BAMF Girls Club - Episode 16

Bella + Weapons = Major Laughs!

What the Craigy Ferg!

It's bad enough that Kris Rusch announced the end of her column, The Business Rusch, last Thursday.

Shortly after supper last night, I started reading about another impending demise. "It's Hollywood rumors," I prayed. But no, it's true. Craig Ferguson is leaving The Late Late Show at the end of the year.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!



The only thing that will make me feel better is if someone can tell me the brand and color name of Eddie's nail polish.

The Eye of the Storm?

Last week, one of Kris Rusch's reasons for cutting back on her business blogging was that the publishing business had entered a period of stabilization. But with the Gulf hurricane season officially starting a month from Thursday and preparation ads starting to spring up, I wondered:  Are things really stabilizing or are we in the eye of the storm?

1) Writers

The trickle of writers who had contracts for novel length works leaving publishing companies has turned into a steady stream. Many new writers are refusing to even consider  working with a major publishing house. We haven't gotten to the point where that steady stream turns into a gush, or where a MAJOR name like King, Roberts or Grisham walks away from their publisher.

2) Publishers Houses

Sure, you've got guys like Joe Konrath predicting the big publishers will collapse, but the bigger publishing houses made record-breaking profiits in 2013. There's also a lot of issues not being said.

Both Disney and Warner Brothers streamlined their print book operations so that they are focusing on materials and IP properties they fully control, e.g. Star Wars and Superman among others. Supposedly, Disney is keeping the contract Lucasfilm had with Random House to produce Star Wars novels, but I question how long that arrangement might last.

After news got out that Harlequin used contractually sleight-of-hand to rip-off writers, pitch slots to their editors were empty at the 2013 Romance Writers of America Conference. Other small publishers, such as Kensington and Ellora's Cave, are seeing a drop in submissions, and the submissions coming in are dropping in quality.

Overall, the publishing houses are reducing advances, reducing print runs, and issuing draconian contract terms to keep the writers they already have tied to them. They are also tying up reversion rights even though they seem to have no interest in reissuing the older books.

The question is at what point will the majority of writer grow tired of these shennanigans and walk way from the publishers, or writing, altogether.

3) Brick and Mortar Stores

It's been a little over two years since Borders collapsed here in the U.S. Barnes & Noble is scrambling to stay alive by cutting down on books and selling trinkets and toys. Book-a-Million and Half-Price Books only sell a fraction of what the ailing B&N sells. Walmart, Target and Costco will only sell  book on the top twenty of the New York Times bestseller list. Groceries stores and pharmacies are whacking their mass market paperback displays in a quarter of what they used to carry, assuming they are still carrying books at all.

On the plus side, many independent bookstores have arisen from the ashes of the Borders collapse and the closing of several B&N's. They've learned their lessons that they can't compete on price alone and are focusing on service and the customer experience.

Can the bigger stores afford to carry books? And if not, at what point do they quit?

4) Devices

This is where I think the most pundits are short-sighted. I've read article after article about slow down in sales of dedicated e-readers. Barnes & Noble is floundering. Sony gave up on devices totally, then sold its e-book division to Kobo. Kobo turned around and laid off 63 people last week. Yet, I still see publishing CEOs claim the slow down in dedicated device sales means adaption to e-books is also slowing.

This is where I *facepalm*.

First of all, if e-book adaption is slowing, why are the same companies claiming record profits? Sales of paper books are down or steady according to the folks who keep track of such things like Bowker.

Second of all, consumers are buying more and more tablets and smartphones. These multi-purpose devices are driving technology sales right now. In fact, tablets sales are seriously impacting Dell's laptop business. Executives don't seem to understand that you can READ on these multi-purpose devices.

Do you want a prime example? Two weeks ago, an older woman and I were sanding in line at the post office to mail Easter packages to family. I was reading on my iPhone 4. She had a HC. She didn't understand how I could read on such a small screen. I showed how I could adjust the font on the Kindle app, which led to an explanation of how apps work on a phone.

And why am I reading so much on my iPhone? Because the toggle switch on my Kindle 2 broke. While I like reading on e-ink since I spend twice as much business time on my computer than I ever did when I was a programmer or systems engineer, I question why should I spend the extra money. If my eyes need a break, I have 1300+ paper books I can read.

Even Genius Kid, who just got a Galaxy S4, doesn't think he needs another device, even though he's been asking for a Kindle for the last year.

When are execs going to understand that the loss of dedicated devices doesn't mean the loss of e-books?

* * *

With all these issues still outstanding (and I'm sure there's more I missed), I can't see any supposed stability lasting for long. The real question to me is--are we on the clean side of the hurricane or the dirty side when the storm roars past us?

Videos I've Been Watching Lately

Yes, more Eddie Izzard and Legos hilarity. The Ten Commandments will never be the same.

Thursdays with Kris

Yesterday was like every other Thursday. I got my caffeine first. This time I ran over Starbuck's for a trenta iced tea, black, no water, no sweetner. In other words, my standard order when Houston temps reach the mid-eighties. I had a hard day ahead of me--getting several thousand words in for a super secret, not-my-usual project I'm working on.

Like every other Thursday morning, I booted up my computer and clicked on Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog for my weekly dose of The Business Rusch before I started.

Unlike every other Thursday, I wanted to cry when I read Kris' announcement. After five years of not missing a week with her words of wisdom, Kris was ending her popular column.

I totally understand her reasoning. If you're not enjoying something you're doing for free, then you need to stop.

In this case, Kris had dispensed her thirty years of experience and hard knocks to a multitude of writers. She was to the point that she felt she was repeating herself, and she had started to dread what was a self-imposed deadline.

Kris also announced that her blog will be revamped soon, so she can't guarantee all her columns will survive the transition. I highly recommended that if you haven't read The Business Rusch yet, start printing off copies for study. There's a lot of advice in the million words she's written. If you haven't read them, you'll never know if there's some tidbit that may take your career to the next level.

To Kris, thanks from all of us newbies from the bottom of our hearts.

What Was That Book Again?

The stormtrooper in yesterday's post is reading Night of the Living Trekkies. Here's the book trailer!

When Real Life Intrudes

My writing productivity has left something to be desired in 2014. Between packing, getting the Houston house ready to go on the market, and dealing with some family issues over the last year, I think I've officially burnt out the creative part of my brain through stress.

While I can't make all the stressors go away, I'm following Colleen Thompson's advice and refilling the well. I'm reading a little more and writing a little less. I'm watching the movies I missed at the theater over the last two summers, and re-watching my favorite sitcoms.

And I'm jumping ship on my book schedule and working on a couple of projects I hadn't planned, just to shake things up in my brain a little.

Hopefully, this will jump start the creative process again.

(P.S. That book the stormtrooper is checking out? Excellent!)

Videos I've Been Watching Lately

Cake or Death! Another Eddie Izzard routine set to Legos.

The Secrets of My Success

Yesterday, Kris Rusch posted a pretty deep article about the change in how Americans consume entertainment. The change hasn't hit the producers of that entertainment yet.

By that, I mean you.

You know who you are. You scour the internet for tidbits of anything to make that one book a success. How do I know this? You're hitting this blog from Yahoo or Google under search criteria such as "indie writer income" or "how to make money writing erotica".

Want to know the secret?

There isn't one.

Right now, a lot of you are grumbling under your breath.

"She won't tell us."

"The bitch is hiding the truth."

"She's just trying to keep us out like all the other successful writers."

Okay, maybe I did lie. Why? To quote  Jack Nicholson's character from A Few Good Men, "You can't handle the truth."

So here's the truth. Two simple steps to being successful.

1) Write.

Write a lot. Publish what you write. Rinse. Repeat.

I hate to tell you, but you probably aren't going to make it with one book. There's going to be more blood moons this year than people who can repeat Margaret Mitchell's or Harper Lee's one-book wonder type of success.

"But writing is hard," you whine.

So what? Either you want to write or you don't. I can't make you. Your mommy can't make you. Only you can make you. It's up to you.

2) Be nice.

Call it the Golden Rule, the Threefold Law, Karma, or whatever the hell you want. Personally I prefer Wheaton's Law, aka "Don't be a dick."

Treat everyone with respect, even if they want something from you. Why? Because you don't know when or how it'll come back to you.

For example, Newbie asked Alter Ego for some self-publishing advice a little over a year ago. I gave her some pointers and blogs to check out.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago. Newbie's doing pretty well for herself. She hired a personal assistant and mentioned AE as one of her inspirations. PA checks out AE's books and tells her friend, who happens to run a book review blog. Book Review Gal contacts AE and asks for a review copy of the book Newbie originally referred to PA. BRG loves book and gives a glowing review. Established Erotica Writer sees review, checks out book, then contacts AE about submitting a story for an erotic anthology bundle.

See? Karma.

It's pretty simple. Write. Be nice. You have to work pretty hard to fuck that up.

Why Traditional Publishing Is Having Problems Defending Itself

Considering what we call "traditional publishing" has been around for roughly seventy-five years, you would think they would know what they bring to the business table. If folks in the publishing houses do know, they are having a very difficult time articulating those points.

The first major problem is how publishers and editors regard writers. They say they treasure writers, but in reality, they view us as needy, whiny pains-in-the-ass. Even Kris Rusch mentioned writers who go into hysterics over changing a comma, and she's an author so she's very much PRO writer.

Another example is a discussion over at The Passive Voice when a Kensington author anonymously mentioned that her editor didn't edit her books. Rather than checking out the writer's story, publisher Steven Zacharius castigated Anonymice on the public blog, which kind of proved why this writer didn't go to him in the first place.

This brings me directly to one of the major services publishers claim they provide--editing.

Barry Harbaugh, an editor at HarperCollins, was trying to refute an essay by Andrew Martin in The New Yorker that talked about MFA vs. NYC. He really stepped into steaming pile when he insisted that editors do edit, but added that he only edited about fifty to one hundred pages a week. Of course, it's all Amazon's fault that editors get a bad rap.

I'll give Barry credit that he does do some editing, but the amount?

Excuse me? The night before I saw Barry's piece, I had edited a fifteen-page short story that I'm about to submit and twenty pages of novel prior to posting the sample online. All of this was done the forty minutes while I ordered and ate dinner at a local Mexican restaurant because I needed to get out of the house and away from Alter Ego's current wip.

Many more trad authors are coming out of the woodwork and talking about no editing, or even worse, abusive editors. In the same link to Kris Rusch's blog above, she talks about an editor who was downright psychotic and gives good advice for dealing with difficult people in the industry.

So what about cover art?

This is the notorious cover for Barry Eisler's book, Fault Line, issued by the French trad publisher. All cultural differences aside, does this look like an international, jet-setting thriller?

And if the writer gets a bad cover, can they do anything about it? Generally, no. The publisher complains about the cost (if the writer is lucky), or simply ignores you.

Not too many writers can turn a bad cover into a plus, but Christina Dodd did. Go ahead. Count how many hands the lady on the cover has. Dodd used the screw-up as a marketing gimmick. But a bad trad cover can't always be changed into gold so easily.

One of fabulous pluses as an indie is the ability to change your cover on a moment's notice. Like when several retailers decide out of the blue that your erotica covers are too risque. *wink*

Another factor is that the writer is blamed for the editing and the cover art, not the publisher, because it's the writer's name on the book.

The publisher doesn't care. There's a million writers banging on their doors, so they'll chuck the one that complains and grab another serf writer at the gates.

So what about promotion, publicity, and marketing by the publishing company? These should be the publishers' biggest strengths, right?

Fuhgeddaboudit! Seriously. Nearly every mid-list writer I personally know who signed a contract within the last ten years spent their entire trad pub advance on getting word out about their books. And with advances getting smaller and smaller and costs rising, that means more money out of a writer's pocket.

Even worse, trad publishers seem to have no marketing savvy in today's world (though they will command the writer to participate in every social media known to humankind).One of the selling points they brought to the table when they tried to woo H.M. Ward was their 2K e-mail list. Ms. Ward has a much bigger e-mail list already. MUCH bigger.

And heaven forbid if you ask the trade publisher to put specific marketing efforts in the contract!

These are the three big things that trad publishers could bring to the table for writers, but they refuse to do so. Here's the thing--it really wouldn't cost them a lot to do even one of these three. Do it cheap. Do it right.

Because indie writers are doing it every freakin' day!