with words like “relentless, dizzying and confusing.”  Oh well, I can pump it down.

But the motivations: Jackson is a lousy freelance journalist with not much of a career until he gets approached by the CIA, not to spy but just to come in for interviews every time he returns from Afghanistan to tell them what he’s seen.  It’s illegal for the CIA to use American journalists for intelligence gathering, but Jackson is a Canadian.  In return the CIA co-ordinate with the mujahideen parties to ensure Jackson gets to all the right places in Afghanistan at the right time to ensure he gets the stories he needs to be a successful freelance journalist.

The problem for Jackson is that he has stepped on a slippery slope.  He finds himself passing on CIA advice to the muj, and soon pushing them into CIA agenda assaults.  He is no longer a journalist but is now a combatant.

Okay, now for the protagonist: Thomas Sutton.  His motivation is much weaker.  He was a paramedic in the Rochester Fire Department, a committed Christian, and engaged to be married when all that fell apart.  He made a surprise visit to his fiance and caught her in bed with another man, a no good loser who’d gone to the same high school.

Sutton is later accused of negligent homicide in the loser’s death.  After escaping a guilty verdict, Sutton decides he is guilty and goes to the most dangerous country in the world at the time, Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, seeking God’s punishment for his crime.

Susan summed up the biggest problem with this motivation: whine, whine, whine.  Get a gun.  Shoot yourself and we’re all done.  Get it over with and save us the time.

Which brings me back to Michael Blair.  He said, “Look, he needs a better reason to go to Afghanistan.  I mean, come on!  You didn’t go there just to research this novel.”

Uhm, actually I did.  To which Blair replied without skipping a beat, “You’re crazier than I thought.”

Maybe that’s why I have trouble finding a suitable motivation for Sutton: I didn’t need much motivation myself to seek out adventure.