What Could a Literary Agent Do For Me?

Tags

literary agent, publishing, self-publishing

I should mention that I’ve never had an agent. I sold my first (and only, so far) novel to St. Martin’s Press a long time ago without one. It is possible that I should have had an agent. It is likely. I don’t know.

I’m planning to self-publish my second novel. This is not because I have been rejected roundly by “real” publishers. I’ve rejected them roundly, I guess, though not angrily.

After my disappointing experience with St. Martin’s (the world did not rise up and kiss my ass upon publication of my book), I decided that that whole scene was not for me. There were so many things I didn’t like about the experience that writing books and having them published just dropped off of the list of my personal ambitions for a couple of decades. I didn’t like having to wait 9 months until the book came out. I didn’t like hearing nothing about sales except once a quarter, and only getting a vague little tiny piece of information then. I didn’t like the small advance I was being offered for my next book. I didn’t like the lack of feedback, generally.

I am not saying I was made miserable, or mistreated. I’m just saying the experience itself was not particularly exciting or fun, after that first flush of victory when the book came in the mail. It was a huge crashing letdown, actually, to see how little it matters that you have had a book published by a major publisher. The book went out there and then it was gone. Boom. Thud. I felt like I would probably have reached more people standing in the street reading it aloud. And I probably would have made as much money. I would definitely have gotten more feedback.

This was a long time ago, and I didn’t have any other options. My street-reading idea was impaired by my shyness, as well as the fact that I lived in a fairly rural place, where there’s not a tradition of street theater, so I just moved on to another career: making websites. This turned out to have a much more satisfactory feedback loop, in terms of money, and in terms of attention, and in terms of feeling like I was having an impact on the world.

I’ve been told that what I should have done was write another book, and another, and another, and another, very quickly, and I would have eventually built up the kind of audience that would have given me the feedback loop and financial rewards I craved. Fine. I can accept that. But I didn’t do that. That path is not currently open to me.

I’ve decided to write a novel again. I’ve been working on it for a couple of years. I do not intend to submit it to book publishers, big or small, for publication. That just doesn’t interest me. I do hope to make a bit of a small business out of it (I’ve made small businesses before, out of websites that I created — it’s what I do), but I think that I could use some help, maybe in the form of an agent.

Despite the generic meaning of “agent,” though (somebody to act on my behalf — in this case, in business matters), it seems to me that most (all?) literary agents serve primarily as gatekeepers to book publishers. As mentioned before, I don’t want that. Just don’t need it. That business model is fine, it’s just not for me.

I’d like a good editorial sounding board who is market-aware and market-minded (this will sell, this won’t sell); a person who could help me negotiate contracts (not with publishers, but with vendors and contractors and so on); someone who is well-connected in the media, and who could help me drum up PR. That stuff. I believe that those are all secondary functions of agents today. Right?

I just don’t need the one thing agents do that they actually get paid to do, which is sign a deal with a publisher.

Would an agent be willing to forego the gatekeeping-to-publishers role in order to do these other things for me? And if so, under what terms? And how would I evaluate which one to hire?

I have no idea. I guess I’ll have to do it myself.

What do you think?

Everything You Need to Know About Promoting Your Projects with Social Media

Tags

advice, kickstarter, marketing, promotions, self-publishing, social media

If you are:

a). a Facebook friend I don’t remember actually having any relationship with, online or off, and

b). you send me a link to your Kickstarter or your Amazon author page, or even a request to “like” your website,

c). by private message, and

d). that’s the only contact we’ve ever had since we “friended” each other, then

e). I will unfriend you.

If that was the desired outcome of your promotional activity, then we are golden! But I suspect it was not.

Self-publishers and other indie artists have simply got to learn how to properly promote their brands and their personae online. It’s not about sending random, unsolicited pitches to people you hardly know, if at all. You can’t just hit me with a spam and expect any kind of happy response, even if you “apologize” for spamming in your spam. Extra demerits for

f). typing your message in all caps.

It’s not that I’m angry. I just don’t have time for this kind of “friendship.”

Kickstarter has done a lot of good. But it is also largely responsible for turning an entire generation of artists and writers into spammers. Same goes for ebook self-publishing platforms.

Using social media to promote yourself and your projects is not a bad thing in and of itself. Using social media clumsily and stupidly is the problem. Spam is spam, whether it comes from a multinational conglomerate, a Nigerian scammer, or Suzy Hipster who just finished her first novel, of which she is very ironically proud.

And spam doesn’t work. It is, in fact, one of the most inefficient promotional methodologies ever conceived. Those penis pill people do it because they can sell a couple of dozen units on a couple of hundred million emails, cheaply. If you’re not operating at that capacity, reaching that many people, you don’t have a chance. (And if you are, then you may be looking at a federal investigation, so I’d lay low).

Good, non-spammy social media promotion takes a light touch. It takes sincerity, and believability, and it has to go both ways. Make real friendships. Show genuine interest in your online friends’ projects too, for example — or in whatever else they’re sharing with you (their photos, their thoughts, their political rants). Don’t just collect a bunch of “targets” to push your stuff on. Again: not for any moral reason, but because it just doesn’t work.

In other words, good social media promotion takes a great deal of time — both in the sense of your butt in the chair working it, and in the sense of elapsed time — which is why so many fail. Everybody wants an instant fix. That’s the spammer’s mentality. You have to cultivate your relationships for years, and build strong and meaningful ties to the people you’re talking to online, before you can expect anybody to have any interest in your projects, especially if you want those people to turn around and promote your stuff to their own audiences — and even more especially if you’re charging money for your projects.

Sorry, but that is the way it works.

The Upper Echelons of Literature? Bah.

Tags

awards, prestige, publishing, self-publishing

People who complain about “the upper echelons of literature” being closed off to them, for whatever reason, strike me as a little bit old-fashioned, like they are trying to have a 1953 career in 2013. If I understand what they are complaining about correctly (they’re kind of vague), the “upper echelons” are the areas occupied by writers who publish in the New Yorker or Granta, get reviewed in the New York Times, and win the “most prestigious” literary awards and grants. To be in the “upper echelons” is to have the approval of a very small, very tony, very isolated and insulated group of upper-middle-class literati and publishing industry insiders. It’s a closed circuit: prestige comes from the approval of those in the upper echelons. The upper echelons have this power because they are prestigious. Their prestige comes from the approval of those in the … you get it.

In other words, the “upper echelons” are just another niche market, and not a very popular or vital one, especially now.

Back when a deal with a particular publisher, a positive note from a particular critic, or the engagement of a particular agent, could get you on The Tonight Show to debate ethics or economics or foreign policy with Norman Mailer and Charo, there may have been some value to getting yourself known in the old-fashioned back-patting boy’s club. Those kinds of appearances doubtless sold books. These days, you’re better off sucking up to reddit editors than New York Times editors — the former have more actual clout with more actual readers.

How Not to Promote Your Book

Tags

promotion, self-publishing, spam

There are a lot of self-publishing writers who are really, really, really bad at promotion.

I’m saying this because I just looked at my Goodreads inbox for the first time in months. I was just going to repost my Meg Wolitzer review over there (might as well find readers where they are), but I got distracted by the fact that I had 74 “emails” in my Goodreads inbox! Oh boy! Reader responses! Old friends who have found me! Something cool, surely!

But no.

The majority were very literally nothing but a link to a self-published book — and when I say literally, I mean literally. Open the email, and find link, period. No salutation, no explanation of why the author thinks that this would be of interest to me in particular, hardly even any indication (other than the fact that the url goes to a bookseller’s website) that this is a book, or that the book in question was authored by the person sending the email. No, that would be too difficult. Too time-consuming! All these people are sending is just a raw, naked http:// link. That’s the majority. I shit you not.

The rest are form letters, from people who at least took the time to copy/paste. “Hello JOEY MANLEY nice to meet you here on GOODREADS, please allow me to introduce myself,” with, yes, a link to a self-published book following that salutation. No indication that they have any idea who they’re talking to. No reference to anything about me. No attempt to make a real human connection, just a transparently pathetic attempt to fake same.

Here’s a tip: if you are a writer, do not use the same “online outreach” strategies to promote your book that penis enlargement companies use to promote their sugar pills! Your potential readers are out there, and approaching them one at a time is surely one way to find them, but you have to seem like an actual human being trying to make an actual human connection. No, strike that. You have to be an actual human being trying to make an actual human connection. This is work. But it works.

More on the ‘Too Many Books’ Tip …

Tags

books, publishing, self-publishing

This Forbes Magazine opinion piece by David Vinjamuri addresses many of the things I’ve been thinking about and worrying about lately: Publishing Is Broken, We’re Drowning in Indie Books, and That’s a Good Thing.

Don’t let the title keep you from clicking. It’s not all self-publishing triumphalism, by a long shot:

Last year I noticed that books were getting cheaper, but the writing was getting worse. It started to get harder and harder to shop the Kindle store because I was either upset by the price of a book or the quality of its writing. Accidentally, I had stumbled upon the new face of self-publishing.

Like Vinjamuri, I, too, am excited by the possibilities of self-publishing to open up the literary world to voices and energies that would never seem worthwhile to a profit-minded New York establishment. New York doesn’t pick books because they are good. New York picks books because they are similar to other books that happen to have sold in the past. It’s so true it makes me want to puke.

But Vinjamuri, and I, both hate most of the self-published novels we’ve ever bought. They’re mostly crap! It’s an undeniable fact.

How do you reconcile these two realities? How can you be excited about self-publishing while simultaneously despairing of its impact and output? That’s what the article is about.

I should mention, too, that Sue Grafton, one of the big name authors Vinjamuri quotes when he talks about the anti-self-publishing backlash, has, herself, backpedalled quite adroitly and graciously away from her original, outrageously cranky, position vis a vis self-publishers.

Go, read.

Too Many Ebooks, Written Too Quickly, May Spoil the Soup

Tags

kindle, self-publishing, writing

I joined a forum for self-publishing ebook authors a little while back, but found it depressing. Many of the posts were about how easy it is to write a book or two a month. One guy bragged that he writes 10,000 words/day until he “gets to the end of a book” in about five days, then publishes it immediately and starts the next one. Everybody seemed to think that his speed was admirable. The common wisdom around those parts seems to be that the best way to make money in the Kindle Store is to put as many books as possible into it, as quickly as possible, and then put some more.

This feels like another ugly bubble to me. I’ve lived through a few of those. One or two people have success at something, some new business model with its own power and attraction and inevitability, so then a million people try to do exactly the same thing — but most do it poorly and quickly. Then it all collapses when the weight of the awful overtakes the buoyancy of the new business model. The good goes away with the bad, and the whole way of doing things gets discredited, for a while.

I hope that doesn’t happen with self-publishing ebooks, but I think it will, and I don’t see how to stop it. The only thing that could stop it is if self-publishing authors started exhibiting more discipline about what they publish, and how often, and how thoroughly they’ve made sure it’s worth publishing, serving as finicky curators of their own work. That won’t happen, probably. So it’s just a matter of time before the bubble collapses, I guess.

I can write quickly. But I never finish anything that I write quickly. I’m talking about fiction, I mean. I like to let words sit on the screen while I think about them — sometimes for days. Switch out a verb here, a tense there, move a dependent clause to the beginning of a sentence, or the end. I like to dig as deep as I can into a storyline, and get to a certain point and realize it’s unworkable, then start over.

This has resulted in me being 47 years old with only one published book to my name, though. I’m not saying my way is “the right way.”

I have to think there’s some kind of happy medium. Surely?

Why Isn’t My Book Selling?

Tags

critique, self-publishing

This post isn’t a rant about my own failures in the book marketplace. I haven’t even published my new book yet, and my old one is mercifully out of print. This post is just a discursive link to Why Isn’t My Book Selling? — a blog where helpful self-publishing veterans will critique your book’s listing page on Amazon for you, including the cover, the description, the 300-word sample, and so on, in an objective way. If we self-publishers are ever going to get as good at this kind of stuff as the “real” publishers claim to be, we need this kind of peer review (and peer pressure!) I love the idea. I love the execution. Go, read!

BookBaby Thoughts and Questions

Tags

bookbaby, ebooks, publishing, self-publishing

There’s this service for self-publishing authors called BookBaby, sibling of the long-established CD Baby service for indie musicians, that I’ve been thinking about using. They handle putting your book in all the ebook stores for you, and will also optionally help you format and design your book. Most other companies that offer similar services (SmashWords for example) charge you nothing up front, but take a percentage of your profits forever. BookBaby charges in a more up-front manner.

Note that I said “in a more up-front manner.” I chose that vague language very specifically. It’s not a one-time flat fee. The marketing on their website makes it sound like it’s a one-time flat fee, ranging from $99 to $249, depending on your level of premiumness. There’s even a chart with three flat-looking fees along the top, defining the columns. They never actually say that it’s a one-time upfront fee. The reason they never actually say that it’s a one-time upfront fee is that it isn’t. There’s all kinds of little extra fees here and there for things like getting an ISBN number, converting an image file and embedding it in your ebook, or even having more than 30 chapter headings in your table of contents. There’s also an ongoing $19/year fee per book to keep it “in print.” All of which is still more upfront than the ongoing sales percentage tax that places like SmashWords charge. And most of which sounds reasonably fair. ISBNs don’t come free to anybody. Converting an image file, arguably, takes a bit of human intervention. The surcharge on extra chapters seems arbitrary to me. But what do I know? And this is a minor quibble.

I haven’t yet distributed an ebook through any of these services, but I do have an opinion about their revenue models, based on other content businesses I’ve looked at or participated in over the years:

— if you are going to do a lot of business, you are probably better off paying somebody a fee (or a set of fees) upfront for specific services, and keeping 100% of your earnings after sales start rolling in.

— the only reason to use a company who takes an ongoing percentage of sales is if you don’t plan to do a lot of business. There’s just no sense in spending cash up front for your own vanity.

Let’s say that a vendor takes 10% of your earnings (note: this is not the actual amount that SmashWords takes — I am just using that number to make the math easier). Let’s say that your profits from each book sold amount to $10 before the vendor takes its cut (again, easy math). Let’s say that you sell 5 copies, for a total of $50 in revenue. You will pay your vendor $5 for the services provided. That’s not terrible. It’s less than lunch. It’s also a lot less than most companies would charge you upfront for distribution and formatting services. You win.

Let’s say that you sold 1,000,000 copies, though, for a total of $10,000,000 in revenue. You will pay your vendor one million dollars for services rendered. That’s pretty expensive for these particular services. You lose, in a big, big way.

Are you realistically going to sell a million copies? No. I’m just trying to show you where the edge cases are. Generally, the more you sell, the worse a percentage-only deal looks. You can’t know how much you’re going to sell before you start selling. Yes, you think you know, but you’re an egotistical author, and/or you’re an insecure author — either way, you’re probably wrong about your potential sales. So if the deal is good or bad only when viewed through the lens of your actual sales, and you won’t have any actual sales until you make the deal, how do you know what to do?

My impulse is to always go with the upfront deal, rather than the percentage deal — if I can afford the upfront deal, and if the company is offering good services. The penalty for making the wrong decision is too harsh if you’re accidentally successful.

I can afford the upfront deal BookBaby is offering — even their richest deal is less than $300. They’re not expensive at all. I just don’t know if they’re offering good services. It’s hard to know beforehand, without hearing from unbiased sources. These people will be aggregating and handling my money, among other things. It’s important to know who they are and how they work. Here are some places I’ve found on the web where people are talking about the services — some are happy, some are not, as you might expect. I don’t know how reasonable or reliable these people are, though, because I don’t know them. I just know that they said stuff.

Why and How I Just Used BookBaby for Digital Publishing

Author Adventures: BookBaby

Self-Pub Spotlight: BookBaby

Of course, I could do all of this stuff myself. Most authors could. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to, though.

What do you think? Do you have any experience with BookBaby? Or with some other vendor? Or should I eliminate these middlepeople altogether and do everything myself?

On Louis C. K. and His Successful Experiment

Tags

comedy, louis c.k., self-publishing, video

Small-time independent artists of every type are always trying to find ways to circumvent the big publishing and distribution machines. That’s because they have to. Every few years, an artist on the more-intelligent side of the “mainstream” tries to do the same. They have to, too. Or they wouldn’t do it. Right? Radiohead did the thing with the album you could name your own price for — remember that? — but it was only for a limited time. Prince moved his whole operation online for a time. One of my personal favorites from my college days, Michelle Shocked, sells all her old CDs as well as new material in unencrypted MP3 form on her personal website. It is only because she took this initiative that I was able to buy myself a new copy of her out-of-print masterpiece, Short Sharp Shocked, which I used to own as a cassette tape, and which I lost five cross-country moves ago. Now that I’ve got the MP3s, I’ll never have to buy it, or worry about losing it, again.

The most recent sort-of-high-profile artist (and I use that term with love — I mean by it, “the kind of artist that has a following and some mainstream success, but is less oversaturatable than Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber”) is the comedian Louis C. K. I love this guy’s show on FX, though my boyfriend finds it uncomfortable and disturbing. To be fair, he has a low threshold for discomfort in comedy — even the British version of The Office makes him squirm. Louis (since he is not Cher, I would normally call him by his last name, but “C. K.” is a weird thing to call somebody) spent a bunch of his own money filming a comedy concert he performed, then a little more building a website, and tried to sell unencrypted video files of the performance for $5 to the public at large. Unencrypted. Got that? So they could be easily pirated, if people wanted to steal them.

So far, he says he’s made $200K in profit. I believe him. And it makes me feel good about people. (Full disclosure: I have not yet bought the concert. But I damn sure won’t be stealing it, either).

You are often told that “people won’t pay for stuff on the web.”

It’s not true. When I launched Modern Tales, the first semi-successful subscription-based webcomics service, I noticed that people — some people — are willing to pay. We had around 4 or 5 thousand subscribers at the height of that project, which is comparable to a fairly successful indie comic book (as a matter of fact, there are Marvel and DC comics with lower paid circulation). It wasn’t enough, though, to support the financial ambitions of 30 comic artists (the typical “successful” indie comic also doesn’t make a profit).

The question is, are enough people willing to pay for your stuff to make it worth the effort you’re going through to try to sell it? As Louis points out, he could have made more money, and worked a lot less hard, by going the traditional route: letting some company hire him to do the concert then sell the video online and pay him a royalty. For him, the advantages of self-publication (I’m going to call it that, because that’s what it is, even though we’re not talking about a book) outweighed all that (he explains it here). For others, maybe not.

His success is not, by the way, an argument against the participation of big publishers and distributors in the careers of artists. As indie-minded a guy as I am, I would never have heard of Louis C. K., if it had not been for his cable television program — which isn’t published by just any old large corporation, but happens to be published by a large corporation I despise (FX, the network he’s on, is part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire). And still, that is the route by which I found him. I suspect that the majority of people buying his video heard about him because of that show, or some other mainstream gig. Without them, he would have probably sold about as many videos as we sold Modern Tales subscriptions.

I think the lesson is this: artists don’t have to choose. This isn’t Nazi-occupied France. One side isn’t evil. I know, I know, you’ve been told differently. For the artist, self-publishing and traditional publishing don’t have to be at odds with one another, despite what advocates of either “side” may want you to believe. You can do both, at different points in your career, or even at the same time. If you’re lucky enough to get mainstream gigs, great. Those can empower your self-publishing work, and vice versa. One artist on Modern Tales who ended up sticking with the subscription model, James Kochalka, was able to attract a paying audience in part because of his success in the print world (and the rock and roll world, but that’s a unique situation). Just make sure that you don’t sign away any rights that would preclude your ability to self-publish, too. At one point in our early days, one of the Modern Tales cartoonists had a print publisher who tried to claim that the cartoonist had signed away his/her digital rights to them, but the cartoonist was able to show them where he/she had purposefully struck out that part of the agreement before signing.

An artist who works every angle, who has the ability to make money from multiple business models, is more likely to succeed than an artist who is dependent only on one. I think. Probably.

What do you think?

Looking for Somebody to Help You With Your E-Book? Here’s a Bunch of Them

Tags

books, ebooks, production, publishing, self-publishing

Here’s a spreadsheet containing dozens of professionals who do freelance work in the e-book production cycle, from cover illustration to copy editing and everything in between. I don’t remember how I found this, and I don’t know the woman who maintains it (her email address is at the top of the spreadsheet), and I can’t speak to the quality of any of the workers listed. But I’ve found it useful. If you’re looking for somebody to do some of this kind of work for you (as I have been), it’s a great starting point. Be sure to carefully vet anybody before you actually hire him or her, though — ask for references, especially, and talk to those references. Just looking at samples isn’t enough! You need to know how easy the person is to work with, how fast he/she turns around assignments, and so on.

And if you’re qualified to do this kind of work yourself, you should go add yourself to the list. Since it’s a public spreadsheet, you can do that, though the owners of the spreadsheet (not me) will have to approve any changes you make before they show up in public.