10 Responses so far

1. 1. Abi Sutherland on May 25th, 2010 at 1:42 pm

   Small point: “yields” in the first sentence of the third paragraph might want to be “wields”.

2. 2. ArachneJericho on May 25th, 2010 at 1:49 pm

   Is this… normal behaviour for Publishers Weekly? I recall they seriously misrepresented and manipulated quotes for an article that supposedly covered a digital publishing panel which featured Pablo Defendini and Wil Wheaton, among others.

   It just seems so immature.

3. 3. -dsr- on May 25th, 2010 at 2:04 pm

   So this PW article: they actually went and dug up JA’s numbers from Bookscan. Which is like kicking open a bedroom door. This is personal stuff..

   I have to disagree with you there. Bookscan is in no way personal: it’s a set of retail sales figures. A set of sales figures which is known to be an undercount because it leaves out the Wal-Mart group, BJ’s and libraries, and probably lots of small bookstores. You can argue about the margin of error all you want, but this is not personal information.

4. 4. Christopher on May 25th, 2010 at 2:32 pm

   I agree this piece was a hatchet job. I am happy for J.A. but his way really only works once you get going. As someone still trying to break in I feel strongly just throwing my books out there isn’t the way to go yet. I doesn’t change the fact he is a success. It is working for him. They didn’t even get the facts straight.

   They should be ashamed of the ba reporting in this story.

5. 5. Ken McConnell on May 25th, 2010 at 2:57 pm

   I agree with you Tobias, the PW article was incendiary. JA Konrath is perhaps an out-lier compared to most authors. But as you noted, the man is making a good living doing what he’s doing. To use his name as a defense for self-publishing by unknowns is not very realistic in my opinion. Again, like you said, most unknown authors are probably not going to see his numbers.

   But there is a rising tide on the Kindle, and I have done quite well there in the past few months. I don’t have a platform or notoriety but I have sold 700 e-books in the last three months. I think this reflects the greater number of folks using devices to read from more than anything else. But I’m happy to be along for the ride.

   This fall I plan to release another novel on the Kindle. It will be interesting to see if the tide is still high then, or if it recedes for me. Speaking of tides, I’m off to get your anthology on Kindle.

6. 6. Mark Terry on May 25th, 2010 at 3:23 pm

   I’m more or less with you on this. I don’t know if the PW piece was vindictive or not. I commented to Joe on his Facebook page, because an awful lot of people seem to be coming to Joe’s defense with a “yeah, you really got in da man’s face on that one,” that “incompetent and lazy is not synonymous with vindictive.”

   That said, the PW piece is problematic for its inaccuracies and its tone.

   I personally think Joe’s an outlier for his Kindle e-publishing–my experience has been different, although I freed up my e-rights to 2 out of print books and they’re up now and I’m pleased to see some sales numbers already better than the one self-published ms I put up there.

   I view the whole Kindle self-pub option as a potential alternative for writers. I’m ambivalent, to say the least, about writers who just don’t have the chops to write professionally throwing up a book and calling themselves published. Alternately, what do I care? There are lots of delusional people out there. (The only real reason it bugs me is because they’re playing on my tennis court. I worked hard to get there, and now there’s a bunch of amateurs getting in the way. So what? That’s the arts in general, right? I thank God regularly I didn’t want to be an actor a musician).

   For published writers, I think it has the potential to free up out of print books, although I suspect the days are numbered when print publishers will ever relinquish e-rights. I think for pro writers who tried something in between traditionally published books that didn’t find a home, it’s wonderful.

   I think only time will tell, but I note that everything I’m hearing about these e-publishing trends they said 10 or 12 years ago when iUniverse exploded onto the scene, a lot of published writers messed around with it and decided it just didn’t really work all that well. (And although Kindle and Amazon are soon shifting a 70% royalty over to writers for self-pubbed works, there would be no surprise to me at all if at some point in the near future they cut that back). So I wonder if that’ll happen here with Kindle, etc. Sure, it’ll work for some. JA Konrath is a bit of an outlier. But then again, in print publishing he was a bit of an outlier.

7. 7. Lynn on May 25th, 2010 at 10:48 pm

   Another reason to be glad I never subscribed to that rag.

   There are other ways to continue a novel series when publisher interest vanishes at the mid-way mark and the offers dry up. Self-publishing is one solution, but there are others. I did it by sustaining my series readership on my own while selling other series in different genres. It took several years, and much unpaid effort, but eventually the ongoing sales tempted my publisher enough to make a new offer to pick up the old series where it left off. In the end I was able to finish the entire series without resorting to self-publication, which made it worth the wait.

8. 8. Metal Dan on May 26th, 2010 at 10:31 am

   The entire digital download media revolution is still in a stage of infancy. Right now the industries that control distribution of most things are trying to not let go of that tangible disk or page. It was still not too long ago that the music industry was fighting tooth and nail against digital distribution. When it comes to books, like anything else, there will always be a place for the purist that wants the tangible in hand product and authors could provide very small, collectible print runs that could create cool new market for small and self publishing authors. Eventually though, there will be a very serious movement away from books. It will take time to convince consumers, writers, and publishers to leave the print format much as stone carvings of the past. If nothing else, I do believe that the waste will be the coffin nail. When activists start throwing around the number of trees being torn down every year to publish another slue of YA novels that just got returned and languished on a shelf in some discount store before making there way to an incinerator on broadcast TV, the evolution should be well under way.

   Don’t get me wrong I love holding a book in my hand, most certainly an old used book with that musty smell of fine aging on a shelf, but things have to move forward. I do imagine libraries where you can digitally borrow a book in the way you can borrow a song with Rhapsody. There could be state and federal funded libraries with small selections and then others where the reader just pays some nominal monthly fee. A lot of what is going to happen will also be determined by the rules that the FCC is to lay down in the near future for the regulation of broadband traffic and we would do ourselves good to keep a keen eye on that process.

9. 9. heteromeles on May 26th, 2010 at 9:42 pm

   @Metal Dan: I’ll put up the obligatory loyal opposition on eBooks. The thing that bugs me about them is that we need ones with a hand-crank, because we’ve got some serious, looming bottlenecks in the US energy infrastructure, and those batteries contain elements from Third World Countries with interesting politics, and we depend on an energy-intensive (read nonsustainable) global commerce system to get all that stuff into our hands.

   That’s the thing that bugs me about putting all our information online. It’s not the Moore’s Law growth of computing, it’s the kludge of an infrastructure that supports it. I hope it all works out, but you know, it’s going to be messy. My prediction is that paper will play a bigger role than we want.

   We’ll see. I’m certainly expecting eBooks to take off in the next few years. After that? We’ll see. I’ll know that eBooks have arrived when the iPad comes with a hand-crank and/or cheap solar panels.

10. 10. Jeffrey A. Carver on May 29th, 2010 at 5:59 pm

    I don’t think I agree that this was an attack piece, though it certainly gave weight to the skeptics of Konrath’s approach. Interestingly, I just read an Authors Guild panel on the future of publishing which included input from the agent Ira Silverberg, and I don’t recall him coming across so negatively about changes in publishing in that panel.

    The fact is, the whole system is in turmoil, and nobody knows what’s going to work in any given case. I just wrote on my own blog about the severely disappointing sales of my own latest book in its mass market paperback edition, and my determination to look for yet new ways to promote things the next time around. (I did free downloads this time, and the results are, at best, uncertain.) It is clear that we midlist authors are in many ways on our own, even if we’re published by the big houses, and we’re all trying to make sense of a landscape that often feels like quicksand. I’ll be watching to see how Konrath does on this.