Editing is a dying art, too. I am a damn good editor, but can I get a job? Freelance, yeah, I edit books and magazine articles as piecework, but you can’t earn a living doing that, and publishers don’t *have *in-house editors anymore. They farm it out to freelancers–some of them totally incompetent–so they don’t have to pay benefits
I do not trust the editors my publisher uses, so I have a gem of a fellow up in Canada I pay out of my own pocket to edit my books, and he is worth every cent.
sigh In the old days, publishing houses were *known *for their editors, they would raid them and brag about them . . .
The internet as a whole IMO does not tend to promote good writing. Content mills like eHow largely focus far more on keywords than quality. I should know. I’ve written over 1500 “articles” for eHow myself. I still earn about 400+ each month in royalties from my old articles so it was probably a good use of my time. The current problem with places like Demand Media (the eHow publisher and a major content mill with a huge IPO last year) and their ilk is that google shoved them down in the rankings. Google’s management figured out that they were aiming for quantity not quality and punished them for it. The companies responded by demanding better quality from their writers without offering increased pay.
This really shouldn’t surprise anyone. Writing has always been a fairly low paying job. My last job in the industry paid less than 30k. The advance on my book contract is pitiful. Fortunately I’m not writing it for the money or I’d starve to death. That’s the punchline to the old joke. How stupid was the starlet? So stupid she slept with the writer.
Part of the problem is that too many people think they can become writers. Far too many people think writing is easy and anyone can do it. As a standardized writing test grader I cannot begin to express how baffling stupid I find this idea. Every year I get to read essays for a month for a specific state. They make nearly all the kids in the state take the test. The average essay is a barely coherent mess even though these kids are about to graduate from high school.
<Nitpick> That’s not the point of that joke. Hollywood writers got paid very well. They just didn’t have any power, and since the starlet wanted to get a role in a film, sleeping with a writer was not going to do it.
</nitpick>
The famous writers complained about how their screenplays never got made or got changed by morons - seldom about not getting paid enough. We just saw LA Confidential, which is full of jokes about this very point.
Many of the larger Print-On-Demand publishers (Lulu, iUniverse, even the dreaded PublishAmerica) make their books available through the same wholesale channels as real books. If you dig long enough, you will find some examples on the shelf at your local B&N.
Well we know that Orwell didn’t. The idea that he didn’t know he’d created an allegory for Communism is simply ludicrous. And if the guy receiving the material thought it was only animal stories, that proves the example is relevant, because the only way he could come to that conclusion is if he was incompetent.
It may be possible, given the hundreds of stores that B&N has. But the simple fact is that PoD publishers can get their books into B&N databases but the odds are not 99-1 against your finding them on B&N shelves but 9999 to 1.
That quote is found in zillions of writing self-help books. Which shows you how much those are worth.
Go ahead, just try to find a contemporary cite for that quote. It doesn’t show up for at least a quarter century after the book was written. It might be closer to 50 years since the references seem to begin in strength aroound 1995. Now it’s everywhere, but I still don’t believe it. The quote sounds exactly like a joke and that’s what I think it is.
The only time I’ve ever seen any of these in a B&N was one copy in their clearance bins, which was probably purchased back when authors would go to B&N and ask them to special order the book, then never pick it up (and give false contact information). That was a trick that PublishAmerica authors used in the early days before bookstores wised up. Nowadays, if you order a POD book from B&N, they will require you pay in advance.
Possibly. Lulu authors usually buy copies of their books and leave them at bookstores on consignment. That’s standard for self-published authors; you’ll probably find a lot of local small press books in B&N on the same basis.
But B&N only orders books from Lulu if someone requests it and usually only if the order is paid for in advance. They do not actively add books from them or decide to stock them without someone making a request.
Compare that with traditional publishing, which sends copies of all their major releases to B&N for distribution in their stores.
I’ll say this: ebooks have got me buying books again.
I sold off/donated all my books a few years ago. I got sick of having to store them. I kept a sentimental handful, but resolved to never accumulate another large collection of books. I didn’t. I used the library, I borrowed off friends. I bought one paperback from a charity shop, and gave it to a friend after I read it. I was given a couple of books by another friend.
Then I got a Kindle. Now I buy books again, since they don’t take up any space and I don’t have to carry them when I move house.
So, there’s one example of ebooks being good for writers.
I think traditional “bespoke” publishing has improved immensely of late. We have several vanity published titles in our store and you’d be hard pressed (no pun intended) to realise they’re vanity press stuff on first glance. They’re well bound and well designed. At least one of them is a bestseller for us, but it pertains to a local historical ruin so interest in our area wouldn’t necessarily mean it would ever sell widely. Vanity press stuff used to look like crap, regardless of the content.
:nodding: My husband and I, along with another couple, self-published a book earlier this year about our respective caregiving experiences. We’re on our second round of printing. Most of our “advertising” has been word-of-mouth plus some strategic marketing. We’ve been told that, in the realm of self-publishing, we’ve been successful thus far.
That’s the other thing – marketing. If you self-publish, you’re 100% responsible for getting your book out there. In many ways it’s more arduous than actually writing in that you have to constantly create new “buzz” via name/brand recognition. The more often your name is out there, the better chances you’ll have to point people to your work.
We ran into an interesting dilemma when we first submitted our manuscript via the traditional publishing route: The agents who read it all agreed it was publishable, but because of the niche category (i.e., caregiving), most, if not all the publishers with whom they work would not be interested – in other words, if the work doesn’t scream potential blockbuster, they’ll automatically reject it.
Here’s the way bookstores work. The Big Six American publishers and the many small, medium, regional, specialty, and academic presses put out catalogs of their books, usually twice a year, in the spring and fall. The buyers for the chains make their choices. Do they then go to the publishers to order? No. They go to the major distributors, mostly Baker & Taylor and Ingram, and put in their orders. Why? Paperwork. Dealing with two distributors simplifies everything. (For everybody else in the world except JB, this is slightly simplified too. Minor distributors exist and some presses may do their own distribution. But don’t tell him. Let him assume that everything I say is absolute without any exceptions or nitpicks. Because everybody always talks that way, right?)
This system has some advantages for authors. They need to do nothing once their books have been sold. It is assumed that the books will physically be found in most bookstores automatically. Individual store buyers at big box stores mostly have to conform with front office directives, but they have some leeway, especially for books of local interest. B&N, remember, controls the biggest chain of college bookstores in the country, which are increasingly indistinguishable from their regular stores. All the college stores will feature books by professors at that college, as well as some specialty books for the main disciplines - the major majors - that the school features.
This covers about 50,000 books a year. That number hasn’t budged in a decade or so. But the total number of titles published has skyrocketed. It’s up to at least 250,000 and rises by probably another 50,000 a year. Those extra 200,000 titles a year clamor for space on the shelves. And they don’t get it.
That’s because while B&N CAN order them, it won’t. Not for local authors, not for specialty authors, not even for the extremely rare bestselling self-publisher like Amanda Hocking. She sold a million self-published books but her new series will go through the traditional publisher St. Martin’s because too many people complained she wasn’t available in bookstores.
The literal expectation is that you will never see your self-published book on the shelves of a big box bookstore. Is it possible? Well, there have been way over a million titles self-published since the turn of the century. Could somebody have won that lottery? I suppose. So what? Think about it. Why would you even talk about a lightning strikes chance like that except to waste space? It’s not going to happen to you. If that’s what you have to resort to then you’ve lost your case. Not that I understand what case you’re making. It might be “self-published books can appear in B&N.” No, they can’t. Not for you, you, you, or you. If that’s what your expectations are, you’ve been taken for a sucker. PublishAmerica is a scam, BTW. It promised for years that it would get your books into B&N and the internet is flooded with complaints from suckers who learned otherwise, to their cost. Lulu is a legitimate PoD printer. It makes no such claims. All it promises is to get book titles into databases.
Once we picked all the nits off the shelves at B&N, the shelves will look exact as full as they before. The sum total of all of the exceptions will be negligible. But let’s not assume. JB, you say you’ve seen “a bunch” of Lulu books at B&N. Name them. Name the store. We’re both in the Greater Rochester area. I’ll investigate. Maybe there is a pattern or an explanation. But we can’t know without names to work with. Please provide them.
Not a blockbuster, but to sell enough copies for them to cover the costs of publishing the book. A book with a potential national audience of 2000 people is not going to pay for the cost of marketing it (including things like paying editors), though self-publishing it can make it a success.
And while vanity and self-published works can look much more like commercially published books, people don’t buy books because they look good. They buy them because the want to read what’s inside.
I still earn about 400+ each month in royalties from my old articles so it was probably a good use of my time. The current problem with places like Demand Media (the eHow publisher and a major content mill with a huge IPO last year) and their ilk is that google shoved them down in the rankings. Google’s management figured out that they were aiming for quantity not quality and punished them for it. The companies responded by demanding better quality from their writers without offering increased pay.