Category Archives: Publishing Stuff

Publishing Stuff

Stuff They Never Told Me About Publishing #2

Continuing the series about stuff I never found out until after I signed the contract. If you missed part one, here’s the link for it.

First, I’d like to give a shout-out to A.B, who commented on the first post—your suggestion was great and the backstage look at creating the cover is in the works. It’s a collaborative effort because it was a collaborative project; you’ll hear not only my side of things, but also my editor’s and maybe the designer’s as well. That’s coming sometime in January. For now, on with the goodies.

Laws in other countries actually apply to writers.

Hmm…that probably didn’t sound right. What I meant was, TAXES. Oh, and ROYALTY RATES. Both are going to be different from the United States if you get a foreign contract, and before you say, “Well, duh,” think about trying to keep track of them all if you sell rights to your book in, say, ten countries. Or, heck, pretend you went the full Rothfuss and got sold in thirty or so. And say that they’re releasing different editions in each one—mass market paperback in Australia, trade in Thailand, hardcover in Russia, etc. What surprised me is that you’ll have to fill out a tax thingy for the IRS to tell all those other countries not to worry, the U.S. will tax you on all that money just fine. If you don’t fill out the tax thingy—well, I’m not sure what would happen, but I’m sure I’d rather not find out. Something to make you rue the day you didn’t fill out the tax thingy. The point I’m trying to make (because I did want to make a point eventually) is that A) I’d never be able to keep track of this without my agency, B) I’d have no sense of what’s a good deal and what isn’t because I don’t have my finger on the pulse of Poland’s economy, and C) I’d probably never have any foreign contracts at all without my agency. I wonder how many foreign contracts unagented authors manage to secure. My (uneducated) guess is close to none. To people who say, “Dude, 20% commission on foreign sales is so whack,” I say, “Dude, I’ll happily accept 80% of any money that I never would have had otherwise.” So, in addition to these excellent reasons why you should get an agent from an editor’s perspective, an agent will open locked doors in faraway lands and prevent foreign revenue agents (also known as ninjas) from confiscating all your worldly goods.

There are known knowns and then there are known unknowns, and it all means we don’t really know

One of the things I’ve found astonishing is that there’s no efficient method in the industry to keep track of book sales. Months go by—yea, even a year sometimes—before people get a semi-clear picture of how your book is performing. All those Bestseller Lists are based on incomplete data and a lot of guesswork. It makes me wonder what arcane system “the people in Accounting” are using. (They are almost always called “the people in Accounting,” by the way, with a sense of mystical dread, and for me it evokes a picture of gray spectral figures huddled around an abacus.) I am sure there are good and sufficient reasons why this hasn’t been modernized; I confess that I’m not sophisticated in accounting practices and any discussion of numbers that lasts more than thirty seconds will send me screaming to find a happy place. Still, I’m suffering a bit of cognitive dissonance here. On the one hand, you have that calm, intellectual guy on the UPS commercials doing magic shit on a whiteboard and casually suggesting global domination using his company’s real-time tracking system; on the other, we won’t know for six months if your book got sold in a Kentucky Walmart.

I’m not going to worry. Every other author has dealt with it and survived because that’s just the way it is. But, um, why does it have to stay that way? If there are any smart cookies out there looking for a place to build a better mousetrap, tracking book sales could use the attention of a genius or two.

That’s all for this go-round. Hope that shed a scintilla of light on the business for the uninitiated. :)

Publishing Stuff

Stuff They Never Told Me About Publishing #1

You know those video games where all of the unexplored portions of the map are covered in darkness—they call it “fog,” and you have to go there to reveal what’s hiding? And sometimes the stuff that’s hiding is freakin’ awesome (like a special weapon or nummy digital food or an extra life), and sometimes it’s an obstacle you can’t get around and you have to go another way, and sometimes it’s stuff that wants to slay you and splatter your viscera on the walls? Publishing is kind of like that, except for the splattering viscera. The sense of adventure is really honkin’ cool, so if you’d like to learn everything as you go, then by all means, stop reading now. But for those aspiring writers who’d like to know, I thought I’d share a few things I didn’t find out about publishing until after the deal was made and I started walking through the fog. This will be an ongoing series with absolutely zero splattered viscera.
Book tours aren’t cost effective.
I’ve been surprised at how many people ask me if I’m going on a book signing tour. There seems to be an assumption that all authors do it. I knew that couldn’t possibly be the case before I signed my deal, but I didn’t know the reason why. I discovered that, economically, it’s not sensible for a publisher to lay out that kind of bread—airfare, hotels, meals and so on—when you might get twenty to sixty people showing up to buy a book at any given site. The publisher’s money would be better spent on marketing and social media networks. Most authors you hear/see doing tours have established reputations or prior celebrity status and are sure to draw big crowds of fanboys and fangirls. But debut authors like me? Nah. It doesn’t make sense to expect people to skip their favorite TV show and go to Borders on a Wednesday night to meet a dude they’ve never heard of before. What I’ll probably do is a few signings in Arizona because the books are set here, but that will be it to begin with. I’ll continue to appear locally as often as I can because it’ll be on my own dime. But honestly, a large part of this process is still in the fog for me, because from what I understand signings don’t get arranged until a couple months from the release date, and I’m still four and half months out.
You need a platform.
You have to blog and tweet “and stuff.” If you do it well, then you have this thing called a platform, and this is something you absolutely must have. Everybody says so. But here I must confess that I’m not too clear on why. It’s kind of like the importance of getting good grades in high school: all the adults tell you it’s vital for your future, and so you study for the quadratic equation test because you hope it will make sense someday.  That’s kind of what I’m doing with my blog. I try to provide some info for aspiring writers (because I know what it’s like to be one) and some entertainment as well (mostly for myself), but I’m sort of in a continuous cringe, waiting for someone to swoop in and say, “No, no, no, McFly, you’re doing it wrong!” And I’m also waiting for someone to explain exactly how x number of followers on my blog or on Twitter translates into x number of sales I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I don’t mind blogging or tweeting—I enjoy both quite a bit! But I don’t understand how the mechanics of this platform thing truly works. (Does anyone? I’ve heard of social media experts, but I don’t know them socially, so how expert can they be, right?) This is one of those things that don’t get adequately explained to newbie authors and thus you might as well get used to it. You need a platform because everyone says so and everyone’s doing it. Now go and build one, and don’t forget to write your next book. ;)
There are many people involved in publishing a book, and they’re all awesome.
Agent. Editor. (Those are the two I knew about because those are the people aspiring writers are understandably obsessed with getting to.) But since the deal, I’ve played jokes on my Assistant Editor and have been pranked in return. And then there’s the Copy Editor. Managing Editor. Marketing Dude. Publicity Dude. (Marketing and Publicity are two different departments and I didn’t know that before; I know who my marketing fella is, but I don’t know who’s in charge of my publicity yet—that’s still in the fog.) Typesetting House. Art Director. Photographer. Model. Digital Artist. A department of people who deal with Subsidiary Rights. The nice lady at the security checkpoint in the Random House building who prevented me from injuring myself. There’s somebody named Phil in Accounting and he sounds like a cool cat. And then there’s the printer, of course, and the people in Sales who take my book to the buyers for the bookstores and say LOOK, THIS BOOK IS FRICKIN’ RAD AND I WILL BE YOUR BEST FRIEND IF YOU MAKE YOUR EMPLOYEES TACKLE YOUR CUSTOMERS AND THRUST IT INTO THEIR HANDS! And we can’t forget the distributor, the warehouse workers, the nice guys who drive my books around, and the spiffy people who work in bookstores and never tackle their customers. I’m sure there are plenty more but I’m not aware of their existence yet. All those people have buttloads of work to do to make sure my book hits the shelves on time and calls to people with the lure of a siren. They come online at different stages of the process and I couldn’t possibly thank them all, but once you think about it, it makes sense why it takes about a year for a book to get “out there.” And it also makes sense why self-publishing often doesn’t work out so well; it’s because you’re trying to do all those jobs yourself and you can’t.
That’s all for this installment. If you’d like to hear about something specific, let me know. :)