Michele Lee

This week I’ve been experiencing this inane feeling of being overwhelmed by the state of publishing. It’s not hard to feel that way, even if you’re a well embedded pro with an agent and editors on your team. And, well, I’m not. This article that just came across Twitter feed is really just one tiny example. Someone offered to buy Barnes & Noble.

Did you know they were for sale? Yup, I did. Right after rumors of Borders bankruptcy started last fall B&N put themselves up for sale. This is the first offer since then.

So here’s a little crash course on the state of publishing, from someone who it about one layer into it.

It used to be that to be well published meant you wrote a great book AND got a great agent who then sold your book, maybe not for great money, but to one of the Big NY publishers, who then shaped your book’s packaging, printed it and distributed it. Sure you could go with a small press, but likely your work would be available in far fewer stores, if any. You could self publish, but it was very expensive and you were guaranteed not to be in stores unless you had friends who worked in one and agreed to take you books on commission.

Eight months ago when I started at Borders I was “kinda” a published author because I had books published by a third party, but none of them were in bookstores so it didn’t really count. My experience didn’t account for nothing, but there were booksellers who knew more about the biz than I did.

The good news is most knowledge is just about paying attention, and the Borders job gave me access to Publishers Weekly, which is a very good source of information.

Anyway, eight months ago Borders was not doing well but people just had speculation on that. Barnes & Noble put themselves up for sale, and Amazon was successful enough at marketing its Kindle that not only were people beginning to associate the Kindle with ebooks period, but authors were looking at Kindle digital publishing as a way to push the projects that had failed to sell to NY, back list titles and Amazon (with B&N on their heels–and in my personal opinion with a better product) opened their market up to non-traditionally published authors.

Let me pause here and say I absolutely believe that Amazon and B&N opening themselves up to self publishing are major, if not THE major reason that they’re still kicking, or doing so well, in the marketplace. Borders made a huge mistake in being too slow to jump on having a website, too slow to offer ereaders and ebooks, and failed completely at not offering a forum for small presses.

In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that this attitude in the current marketplace comes off as elitist. For the last two years my work has been available at Amazon and B&N, but even as an employee I could not get it into Borders.

It’s not about ebooks versus print, it’s about people becoming less tolerant of corporations making their decisions for them. People want their own content. While New York continues to put out good work (and crap work, and meh work) readers want to see what else is out there. They want more options not less, and more content, cheaper, not 40% less (the number is taken from Borders’ recent plan to reduce subgenre stock by 40%) content along with an exhaustive push to buy more.

It’s absolutely vital for retail establishments to meet the needs of their customers and in the book world not offering the widest possible selection and ebooks, hurts you. (Of course if you operate one a small enough scale, namely indie stores, you can definitely survive by super focusing on your client base and their needs rather on pushing yourself bigger. However, as a writer and reader when I walk into a store and they consistently don’t have my books or books by my friends or even favorite authors, which sadly the indie new bookstores fail to do, I’m not going to want to give my money to you. Magnify this if your store or employees have a pissy attitude about those books I love, or the ones by my friends or my own. No scratch that, just know that if I come into your store and your booksellers are snots and you don’t have any books by the writers I consider my peers then I won’t be coming back.) Of course no physical store can stock all books, but physical stores should have a reasonable method of getting those books, either through store-to-store transfer, the ability to add customer orders to normal stock-to-store shipments or reasonable mailing times and rates.

So some stores haven’t been meeting their customers needs, plain and simple. And they’re paying for it. (Which let me say again, sucks, because crappy stores or not, losing bookstores sucks.)

And the position of B&N proves that even when you are doing things right the economy just sucks and people are increasingly going for fast and direct from the comfort of their own home rather than having to spend money on gas (who can blame them!), fight traffic, find what they’re looking for and get through the lines and doing the reverse to get home.

Borders precarious position makes people like me wonder if getting into bookstores is really the best career plan in the first place. It’s a valid question, particularly when you’ve been through the liquidation and know authors that were lucky enough to be in the stores aren’t seeing those royalties.

Now, add in publishers. You know, the people who are digging in their heels or outright fighting ebooks (withholding them from releases, charging higher prices for them to fuel print sales, releasing crappy-formatted files, even books missing chapters). Who are also cutting back on the number of books they’re buying. They’re dropping successful writers for not being successful enough while there are also reports of publishers under reporting ebook sales. Why? Who knows. Maybe it’s move to discourage or slow ebook growth. Maybe some people are right and publishers are making up for their poor sales by cheating authors out of royalties. Maybe it’s crappy accounting systems that aren’t able to handle ebook sales (You’d think they’d fix that as soon as they could though…)

Consider, too, that publishing has always been hit or miss. Great books flop, crappy books soar, and everyone follows trends until the dead horse is a pancake. The nature of publishing though is all about guessing what readers want, and you know what, even readers don’t always know what they want until they read it and like it.

And let’s not forget Dorchester (do I really need to expand on that one?)

So while my personal goals used to be get an agent, sell a book, several books, to a big publisher, squee every time I see my book in stores and establish a reader base, I think I’d be a fool if I didn’t consider whether that plan was the least risky given the current book selling environment.

Now, before you think this is a Self-Pub 4 Eva post let me confirm that there is a lot more shit out there in the self pubbed world than in the pro world. (Admittedly someone will always love a book someone else thinks is shit.) amazon has this neat little equalizer in that–seven day returns. So if you buy a book and it’s atrocious, you can return it. Of course if you’re selling novellas *coughcoughlikeme* people can read your book and get their money back in those seven days too. And the plethora of free content and piracy means some people also feel no need to pay artists for their work.

And if you self publish you STILL aren’t in physical stores, which still excludes browsers and print only people from your audience. So you, also aren’t meeting the needs of all of your customers. Also you still start at a lower level, always because people assume self published works aren’t good enough to “make it” and often because of a lack of professional covers, editing and formatting. Amanda Hocking admitted she was going with a pro-level publisher because she needed people on her side so she had more time to keep writing. It’s HARDER to make it self publishing, still.

So self publishing still isn’t a perfect solution, but neither is commercial publish a perfect goal.

Three years ago I started saying that I felt that big publishers, in an effort to better gauge the needs of readers, were using small presses to test writers. Almost every author I know of came out of a small press first. Maybe only one book, but they did. In fact, now that I try I cannot think of any writer I am friends with who didn’t sell to Ellora’s Cave or Apex or someone else first. Not magazines and not collectors markets. Sure if could also show some leaning of the ropes, or maturing as a writer. But there’s also more and more stories everyday about people starting out by building an audience in self publishing then getting pro publisher attention (don’t be fooled though, it takes sometimes dozens of books and years to get to that point. This is NOT a short cut!)

And on a completely personal note, part of my questioning was because I was reading a book that I thought by the blurb, style and cover was very similar to one I’m trying to sell–and I hated almost everything about the book. So yes, there was an element of “How can this crap get published when I know my book is better and I can’t get an agent to take me on?”

See, writers, we’re a little neurotic. When something is rejected we wonder what we did wrong. Sometimes it’s nothing, sometimes it’s a lot, sometimes it’s just bad timing. It’s part of the process to reevaluate your work. Is it really as good as you think it is? Have you missed a trend, or worse, written to an exhausted, burnt out genre? I must admit I have written a friend before in despair and begged them to read my book and tell me why it was broken. It has to be, right, if no one will take it?

And the answer is, no it doesn’t. Fabulous books are overlooked all the goddamned time (pardon the frustration there, but I love good books, mine and all the fantastic books I’ve critted for people that haven’t sold and really should have) and often for no good reason. If I had a dollar for every “I liked it, didn’t love it.” or “Great writing/storytelling, but I don’t think I’m the right agent for this” or even “I’m completely sure this book will sell to someone else” I’ve gotten the last two years I could pay this month’s power bill.

And not just that, I had some really great conversations at WFC where many of the professionals who have read my work have said directly to me that nothing is wrong with my work. There just aren’t enough spots for all the good stories. (And yes, if you couldn’t tell this is exactly where my day job hunt is right now too. There aren’t enough jobs and someone else is getting there first, or has a better resume, or more education or simply catches the hiring manager on a better day.)

In reassessing my own skills and the words that I’m putting out there I also have to try to guess at whether the market is buying what I’m offering in the first place. Seeing as the state of the market, how could you not wonder if they’re not skewed toward books that they know will sell because something similar is selling well? Or the author is already popular? Or comes with an established reader base? Or built in promo?

How can I not sit here and wonder if I just missed out on my chance to get in on the big publishing boom of like five years ago by not pushing hard enough? And how can you not wonder what exactly is the best way to get where you want?

This isn’t an anti-publishing rant. I’m not giving up and throwing all my work on Amazon. In fact, I still don’t even like Amazon, except that it’s selling my work which is better than I can say for others.

I still think if I’m egotistical enough (or confident, though in the publishing world it’s ego until someone else reads your work and pronounces it saleable) to think By Blood or Cursed or any of my other books are good enough to be published, then I’m egotistical enough to think it deserves the best, and not the easiest.

Also, I’m contrary in the face of odds and statistics and take great pleasure from thumbing my nose at people and systems who tell me I’m not good enough or smart enough or whatever enough to do something.

But at this point, with the state of the market, why aren’t you wondering the same things I am?