KK on publishing

This post by Kevin Kelly about publishing is interesting and informative, but it gets some things wrong. For instance, he says this about the traditional publishing route:

The task: You create the material; then professionals edit, package, manufacture, distribute, promote, and sell the material. You make, they sell. At the appropriate time, you appear on a book store tour to great applause, to sign books and hear praise from fans. Also, the publishers will pay you even before you write your book. The advantages of this system are obvious: you spend your precious time creating, and all the rest of the chores will be done by people who are much better at those chores than you.

Book tours have always been for bestselling authors, not for midlisters. I’ve never had a book tour, though I have had publishers pay for the occasional one-off talk. And “pay you even before you write the book”? — well, they’ll pay you something, but, as I’ve said before, advances are parceled out: if you get a book contract on the basis of a proposal, then you’ll get a certain about on signing, a certain amount on turning in a complete manuscript, a certain amount on pub date. All of this is an “advance” in the sense that it arrives before any copies have been sold, but if you hear that someone has a $100,000 advance, they’ll probably on signing the contract get $25,000. Long gone are the days when a writer could live on his or her advance while writing the book. (The people who could live on their advances are people who already make so much money that they don’t need the advances.)

One note about “packaging”: I have found that, in general, publishers will work with authors to get a cover that everyone likes — often by showing three or four options. But when Profile in the U.K., the publisher of Breaking Bread with the Dead, showed me the cover of the book — one design and one only — I told them that I hated it more than I could possibly say and they replied that they were going to use it anyway. (One editor added that what I had written was basically a bunch of essays so it’s not like it really matters what it looks like.) When they sent me my author’s copies of the finished book I tossed the box in a closet and have never opened it. I really think that with that dreadful cover they killed any chance of the book doing well in the U.K.

Their cover for How to Think, my other book with them, was great.

New York book publishers do not have a database with the names and contacts of the people who buy their books. Instead, they sell to bookstores, which are disappearing.

No, the decline in bookstores stopped around 2019, and since then there’s been a mild upturn. Who knows whether it will continue, but for now bookstores still matter, very much.

Are agents worth it? In the beginning of a career, yes. They are a great way to connect with editors and publishers who might like your stuff, and for many publishers, this is the only realistic way to reach them. Are they worth it later? Probably, depending on the author. I do not enjoy negotiating, and I have found that an agent will ask for, demand, and get far more money than I would have myself, so I am fine with their cut.

This isn’t wrong, but it’s not the whole picture. An agent will almost certainly negotiate a bigger advance for you than you could negotiate for yourself, but a good agent will also retain foreign rights and then negotiate with overseas publishers and translators. If you do not have an agent, then your initial publisher will keep those rights for itself and then do whatever it wants. I am not sure how much money I have made over the years from overseas editions of my books, but a rough guess would be $50,000. Not a fortune, but nothing to sneeze at.

Now, about trade publishing KK makes one essential true point:

BTW, you should not have concerns about taking a larger advance than you ever earn out, because a publisher will earn out your advance long before you do. They make more money per book than you do, so their earn-out threshold comes much earlier than the author’s.

Two of my books (Original Sin and Breaking Bread with the Dead) have not earned out their advances, but the publisher has made money from both of them.

About self-publishing I know absolutely nothing, but KK makes me wonder whether I might want to try that at least once in my life. But, as he makes clear, when you’re DIY-ing it all the work is on your shoulders, including the following things that in traditional publishing others do for you:

Editing

Designing

Printing

Binding

Storing

Selling

Shipping

Promoting

You may say “Well, I can hire people to do those things for me” — but that process will itself be time-consuming, and you might find that at a certain stage you’ve simply re-created the traditional publishing model.