Kristine Rusch: Playing to Win

Imagine me as the couch who wants to teach you how to play effectively. The first thing you have to do is learn how to win.
- Kristine Kathryn Rusch, The Business Rusch: Playing To Win

Kris Rusch hit a home run with her blog post this Thursday. It feels like each week I say: This blog post by Kris is a must read! And they are, but this one especially. She writes:

You won't succeed at writing and business every single day. You will fail. But no one wins without losing. Failures teach you how to be a success. In fact, the biggest successes always have a slew of failures behind them. Failing is how we learn.

We shouldn't feel like a failure if we haven't written a bestseller (yet!). Success comes over the long term. The key is to write fast and well and get a lot of work published, so it can sell consistently over time.

Playing To Win is a wonderful, inspiring, article. I'm going to go and write now.

Kristine Rusch: Should writers be compared with abused spouses?

Writing is challenging regardless of whether you're going the traditional route or are independent. Many of us have been told since we were toddlers that we couldn't make a living as a writer. Not only are we not good enough, but there is just no money to be made. If you are stubborn and persevere, it only gets worse.

Kristine Rusch writes:

Last week in her blog, writer Sarah Hoyt compared writers to battered spouses. She says that some of what she hears from writers reminds her of the reasons battered spouses stay with their abusers. I have to admit, I’ve had that same thought myself, but I’ve never written a blog post about it because it seems too simple.

Writers do react badly to any suggestions for change, from leaving an agent who is clearly no longer interested in working for them to staying with a publisher even as the publisher’s contracts and advances get worse. But I think the way that writers act has a lot more to do with crisis response than with abuse.

The writers who stay in the business become survivors. “Survivor” is an interesting word because it implies that the survivor went through something traumatic. Indeed, my handy dandy Encarta World English Dictionary defines the word “survive” as managing to stay alive “especially in difficult situations” or “after something such as an accident or war that threatens life.”

Read Kristine Rusch's entire article here: The Business Rusch: Fighting Uphill.

Are Gatekeepers Necessary?

Occasionally I read a post by an author and they not only nail what I have been thinking and feeling about a subject but they express it more eloquently than I ever could. Kristine Kathryn Rusch has done just that with her article, "The Business Rusch: Slushpile Truths", a response to Eric Felten's article, "Cherish the Book Publishers—You'll Miss Them When They're Gone", that appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

She writes:

Let me tell you, Mr. Felten, as a person who read slush for a decade, discovered lots of new writers, and won both a World Fantasy award and a Hugo award for her editing work, the slush pile isn’t some growing, breathing, horrible thing to be avoided. It’s a tower of hope, of dreams, of writers who want to do something with their lives.

Yep, there’s bad stuff in it. But the bad stuff is less common than the dull stuff, the mediocre stuff, the unoriginal stuff. The bulk of the slush pile is boring, not terrible. You start reading one of those manuscripts, your eyes glaze, and you set it down, and move onto something else.

Sound familiar, readers? Of course it does. The slush experience mimicks your own reading experience with traditionally published books. Yep, you folks do it with books that have already been published. [Italics in original]

Go Kris! She nailed it. "The bulk of the slush pile is boring, not terrible."

I have heard folks say things like: Indie authors write crap, just pick up 10 indie published books, you're lucky if you find one you'd want to read. I don't disagree, but the same is true for traditionally published books. The books I'm not interested in reading are not terrible books, they just failed to grab my attention.

One last quote:

Why am I taking this guy on? Primarily because so many of you sent me this silly piece, which just goes to show how many of you read The Wall Street Journal as opposed to the more obscure bloggers on the NPR website. (They covered this issue last summer.) I think a bunch of you also sent it to me because you agree with him, because you’ve bought that piece of swampland in Florida with the sign that says “Professional Gatekeepers Necessary.”

That was my much needed laugh of the day. Thanks Kris. Looking forward to next Thursday.

Writers Despair

Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes:

[W]hat I've seen this past month from established writers is an abundance of despair. I got a sad phone call from a friend, had a lot of sit-down conversations with writers who were ready to give up their dreams, and a nine-page single-spaced e-mail from a hell of a writer of dozens of published books, wondering whether or not to quit altogether.

What are these writers despairing about? Lots.

Books that would have sold five years ago don’t sell now. Series that are growing are getting bounced from their publishers for not growing enough. Agents, unable to sell product, are telling their mystery clients to write romance novels and their romance clients to write thrillers. Other agents are starting backlist e-pub companies and robbing their clients blind. Still other agents are blaming the writers for the fact that nothing is selling well and encouraging them to sign terrible book contracts.

Bookstores don’t carry paper books any longer. New York Times bestsellers can’t find their backlists in stores. American authors with bestselling novels overseas are being told that foreign countries never pay the promised royalties, only advances.

Traditionally published bestselling writers look at their royalty statements, see that their e-books sell only 30 or 100 or 200 copies in six months, and wonder how the hell upstart self-published writers whose books have ugly covers and whose interiors need copy editing manage to sell tens of thousands of e-books each month.

Editors who once had to tiptoe around their biggest authors are telling those writers to change what they write because their sales have decreased, and clearly, their writing has gotten worse over the years. Writers whose rabid fan base numbers 10 or 20 or 50K get told that their books no longer sell to that fan base even though the writer is constantly getting e-mails from that base and is signing brand new books for that base.

Publisher sales figures are impossible to get. An estimated laydown of 50,000 becomes an estimated 17,000 one month later. On the royalty statements issued six months after that, that laydown then becomes 5,000 books with another 5,000 in the reserve against returns. But, that same book, tracked by Bookscan (which only covers 50%-70% of the book market [and maybe less now]), shows sales, sales (not books shipped), of 30,000.

But even if Bookscan’s numbers are true, the book’s editor says, thirty thousand is pretty insignificant for that genre or for that particular series or for that particular writer. The writer will have to take a smaller advance and accept worse contract terms. Or the writer doesn’t get offered another contract period.

And of course, of course, it’s the writer’s fault. The writer misread the numbers, wrote down the wrong amount in the initial phone call with the editor on the laydown. Oh, it wasn’t a phone call, but an e-mail? My bad, the editor says. It was a typo. I didn’t mean 50,000. I meant 5,000.

So, the writer says, if you only printed 5,000 and I sold 5,000 and the book is still in print and still being ordered, then my book is doing well, right?

Wrong. We overpaid your advance, the editor says. We never ever should have paid that much money on a book that would only sell 5,000 copies.

What's the solution?

First: Know that

It’s not you. You’re fine. Your writing is as good as ever. The business is changing and you’re caught in the crossfire. It’s not personal, even though it feels personal. You are caught in the middle of a nightmare. The rules are changing, and no one knows where any of this is headed. Talk to other writers. You’ll see. It’s happening to all of us.

Second: Read Kristine's article.

Photo credit: "Between life and death" by Kathryn under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Book Contracts

I have been enjoying reading about contracts lately. I know, I know, that claim may seem less than plausible, but I think that book contracts may be infinitely more fun to read about than to read.  At least, if you're not a lawyer.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Passive Guy (from The Passive Voice) -- a retired lawyer -- have been blogging about book contracts and, generally, helping to raise the awareness of new writers on the subject.

In that spirit, here are some links to posts about contracts that made my jaw drop.  I had no idea what rights certain agents were trying to retain for themselves.  On that note, if you are a writer who has signed a book contract lately, Passive Guy is collecting them, trying to get an idea for what's going on in the industry these days.  I'm eagerly awaiting that series of blog posts (or, hopefully, ebook!).

From the blog of Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
- The Business Rusch: Writing Like It's 1999
- The Business Rusch: Advocates, Addendums, and Sneaks, oh my!

Kristine Rusch has many more excellent articles on the business of writing, but her website is well laid out so if you go there they should be easy to find.

From the Passive Voice Blog
- How to Read a Book Contract - Agency Clause
- How to Read a Book Contract - Agency Coupled with an Interest If you are a writer with an agent and, like me before I read this blog post, you have no idea what agency coupled with a interest means, this is a must-read post.

Here is what Kristine Rusch had to say about these two posts:

If you have an agent, please read these two posts even if you think you understand the agency clause. It is my experience that most writers do not understand what they’re signing in their book contracts, and some agents have been misleading writers as to what these clauses mean.

Also of great interest to me were:
- How to Read a Book Contract - Somebody's Gonna Die
- You Just Signed with a Big Agent? Oh, I'm So Sorry.

See also:
- Self-Publishing Basics: The Copyright Page

Self-Publishing Tips

Here's a great article by Marie Force on how to format a manuscript for Amazon: Self-Publishing Tips for the Uninitiated.

Also, I would like to recommend Zoe Winter's book, Smart Self-Publishing: Becoming an Indie Author. I have read this book and use it now as a reference.

Although not about the nuts and bolts of formatting, etc., Joe Konrath's blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, is a must read for anyone thinking of independently publishing their work. Not only will it introduce you to other indie authors but Joe gives excellent advice on how to market your book(s).

Although not directly related to self-publishing, Dean Wesley Smith's blog, especially his Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing series, contains invaluable information about the business of writing. After reading his blog posts, I'll never think about writing the same way again.

Dean's wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, has her own blog where she discusses, among other things, the business of publishing (contracts, etc.)

Another blog I have found a wealthy of information on is The Passive Voice, especially when it comes to anything to do with contracts.

There are many more blogs I want to include here but I need to run or I will be late for my day job! Cheers!

Dean Wesley Smith and the New World of Publishing

If you are a writer, or at all interested in the business of writing, Dean Wesley Smith's blog -- as well as Joe Konrath's blog -- is a must read.

Today Dean wrote about writing speed and how that influences which route a writer might be interested in going in -- indie publishing or traditional.  It is one of the best articles I've read on the business of writing.  His wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, has a great blog too and she is currently doing a series about the new world of publishing.  Good stuff.

Happy reading. :)