No One Buys Books

An excellent article by Elle Griffin summarizing the nonfiction book, "The Trial" about the failed merger of Pengin and Simon and Shuster. (The end result was Simon and Shuster being bought up by a rapacious venture capitalist corporation that is in the process of pillaging it's assests, a much worse result than the merger would have been.) Anyway...the article provides a careful and detailed (albeit, depressing) analysis of the publishing industry. Worth a read if you haven't already seen links to it on social media.

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

On Going Back to Rewrite a Previously Published BooK

An author I follow has recently posted they’re going back to rewrite their first novel. They explain that as they’ve become a more experienced—and therefore a more accomplished—author with many more books since, they now recognize the many mistakes they made in that first book. Those errors are haunting them and they have decided 2024 is the year to go back and rewrite that first novel, and perhaps parts of the rest of that initial series.

Hmmm. I have a few reservations about this announcement.

First, I liked that first novel. A lot. It’s possible some long-time fans might feel it being rewritten a tiny bit insulting. We bloody well discovered you with that novel, so don’t go saying we were wrong about it.

For example, the author now sees that the tone of the series was ‘inconsistent’, ending up a lot darker at the end than the tone of the original book; that it went from YA to a series for older readers. Um, yeah. That’s one of the things I identified that I liked about that series—that issues that seem straight-forward at first can get, not just worse, but more threatening existentially. A whole generation readers grew up following that series from YA to WTF and matured right along with the writing. We followed the hero(ine) ever deeper into grimdark, damn it, and now you’re telling us that was all a mistake?

Second, and more seriously—history tells us, authors going back to rewrite their earlier novels hasn’t always worked out well.

Let us take two relatively well known examples.

Case Study #1: Blake’s Progress by Ray Faraday Nelson first came out from Laser Books, edited by Roger Elwood, in 1975. It was a pretty good book. But as many critics noted, myself included, it just missed being a great book. And . . . we all blamed Roger Elwood for not pushing Nelson to that next level.

We expect editors to coach writers to produce the best book they can, otherwise, what’s the point of having editors? Any idiot can choose good books for a press, but the reason publishers get the lion’s share of royalties is supposed to be because they’re adding value—by editing good books into great ones.

No one had such expectations of Roger Elwood. Laser books was an imprint of Harlequin, which in those days was pumping out Harlequin Romances to a strict formula like so much processed cheese. Elwood convinced Harlequin that SF, then the second ranked marketing category just behind Romance, could be packaged in exactly the same way: 3 titles a month, 50-60,000 words, a brand-recognizable cover, and a reliable product that readers would loyally consume without even bothering to read the cover blurb. In effect, consumption based on genre rather than particular themes or authors or a unique cover.

Since we assumed Elwood was delivering processed cheese, many dismissed him and his imprint out of hand. SF readers, particularly faanish fans, were horrified by the Harliquin connection because fans had invested a lot of energy in those days distancing themselves from the genre’s pulp origins and particularly any association with formulaic Romance. (Romance has matured into a significant literary movement beyond the original limited formulaic Harlequins, and SF has become mainstream, so such attitudes have largely died out, but it was still definitely a thing in the mid-1970s).

More significantly for Harlequin’s marketing model, SF readers attended to authors and themes far more than Romance readers. Instead of all three releases selling a predictable, fixed number of copies, sales varied wildly between titles, leaving Harlequin with unsold inventory for some titles and unmet demand for others. Since that wasn’t how their model worked, they dropped the SF imprint within 2 years.

So . . . we all assumed that Nelson’s book must have suffered from bad editing.

Nelson, perhaps because he was reading those reviews, rewrote Blakes Progress ten years later as Timequest, published by Tor. No one could complain that Tor was some sort of second rate publisher, or their editors suspect.

Yet, speaking for myself, I found the new version unreadable. It was bloated, pretentious, overwritten and took itself far too seriously. Blake’s Progress was a good book, a nifty idea from which readers could extrapolate to what could have been a great book. But instead of fulfilling the promise of Blake’s Progress, Timequest was actively painful to read. I was unable to get through it.

Case Study #2 The Carpet People was originally published by Terry Pratchett in 1971, when he was 17. I was 19 that year and found The Carpet People on display in the “new books” section of the Strathcona Branch of the Edmonton Public Library. (Considering how few copies that initial version sold, I feel divine intervention was required to put a copy into my hands more than a decade before anyone had heard of Pratchett or the Disc World.) To this day, I have a visceral memory of lying on my stomach, tracing out the action of the book on the deep pile and intricate pattern of the Turkish carpet in my Mom’s front room.

To say that the original made a strong impression on me does not really cover the sense of wonder that it evoked, or that I never stopped thinking about it. It’s one of maybe five books that made me want to be a writer. Fifty plus years on, I still have the carpet I first read it on . . . and I can’t look at the pattern without seeing the roads and village of carpet people it traces out.

But here’s the thing. I knew that novel had issues. I remember clearly my having enthused to my family—and anyone else who would listen—how great that book was . . . but always with the cravat that it had flaws. “You just have to ignore this loophole” or “Yeah, this other scene doesn’t quite work” I would say, in case they actually were persuaded to read it and wondered how I could miss such obvious weaknesses.

They must have been obvious weaknesses to Pratchett, too, when he undertook to rewrite the book twenty years later.

You can bet I devoured that rewrite the moment it hit the market. And it was . . . not the book I had read.

I’m not saying it was bad. On the contrary, the new edition was essentially flawless, the mature Pratchett writing at his peak. All the weaknesses of the original were now erased, the dialogue was pure Disc-World gold, the structural issues and under-development of the original all addressed.

But, um.

As Pratchett himself famously put it, "This book had two authors, and they were both the same person." He was clear about wanting to retain the strengths of the original, of it being a collaboration with his younger self, but I would argue that revising out all of the original’s flaws necessarily erased the 17 year old. I maintain that the rough edges were a crucial part of the original’s charm. The lack of sophistication was part of what lent the book much of its vitality, its ability to massively evoke my sense of wonder.

It is not just that the elder Pratchett was tampering with a treasured memory. I get that must be a factor. Nevertheless, I think it’s more a question that each of those two authors had their own strengths and weaknesses. The original version’s strengths lay partly in its very flaws—as they say in computer software circles, “that’s not a bug, that’s a feature”.

The original version was more interactive. As a reader, I had to fill in the cracks and plaster over the rough bits myself. I took the 17 year old’s vision and ran with it. It triggered the writer in me by making me extrapolate from what was there to the bits that were missing. In contrast, by smoothing out all the edges, the elder Pratchett changed the book from a collaboration between writer and reader to one where the reader is passively watching the perfectly rendered movie that is any mature Pratchett novel.

I am not saying that mature Pratchett ruined the book’s experience or even that he eroded my own fond memories of it. For the 99.9% of his readership who hadn’t read the original in 1971, the 1992 version is perfectly wonderful. I can’t imagine anyone being disappointed with it. 
No, what I’m arguing is that the original had its own strengths and didn’t really need to be rewritten. It was never a failure. It served a different purpose, is all.

I completely understand Pratchett’s decision to rewrite. His Disc-World and YA fans would be expecting any Pratchett title to be the work of the mature Pratchett, and might well have been disappointed if they purchased a less polished volume. And of course, it makes no sense to have a viable property and not reprint it. But I am sad that the 17 year old’s book is no longer out there to engage and encourage 19-year-old-writers.

Which brings us back to the author I mentioned at the outset rewriting their first book in their first series from ten years ago. Artistically, I don’t think that’s remotely necessary. And I’m not entirely happy that the thematic development of the series will be smoothed out so it’s now all grimdark, not the sort of escalating existentialism that I appreciated as the original series progressed.

But commercially . . . yeah, I get it. If that first book is preventing potential new adult / grimdark fans from reading and discovering (more importantly, buying) the whole series, than yeah, that needs to be fixed. But let’s think of it as “repurposing” the book rather than “fixing” it. By all means, re-edit to relaunch the successful series for a new generation of readers. Just don’t bad mouth the original.

A lot of self-published authors get better over time, and many of them have expressed regret to me over their having rushed their first novel into print before it was ready. That’s one reason I sometimes advise authors to use a pseudonym when starting out, rather than risk associating their name (i.e., their brand) with a book that won’t always remain up to their standards.

And of course, I think the services of a good editor can make a difference in ensuring that first book isn’t something that will be regretted later, but I’m pretty obviously biased on that one.

Going back and rewriting that book, though… Usually the time would be better invested in writing something new at one’s current level than revisiting and reinvesting in—“throwing good money/energy/time after bad”—at a title that has already had its turn. Let it go, unless reader feedback makes it clear that it’s sabotaging sales of more recent titles (e.g., when it’s the first in a series and one is losing all the readers who insist on starting any series with book 1).

If one is going to revisit and rewrite—the rule has to be:

1. wait at least ten years, to ensure one has actually gotten ten-year’s-worth-of-writing better; and also so that the original audience has forgotten it such that it counts now as a new release.
2. Changing the title is acceptable if and only if it’s noted somewhere that this is a re-release of the old title. (Tricking people into rebuying the same book, even rewritten, is likely to piss them off enough so they never buy from that author/publisher again.)
3. really consider the strengths of the original (e.g., youthful vitality) and ensure one is not eviscerating what made the original book work and end up with something actively worse. Rewriting is always a double or nothing bet.

Was it really that bad, or merely a different genre/demographic/market/purpose? Smart authors often deliberately choose the simplest novel (of the dozens in their brain) to start with, in order to master the craft of plot, pacing, dialogue, basic character, and so on before attempting their magnum opus. Starting with a space opera before writing one’s Dostoevsky-equivalent (or whatever) doesn’t mean the first novel was crap, just that it was serving a different purpose/market than one is writing for now. The Dostoevsky writes space opera thing isn’t likely to work out.

Chicago Manual of Style Applied to Fiction

The Chicago Manual of Style is industry standard for North American publishing, but it was designed for academic texts, not fiction. So, that's always been problematic when coming up with questions about style while editing (writing) fiction. I was this many days old when another editor pointed out that Chicago Manual has a BLOG for fiction to answer those questions:

https://cmosshoptalk.com/fiction-plus/

Well duh! Great resource!

Editing Canadian English

Editing Canadian English by Editors' Association of Canada
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I mostly use Chicago Manual of Style and/or American Psychological Association style guides in my role as book editor, but it's nice to have this resource on my desk for Canadian content that doesn't require strict adherence to either APA or CMOS. The book contains intelligent discussions of the Editors Association of Canada (Editors Canada) take on a whole range of issues--dealing with racism, sexism, ableism in writing, for example--that move the reader from a simple prescriptivist perspective found in most style guides to a much more sophisticated understanding that is closer to the way professional editors think.

Highly recommended for all Canadian editors, and for Canadian writers interested in self-editing.

View all my reviews

Interview with Terry Fallis

Fabulous interview by Mark Leslie Lefebvre with Terry Fallis about going from self-published writer, to Stephen Leacock Medal winner, to bestselling author with one of the world's largest publishers. Terry talks about writing a novel no one was interested in publishing (a satirical novel about Canadian politics--well, duh!) but nevertheless reached the audience he needed to reach.

If you don't have time to watch, do what I did and listen to the audio podcast at the link included. It has the advantage that you can listen on your headphones as you do the dishes or vacuum or walk the dog, so you get two things accomplished in the time for one. Also, the audio version includes 15 extra minutes of Mark's commentary on HIS writing life, in this case, excellent advice on how to keep from being overwhelmed by too many writing projects or being discouraged when you (inevitably, in my view) fall behind self-imposed deadlines.

My favourite Fallis advice to writers from the interview—something I've also been telling students and clients for years—is not to chase trends:

For crying out loud, write something that you care about. If vampires are all the rage right now, don't write a vampire novel because of that. If you love vampires, by all means. But I remember meeting a writer, an aspiring writer, and she said, "Yes, I'm writing a novel about vampires because they're so hot now". (In the rise of Twilight.) And I said, "Oh, do you, are you interested in vampires?"
"No, not really."
"Do you know much about them?"
"No, not yet. But I'm just researching them now."
"Do you know any vampires?"
"No."
"Are you a vampire?"
"No."
"Are you touched in any way by vampires?"
"No."
So I could only imagine the challenge it would be to write a book that feels real, and powerful, compelling, authentic, when there is no connection at all between the subject matter and the writer, beyond the marketing imperative of the high profile of vampires at that moment in time.
So when people would say,"Why would you write a politcal satire of Canadian politics, that sounds like a terrible idea," and maybe it was, but at least it was something I cared about, and knew about, I'd lived in that world, I had some views on it and I had a story I wanted to tell to illuminate a different path we might take in how we practice politics in this country. And I think it's hard to write your best work when you're not writing about something that you care about.

I've seen this again and again: writers chasing a trend. Even those talented enough to write something half-way decent are wasting their time because by the time their book is ready, the market has been flooded by copycats, and the trend is over. Any book you can write fast enough to cash in won't be good enough, and any book that's good enough will take too long to write, have edited, go through the submission/or self-published process to appear while the trend is still there. The only authors who were able to cash in on Twilight's success, were those who already had a really fine vampire book in their bottom drawer before vampires were hot.

Similarly, there is no hope of predicting what the next big thing will be to get ahead of the curve—would you have expected Canadian political satire, for example? And even if you could predict, it still has to be something to which you actually have a connection. Certainly, every genre editor can spot when a mainstream writer has decided to "knock out a genre novel" on the grounds of "how hard can it be" and reinvents every cliché that died out 50 years ago—or worse, believes an SF or Romance novel has lower standards. No thanks!

The whole interview is awesome because Mark is a great interviewer and has known Fallis forever, certainly before Fallis was known outside of Hamilton, and because Fallis is a fascinating guy with an unusual career path. (And for older writers like myself, it's encouraging to know you can still make it as a writer after age 35.)

I'd also recommend Mark Leslie Lefebvre's Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing for not just this episode, but as an ongoing series. Mark was the founder and former director of Kobo's Writing Life program for independent authors, was a long-time bookseller and one of the first to install an Expresso Book Machine in Canada (i.e., print-on-demand before anyone else had heard of POD), and is an established author himself. He has an insider's knowledge of both traditional and self-publishing, and extensive experience as a bookstore manager. So...yeah, you need to be listening to this if you want to understand what's happening in the industry.

Highly recommended.

VidCon Report

This year, I attended my first VidCon, since that seems to be where the new center of cultural creation is these days. If you're interested at all, here is my VidCon Review.

An editor's view of clients

A good depiction of an editor's view of clients for Halloween: Boo! These Are the 10 Monsters Your Book Editor Fears the Most by Blake Atwood.

Blake concludes by saying "Now, this isn’t a complaint article about editing clients. Rather, it’s meant as a curtain-parting glimpse into what editors deal with in terms of unprepared, underprepared, or naive clients. It’s what not to do when working with an editor."

He goes on to say, "Additionally, many of these 'monsters' come by it honestly. Because they don’t live, breathe and eat writing and publishing as editors do, they just don’t know what’s conventional or expected. Most editors understand this and are glad to help new authors learn the ropes—so long as the author is receptive to expert advice."

Of course, most clients are not like those described. Most are reasonable people looking for expert advice on their manuscript and open to input to ensure their manuscript is as good as it can be. They are happy to learn about the process and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their writing so they can eliminate any bad habits for next time, and pleasantly surprised how good their writing is after an editor as been over it. The editor-client relationship is almost always positive, Blake's occasional monster notwithstanding.

Resources for Self-publishing Authors

Proofreader and copyeditor, Louise Harnby, has some excellent free resources for authors.

https://www.louiseharnbyproofreader.com/self-publishers.html

on topics such as How to Master Point of View, self-editing, children's books, indexing, and so on. Worth a look!

Is there money in self-publishing?

A well researched report reported in the Guardian newspaper reports that

Despite the splash caused by self-publishing superstars such as Amanda Hocking and EL James, the average amount earned by DIY authors last year was just $10,000 (£6,375) – and half made less than $500.

...

Romance authors earned 170% more than their peers, while authors in other genres fared much worse: science-fiction writers earned 38% of the $10,000 average, fantasy writers 32%, and literary fiction authors just 20% of the $10,000 average.

...

Self-publishers who received help (paid or unpaid) with story editing, copy editing and proofreading made 13% more than the average; help with cover design upped earnings by a further 34%.

Read the full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/24/self-published-author-earnings?CMP=share_btn_fb

Note that the 'average' (i.e., mean) was highly skewed by a handful of high earners. The mode was closer to $500 and a quarter did not earn back their costs. One should probably start with the expectation of making less than $500 on one's first book...

I do know self-published authors who are making a living, though. Krista Ball comes immediately to mind, since she is also one of my favorite authors. But she had a long term strategy and really works at both the writing and marketing...Nobody could say she had found a get-rich-quick scheme. If you're in writing for the money, I think you're in the wrong business. There are a lot easier ways to make a living. But if you're in it for the love of writing, yeah, you have a shot at making...$500.

It only makes sense to seek professional editing if one amortizes the cost over not just one manuscript, but over one's whole career—what one learns from having one's first book edited should show up as a better first draft of #2, and getting #2 edited teaches you how to write book #3 and so on. Editing gets less expensive as you go because your manuscripts start out cleaner, and so take less time to edit. That's theory, anyway. Doesn't always workout that way--being creative, authors can always come up with new ways to screw up a manuscript. But I for one like to think of myself as an educator as much as an editor for any particular manuscript.

The Collapse (and Rebirth?) of the Textbook Market

Headline: Nelson Acquires McGraw-Hill-Ryerson

*Sigh*

The continuing consolidation of the legacy publishers into one giant corporation continues apace. Even when the branding remains to provide the illusion of consumer choice, the reality is that there are fewer and fewer publishers to whom authors can submit, and fewer and fewer differences in content for consumers to choose between.

As each publishers seeks to increase profit and therefore market share, it is much easier to do so by buying out the competition, then by predicting which books will sell. As the giant publishers acquire every other imprint, they do so by taking on debt (on the assumption larger market share will pay off the new debt over time). Having debt on that scale requires that each title produce a higher profit margin then when they had no debt, since the debt has to be serviced in addition to all the previous costs, and the only way to do that without moving price point beyond anything consumers would accept, is with economies of scale. Which means each title has to sell in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Mid-list authors no longer earn enough to be kept on, and niche markets can no longer be served.

These trends mean publishers can no longer afford to take risks, which means we’re looking at an increased tendency towards lowest common denominator and processed cheese.

In the Sf markets I write for, the number of major imprints (defined here as being available in brick and mortar stores) has fallen from over 40 when I started my novel to about 6 I can think of now. It’s worse in the textbook market—the strains have reached critical mass and the whole damn thing is (in my view) about to crash. My daughter’s textbook for the course she is taking in summer school is $210. But what choice does the instructor have? There are no cheaper choices because there are no other publishers, certainly no cheaper publishers, to choose from. But that is a ridiculous price! That could be a $5 ebook. Students complain, and instructors shrug, but eventually that trend will lead to rebellion. Instructors will (like me) stop assigning texts that students won’t even pretend to read, because they can’t afford to buy them. (My daughter’s roommate showed us her new $1000 bedside table in residence: it was a pile of four textbooks with a lamp on top.)

The collapse of McGraw-Hill-Ryerson in the k-12 market signals the end of the Canadian market—Nelson has made a miscalculation. As the increasing monopoly drives textbook prices even higher, there will simply be no k-12 textbook market left for it to service. The current attitude among the remaining publishers seems to be, well, what are schools going to do? Buy ereaders for every student and buy ebooks? No problem, we control the ebook market too and will make them pay hundreds for an ebook. Schools have to have textbooks, right? Bwahahahahahah!

But that’s not going to work this time. As I may have mentioned here before, I still have colleagues from when I worked in Alberta Learning (Albert's ministry of education) and I am reliably told that Alberta has made the policy decision to completely stop buying textbooks in 2018. That’s it’s. Done. No more textbooks. Because, they said, textbooks are "so 19th century" and no longer serve any purpose.

Textbooks were invented as a way a getting readings into the classroom economically when books were scarce. Previously, itinerate teachers would teach from whatever book they happened to have in their backpacks, but when schools evolved as stable public institutions, they became stable book markets: textbooks were provided via the state to make sure every classroom had a set of books cheaply; then to ensure that every classroom had a set of approved books [the Irish Readers being the first official textbook, whose explicit purpose was to teach Irish school children loyalty to the British Empire and suppress republican sentiments. The first Canadian Reader was the Irish Reader with a new cover on it; it wasn’t until the 1920’s that Irish Reader was replaced with a pro-Canada version]; and then to better organize material by grade and reading level.

And that tradition has continued pretty much up to now. Largely out of force of habit. But the Alberta government has figured out it can save millions by not buying any more textbooks. Because, why bother? Teachers can assign the appropriate entries on Wikipedia, or choose from the millions of pages—or more likely, video*mdash;of appropriate material available on the web. Which will be more up-to-date than any textbook, since it takes years for textbook to go from commission to publication, and so are two to three years out of date by the time they reach classrooms. But schools only renew textbooks for any particular curriculum once every ten years. In Alberta, it's done on a rotating basis, so this year social studies, next year Language arts, and so. That way curriculum committees have ten years to refine the next curriculum based on new research, assigning authors to write the update, arranging with publishers and so on. . . And schools only have to invest in textbooks for one subject per year, keeping those textbooks for ten years while they buy one other subjects per year, by the end of which time those initial texts are both worn out and too out of date to continue using, but then that subject comes up again in the rotation. But the down side has always been that teachers always had to supplement to bring up to date, particularly in social studies and science. Now, skip the cost and inconvenience of the outdated textbook entirely and let teachers use free, uptodate materials by following self-updating wikipedia and various teacher sites. Let classroom teachers custom make the readings for their particular class’ range of abilities and interests, for their particular community and neighbourhood (let’s use the Chinese examples in this class since 28% of this neighbourhood is ethnic Chinese, or use Calgary example for this class in Calgary, etc) for their particular slant. Let math teachers show the Khan academy videos. Why pay for textbooks at all?

So Alberta is done. Alberta is always at the forefront of any trend in Education (the Deputy Minister appointed my former colleague to the explicit position of seeking out innovations and mandated that there wasn’t to be a single innovation anywhere in the world that Alberta wasn’t on top of evaluating, and immediately adopting if it worked) so I won’t be surprised if we’re the first to go textbook-less. . .but um, won’t be the last.

At the university level, I think there is increasingly the opportunity for small presses and independent authors to put out inexpensive ($10) ebooks or ($40) Print On Demand textbooks without any role for these mega-corporations. Let me finish my text on test construction, post it to Amazon, and let individual instructors decide whether it meets their needs for their class. The author makes $5 per copy, instructors get an expensive text for their students, and everybody’s happy. Universities will eventually figure out to count self-published texts towards a professor’s output by asking about sales (i.e., how many other instructors are using their book) rather than by asking how prestigious the publisher is.

A more boring textbook for Teacher Education than it needed to be.

And we will get much better, much more interesting textbooks. I’ve no doubt already mentioned in previous posts how the publisher of my first textbook insisted on me taking 95% of the humour out because a few of the referees thought I was not sufficiently serious about the subject. So I did take the funny bits out (because I needed the publication credit for tenure), and that textbook tanked after two years—but the stuff I took out and subsequently distributed myself is still in use in some Education Faculties across Canada, 25 years later (and has made me more money than the publisher paid as the advance for the whole book) precisely because they are funny/outrageous. History is BORING, for example, because textbook publishers explicitly remove anything remotely controversial, lest it be unacceptable to some market somewhere: as the saying goes,"if you can’t sell it in Texas, you can’t sell it anywhere.” So no evolution in biology texts, nothing but the bare facts of history, because talking about Louis Riel sells differently in Quebec than Alberta, so just avoid the whole controversy and stick to just dates and indisputable (i.e., uninteresting) facts. Nothing local, because we have to sell the same book to everybody, everywhere. (Or more recently, make only token changes in the new “pick and choose your chapter” textbooks which switch “Alberta” into the sentence from “Ontario”, which are about as useful and meaningful as those kids books you can buy which will print your kid’s name in as one of the character names.) Why you hated every textbook you’ve ever read, but loved every science book by Claire Eamer. . . . Let’s just go with Clarie’s books from now on, eh?

Thus endith today’s rant.

=====================

And now it's another day:
ADDENDUM

Years ago the Social Studies Curriculum changed to include an understanding of the Acadians (specifically, the community of Meteghan, NS) in Grade 2. Unfortunately, teachers found that when they came to that portion of the program of studies, the province hadn't actually gotten around to writing a textbook or providing any other resources about Meteghan. Since I had a daughter in Grade 2 and was an Education professor, I set out to prove to my student teachers how easy it was for a classroom teacher to produce their own curriculum materials--that they don't need to wait around for, or be dependent upon, textbook writers. I produced the "Tigana Learns About the Acadians" website, gathering & filming the material in one day, and constructing the actual website in about two to three weeks of after hours fiddling. And that website got over 80,000 hits by Alberta Grade 2s, until the province got around to producing resources three or four years later.

And that was before YouTube was really a thing! (2006 is so long ago that most modern browsers won't show the .MOV files on that site without some fiddling, though there are workarounds for teachers who are still using the site with their Grade 2 classes.) It is WAY easier to do that these days: which begs the question, why ISN'T producing their own curricular materials an expectation on teachers?

Not every objective in every course, of course, but maybe one thing a year? So that all together we in effect crowd source the whole curriculum? Sounds ridiculous, but it really isn't. Every teacher I have ever met has one unit in their curriculum where they think the text is stupid or the module is missing something key, or whatever...so, don't just complain, upload something better. Then let other teachers grab it or not, based on their classes and their tastes.

There are in fact, lots of websites like that today--some charge teachers to download lesson plans and pay the teacher who uploaded it a percentage, like any textbook publisher, only better because it's custom made by the people who are teaching the concepts, the frontline workers, not someone who hasn't seen a classroom in 20 years. Not that there isn't room for authored books (see Claire Eamer example above) but teachers could regain a degree of professionalism, of professional autonomy, if as a profession they produced at least some of their own collaborative materials.

Or in sociological terms, the separation of curriculum design from classroom teachers reduces teachers to deskilled workers: technicians who implement other's design, which inevitably leads to alienation from the work process. Allow teachers to develop their own resources and you automatically get better teachers and better resources. The Wiki format or the upload/down load for cash format, or just everyone produce their own Youtube videos and self-published books for sale on Amazon...or something new we haven't thought of yet...it doesn't matter, we just need to take charge of our own teaching again.

2016 WWC Guest of Honour Speech

Dr. Robert Runté speaking at When Words Collide.

The When Words Collide writers' conference (held each August in Calgary) has a podcast page on which they release Guest of Honour speeches, panel discussions, and interviews. These are generally well worth a listen.

My Guest of Honour speech August 2016 was just released: "WWC 2016 GOH speech finds the curmudgeonly, retired professor Robert Runté questioning English teachers and praising fan fiction".

The Actual Self-Publishing Experience

I see a lot of rubbish about self-publishing on the Internet, most of which comes down to some sort of get-rich-quick schemes. There are hundreds of supposedly successful self-published authors offering to sell you their (self-published) secret to their success—which won't actually apply to anyone else because they were either (1) an early adopter who used this or that social media technique (trick), which won't now work for you, the too-late adopter, because consumers are wise to that one now; or (2) they were already well known authors or bloggers or Youtubers or etc with an established readership who simply carried that reputation/readership with them as they cut out the middlemen (i.e., dropped the publisher(s) who invested to made that author's reputations in the first place). Most new writers won't be able to duplicate their success, but nevertheless fork over $$ for books or courses from these self-appointed gurus, and then end up selling maybe 100 copies of their novel, no matter how slaveishly they adhered to the suggested formula.

It is therefore extremely refreshing to come across actual facts about the actual experience of an actual author....for free.

Arthur Slade is a successful Canadian YA author: he has won major awards (e.g., the prestigious TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and the Governor General's Award for Children's Literature) and sold a lot of books (i.e., makes a living at it). My oldest read a number of his books (e.g., The Hunchback Assignments series and ,Jolted) during the crucial period when she was deciding whether reading was really worth the effort and I credit Arthur for being one of several authors who pushed her over the edge to 'yes'. And I've used his novel about high school cliques ,Tribes, as an assigned reading in my course for student teachers.

Now Arthur is experimenting with self-publishing, and what's of potential interest to readers here, is that he is documenting what he has done, step by step, what it cost, and how the whole process has gone (so far):

• Why I am Self-Publishing in which Arthur talks about his reasons for self publishing his vampire novel(s); arranging for editing and book design and so on.
• Part 2 where Arthur discusses how it all went a month after the book's launch (complete with charts!)

It's all pretty useful information, and gives one a real feel for costs and income—though one month is still pretty early and we can assume the book will continue to earn for some time to come.

[Arthur has also previously talked about self-publishing his backlist as ebooks if that could apply to you.]

You will note that even though Arthur is a critically acclaimed writer (see awards above) such that we can assume the quality of the manuscript is high (reader reviews would seem to confirm this); and even though he has an established readership ready and willing to buy his books, and he is pretty savvey about social media and so on, he didn't exactly sell a billion-zillion copies. I'm guessing that he did about as well in terms of sales the first month as if he had gone to a small press (which would have covered the expenses, but then taken half the net income) so those figures look pretty reasonable to me.

The question then becomes, what are the implications for a new writer?

Well, the most obvious moral is: don't quit your day job. If someone tells you can write a book and make your fortune, and you buy their book or take their course or etc, expecting that to happen, then I'd like to introduce you to my cousin from Nigeria who has this really interesting proposition for you.

The second, perhaps less obvious moral, is that if you're going to do self-publishing right, then you have to be the publisher, and hire the editor, cover artist, and book designer etc for which the publisher normally pays.

I note that Arthur says he paid an absurdly small amount for editing, but that just means that Arthur's manuscript didn't require much actual editing. (I mentioned that he is an award-winning author, right?) New author's can expect to pay more for editing because their manuscripts are likely to require more work, and perhaps several iterations, to get to publishable standards, which therefore requires more hours of editing.

[Professional editors charge between $40- $60/hour, but one can often find colleagues with whom to swap edits, or qualified friends to do some of the initial editing for free, so that the professional editors are not starting from scratch, as it were. Going to a small press is another way to avoid paying out for expensive editing, since editing and cover art and book design and distribution are what the publisher brings to the table—and distribution of ebooks is probably about as easy for you as for them, so...it's just really about the editing/art/design. (Oh, and publishers may add a layer of branding, assuming they are a credible publisher (like, say, CZP).]

Realistically—which is to say—statistically, most self-published books only sell 5-200 copies, depending how big one's family and circle of friends is, and how aggressively one is prepared to push the book on neighbours and one's church congregation. I'm considering self-publishing my collected short stories, once I have enough published stories to fill a book. I have a bit of a reputation among fans, and people seem to like my stories, so I can allow my ego to daydream about such a collection eventually making sales into the 50 copy range, but I'm no Arthur Slade, so I do not expect to ever match his self-published sales figures. So...we're talking chapbook, we're talking souvenir, we're talking self-fulfillment, but we're not talking about making a living, let alone making one's fortune. You've seen Arthur's figures... feel free to extrapolate that experience to your own situation.

How Do I Become a Professional Writer?

I am often asked by aspiring writers, especially those with some critical success writing short stories or winning contests, "How do I become a full-time writer?". The short answer is, "You don't."

I don't actually mean that too personally. It's usually not that one is not a good enough writer, it's that that career line simply doesn't exist any more. In the 1920s and 1930s, writing fiction for the pulp market could garner one a decent income. Unfortunately, that pulp market, and the pocketbook market that replaced it, are essentially gone. The few fiction magazines that remain still pay the same rates they were paying in 1930, so it is no longer possible to make a living from writing short fiction; and pocketbooks are pretty much down to a few dozen best sellers. When I started my career, there were 42 different publishers to whom I could send an SF manuscript...now we're down to maybe five. Given that everyone else is submitting to the same five editors, the bar for entry has been raised too high for mortals to cross, and the wait times to even have one's manuscript read (given the thousands of manuscripts submitted to the same five markets), this is simply no longer a viable career option.

For example, out of the three hundred or so published writers I know personally, perhaps three make what one would consider a decent middle class living; another 20 or so live by writing, but consequently live extremely humble lifestyles. For example, I recall one woman—the author of about i5 books at that point—who exclaimed to our writer's group, "Now I'll be able to buy tea!" when a royalty check arrived. I don't know about you, but not being able to afford a box of tea for months at a time does not constitute "making a living" in my books.

Most writers I know have day jobs to support themselves and their families. Many work as technical writers, so that they are still practicing their craft, but computer manuals and political speeches are not what they would 'count' as their actual writing. Others have jobs in unrelated careers, such as 'spouse'. (Though one writer told me lately that she would have married anyone prepare to support her writing, so maybe that is a related career after all.)

To which aspiring writers often retort, "Well those guys (pointing to the best seller counter) make a very good living. How do I get to be one of them?"

You don't. Because it is not enough to be a great writer anymore; you have to be outrageously lucky as well. (Or, you know, deal-with-the-devil seems the only plausible explanation for the success of some writers, but that's beyond the scope of the current post.) Unfortunately, pointing to a successful best-selling author these days and asking how to get there is much like pointing to a lottery winner and asking me how to make a living buying lottery tickets. Yeah, there are folks that worked for because somebody has to win, but I think we're all agreed that if one mortgages their house to buy lottery tickets,they're an idiot. One has a better chance playing for the NHL as a career path than making it to the exalted ranks of best selling author, so most career counselors will recommend having a backup plan to even the best aspiring hockey players.

The good news is that becoming a published writer is easier than it has ever been. Getting into the big five is next to impossible without an agent, and getting a respectable agent to take one on is pretty difficult, but it is possible, provided that one's work is both to that standard and commercial. But there are lots of smaller presses around, which can deliver a fair degree of quality and prestige,if not best-seller scale sales. And if one can't find a publisher to take one, one can always self-publish. (If you're going to self-publish, I suggest starting with Kobo Writing Life, which is an author-friendly interface, run by author and book nerd, Mark Lefebvre.) Seeing one's book in print (and digital) is easy--getting anyone to buy it after, not so much.

Bottom-line: if you're in it for the money, you're likely going to be disappointed. If you're in it for the writing, then happy days.

Advice to Redacted

Novelist and screenwriter Chuck Wendig wrote a pretty good response to an aspiring writer who wrote to ask about writing as a career. AN EMAIL ABOUT WRITING, AND MY RESPONSE is a pretty good read, and I recommend it. I particularly liked this bit:

Worry more about writing good stories than getting published. The publishing industry is just the minotaur in the middle of the maze: the challenge at the end. You still have to get there. You still have to wander the maze in order to fight the monster.

and this is also good advice:

Don’t chase trends—let trends chase you.

The column is inspirational...but, um, I can't help but feel that Wendig missed the mark on answering the question asked. When Redacted expresses concern that

I’ve been hearing these nasty horror stories about writers going hungry, being unable to find jobs...

I think he's asking, "How do I make a living as a writer?" And not just a living, but really, "How do I obtain the lifestyle to which I aspire as a successful writer?"

The answer to "how do I become a writer" is very simple: one writes stuff. If one has the least talent and invests the usual 10,000 hours of continuous study and effort, one can likely even manage to become a decent writer. Perhaps with persistence, a published writer. Taking Windig's advice would probably help in becoming a published writer.

The answer to "how do I make a good living as a writer" is, however, entirely different: you can't.

I know just about all 200 or so of the SF writers in Canada, and out of that number, I'd estimate that only 3 or 4—so call it 2%—actually make a decent living as writers. Even Sawyer—unquestionably the best known of Canadian SF writers—recently remarked that he couldn't make a living by writing alone: his speaking engagements are a necessary supplement. (Sawyer is a fabulous speaker, by the way, which cannot be said of many writers. It is not a sideline that most writers could avail themselves.) I could name another 10 or so whose major source of income is writing, but their lifestyle is strictly hand-to-mouth. For example, I remember one of them —one of the better ones—exclaiming over a minor winfall that afforded her the luxury of buying box of tea large enough to last her a month. I strongly suspect that this would be the sort of 'horror stories' to which Redacted was referring. Everyone else basically had day jobs to support themselves. Of course, many of these day jobs involved working as writers—speech writers, technical writers, journalists, copy editors, staff writers, English teachers, and so on—but still, 9-5 jobs working for other people.

So, people who pursue writing as a career in the expectation of being one of the 2% or so of writers who are actually able to make a living as novelists are basically deluding themselves. If one's motivation for writing is to acquire the writer's lifestyle, then one had better understand that that life is about earning the occasional box of tea, not the glamorous life of the best seller. The chances of making it as a big time writer are about the same as a random hockey-playing kid making it to the NHL. Obviously, some do, but um, one doesn't plan one's life around that expectation.

[Having said that, though, my colleague the career counsellor tells the story of a student who explained to him that he didn't require career counselling because he had already decided that he was going to play for the NHL. My colleague insisted that the student develop a 'backup plan' for his education, "just in case" that didn't work out (*snicker* *snicker*); but the student in fact went on to become a huge hockey star, much to my colleague's eternal chagrin. So far be if from me to tell anyone that it is impossible for them to make it to the NHL or the Times bestseller list; I'm just saying wait until after your first $100,000 advance to quit your day job.]

I really have two points here. First, becoming a writer should not be confused with becoming a full-time professional. There are lots of opportunities for writers; indeed, thanks to new self-publishing technologies, there is now no excuse for anyone not to become a writer.

There has been some fascination in social media lately, for example, with the statistic that in Iceland, one person in ten has a novel to their credit. People seem surprised and impressed by this statistic, but I think that response is based on confusing "has written a novel" with "is a full-time writer". Because I'm pretty sure that is not the case. I very much doubt if the market for Icelandic literature is large enough to feed very many writers; nor that much Icelandic literature gets translated (or written in English) to penetrate the international market. What that one in ten figure is really telling us is that in Iceland, people write (and finish and circulate) their novel, even knowing that there isn't any money in it.

Being an editor, I have the (undoubtedly annoying) habit of asking people "written any good books lately?" as a variant on the usual conversational gambit of asking people what they have read recently. But here's the thing: probably one in five answer that they have indeed written a novel (or at least started one), now safely tucked away in their dresser's bottom drawer. Granted that I am probably dealing with a biased sample given the sort of people I am likely to run into, I don't think it is too much of a reach to suggest that perhaps one in ten Canadians have also written (or started) a novel. The difference between Canadians and Icelanders, then, is that Icelanders then go on to share their novel in the reasonable expectation that they have something to contribute to the body of Icelandic literature; whereas Canadians do not think in those terms at all. Quite aside from the fact that we are intimidated by a North American market that swamps any sense of a Canadian canon to which our work may contribute, we tend not to see literature as a conversation between writers, or between writers and readers, but as a way to make money. I very seldom hear people ask, "do you think anyone would be interested in reading my book"; instead they ask me, "will anyone buy it?" It is a subtle but significant difference. If a Canadian cannot believe s/he can make it as a professional writer, the book(s) go in the bottom drawer. But that's crazy. Just because you can't make the NFL team, doesn't mean you and a bunch of the guys can't get in some ice time. If it is okay to be an accountant during the day, and play Hockey Thursday nights in your local league, why isn't it okay to be an amateur writer? But in our capitalist mindset, if a book doesn't sell well enough to pay out on all the hours it took to write it—at an hourly rate equivalent to or exceeding our day-job rate—then it must be considered a failure.

This is astonishingly wrong-headed.

Contrary to the position of capitalist ideologues, market forces are not the only measure of worth. Indeed, Stephen Meyer and David Brown and E. L. James and a host of others are pretty compelling evidence that market forces are a very long way from the best measure of quality.

Don't get me wrong: I have nothing against making money from writing, and wish every writer the best of luck. But the expectation that one should be able to make a full-time living from writing is well, unrealistic. Poets and origami artists have had to face the fact that there are very few full time positions for poets and paperfolders, but thankfully poetry and origami have not died out.

Second, Redacted wants to know the secret of becoming a full-time author because "economics isn't for him". This reminds me of an acquaintance who patiently explained that she had had to quit her job "because I'm not like other people. I cannot tolerate the restrictions of a 9-5 job. As an artiste, I have to have an outlet for my creativity. I have to write!" One got the strong impression that she believed herself surrounded by worker bees who were perfectly content working 9-5 jobs, who didn't get just as frustrated with long hours, annoying coworkers/bosses, and mind-numbing routine as she. In other words, she was a spoilt, self-entitled idiot. There is nothing wrong with Redacted asking how one achieves one's dream job; but it is important to recognize that that is one's dream job, not one to which one is inherently entitled. I note, for example, that my aforementioned acquaintance never in the thirty years since produced a single short story, let alone a novel, while plenty of the worker bees she disdained managed to hold down two jobs, raise a family and still knock out an impressive novel or two.

Or, to put it another way, the complaint that one can no longer make a living as a novelist is kind of a first world problem. There are like a billion people on this planet who can't access clean water, so I find it hard to get worked up over the fact that one can't always quit one's day job to indulge oneself in full time writing.

Again, don't get me wrong: there is nothing wrong with aspiring to become a full-time novelist; but one does not generally get there by starting as a full-time novelist. One gets there by writing. After work, after the kids are in bed, and if they are very lucky, a little bit extra during NaNoWriMo. Once one has had some critical and financial success, one might consider whether quitting the day job to free up more time for writing is a practical option; starting from the assumption that that the world owes one a living as a wordsmith is the road to disappointment.

This is not a popular position. When I say things like this, aspiring writers tend to hear "you're telling me I can never be a writer, and I should give up"; which is, of course, pretty much the exact opposite of what I am actually arguing. I'm an educator as well as a development editor, so I pretty much believe that given sufficient commitment anyone can become a competent writer; and that almost all of my clients could become proficient or brilliant writers. I'm just arguing that becoming a writer should not be confused with becoming a best seller. That aiming at the best seller market my actually demand that you become a worse writer than you are now. That selling your vision, your voice to break into the American mass market may be a really bad goal. What I am arguing is that maybe it is okay to be a part-time writer, to write for an hour or two each evening, rather than all day. (As it happens, most full-time writers only write for part of the day anyway, the rest being spent on marketing and recharging their creative energies, but that's a topic for another column.)

Let me give you an example: H. A. Hargreaves was a university English professor who devoted roughly one week every second year to writing short stories. But over his career he produced two short story collections, North by 2000+ and Growing up Bronx which represents a respectable output. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that the stories in North by 2000+ have had a profound influence on Canadian SF. Hargreaves never expected nor made a living from his writing, but he nevertheless made a truly significant contribution to Canadian culture and became a hugely important part of the conversation with other writers, critics and readers about what makes writing Canadian.

It is not necessary to be a professional writer to count yourself a writer. Writing doesn't have to be a career. Authors who disdain 'amateur' writers are not just pompous, they are suffering from false consciousness: they have been duped into believing that schooling is about job training rather than education; that culture is only valid if it is an industry; and that the only measure of success is income. Instead, they should be celebrating the opportunities to join with all writers and readers (most readers these days being other writers) in the conversation that is Canadian culture. They need to recognize themselves as a 'class' and develop the class consciousness that rejects the divide and conquer logic of professional vs amateur. They need to embrace readers and beginning writers and self-published writers as their brothers and allies in lobbying for more recognition of the arts. They need to become, in Gramsci's terms, the organic intellectuals that are the vanguard of the revolution to—

Oops, sorry. Getting carried away there. Baby steps.

Write your novel, your stories. Strive to get better; strive to have something to say. Stop asking if you can make a living at this. Do it because you have something to say; because you were blessed with a muse; or simply because self-expression is more enjoyable for you than stamp collecting. If you ever get good enough to actually make significant amounts of money, well, bonus!

But if you're in it for the money and the lifestyle...have you considered buying lottery tickets as a more viable career option?

Self-Editing

Pretty good article on editing one's own manuscripts by Kristen Lamb Sept 2, 2013 on Huffington Post:

Six Easy Tips for Self-Editing Your Fiction.

Not everyone can afford an editor, so knowing how to edit one's manuscript oneself is crucial. But Lamb also makes the point that even if one can afford a professional edit before self-publishing or submitting the manuscript to a traditional publisher, you get more for your money if you can edit out the obvious mistakes before hiring a professional:

There are many editors who charge by the hour. If they're spending their time fixing blunders you could've easily repaired yourself, you're burning cash and time. Yet, correct these problems, and editors can more easily get to the meat of your novel. This means you will spend less money and get far higher value.

Sound advice!

I was sufficiently impressed by this article that I followed it back to Lamb's personal blog which also turned out to be pretty good. Funny and insightful, even though I don't always agree. But enough to make the input useful. Check her out.

Acknowledgements

Found my name in a list of acknowledgements in a recently released novel. On the one hand, pleased to have my input acknowledged. On the other, mildly annoyed at the implicit endorsement some readers may infer from the inclusion of my name. Because my main contribution to this novel's development was to explain why I was rejecting it. Even without having seen any of the writing, the premise struck me as a non-starter: cliches and coincidence do not a great novel make. But encouraged by friends and family, the author has now self-published.

I've downloaded the book out of curiosity, and the next time I'm in a line up at the DMV or similar, I'll read a few pages on my phone. Because I could be wrong; it could be extremely well written.

And the plot could be a lot better than it sounded. I am constantly amazed at how awful people are at writing synopsis or giving verbal pitches. But try describing the plot of, say, Romeo and Juliet without it sounding ridiculous. Can't be done. And I had the interesting experience recently of writing a synopsis for my own novel and my editor telling me, "That's just totally wrong. That's not what your novel is about at all." And am now awaiting feedback from my beta reader, and already know two things: (1) any manuscript always needs a couple of rewrites and (2) after three years of writing, I'm prepared to do another draft or maybe two, and then I'm publishing this sucker if I have to do so myself.

So I sympathize with this writer. Although my general advice is that the positive feedback of friends and family is not a reliable measure of quality or commercial potential, there comes a point where one has invested so much of oneself in a novel that commercial or not, ready or not, it's getting out there.... And that's okay. If you want your friends and family to have a copy of your book, go for it. Mine will have a spaceship on the cover.

The only downside is that if one is trying to become a professional writer, then one runs the risk of hurting one's brand if one publishes a manuscript before it is ready, or publishes an early manuscript before one has achieved professional standards.

And then there's Donal Ryan.

On Publishing vs Self-Publishing

"How do you get your books out to your audience? How do you convince an audience that they should buy your books? If you wanted an aspirin, would you buy it from Bayer, or would you buy it from the guy on the street corner who says he’s giving you a better aspirin than a big drug company, except he’s making them in his basement?"
---Sandra Kasturi, On The Advantages of Small Furry Animals in Publishing, Winnipeg Review

Reviews and Defamation

As a sometimes reviewer, found this page at Caslon Analytics (an Australian consulting firm) highly entertaining: covers what one can and cannot be sued for in a negative review, with some hilariously malicious reviews included as examples. Their page ondefamation in novels may also be of interest to readers of this blog.

(Thanks to novelist Chris Hoare for bringing these to my attention.)

Pricing E-books

Thoughtful and informative piece on e-book pricing from Steve Bareham.

Coincidentally, just went to a presentation on ebook publishing in academia where the speaker noted that ebook textbooks were selling for about twice what the same book in hardcopy sold for. This, of course, makes no sense because the elimination of paper, printing, storage, and shipping costs should make ebooks much less expense. The presenter had no explanation for this, but said it was a clear and universal trend in textbook publishing. So, three possible explanations present themselves to me: (a) the academic text publishers are entering ebook market only reluctantly and fighting a rear guard action to prop up print market by reverse pricing, -- but that is a losing battle, so hard to credit that explanation; (b) the publishers assume a certain amount of piracy when making their texts available in ecopy, so build that into the pricing; (c) simple supply and demand: college and university students are moving to ebook format faster than other demographics so can be charged accordingly. Since one is often required to drag texts to class, and since texts weigh a ton, I wouldn't be surprised that students might actually be prepared to pay a premium to have all there texts on a Kindle.

But what the big textbook suppliers don't seem to recognize is that they are doomed. As a textbook author, what exactly is my incentive to go with a big publisher which is going to charge my students an arm and a leg for my book; demand that I change my book to meet the needs of some idiot instructor on another campus whose course has just enough overlap with my text that if I add five more chapters (which my students have to pay for) he might adopt it; and pass on almost none of the profits to me, the author?

I've sold my upcoming textbook to a small press (Five Rivers, of course) which will charge my students a quarter of what they are paying now and pay me five times the royalties. And my colleague was explaining to me how his self-published textbook is quickly spreading to other campuses and he's making 100% of the net. The big publishers were necessary when publishing was too complicated and time consuming for an academic to undertake him/herself. But today, the technology actually makes it simpler--and incredibly faster--for me to put a course reader together myself online then to have the university bookstore--let alone some distant publisher--do it. Producing and distributing a single author textbook is still bit complicated, especially if one is looking for decent cover art, book design, national distribution etc., but a small publisher can do as good a job as one of the big three, and they take a much smaller cut of the pie.

And, what is most important to me, the smaller publishers don't insist on controlling what and how I write. The big publishers have to sell thousands of copies at exorbitant prices in order to break even; so they have to insist on authors revising their texts to reach lowest common denominator in the marketplace. Which is why all textbooks are boring and cover the exact same content the exact same way. The last time I wrote a text, the publisher insisted on taking out all the funny bits because some of the instructors the publisher sent sample chapters to felt that funny has no place in a serious text. (Rubbish! Either they were afraid my funny bits would upstage their own lectures, or they simply too pompous to be allowed in a classroom. Funny not only makes reading a text more palatable, it helps students learn and remember.) I'm okay with an editor telling me my jokes aren't working, but I have a problem with the marketing department saying my text has to be rewritten so it can sell in Texas.

One of the more provocative (read: "outrageous") textbook chapters I wrote is still being reprinted and used in course readers on half a dozen campuses across Canada, even though the textbook it is from has been out of print for nearly 20 years. Precisely because it is funny and provocative and not the same as everything else. In those days, I had no choice but to try to get my text published by one of the big academic presses. Now, I can upload that chapter to a clearing house and get paid directly every time a prof reprints something I wrote. No intermediate editors, publishers, or distributors required.

So then the question becomes: how much should I charge for my article? Too high, and budget-minded instructors might cut it to bring their course reader down to something affordable for their students; too low, and revenues generated might not be worth the trouble. There is something to be said for giving it away free, since reputation counts for something in academia, but as Steve Barham points out, 'free' often implies 'worthless' to potential buyers. Tricky business, setting prices. Barham article is a good place to start though.

Fascinating post on e-publishing by Arthur Slade

Gov General Award-winner Arthur Slade on ebook publishing tells exactly how many copies sold, and how much cash made: http://arthurslade.blogspot.com/2012/02/glorious-year-of-ebooking.html

So much of the blogosphere focuses on one or two (highly exceptional) stories to hype self-publishing model, or equally unhelpfully tell us that the average self-published title (i.e., by illiterate, unedited newbies) sells fewer than 20 copies, that it is very difficult to get a handle on actual potential for writers.

On the other hand, I have to say I'm a little shocked. If Arthur Slade can only bring in five grand a year from e-books, where the hell does that leave the writers who haven't won a GG and don't already have 15 titles in print? Yikes.

Of course, we all hope that our particular title will go viral, or can figure out that $5,000 a year might work out okay if that figure grows or remains steady for several more years to come. The typical advance for a new SF author from a major publisher is between $3500 to $6000, so $5000 from self-publishing still compares -- except that the big print publishers throw in editing and cover art and book design and perhaps some marketing for free, so at least half of that theoretical $5000 payout is likely going to cover self-publisher's costs. But bottom line is, are you in the same league as Arthur Slade?*

Mind you, at least one of the authors I've edited for has told me s/he is making more than a $1200 per month off ebooks. So it can be a good revenue stream.

My take on it is that self-publishing works best for (a) established writers continuing to bring out new print books with the majors, but who have reissued their out of print backlist as ebooks (which would otherwise not be earning anything, and which have already gone through extensive editing etc.); and (b) new or experienced authors writing for a niche market too small to attract the major publishers, but sufficiently large and untapped to provide steady modest income to those servicing that market through small specialty presses or self-publishing. In both cases, when a satisfied customer finishes with one title, they may go on to buy an ebook by the same author.

[Update 18/02/2012: *Arthur Slade commented:

Robert, I honestly attribute very little of my sales to my own fanbase. Most of my sales are in the US and UK and they don't know me very well there. It's more whether you have the right book for the bigger audiences. My YA books (other than DUST) don't cross over that much into the adult market, which are the majority of kindle owners. I wish I had a serial killer mystery in my back pocket, or a romance. Or a brilliant fantasy. I think my numbers would be much higher if I did.

Of course, Slade has a point! Most Kindle users are adults, so children's books won't have the same market base. But that may be changing rapidly. I know I download books to read my 8-yr old on my Kobo, and my older daughter (13) has her own Kobo. As all her peers seem to be upgrading to smartphones and/or tablet computers, those that read will more likely read on Kindles et al. Already my students are asking for their texts in e-format...rather than lugging heavy texts around with them all the time. And the provincial government is talking about switching from texts to e-materials in next couple of years. So...give it a minute....]