I've been gone awhile. BEA, excuse, something else, climbing, etc.

It's question and answer day today! Let's skip the pleasantries and get down to business.

EponaReviews ‏@EponaReviews21h

How do I get into publishing? And what qualifications are required? :)

Thank you for the question. My answer is based on my experience and the experiences of those I’ve met along the way. I’ll save you the careerbuilder.com article (mainly because I think it’d probably be a lot of intuitive, oft repeated platitude bullshit) and give you a rambling answer.

You should know that I got into publishing by one day deciding I was going to be a publisher. I didn’t really know shit about shit at that point (I was 23, full of adrenaline, naive, and ready to go!), but I already owned a company with a friend of mine. One of the first things we did was met with some local dude who ran a publishing company that had books featured on the local books section of our local bookstore.

That guy gave us some advice. More importantly, he gave us some of his time. Though our two publishing paths would soon thereafter take off in completely different directions, I am still very grateful for the time he gave us.

I also read a bunch of books (most notably Dan Poynter’s guide) that are now probably all out of date because publishing in 1999 was a way different beast than the one on your doorstep right now.

And then? I just did it. Small print runs of poetry and short story collections. Though it’s probably not all that cool to say right now, they were practice runs for the real thing. That real thing was the novel Red Sky, Red Dragonfly, published in the fall of 2001.

From there, I ran a company for a few years, sold it to a larger company, got in a fight with management, then started a new company, then sold that to a larger company, and that’s where I am today.

In all of those years, I’ve had a bunch of interns who are now scattered throughout the world, including some of them at agencies, larger publishers, still working with me, and related publishing worlds. Some of them are also huffing glue in an alley in Omaha, so it’s not like this is a guaranteed winning proposition.

So what can you do? Find a local publisher. Ask if you can intern. Or, if there aren’t any in your area, find a company you really like that has a web presence and ask them if you can work remotely. The smaller the house, the greater your passion for them—the more likely they’ll find a way to bring you on board.

If none of those things work, you can do like me, and make a bad decision and start your own.

For more on this subject (that’s a little more of the feel good variety), I detailed all of this much more in an earlier post.

Zack Barnes ‏@zbarnes21h

How does the Editor and authors get paid for an anthology?

This can go a couple of ways, Young Zack.

One is the ol’ “Flat Fee” style where the publisher hands over a bunch of cash pays out a one-time fee to each of the contributors and the editor and that’s that.

Two is the “holy shit, this is kind of complicated and I’m going to bang my head into a wall because I have to deal with it, but ultimately it’s the right thing” way. In that situation, an advance is figured out, and that money is divided between the editor and the contributors. It can be broken down in a bunch of complicated ways including story length, but, let’s just say, for the sake of saying something, that the whole project consists of 10 stories, the advance is $5,000, and the royalty rate is 10% and the book costs $25 and nobody, anywhere is getting a discount.

That initial $5k advance might get split this way (there are an infinite amount of ways for this to happen, this is just for illustrative purposes) -- $1000 to the editor. $400 to each of the 10 contributors. Once the book has sold 2,000 copies it will have sold out its advance (royalty rate would make it $2.50 to creators/copy sold). At that point, for each sale after that, the editor would make $1.00 and the contributors would get $1.50 that would then be split 10 ways (aka $.15/sale).

That’s Mansion Money, son! That’s what publishing is all about.

bill gordon ‏@UndeRadar2m

Would love the answer to the scandalous book pricing going on by Amazon…why are e-books more expensive than paperbacks!?

I’m not going to pretend to understand book pricing right now. There are some general guidelines folks might use when pricing things, but then those “suggested retail prices” are run through meat grinders and algorithms and some robot that was put together with parts from a transistor radio and a remote control car originally purchased from a Radio Shack in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1984. You see what kind of thing you get. Throw in, on top of all that, agreements to not be undersold by other vendors, the ability to generate discounts at will for whatever rate the robot says is best, and shit stops making sense.

That’s the scientific explanation.

There’s also the Wizard of Oz, don’t-mind-the-guy-behind-the-curtain shenanigans. Some people might tell you that there are strategies afoot that intend to stop certain vendors from making ebooks the only way to buy a book in ten years. Those people hang out at the intersection of Conspiracy Blvd. and Collusion Avenue.

Mainly though, it’s because people don’t know what’s going on, and they want to act, and everything they’ve ever known no longer makes sense, and they don’t want to be seen as passive or dinosaurs, so they just do something even when it doesn’t make sense.

Also, that part about robots is kinda true.

BENJAMIN LEROY

Mia ‏@arrhyth_mia I'm curious about book pricing. There seems to be much variance between retailers, digital/print, physical/online store.

I’m a business guy. Actually, that’s bullshit. But I sometimes have to talk the talk and pretend like I am. Here are some observations I’ve made from the shores of Business Lake on the outskirts of Industry Town.

(1) When you assume that a business, because it has a name you recognize, must be on top of things, you’ve only got a 50/50 chance of being right. Some of the most colossally ill-informed, uninterested, and self-deceiving people I’ve ever met, happen to be in positions of power at companies large and small. These folks ride their “gut impulses” right into brick walls. They’ll tell you something is the way it is (the price of a book, for example) because that’s what it’s supposed to be. Even if you point out that it was a keystroke error by a temp worker, ol’ Jack Welch v 2.0 will talk around the issue, assuring you it was by design.

(2) Nobody knows how this is all going to shake out. Questions about book pricing aren’t answered in any real and permanent way. Not today at least. Are you paying for content? Delivery? How does the price compare to a candy bar? Why is gold valuable? We’re living in crazy times and if we’re so inclined, we can sit around the table with a Big Gulp and Doritos and we can talk all night about value and worth and never come to consensus. We are microcosms battling the same battles that happen in macro boardrooms.

(3) Some folks are content to lose/not make much money today if they can, metaphorically speaking, stab the competition in the throat in the long term. If I had a pile of cash on hand/credit extended to me that would allow me to pay my bills for the next five years and I knew my competition was not as flush with capital, I could see a strategy in forcing them to tie up cash with keeping the lights on until it was no longer feasible. I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, but I could understand, on some Machiavellian/Sun Tzu level how it makes sense. So I’d set my prices super low, smile politely, make very little money and say to my opponent, “Your move.” Since they wouldn’t be able to match price, they’d lose business, and with the reduction in business, they wouldn’t be able to pay rent. Then they’d go out of business, leaving me to control the market, at which point I might consider jacking up my prices and capitalizing on all of the patience I showed.

Orion Strange ‏@Nerdy_Orion time travel or who would win in a fight... Superman vs The Sentry?

I didn’t even know who Sentry was, but historically speaking, my issue with Superman was that, besides the whole Kryptonite thing, he was a little too perfect. When I saw that The Sentry was basically Superman +1 I was like, “Meh, give me Badger and I’ll be happier” because (a) I’m trying to be contrarian, (b) dude was from my neck of the woods and namedropped places local to me, and (c) if I pull out something kinda obscure from the comics world, I’m hoping it’ll ease any blowback I might receive for dismissing Superman and Superman +1.

Thomas Pluck ‏@tommysalami prior to publication, what can a writer do to build a network or foundation to make publicity/promo easier for the publisher?

Be a good citizen. I don’t mean helping old ladies across the street or anything (though, more bonus points to you if you do), but be a part of the conversation. Read books. Talk about books. Publish short stories in anthologies and zines. Don’t be the overaggressive d-bag auto-Tweeting twenty times a day about something nobody cares about. There is no formula, of course. Some folks got it in higher doses than others, and no amount of jumping in front of the camera is going to make people photogenic.

Mark DC ‏@FilmCriticOne Okay, here is one: would publishing a book, even if sales were weak, help get a screenplay made into movie?

Man, I gotta be honest, I don’t understand the movie business (barely have any grasp on publishing) and what it takes to get something from book to screenplay to onscreen.  In the last ten years I’ve talked to producers, actors, scouts, and a bunch of other folks who were, ostensibly, connected to the movie industry. Sometimes they’ve asked specifically about things we’ve published, and I’ve allowed myself to get excited about possibilities that have ultimately fizzled out. Getting a screenplay turned into a movie takes some next level wizardry that I don’t understand. At all. 

I talk about a lot of things including publishing and writing and charity on my website. www.benjaminleroy.com

BENJAMIN LEROY

I hope everybody is doing well wherever you are. I've been taking questions on Twitter this week to fill up the space on this blog right here. So, that's what you'll get below. And if you've got your own question, leave it in the comment section, and if I have time, I'll get to it.

Also of note--I'd like to give one of you $100 towards the registration fee of the writing conference of your choice. A whole bunch of details about that can be found over on my website www.benjaminleroy.com

Ok! On to the questions!

@JNEWMANWRITING -- What, in your opinion, is the number 1 mistake authors still looking to get their first book published make?

Being in a hurry.

Without having gone through the process before, it’s not hard to understand why some first time novelists feel like the work is done as soon as “The End” has been typed.

It’s unlikely that a book is ready to go to market after a first draft. In fact, I’ve never seen it happen.

Nonetheless, authors are excited to share the work they’ve been chipping away at for months or years, and are in a hurry to reap the cash money rewards that come to all books ever written by anybody. So, before they break out the revision machine, they bust out the SASE and start firing queries off to any publisher who has ever published any book that kinda/sorta is like the author’s.

This is an unsound strategy.

I’ve been publishing books for a dozen years or so. That breaks down to somewhere around a hundred novels. The debut novels I’ve published have been worked, reworked, and reworked again, before ever ending on my desk. After that, even when we’ve accepted things for publications, there’s still another round of hey, did you ever think about doing something like this instead? or hey, this character’s motivation doesn’t really stay consistent between these scenes, can you address?

The authors I’ve been blessed to work with, have done a lot of hard work before I’ve ever seen the book and then are willing to work on it again even after they maybe think they’re done with it.

Writing a book isn’t hard.

Writing a great book is and that's an important part of planting your literary flag. 

It takes time and perspective. It’s not a race. You only get one shot at a debut novel, it behooves you to make sure that novel is the best it can be. If that means a few months away from the book while beta readers go after it, that's ok. If that means you need to write multiple drafts, you aren't the first person. Be as objective as you can in this subjective world.

@MARRIEDWITHDEBT -- I'd like to hear your take on the novella's place in publishing today.

I’ve long been a proponent of a book needing to be as long as it needs to be to tell the story it’s trying to tell. That means that I’ve published books approaching 500 pages. It also means I’ve published books that barely make 150 pages. It used to be (or so I was told repeatedly) that a book needed to be at least 200 pages to be considered a novel. Like many bits of repeated “conventional wisdom” in the publishing industry, I’m not sure where it came from originally.

But, I do know, from having filled out dozens of profit and loss sheets over the years, that a book needs to have a good ratio of production cost compared to cover price. One of the things a publisher has to consider when deciding whether or not he’s going to publish a book is what are that work’s competitive titles and how are they priced? It might cost $.25 less/book to produce a 150 page book than it does for a 200 page book. That’s a good thing. But, if people are expecting to pay a certain price for a 200 page book and you need to charge the same for a 150 page book to keep acceptable margins, you might run into a raised eyebrow from John Q. Consumer. That’s a bad thing.

Further complicating all of this is the EXPLOSION~! of ebooks.

Actually, I think ebooks allow for all kinds of fun experiments in book length. Sure, there are still layout costs and those are based, at least in small part, on book length, but the actual raw materials of book production are not there. It’s easier to keep to margins.

What does that mean for authors? It means, depending on their market expectations, now is a glorious and transformative age that likely embraces the novella more than at any time in the recent past.

@EVANJGREGORY -- Do you think publishers could do more to court self-published successes, and build on their success in bookstores?

I’ll be the first person to raise his hand and say I don’t have any answers, just theories, about how things are going to evolve as it relates to the self-publishing world and its crossover into traditional publishing (every time I utter that phrase, a little part of me dies).

Part of the challenge facing publishers is establishing the veracity of “success.” Numbers, rankings, likes, favorites, reviews, all of these things seem prone to manipulation, some in greater magnitude than others. Until a concrete way of understanding a self-published book’s successes is devised, there’ll likely be some hesitation in making the leap.

Except, there are some folks in positions of power who are afraid of looking like they aren’t on the cutting edge and they’re afraid of being left behind. Those people are going to be prone to jumping in (cannonball, not jackknife) to the available pool. One of them will, no doubt, bust out the checkbook, throw a bunch of zeroes at a self-published project that is “guaranteed” to be a “best seller” that will inevitably fall flat (because that’s a risk across ALL publishing, nobody knows how to guarantee a hit) and then everybody will be gun shy.

For me, the challenge, historically, has been that once a book has come out (in any form), it’s no longer able to be reviewed in the trade publications, and those are a huge part of our process. Those publications (Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, and Kirkus) may have changed their policies and/or make exceptions for special cases, but I haven’t updated my thinking.

With all of the other day-to-day tasks in front of a publisher (at least one of our smallish stature), I’m not sure who would look around for self-publishing successes. I keep pretty good tabs on what’s going on elsewhere, but I’ve got an inbox full of queries from agents and others that nearly overwhelms me just thinking about it. It’d be one more thing.

Does that mean I’m going to possibly lose out on working with a super awesome self-published author who has a book that I would love to pieces? Certainly a possibility and one that I’m comfortable with at this point.

I believe we’re still in a transitional phase and the future hasn’t settled. I’m doing ok right now doing the things I’ve always done, and I’m not much for jumping just because some dude next to me is jumping. He catches a fish, I’ll give him a high five. He breaks his neck, I’ll send him a card. Either way, I’m just going to hang out on the bridge a little bit longer.

@MCVLADIE -- How do you find a good editor and/or is it standard to submit your work with professional editing? Doesn't publisher do this?

Excellent question.

I’ve got no scientific evidence to back up my first claim, so either trust me or don’t when I tell you that in the last fifteen years there has been a marked increase of freelance editors available to authors. Some of them are qualified. Others, err, not so much.

One problem authors encounter while trying to separate “good editors” from “other options” is that anybody, anywhere, at any time can hang a shingle outside his/her door and say, “I’m an editor now. And I’m available to read your book for money.”

There’s no test to take. No license to acquire. The barrier of entry to the editing market is non-existent.

Things you might ask editors when you’re trying to sort them.

(1) Can I have a list of books/authors you’ve worked with in the past? If you know the names and know something about the particulars, great! If you don’t yet, you might invest in a book or two (if available) and see what you think about how it reads. If no books are available and the names don’t mean anything to you, well, I ain’t saying it’s necessarily a dead end, but I’d definitely turn on my high beams before stepping on the gas pedal.

(2) Do you have any relevant experience in the publishing world? There are plenty of people with real world publishing experience who are available to edit your book. My old colleague, Alison Dasho, before starting her new job at Amazon this week, was doing freelance editing work. Although she couldn’t guarantee anybody a publishing contract anywhere, she does have extensive experience with getting books ready for the market, as she has been doing editing in the publishing industry for more than a decade. There are other Alisons in the world (and I've got a list of some if anybody needs one).

I’ve seen some freelance editors cite their love of reading books as, essentially, their sole qualification for being an editor. This is a super dicey proposition. Theoretically, everybody editing books loves reading. I love playing softball, but I shouldn’t be giving Major League (or Minor League) baseball players tips on how to properly field the shortstop position.

That’s my answer to the first part of your question. Now to the second, and this is one that gets brought up quite a bit at the writing conferences I attend.

Phrased differently—If Publishers aren’t going to do any editing, just what do they even do?

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been a part of the publication of approximately 100 novels. Every single one of them has been through in house editing (editing done at Bleak House or Tyrus). But it should also be noted that when we agreed to publish them (by signing contracts and paying advances), they were already in excellent shape. In most, if not all of those cases, the book was polished and edited by the author (and in some cases, the author’s agent). Books had been through multiple drafts.

Some of those authors worked with writing groups. Some of them used beta readers they’ve learned to trust. Some of them worked closely with his/her agent.

The important thing I want to highlight is that somebody, besides the author, went over the book to provide feedback, make notes, gently tear things to pieces, etc. Not all aspiring authors have connections to helpful critique groups or beta readers, and may seek the advice/opinion of a freelance editor.

Does a publisher expect an author to have necessarily paid for a professional editor to go over the book? No. But a publisher is only going to consider works that already meet a minimum threshold of quality. We don’t care how an author gets there, but it’s necessary they’ve arrived.

And then the publisher will get out a box of red pens and start the process anew...

Ok, that's it for this week. Seriously though, if you're even thinking about going to a writing conference, you should stop by my website and leave a comment because I'm giving somebody $100 towards the registration fee of the conference of his/her choice. Why? Because, among other things, I want to dispel myths and fears about the publishing industry and I want you to become friends with other people on similar paths.

www.benjaminleroy.com

BENJAMIN LEROY

Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have seen a little meltdown I had yesterday afternoon. I’m all better now. Thank you for your concern. For those of you who don’t or who have learned to tune me out, I was tres bent out of shape by the over and unqualified usage of the term “bestseller” and how often it pops up in author bios.  A few deep breaths and everything got better.

Anyway, on an unrelated note, baseball season is almost upon us and I, for one, am eagerly awaiting opening day. I’m a fan of the game, especially its history (the company was even named after one of the great specters of Major League Baseball’s past).

Because last week I talked your ear off about the history of the company and my own history in the publishing world, I figured I’d go brief this week and talk a little baseball. To that end, I’d like to list the three best Hall of Fame outfielders of all-time.

(1) Ty Cobb – I named the company after the guy. He was a fierce competitor, driven by family ghosts, and so singularly focused on winning that he left behind an indelible legacy. When he retired he held all kinds of records. Most important stats .366 lifetime batting average, 897 stolen bases, and 4189 hits.

(2) Ted Williams—another malcontent, another fierce competitor, and another guy that hit everything that got thrown at him. Also, the dude served in WWII and the Korean War during his baseball career, and not as an entertainer playing exhibition baseball games on base far away from conflict, but as a fighter pilot. In addition to being awarded a variety of commendations from the United States Government, he finished with a lifetime batting average of .344, 521 homeruns, and 1839 RBI. Baseball fans will always wonder what the stat line would have looked like if he hadn’t served.

(3) Jeff Taylor—the guy was a three time MVP during the years 2003-2006 and had a .453 career average. Nearly 100 points better than Cobb.

So there you go, Play Ball!, and all of that. I’m really looking forward to baseball season this year (as I always am), even though my beloved Chicago Cubs, on paper, don’t stand much of a chance this year. Oh well, I just love the game...wait...what? You’ve never heard of Jeff Taylor? You don’t remember him being a three time MVP?

Oh.

I think I see the source of your confusion.

You assumed, because I said the three best Hall of Fame outfielders of all-time that I was talking about Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.

But  I wasn’t.

Because Jeff Taylor was a high school baseball player in the Woodhaven, Michigan area. I got his stats from his former school district’s website. And I was like, “Damn! Dude hit .453. Cobb only hit .366. Both guys are Hall of Famers, therefore Jeff Taylor has earned the same distinction as Cobb.”

Rightly, you reject that logic. To be inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame requires that you excel at the highest level of the game known to man. To be inducted into the Gibralter School District Sports Hall of Fame requires...something else.

And now I’m back to this issue of people slapping “Best Selling Author!” on their author bio when the only argument you can make is through very squinted eyes when you’re looking at a sub-category on Kindle’s hyper specific best-selling list, sometimes in categories that have very limited competition.

“Look ma! I’m #4 on the Mysteries and Crime Fiction --> Iowa setting --> Corn based whodunit --> Tractor mysteries!”

Yeah, sorry, that doesn’t count.

It’s deceitful and self-aggrandizing and just as shitty as the bulk of Saturday morning television ads for toys that don’t hold up to scrutiny (damn you, Hotwheels). I understand the marketplace is really tough and some book promotion person has told you to tout yourself as a “best-selling author,” but that term has meant something, either implicitly or explicitly, for years. It has meant that a book has popped up on a publication such as the New York Times or Publishers Weekly or USA Today’s list.

Can that system be rigged? Certainly. But it gives a general sense of a book’s popularity. Can the Kindle list be gamed? You betcha. And a lot easier than the publications above. And since nobody really knows what Amazon sales ranks translate to, knowing a book has made the Kindle best-seller list is vague at best. It certainly, at this point, draws no parallel credibility to that of placement on the other lists does.

The logical way this plays out is that every author trying to jam a foot in the door will figure out how he/she qualifies as a “best seller” and every book will be written by a “best-selling author!” and what is now a non-specific, semi-confusing term will become meaningless altogether.

Jeff Taylor doesn't sit down next to Ozzie Smith and Cal Ripken at autograph signings saying, "For $20 you can get your picture taken with me, Hall of Fame baseball player, Jeff Taylor." If he did, you'd say he was being absurd and you'd point out the whole Gibraltar School District Hall of Fame isn't anywhere near the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.  

It’s this kind of noise and static that will ultimately push potential readers away because they’re going to feel as though authors are trying to manipulate them.  One more self-perpetrated injury in the quest for a bigger audience.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game...

b.

For less surly ramblings about the world and publishing, visit my website www.bejaminleroy.com

BENJAMIN LEROY

So, at some point here, I’m going to write this big manifesto about publishing that will no doubt get whispered about on the internet for the next fifteen years, but for right now, I’m back with another Q&A session. Is it lazy? Sure. Maybe. But maybe there are questions here that you’ve been afraid to ask, so maybe you shouldn’t be too judgmental.

(1) Does an author need to be all up in the social media hive? Twitter, Facebook, etc. (@zbarnes)

  This is definitely a question that I’m going to be addressing in the Big Manifesto, but my short answer here is...no. I want to tell you more. I want to discuss this at great length, but for right now, I’m just going to say, no, an author does not need to be all up in the social media hive.

(2) What makes the Big Message so hard to articulate? (@seanchercover)

When an author—actually, let me expand this—when people have something that is buzzing around their insides that they want to share with the rest of the world, there’s an added stress to make sure you get it right. The mistake is in thinking that proper articulation (finding the right words) is the only necessary component.

It’s not.

There’s also body language, use of exclamation points, ability to be heard, and about a million other things at play. The words are important, yeah, but they are not everything.

I know that probably sounds like something I shouldn’t give voice to on account of me making a living by selling words, but the truth is the truth and I can’t dispute it here and try to peddle it somewhere else as gospel.

Anyway, back to the question about the Big Message. It turns out some people don’t believe in the Big Message. To them, life is a series of 30 minute episodes with no story arc. Things happen. People laugh. People cry. Special guests appear for an episode. Some stick around (Cousin Oliver being the prime example). Other times there are very special episodes and those usually involve a tragedy.

But there is no arc.

Therein lies one of the problems of articulating a Big Message—you have to convince, subtly, and without a hammer, those people who aren’t inclined to believe in Big Messages that there is, in fact, a Big Message without being written off as a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, loud mouth who is madly in love with the sound of his own voice.

Then again, there are others who believe in the Big Message. Those two can be broken down into two categories.

(1) The Know-it-All. Not only does the Know-it-All believe in the Big Message, but he/she knows the Big Message and isn’t afraid to tell you about it and criticize you for not believing or call you stupid for believing something else.

(2) Then there’s the Socrates school (the wisest among us know nothing) of people who are searching for the Big Message. Really looking. Behind rocks. Under the carpet. In the stars. In the laughter of strangers. On the open stretch of highway connecting every goddamn town I’ve ever...they’ve ever driven down. Sometimes the Big Message feels like it’s in your hand, but you don’t dare open your hand because you’re afraid that as soon as you pry your fingers apart it will float away like so much campfire smoke. And sometimes, with that message in hand, you’d like to gather everybody around for show and tell, but you are deathly afraid of opening up that paw of yours and only seeing the lifelines delicately carved into your palm.

Ok, (this has gone on entirely too long, and for that I apologize, sincerely, but also, I persist) now that we’ve narrowed down the three general approaches to the Big Message, you can see why it’s hard to articulate. If you aren’t afraid of being called a pretentious asshole by one group you’re worried about being told you’re wrong by another. And adding to all of that, you aren’t even entirely sure what you’ve got, because you’re afraid to really give it the once over, and in most cases, doubt you can hold onto it long enough to even look.

And that, friend, is the answer to that.

Love,

b.

I ramble even more over on my website http://www.benjaminleroy.com