Looking for a concise guide to publishing, self and traditional

Alchemist

Alchemist

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I know this has been discussed many times before, which is part of the problem. There are so many threads to wade through--and I'll probably wade through them anyway--so many interviews, blogs, etc. What I'm looking for is "the best," or at least a good and concise guide to publishing, with perhaps an emphasis on self-publishing, that covers all the basics, such as:

*(Both) Pros and cons of self-publishing vs. traditional publishing
*(Both) Marketing, cons, etc
*(Both) What to do as an author - website, blog, etc
*(Self) Advice on how to do the physical work - what programs/sites/etc to use, how to find artists, etc
*(Trad) To Agent or not to agent

Etc. I realize that, in the end, I'll probably just have to wade through all of what is out there, but if you have specific recommendations that you think are especially helpful, please point the way.

Thanks!
 
Hmmm, you might want to go look at The Book Designer's website. He might have a book out there that covers all that...maybe.
 
If you're looking for that magic formula, there isn't one. Luck, timing, networking, and talent seem to be the keys these days. Really, as far as publishing choices, it'll come down to how long you want to wait, and what your expectations are. Do yourself a favor. Find a SF/F or Comic Con convention that will have authors in it. Go to the writing panels. If an author has a table, head over and talk to them. See how they do things.
 
I'm not as much looking for a magic formula, but rather a set of guidelines and factors to keep in mind, even a step-by-step process. I found an article by Michael J Sullivan that helped in that regard, but will continue looking.
 
Alchemist said:
I know this has been discussed many times before, which is part of the problem. There are so many threads to wade through--and I'll probably wade through them anyway--so many interviews, blogs, etc. What I'm looking for is "the best," or at least a good and concise guide to publishing, with perhaps an emphasis on self-publishing, that covers all the basics, such as:

*(Both) Pros and cons of self-publishing vs. traditional publishing
*(Both) Marketing, cons, etc
*(Both) What to do as an author - website, blog, etc
*(Self) Advice on how to do the physical work - what programs/sites/etc to use, how to find artists, etc
*(Trad) To Agent or not to agent

Etc. I realize that, in the end, I'll probably just have to wade through all of what is out there, but if you have specific recommendations that you think are especially helpful, please point the way.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

The problem is, Alchemist, that you keep asking for a set of instructions that all authors can follow which first off, does't exist, and second off, will not work for every author. I know you're just trying to gather information to make good choices. But "good" is going to be about what works for you specifically. Authors in general can only talk about what worked and did not work for them, and quite often, they don't actually understand industry practices and can attribute success to the wrong factors.

So there is a fair amount of confusion out there, even with helpful people, so I don't blame you for having confusion. There are books out there but they aren't always comprehensive or effective for a lot of fiction authors. (The book publishing industry is not of interest to most people and so is seldom written about.) Some of the better ones are now rather dated in the electronic age. A lot of the ones on self-publishing unfortunately seem to think they are selling Amway or starting a cultural religious revolution and gild the lily, let's say. Even when it's very business based, it can be problematic. Kameron Hurley just wrote a good article on her blog on publishers trying to tie down authors on licenses in terms of contract terms, but while the bulk of the article is correct, she got details wrong. So what's "best" varies and you will still have to wade through it.

You are dealing with a business that is about people, that is a mix of creative and resourceful mixed with slow and clunky, that has a customer base that hates advertising and does not treat fiction products like other products, nor regards reading fiction as a social status purchase, that has insane business practices even in the electronic and self-pub areas that you won't find anywhere else, has little in money and large growth, but a great deal in resiliency because the people who love fiction really love it.

I will happily agree to answer here any specific question you have about agents including agent contracts, publishers and how fiction publishing works with their licensing, contract issues with partner publishers, how self-publishing contracts/relationships with vendors are different from licensing partnerships, subsidiary rights issues, how conventions work, and whatever I can remember of things authors have done to market works. And others will chime in too, as they've been doing. And Mike has a whole bunch of articles on the physical side of self-publishing that will probably be helpful there.

Ultimately, no matter how much info you gather, you will have to make decisions about what it is that you want to personally do and experiment, because much of fiction publishing in any form requires slogging and waiting. Self-publishing can end up very effective, but it becomes effective the same way partner publishing does, which is through word of mouth. Self-publishing is still building its infrastructure. The physical production infrastructure is pretty much in place, both print and electronic. The marketing/distribution infrastructure in electronic got sat on and stunted by Amazon wanting to keep their monopoly, but that may change and Amazon can still be effective for distribution. The print self-pub infrastructure has remained a bit clunky. The media and community infrastructure for self-publishing is still developing -- reviews, publication notifications, author interviews, etc., and that's why the hybrid authors are having the most success right now -- they can get the word out on both partner and self publish products through older channels.

But even in that imperfect, flooded market, it can act a lot like the magazine market did in the past (and still does on a much smaller scale today,) which is let authors build a body of smaller work for sale and/or visibility that then may lead to bigger sales and partner deals and multiple mediums. So one of the things you may need to look at is not ruling anything out unless it is simply something that is not going to work for your personal circumstances and needs.
 
Thanks, KatG -- I always appreciate your engagement and knowledge.

To respond to your post, at this point I'm not ruling anything out. I find self-publishing appealing because, in rough order A) retaining creative control (everything from editing to art and even font used), B) higher percentage of sales go directly into my pocket, and C) faster schedule (I've read about horror stories in which trad publishers sit on a book for years). I find traditional publishing appealing because, in no particular order, A) a sense of validation and accomplishment, B) seeing my book in an actual store, C) letting someone else deal with the nitty-gritty, and D) higher quality printing.

There are probably other reasons, but those are what came to mind.

While I still have some work to do on my book, it is getting down to the wire; I would say maybe another 1-3 months before I feel that it is ready to...do something with it. So I'm past the hypothetical stage that I've been in for years, decades really since the dream first arose in my mind in high school. Ten years ago I would have never considered self-publishing (the dreaded "vanity press") but now it seems like a much more viable option.

One self-published author just told me via email correspondence that it is a LOT of work, which is of course daunting but also thrilling in that I like the idea of being involved with the entire process and guiding the ship. I also take seriously Michael Sullivan's advice that once you finish the first book, focus 90% of your time and energy on writing the second book (especially if you're writing a series, which I am), because it will be important to build up a body of work to "feed" to readers (my word, not his).

I appreciate your offer to answer questions. I suppose my biggest question at this point is to what degree can I approach BOTH avenues right out the gate? In other words, can I self-publish AND shop my novel around? While I'm at it, is it really such a bad thing to submit work to more than one publisher (or agent) at a time? I never really got that. It seems like an author should try to leverage any way possible. Waiting patiently for each agent or publisher to say no seems like shooting oneself in the foot.

A secondary question is whether the conventional wisdom still holds that an agent is a good idea if going the traditional route. When I first started reading about publishing, maybe 20 years ago, the big book at the time was Orson Scott Card's, and I remember him hammering home the "need" for an agent. Does this still hold water?

Another question is about blogs and websites. I'm dabbling with putting one together and am looking at Wix, Weebly, Wordpress, and Blogger. Is there a "go-to" platform for SFF authors? I'd like a platform that I can both blog as well as put up sample chapters and other "freebies," that is fairly easy to use and versatile, but has a lot of nice theme options. I know: I want it all.

A final question is, what are (rough) current advance ranges for first novels from big publishers (e.g. Tor, DAW) vs. small publishers (e.g. Pyr)? Last I heard, big publishers usually offer in the $4-7k range; I'm guessing small publishers half that or less.

I've got tons more questions, but those are some of the main ones floating around in my head. Thanks!
 
Alchemist said:
When I first started reading about publishing, maybe 20 years ago, the big book at the time was Orson Scott Card's, and I remember him hammering home the "need" for an agent. Does this still hold water?
Click to expand...
Not with the small presses it doesn't. Agents still help, but aren't necessary. Rejection rate is still the same as the bigger houses, so you still need to be at the top of your game with submissions.
 
LOL, well I did ask for that, didn't I? Okay, let's do some word vomit, but I'm going to have to do this in stages over the weekend. :) I'll tackle self-publishing set-up first:

The biggest problem is that most authors, even some very successful authors, have mistaken understandings of what they are and how they are actually operating. They look at it wrong, essentially. Authors who are trying to sell creative work are not people -- they are businesses. They are sole proprietorships, although some authors actually incorporate themselves for tax purposes. (Most authors starting off don't have to do that, though.) As a business, the product of the author is a creative intellectual property in the form of written texts. This intellectual property can then be made into a variety of products -- print books, e-books, audio books, plays, movies, games, etc. The author business has to decide how it's going to turn its creative property into salable products, which type of products, how it's going to handle the labor and time involved in producing products, how widely it will attempt to distribute the products, and the costs involved in the raw materials and labor in producing, distributing and marketing the products to produce hopefully sufficient profit, or, if profit is not the main goal which is an unusual aspect of some author businesses, sufficient dispersal into the world for other goals.

In self-publishing, authors add a second business to their creative property business. They become both an author creating property and a publisher producing product from that property. The author takes on all the labor of that second business and all the costs of doing that labor and hiring others to do the labor if that can be afforded in initial investment outlay. The author is responsible for production, distribution, and all marketing. The author's second business, the publishing business, becomes the equivalent of a small press with only one author on the list and only one staff member (the author) and maybe some free-lancers. So the author does have all the control over not just the creative property (first business,) but the products that are made from it that are not licensed out (second business.) And the author like a publisher gets profits after all the labor and other costs have been deducted. But the author has to pay all that labor and costs, including up-front costs, and taxes. The author has to find vendors and distribution channels, etc. Authors self-publishing, since they are often doing the work themselves, tend to discount their own labor as free. But it's not free because the labor spent in the second business cuts into the ability to do labor in the first business (writing,) and to do other labor (such as a day job,) that provides income that provides capital for the second business (publishing.) That labor has a cost, mainly in time but often also in income terms.

So the assessment isn't really about partner publishing versus self-publishing, which is really about how the product is getting to market. It's about whether an author starting a first business (writing,) wants and is able to take on the labor, costs, time and market factors of being a small publisher (second business) with only one offering, or not. For some authors, because of their natural inclinations, work experience and current life considerations, self-publishing is ideal. These authors make excellent small presses that sometimes even become medium presses of just one author or take on other authors in licensing. For other authors, it's a nightmare they aren't really capable of exploiting very well. And life circumstances change, so an author may be able to do it sometimes and not others. And it is possible to run both a small self-press for some properties turned into products and do license publishing on other properties (hybrid authors.)

So we have authors who were license published setting up self-presses for some or all of their properties. And we have self-press authors who close down their self-press business and switch to license publishing reprint and original because the costs and labor involved with running the self-press cut into their first business too much and/or does not achieve the business goals they want for their first business. I should also point out here that technically, Mike Sullivan is not entirely a self-publisher. His wife created a small press that carried more than just him as an author. He was involved in the operations of that small press, but he had more labor help by that set-up than most self-publishing authors do. Likewise, the author of Eragon was published not by himself but through a small press operated by his parents, who then did the labor of a small press for him. So there are half-way set-ups here also available that people have done. Self-publishing thus offers many options but also involves a great deal of work. How much work an author can invest (or hire as outside labor,) varies greatly and that's the big deciding factor in how you proceed -- what are you going to spend your non-writing time on and how grand a scope are you going to attempt.

In self-publishing, the development of a viable regular e-fiction market that was not just niche allowed self-presses way easier distribution and the ability to low price products and do short property products. But the reality is that individual self-publishing authors with just one property creator don't have a lot of business leverage in that market and much less exposure. And unfortunately, Amazon squelched competition from other e-vendors as much as they could to hold a monopoly, especially with small presses and self-presses. So the e-market has gotten backed up and limited, though there are hopes that it can expand vendors in future. And for a lot of self-pub authors, Amazon alone can be sufficient distribution, depending on their circumstances. Once established, Amazon and some of the other bigger vendors pressured self-pubs to raise their product prices or face bigger marketing fees from the vendors (their "cut".) They offered options that were helpful to some authors but also bound those authors more to just working with Amazon.

This combination of few e-vendors in the English language market, consequently slowing the building of marketing infrastructure such as review media outlets, and price/cost pressures, has caused many self-press authors to also go into short-run and POD print editions to one degree or another. It is difficult to get such print products into bookstores and stores because a lone author can't necessarily offer the marketing and distribution terms the booksellers want. But the self-pub authors can do fairly well with selling print through online channels, and so we're going to see more of this going on, as well I expect as collectives where several self-pub authors band together as a small press offering several authors and being able to get good distributors for them and more into stores. That was happening in print self-pub even before the e-book market was opened up.

In electronic self-publishing distribution, the self-press makes distribution and sales contracts with e-book vendors such as Amazon. These are not the same as contracts with publishers at all. They are vendor contracts. E-book vendors are under no obligations except to produce workable formats for their platforms and letting self-press authors sell through those platforms for cost fees (their "cut,") and do accounting of sales, same as is done with small presses. They have no exclusive production rights over the author's creative property or exploitation of such as products. They can demand marketing requirements for selling through their platform, but that gives them no real claim to license rights. The e-book vendors deduct their fees from the sales and then pass on the gross sales to the self-press, which then deducts further labor, production and marketing costs and gets net profits that go to the author.

The problem the e-book market has had is that e-book vendors like Amazon are misrepresenting and lying about these sales contracts, pretending when convenient to self-pub authors that they are like publishing license contracts. Instead of calling the money they give to the authors gross sales, they call them royalties, as if they had been given a license of rights by the author. Consequently, thousands of authors in the U.S. alone are filing their taxes for their sole proprietorships incorrectly, not taking the business tax deductions they could take because they are filing the sales as royalties. This pisses me off and I'd like to see the big self-pub authors pressure Amazon and e-book vendors to cut it out, but I do understand that they don't want to piss off Amazon by trying it. Amazon gets a lot of PR out of playing that game, so they won't stop doing it. So we have a lot of self-pub authors who keep comparing Amazon to Macmillan or Random House as if they were the same companies with the same relationships, which becomes faulty data for decisions about how to conduct their self-press business. It causes a lot of problems and if you self-pub, you really need to be aware of what it is you are actually doing, so that financially you can alleviate your costs as much as possible and produce more profit on your unit sales, and make smart choices about how you do business with e-book vendors like Amazon or iBooks.

The strategy that Mike mentioned is one that a lot of self-pub authors attempt and which publishers also sometimes use in print as well in wrangling with booksellers (serial publishing.) The idea is two-fold: 1) create a mass which tricks potential readers into believing the author is bigger with a bigger fan base than they have (like a bird puffing out plumage;) and 2) in SFF and fields like romance, to satisfy core fan readers who tend to be voracious readers and if they like your stuff, will plow through it at whatever speed you can throw it at them. These core readers are then great at spreading word of mouth, which is why we have category markets in the first place.

So that's the self-pub side, or part of it anyway.
 
License or partner publishing gets called traditional publishing, which is silly as it is no more traditional than self-publishing and self-publishing was first. If an author decides to try and license publish, the author creates a different second business, a marketing business, in which the author markets the creative property to potential licensing partners. The author owns the text of the creative property and all rights to exploit it into products (copyright.) As the owner, the author can grant a license to a business to exclusively exploit/use the property to make certain kinds of products (authorize the business to use the licensed material as the rights holder.) In a licensing agreement, the business does not buy the rights in the property or the creative property itself, just the production license. The author remains the owner of the creative property and its rights of licensing and controls it, but the business is the owner of the product that is created involving the property under its authorized license and controls everything involved with that.

So if an author licenses a creative property to a film studio for dramatic rights, the author retains ownership of the creative property text, but the film studio owns the film made from it and controls every element of production, distribution, marketing, pricing etc. Likewise, if the author grants the license for book production to a publisher, the author retains ownership and control of the text and its subsidiary rights to license or exploit, but the publisher owns the book products made from the text and thus controls every element of production, distribution, most marketing, and pricing, etc. of those products. The author grants the publisher the exploitation right and in return, the publisher handles all the costs and labor of their product, and sometimes the marketing costs of the author working with them (book tour,) and of distributing including shipping and cloud storage, marketing, accounting, etc.

At no time does this licensing agreement make the author an employee or independent contractor of the publisher (or film studio, etc.) The author does not work for the licensee. The author licenses to the licensee, creating a limited business partnership. (Book packagers being involved in the equation creates a different set up of partnership relationships, which we don't have to go into unless people want to.) The rights of exploitation licensed to the licensee are limited to what is stated in the contract, under the terms of the contract. Specifically, the particular products allowed to be made or further licensed by the licensee to other licensees (subsidiary rights,) are listed, and the geographical/economic territory in which the products can be sold under the license are negotiated and agreed upon in the contract. There is also the term of license -- the agreed upon authorization. For books this is copyright which is pretty long, for film it's forever and for certain products such as sometimes audio books it may be a set number of years.

The author has the contractual responsibility to deliver to the publisher the creative property (text) in a form editorially satisfactory to the publisher so that the publisher can produce it into a product the publisher thinks it can sell. The author also has the responsibility to review the publishers' page proofs for errors to make sure the text property is correct, to cooperate with the publisher in the production process, and to assist in promotion of the products the publisher produces and sells, sometimes at the publisher's expense or at the author's as part of the author's creative property business. The author also has the requirement of not undercutting the potential financial worth of the license granted. The publisher has the responsibility to produce the products licensed within a contractually specified time period after delivery of the creative property, to not alter the creative property (text) beyond their authorization, and to pay the author their licensing fees from the sales of the product (royalties specified in the contract.) The author gets paid first, before the publisher deducts its costs and taxes, but after vendors have deducted their fees and cuts, (which is something that greatly affects how publishers price books, which people seem to forget.) The publisher is obligated to properly account for the author's licensing fees from the sales of the products (which are sold via different accounting systems,) and provide statements thereof and pay the author the licensing fees on a regular schedule.

If the publisher mis-estimates how well the product will sell and/or cost to produce and distribute, and loses money on the products, that's the publisher's problem. Likewise, if a film fails, that's the film studio's problem, not the author's. The investment gamble is the licensee's risk; the author gets paid what was agreed upon for the license authorization, including the proportion of what sales there are (the royalties.) Larger publishers may provide an author with an advance against estimated royalties from the product sales. Essentially, they pay a portion of the author's agreed upon licensing fees up front, as an investment, before there are any sales. They do so in order to get the author to be willing to grant them the license over other publishers and to fund the author while the author is completing the final creative property for them, so that they are more likely to get the final creative property. This advance usually gets confused in the media as a sales price, instead of what it is, a licensing fee.

The publisher estimates what the advance should be on the basis of what they think the book product is likely to make the author in licensing fees from sales, of what they can afford to pay up front from the funding they get from the sales of other books, and of what they decide they are going to risk to get the license over other publishers who might want it. (In a book auction for the licensing rights with several publishers competing in rounds, a publisher may end up offering a bigger advance than originally planned.) The advance is paid in stages, usually with a first payment on the signing of the contract. Authors may get portions of the advance after the book is published and out for sale, but they usually get a portion before that.

If the book product doesn't sell a single copy, the author is still contractually entitled to receive the full advance contracted from the publisher as the license fee. The publisher eats the loss if they guessed wrong or mess up sales. If the book sells, the publisher is not obligated to pay the author any more licensing fees (royalties) until the amount of the royalties equals the full advance being paid out to the author. If a book product generates more royalties, including subsidiary rights licensing fees, than the advance, the author has "earned out" the advance and subsequent royalty monies are paid out to the author on the regular schedule.

Because of the financial capital involved in floating the advance to the author, with the potential of additional loss, most smaller publishers do not pay advances. Instead, they just account the royalties from sales and pay the authors the royalties on the regular schedule. Pyr, however, is not a small press. It's a medium sized press and pays advances. Obviously, the bigger a press, the bigger an advance they can venture. In a book auction for a hot title, Pyr likely won't be able to beat Tor or Harper Voyager. But Pyr might find a title that blows up, which Pyr then can also sub-license as paperback to a larger house and to other country territories if they have those territories as part of their license. A lot of medium and small press publishers get a good chunk of their income from this sort of sub-license, which allows them to then take on new authors.

This is again why you should not be contemptuous of any best-selling author, especially one on your publisher's list, because they provide the capital by which publishers can gamble on unknown and lesser known authors. This is also why the mid-list tends to get squeezed -- they're in that middlish advance range where if they don't earn out, it's a problematic loss for the publisher and unlike newbies can't be paid a small advance. Because they aren't new, it's hard to get them media coverage and bookseller interest in stocking (both welcome debuts as new product.) But because they aren't bestsellers or only just category bestsellers, advertising won't be as effective as it is for bestsellers to make up the lack. So whenever a publisher has its own financial squeeze or there's an economic downturn like a recession, the mid-listers get dropped from the lists. The booksellers aren't as friendly to them, and they have to show growth in their sales; the worse the economy, the more growth they have to show. Which is why even if you self-pub a book or get a license deal, it's just the start of things.

The answer to your advance question, Alchemist, is that it depends. The average range of SFF advances, when there is an advance is still $2,000-$7,000 and has been for a very long time. That's because fiction doesn't sell as well as non-fiction and is much more unpredictable on sales estimates. Category publishers do most of their publishing in mass market paperback, the margins are very slim, and so the advances for books sold in the category markets are less, usually, than SFF titles sold in the general fiction market. The bigger publishers do have a basic line that they don't go below, because they can float the money. If a book is well-received by a publisher or publishers, then it may get considerably more than that basic range. But those are few, obviously, and usually involve agents and book auctions and a whole lot of luck. Foot in the door deals are usually what first timers get, and then they try to build an audience from there.

So in a license publishing situation, the author has their first business (writing creative property,) and a second business (marketing that property for license to licensees.) That second business has a fair amount of cost and time to it too, although less cost than it used to have because of electric online submissions. But if an author gets a license deal, the licensee takes on all the costs and labor of making the product and launching it into the market, with the author then incurring some promotional costs in addition to production costs for creating the property. It's wider distribution in more channels, and if the author gets an advance, it's money up front that can't be taken away, which funds the first writing business. It's not necessarily less work, depending on the circumstances, but it means that if an author doesn't have the time and skill sets to be their own publisher effectively, they get a company to do it in return for giving up specific controls through the terms of the license, which can give them more time to devote to the writing business. But there are downsides, there can be problems, no guarantees, etc.

So it's important when you are talking to authors who are licensing, self-pressing or both, that you ask concrete questions about actual financial costs and time spent in labor and what kind, to find what is going to work for you or not. And hopefully the authors are honest about it, because sometimes they aren't. But no author is obligated, obviously, to discuss their personal financial factors with you or provide you with assistance in getting published.

I'll tackle websites, agents and marketing business-publishing business balancing acts over the weekend.
 
Thanks, KatG. My first response: more, please! ;-) But take your time. I really, really appreciate the time you're putting into this.

I'll start with a response to your self-publishing post, and then the next one later.

To sum up one of your major points, what I hear you saying is that self-published authors frequently make the mistake of not realizing that they themselves are the business, and that self-publishing--unlike trad publishing--involves two distinct "sub-businesses," the creative (writing) component, and the business (publishing) component. An author who wants to self-publish must understand just how much work the "second business" involves.

This would imply that a self-published author has to be willing and able to take on the "second business," whether collaboratively (spouse, other authors, etc), or individually. This involves a good news/bad news. The good news is not only the obvious one of creative control, but a greater ability to impact outcome. Traditional publishing seems like much more of a crap-shoot, everything from getting past the slush-pile to whether or not your book becomes popular. Self-publishing, on the other hand, is largely--or at least more so--driven by the authors hard work in terms of marketing, networking, etc.

The bad news of that aspect of the "second business" is all the work that it entails, much of which most authors aren't really qualified for. Some of it can be learned, but some of it is very difficult for many authors.

On the other hand, I don't see why a traditionally published author can't be more proactive with marketing and networking, even though they're not self-publishing. In other words, whether or not one is being self-published or not, in the current context of media technologies and the internet, an author can have a hand in their success (or, in some cases, lack thereof!) through savvy use of online venues. To be honest, I'm surprised that more authors don't have, for example, Youtube channels, podcasts, etc.

It may be that authors think that getting a book contract solves all their problems, which I imagine is a bit of a trap. "I'll just let them take care of everything for me."

This makes me think that every author, at least those other than the Big Names, should act as if they are self-publishing and take at least part of the "second business" into hand.

A quick question re: Amazon. Are you saying that if one publishes through Kindle/Amazon, they can't publish elsewhere? Also, do self-published authors through Amazon required to report their taxes as royalties, or can they report them as other forms of income, and it is just that Amazon is being sketchy about it so authors don't realize how they should be reporting?
 
Just read the follow-up on partner publishing, which answered or adjusted some of the views and questions in my response.

For instance, in my response I eventually came to the place where a licensed author still has a second business, it just doesn't involve the actual publishing. So from what I gather, there are three basic areas or businesses, with authors being involved as follows:

creative (writing): Self and Licensed
marketing/promotion/networking: Self and Licensed
publishing/distribution: Self

Is that basically correct? The author is involved in the first two in both cases, but only in the actual publishing of the product and its distribution if they self-publish.

I'm guessing you'll touch upon this in your next installment, but I'm thinking that the overall benefit of an agent is optimization of income opportunities? For instance, an agent--I imagine--is much more likely to get your first book into an auction situation, whereas if you selling your book yourself, publisher by publisher, chances are you won't know how to navigate the economic and legal waters.

To be honest, I'm more confused than every about which direction to take. If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said traditional, err, I mean partner publishing. If you had asked me a few days ago, I would have said I'm now veering towards self-publishing. But now I'm really not so sure.

One more question, perhaps that you can fold into your discussion on agents. Is there a self-publishing version of an agent? Meaning, someone you can hire that doesn't take an up-front cost (or at least minimally), but is willing and able to guide and assist you through the process of self-publishing, but makes a percentage off of what you make? Sort of like a "self-publishing coach"?
 
Lol, okay, first off, while they overlap and are connected, marketing and promotion/publicity are two different things (and usually two different departments in big houses.) Marketing is primarily marketing the products to vendors to get them to buy them for stock and stock them in their sales venue -- bookstores, non-bookstores that sell books like Target and Amazon, wholesale resuppliers like Ingram's, jobbers and distributors that supply the wholesale market of newsstands, grocery stores and such. Marketing is where the publisher sales reps come in and publisher catalogs, etc. Some of this works concurrently with publicity/promotion -- co-op advertising arrangements is when the publisher pays for the book vendor to advertise their products (marketing fees) -- an in-store display or table, a bookstore ad in the paper or online that features several titles including the publisher's, algorithms to pop the title up on websites (Amazon makes a ton of money on that one,) and joint events, etc. Some of these marketing issues work with promotion to customers and some of them, like giving vendors bundle discounts, pricing of books, publication scheduling, and various types of returns terms, are not publicity issues.

Promotion involves making the reading public aware that the product exists, is available for sale and of interest. And this is the big problem for fiction, all kinds, because readers are resistant to publicity and promotion of fiction works. They don't like to be advertised to and they mainly ignore ads and promotions for word of mouth recommendations from family, friends and possibly a few reviewers or media folk whose opinions they like and thus trust. They do also browse book-selling vendors for books so the in-house displays (and cover art) can be effective -- which is why book vendors soak publishers for marketing fees for them. Both self-pub and license pub fiction and magazine fiction, etc. rely on word of mouth and no one can control, create word of mouth. This is a very frustrating thing for them. Authors and publishers keep trying to game it -- which is why networking became a buzz word and "branding" at one time, borrowed from other industries. But it remains the same -- word of mouth sells fiction and ads do not generate word of mouth, which, since ads are very expensive, means that publishers don't do a lot of the stuff that other entertainment industries do -- they don't do market research as it is expensive and doesn't help, and they don't do heavy ads or big promotions on most titles. Especially since the majority of fiction novel titles come out in mass market paperback originals that don't even get that many reviews.

So the more an author sells and is well known, the more advertising and promotion the publisher can and will invest in because then it's effective to announce that a new title from the bestselling author is coming out. It becomes worth the cost to pay for an author to book tour, rather than the author touring at their own cost, and so on. And sometimes because they think a new book will be big, they'll gamble on ads and promotion for a newbie to get some attention. But it's very selective because of limited effectiveness and smaller presses don't have the money, so publishers also do targeted advertising -- a SFF title might get ads in SFF media if they think it will be or is big enough. They try to get the book to those likely book buyers listen to and to reviewers. They are mainly just trying to make people aware that the book is there, in hopes that some will read it and spread word of mouth.

If an author is working with a license publisher, the author will be doing almost nothing in marketing and distribution tasks -- the publisher will be doing those since it's part of their license and control of their product and it involves the vendors and financial terms. However, authors do sometimes, especially if they are with a small press, try to get bookstores local to them and such to stock their book and then get the publisher to back them up on that. But on promotion/publicity, authors will be doing 90-50% of promotional work and it depends on the author and what they can afford to do in time and money. And what they do promotionally has to be coordinated with the publisher -- you can't step on what the publisher may be doing. But publishers, especially small presses, are happy to have authors go out and get interviews, reviews, do promotions, tour bookstores, go to conventions or book festivals, etc., in addition to what they may do. If the author comes up with something good, they may throw the author some money for it and borrow the approach for other book promotions. If the author has the money, the author can hire a free-lance publicist, but again the publicist has to work with the publisher's publicity people.

How effective the author's promotional efforts or any promotional efforts are is a long debated point. Networking on social media or appearing at a bookstore or convention may do nothing, but everybody figures it can't hurt to try it to put the word out. Since a lot of online/social media stuff is free, publishers encourage authors to do as much of it as possible. Books that have barely any promotion have become massive hits and books that had extensive publicity investments by the publisher have flopped. Publishers do give a lot of authors time to build up an audience slowly, because most bestsellers are made slowly through steady word of mouth. How much time depends on economic conditions for the economy and the publisher specifically. Booksellers are more impatient and they keep trying to codify it with numbers, like other industries use. The use of BookScan numbers is an attempt to somehow be able to predict who's going to sell for stocking decisions of non-debuts, even though it doesn't work. Bestselling authors do not have consistent sales. A book that's a hit for a bestseller does not mean the next book will be a hit, even if it's in the same series. It's dips and rises.

So you could say that an author who is working through license publication has three businesses -- one: production of creative property (writing,) two: marketing the product to producers (publishers and other types of producers, and frequently to agents to help get to producers,) and three: promotion and publicity work for the licensed publications. That's a lot of work -- authors doing license work do not sit on their butts. For the purposes of accounting and taxes, however, authors in licensing have one business with multiple income streams from licensing to various producers who sell the products made with the property and give the author their licensing cut (royalties.) It is a creative property production business.

The self-press authors have two businesses -- the creative property production business just like the license authors, which includes promotion work which can be deducted as business expenses, and the small press business. As a small (self) press, authors do production, art, pricing, marketing, distribution, promotion, collection of sales monies from vendors, and accounting. The self-pub authors do all the jobs that are done by people in a publisher, the whole thing, plus all their author jobs.

Because the author is promoting just themselves, with no other people having invested in them, they face a client base that is even more publicity resistant than license authors have and even more dependent on word of mouth. Ads are likely to be ignored or drowned in a sea of ads, unless the self-pub author has sold well enough to be known, just like license publishing. Self-pub authors have problems getting reviews because there are too many of them, nobody is paying much attention to them, and the self-pub market doesn't yet have the full marketing infrastructure and media to help them out. Self-pubs have a harder time getting their print books with vendors because there are too many of them but mainly because they can't offer the business terms and discounts booksellers require. They aren't professional businesses most of the time, although local booksellers may be willing to carry local self-pub authors if the product looks okay enough. Online POD sales off-set this, but getting people aware of the books through vendors or online outlets for POD remains difficult.

For e-books, to create a fully viable e-book retail market, Amazon made it easy for self-pubs to hop on in with Amazon as their vendor, made production easy and gave them a break on marketing co-op fees. Now that things are more established, they are giving self-pub authors less of a break on marketing fees. (The battle between the big publishers and Amazon was not over e-book prices -- it was over Amazon wanting bigger co-op marketing fees as their cut.) But it's still a lot easier on production costs and distribution costs than doing print. The main problem is that there are just not a lot of vendors in the English language market. Amazon squashed competition and many possible vendors, mainly tech ones, decided books weren't interesting to them. So that means the bulk of e-book self-pub is awash in the sea of Amazon display. Word of mouth can still spread, which causes a small percentage of books to gain more awareness and Amazon will give free or cheap co-op to the self-pubs still to help that. But the same pyramid shape of sales in license publishing can be found in self-pub -- only it's about seven times as large a group of authors.

If a self-published author works with Amazon, they do not have to go exclusively with Amazon. They can also sell through vendors such as iBooks (Apple,) Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, Smashwords, etc. But Amazon smartly insisted that if you sold an e-book for less at another vendor, Amazon had to have the same price as part of their vendor agreement. In the print world, you can do a special discount sale with one bookseller but not others. But if you try that with say the Nook, Amazon will automatically lower the Kindle price to the same price. And if you wanted to do a free giveaway with another vendor, which e-book self-pub authors use as a promotional strategy to get readers for word of mouth, Amazon will drop your Kindle price to zero. So it gives them price control over the market, as does their insistence that if you price your e-book too high or too low, Amazon gets a really big marketing fee cut of your profits. Amazon has enough potential distribution that many self-pubs just sell on Amazon, since the others are a lot smaller with the squashed market. But it's a big ocean there and dealing with any of the e-book vendors, you have to give up a fair amount of control over your product to be able to sell on their platform, especially with Amazon using a specialized format. And, unlike with publishers and book vendors who negotiate set terms, Amazon and the other e-book vendors can change their terms with self-pub authors any time they want. So these are business factors that can be managed, but authors need to understand them.

Amazon also has programs, such as Kindle Direct, in which self-pub authors agree to sell e-books only with Amazon, and to include their product on Amazon's streaming book service. This can work well for some authors, but it's also caused problems for some authors and the streaming service has caused some of them to lose income and so some have gone back to the regular Kindle program apparently. The electronic market is still evolving, has lost the initial launch momentum and lookey-loos on sales growth, but it has become an established tool that took up some of the lost mass market paperback market that publishers have been dealing with since the wholesale print market shrinkage of the 1990's.

What needs to be perfectly clear is that there is no form of written fiction publishing in which authors do not have to do tons of stuff. But how much stuff is up to the author and involve business decisions of time and money. Authors each have to decide how to run their business and what works for one does not work for all. An author doing hybrid -- as most of them are doing -- is dealing with different types of income and different business factors depending on the product.

If you receive income from self-pub sales, it's sales income, not royalty income. Royalty income is done on a different tax form, reported differently, from sales/service income, and is a fee for an authorizing license, mostly but not always based on unit sales or net receipts of unit sales. However, if Amazon is sending tax forms to self-pub authors (and the copy to the IRS) as royalties, then that would be how the author also has to report the income to the IRS (or other country equivalent tax agency.) But this may mean that authors are missing some business deductions they could take from sales income. So it's a good idea, if you can, if you are self-pubbing or hybrid pubbing, to check with a tax accountant or try to get some info on it. Because when you are acting as a small press (self-press,) you are not licensing from yourself, you are just exploiting your rights, and you don't pay yourself royalty cuts from the net sales. Instead, you just keep the net sales of your press business. So it's different.

A self-pub author may hire freelancers to provide press services, such as a cover artist, editor, publicist, etc. All these are business costs of the self-press and deductible tax-wise. A self-pub author may also be licensing subsidiary rights, including book rights, as well as acting as a press. A self-pub author might do an English-language version of their book and sell it as a self-press in North America and the U.K., etc. but then get interest from a publisher in France and so license the French-language/territory rights to the French publisher to translate and produce. So the self-press author then is a publisher in one territory and a license author in another. Same with audio editions, film adaptations, etc.

We'll have to tackle agents tomorrow. :)
 
Okay, moving on in the panoply of questions to literary agents. Literary agent was a career that developed in the Victorian period (in Britain first,) and early twentieth century because a lot of publishers were bad about reporting sales and paying authors what they were owed (something that continued and can still often happen with small presses.) The bulk of publishing was a type of self-pub, with publishers acting as printer/distributors. Publishers would select which books they would print and thought would sell, but the author would pay for the production and costs. The publishers would distribute and sell the books, also often being the booksellers, take their cuts and give the remainder to the authors. There was also serial publishing in newspapers and magazines, where the author was paid by the word and then the collected serial was published as a book (Dickens,) and the media moguls of these publications often also did books (the beginnings of media corporations.) Businesses developed comic books and paper chapbooks (penny dreadfuls, dime novels.) Authors did plays which were performed and then turned into printed folios or novels. Contracts became more standard and complicated, copyright law developed. Part of publishing started shifting to a license arrangement that we know today with the publisher obtaining an exclusive license contract from the author, paying all costs of distribution and production and paying the author royalties, while other mediums developed different practices and some of the market remained self-pub.

Into all that came the agents, who are free-lance contractors who work for authors in return for a percentage of the authors' earnings. Because their income depends on their authors, agents have to be solicited and convinced to invest their time, contacts and money into working with a particular author/book, and agents can only represent so many authors effectively at a time. Agents act as sales representatives and business managers for authors. They are marketers first off, keeping in contact with publishers and others about what they are looking for, helping authors package and prep submissions and then submitting those to licensees of books and other forms and trying to get them to buy the licenses. Agents negotiate verbal contractual terms that make the initial deal and the terms of the written contract that solidifies the deal, and advise authors on these deals. Agents advocate for authors to get the full publisher support, usually by nagging the editor, the in-house advocate for the book. Agents watch and pressure to make sure that publishers live up to contractual terms, go over royalty statements and get additional sales info from publishers and collect all monies owed to the author. They take their cut and agreed upon expenses reimbursed, and then get the rest to the authors through what are called trust accounts.

They are not in charge of publicity but they do usually try to help and advise authors with some publicity, connect authors to publicity resources, publicize authors as part of their client list, and nag the publisher for every bit of promotion support they can get. They help the author plan out career moves and next projects in line with the authors' personal goals and market factors. They market and negotiate subsidiary rights licenses to publishers in foreign language territories, and to audio, dramatic rights, etc., that the author has retained and not granted to the book publisher. These subsidiary rights, especially foreign territory book rights, can often bring in a lot more income than the home territory book license deal. Those subsidiary rights licenses that are granted to the publisher, the agent nags the publisher to either produce or sub-license, especially paperback issues if the first publication was hardcover. If there are legal problems and disputes, the agent offers limited legal advice (or full if the agent is also a lawyer as some are,) and helps the author get a lawyer. Agents are the go-betweens for authors and their publishers, usually being the bad guy nagging about financial issues so the author can have a nice editorial relationship with their editor. There's a lot of other stuff that agents do, but those are some of the main ones.

Agents know that they may find a good property from any type of author anywhere, so unlike the screenwriting biz and other creative industries, the barriers to submitting to them are not high and you don't have to know someone to get in, though if you can connect with an agent at a convention, writing conference or place they are actively looking for authors, that can help you in submitting. If they are open to submissions from authors, they are actively looking and examine all submissions, though they will concentrate on submissions that fit the areas of fiction they are interested in repping (though exceptions to those specialties often occur.) If an agent is happy with their client list, the agent might solicit some people they hear about but otherwise, they simply stop taking any submissions.

If an agent is willing to represent an author after looking at their stuff, and the author likes the agent, they sign an agency contract which spells out how their business relationship is going to work. That includes things like what happens when an agent sells an author's book and is in charge of handling the monies from that license as the agent of record, but then the author and agent break up and the author gets another agent, (usually that the first agent continues to get commission on the license they sold, and handles monies from the first license, in coordination with the author and second agent.) And how marketing expenses the agency incurs are going to work. Some of those terms are negotiable, and some are not if you want to work with that agent. In general, it is not in an agent's best interest to screw over or financially imperil author clients, so there is flexibility. That doesn't mean that authors don't have to pay attention to what their agent is or is not doing for them and authors need to communicate clearly about their questions, concerns and needs with an agent. It is important to remember that agents are not mind readers nor your mommy. They are yet another kind of business partner, one way more tied to your success than publishers.

Publishers also understand that a fiction property they think can sell can come from anywhere, which is why even the big ones held onto "slush" piles for as long as they could and a few imprints in big houses still do, as well as smaller presses. Consequently, they understand that an agent, even a new agent without much of a client list yet, can possibly bring them a number of useful authors and are generally welcoming to all agents (not high barriers.) That gives agents, with multiple authors and the possibility of authors, more leverage in the market than a single author can have. Agents can often get better terms and royalty rates, although not always. Sometimes foot in the door deals are necessary to get the author positioned for better license sales later on. If an agent gets a set of terms for an author with a publishing house, the agent can negotiate precedent to get the same terms for other author clients with that publishing house. Publishers put up with multiple submissions to publishers and book auctions where publishers bid against each other from agents because again the agent has the leverage of an author list and potential authors down the road. It's much harder, though not impossible, for a lone author to do that sort of thing. It's not always necessary to do it -- sometimes an exclusive submission to an editor nets a good offer and a lot of the time, it's unlikely that there will be multiple interest to produce an auction.

The percentage of the population that regularly reads and buys books has stayed relatively stable, but the number of authors who want to publish books, including very often fiction ones, has increased dramatically, starting in the 1980's, when the wholesale market was still operating full bore and bestselling authors still sometimes got to be guests on talk shows. And publishers' operations got more complicated with more types of products, marketing demands, and more books produced. So it became less and less viable for bigger houses to have their junior staff spend hours and hours of time hunting through unsolicited submissions, especially when the wholesale market dropped and they didn't necessarily need a horde of paperback authors and had fewer vendors. So over time, imprint by imprint, larger houses closed their doors to unsolicited submissions (an exception being category romance publishers and for a long time, SFF imprints.) That meant they looked at either author submissions they solicited -- they contact the author or agree the author can send them something from a conference encounter for that purpose, etc., or submissions from agents that editors agreed to see. So agents have become the first readers and treasure hunters for publishers, although they work for authors. But lots of unagented authors do still end up working with big houses, smaller houses and self-pub -- even before 2008 and the e-book market.

Agents do work with medium and small presses. Bigger houses pay advances and better ones and sometimes an advance is all the author gets from the license. But sometimes because of the property's nature or because it hasn't sold to bigger houses, agents are placing books at smaller houses. Some agents also represent smaller presses as agents -- selling subsidiary rights for them of their licenses -- reprint and paperback reprint deals to bigger houses, licenses to foreign country territories, audio rights, dramatic rights if the small press has them, etc. Far from seeing small presses as rivals, bigger houses see small presses as farm teams from whom talent can be found that's gotten a bit of a record with the small press, thus giving an income boost to small presses as well as the authors.

Likewise, agents do work and always have worked with self-pub authors, as if the author is a press, which they are. They rep the self-pub authors for reprint deals with publishers, for original deals on properties the authors don't want to self-pub (hybrid,) and for subsidiary rights just like with the small presses -- foreign country territories, audio, dramatic rights, etc. If a self-pub author builds up a customer base, it's not at all unusual for that author to get a literary agent to go bigger and be able to sell rights that it's harder for authors to sell themselves. Even self-pub authors don't necessarily want to have spend time negotiating for a deal for Korean or Polish print, and/or electronic rights, if they can even find those publishers, and agents help collect and manage monies and contracts. And the reality is, for the handful of authors who face being able to sell dramatic rights licenses, you need a literary agent and/or a film agent to avoid getting ripped off. Dramatic contracts are nasty and they are usually for a license throughout the universe in perpetuity. That's the actual legal language.

Agents have been negotiating with publishers to adapt and improve electronic rights issues, including reserving electronic rights licenses, since the 1990's, when electronic print went from a sleepy little used right thrown in with the publisher's license to a potentially viable additional market, and again when Google decided that they wanted to copy every text published and offer them online without paying a dime to authors and license holders. And they went into high gear after the Kindle launch, dealing with an exploding market, the birth of many more electronic publishers, and re-negotiating old contracts as well as new ones. While some things have gotten a bit more standardized, these negotiations are still on-going and just about every sort of arrangement possible in the electronic market has been going on as we figure out exactly how the electronic market is going to work. With podcasts and streaming, the audio market, while still small, also got a really big boost from the days of CD's, and required a lot of negotiations. Publishers understandably but often obnoxiously have tried to lock down as many rights to be part of their license as possible with the new product lines, but agents with big clients have been able to leverage terms, which then has a ripple effect throughout the whole industry. There are also a lot of e-book publishers now and a lot of them are doing novellas -- shorter works. That sometimes involves agents and sometimes it doesn't.

Again, far from seeing self-pub authors as a threat or a problem, publishers regard the self-pub market as a dipping pool in which millions of titles try to get an audience and the ones that bubble to the top, they solicit for reprint or foreign pub rights deals. The expansion of the self-pub market has simply expanded that relationship in the market. Some big self-pub authors have tried reprint deals, especially to help with print distribution, and found that they don't like it, the terms, and that their particular publisher didn't do what they wanted for their careers. Some have done it and had it helped boost their careers and sales considerably and give them more time to write. A number of self-pub authors have turned themselves into small presses publishing or reprinting other self-pub authors, mainly for the print market -- and we will again I think see more collective group workings among self-pub authors -- it helps them with book vendors because it's more than one author and they can give better terms to vendors. And agents will be a part of that, whenever there are licenses involved.

I think I covered the main questions there on agents. Later, marketing to agents and publishers and the publisher/self publish questions, and the website stuff, etc.
 
Thanks so much, KatG. I will re-read tomorrow and reply. I'm wondering if you've ever considered writing a book on the history of fantasy lit and the publishing world? We've had one or the other, but never both together (afaik).
 
OK, a couple thoughts. Going back one post, my general response is a sense of just how much luck is involved in whether or not your book sells. I mean, if it is a good book, chances are you'll at least find a small readership. But for a book to be a hit, it seems that quality is less important than whether or not the book hits a particular cultural nerve or literary fad, and whether you happen to follow the "right" combination of steps to get your book to wider attention (which, in turn, involves no set formula). Maybe it isn't entirely luck, but it certainly seems to involve a good amount of it. Hard and quality work will get you published (eventually, some way or another) and read, but it won't necessarily lead to popularity or broader success.

As for agents, one thing you didn't touch upon is how to find the right agent. Any thoughts on this? From what I understand, a lot of authors find out who represents their favorite and/or similar authors and start there.

I'm also wondering about timing. I've always thought it was rather linear: finish book, find agent, agent finds publisher. But it seems that some authors submit to publishers first and then, once they get a "bite," they hire an agent. Do some send queries to both agents and publishers at the same time?

It also seems like if you're going the licensed/partnered approach, an agent is a near-must. I imagine that the 15-20% commission is more than made up for by the agent's ability to navigate all of the ins and outs, finding new opportunities, international markets, etc. In that regard, do you know of any well-established SFF authors who don't use an agent? I imagine that some eventually learn the ropes and don't feel they need an agent anymore.

I'm sure more will come up, but I'll just wait for your next post.
 
Sorry, got a bit held up. You have to stop adding questions for a bit! :)

In terms of literary agents, agents are not like training-wheels. They are business managers. Big authors, including the self-pubs eventually, almost all have agents because they have lots of complicated contracts for a variety of different licenses and they need someone to help market, manage their business stuff, deal with contracts, collect monies, etc. In the U.S. market, if you want to do partner pub or you're going to be doing a lot of subsidiary rights license sales, a literary agent is pretty much needed as part of the process. However, there are territories where publishers receive government funding and contracts are heavily regulated/standardized, and the use of agents for direct book contracts may be less. In Australia, for instance, our friends tell us that there is a fairly standardized contract so they are more likely to use agents for international subsidiary rights sales.

A lot of authors starting out may not be using agents and may be going to medium and small presses that don't require agents for submissions. This can work out great but it can also work out bad because a lot of the small press contracts are awful and have missing language, like how long the publisher has to publish the work. So if you're going that route, go use resources from author groups about contract language. Even though sometimes the advice is a little over-idealized and you'll likely have to compromise, they offer good guidelines. The SFWA (Science fiction and fantasy writers of America) offers stuff, and there is the National Writers Union (also US,) the Author Guild, etc. Mike Sullivan has offered a lot of useful info on self-pub.

Remember that you are, in writing a work, including the short ones, creating an intellectual property (manuscript.) And it is the exploitation of products from that property (book, audio book, film, game, etc.) So contracts are all about either licensing rights to produce, market and distribute product (publishers, etc.,) or vendor contracts to distribute/sell product (Amazon, POD, etc.) So when you self-publish, you are simply exploiting your own rights to produce product from your property. But if you are exploiting the production rights, then you aren't offering first publication exclusive rights to a licensee. You're offering reprint rights -- a subsidiary right licensed to exploit your property. So if you self-publish your book online and/or in print, and then market the same property to publishers for partnering, that's a reprint license, not a publishing license. It's the same as a small press offering reprint or reprint paperback sub-rights to a larger publisher (and splitting the money from the license with the author.) As a self-pub, you are a publisher, not just an author. The license has already been exploited in some way, so it's not a first launch.

So you can self-pub and market a work at the same time, but it's then a reprint. And there are different issues in a reprint license. The publisher will consider if the likely market for the book has already found the book and that's pretty much the audience, meaning a reprint won't sell much more, or is it likely that the publisher can expand the audience with wider distribution, etc., which they likely expect if the book is doing very well in self-pub. How many rights in the property they can license is also an issue in reprint deals -- do they get print and electronic and you stop publishing, or only one, can they do hardcover or only paperback in print, etc. So it's different factors and attractions and you have to figure out, as a publisher yourself, what sort of licensing deal you want to do/offer to publishers and offer an agent to market for you if you go that route.

Finding an agent hasn't particularly changed much except that now the submission process is cheaper and faster because of online electronic submissions (which some agents may only take for queries, but most have gone electronic altogether.) Authors do indeed gather agent names from the Acknowledgement pages of their favorite authors' books. There are also associations of agents like the Association of Author Representatives. Their members agree to follow basic business practices, so that member list isn't a bad place to start. If you are going to a convention for other reasons (since they are expensive,) and they have agent/editor appointments, you can try that. Likewise writers conferences do usually have agents who are giving talks do appointments. On both of those, it's important to follow the rules. And it's entirely possible if you publish short fiction in various places or you are selling well in self-pub that an agent might come to you, but it's rarer.

Agents are dealing with thousands of authors who would like to work with them, which is not possible for them to do. So even the newer, more hungry ones are not that hungry that they'll snap up any author with an offer from a publisher. If an author goes and gets an offer from a publisher, then goes for an agent, the agent will be coming in late. The agent will have a lot less leverage to negotiate deal terms and may not be able to improve the offer much, as opposed to the agent being the one who submitted the work. And there can be contractual issues of whether the agent is going to be the agent of record on a deal you first got yourself. If the house is smaller, there may be not a lot of money on the table and it's tricky to be able to take the work to a larger group of publishers from an offer made by a publisher in good faith on exclusive submission. There is a time constraint. So it's not automatic if you get an offer. An agent will usually want to take a look at your book property before deciding because it's a long business relationship, even with the time constraint. But it does sometimes happen. If you somehow got an offer from a big publisher without having an agent, certainly you would want to go and try to get an agent. If you can afford it and you get an offer from a publisher without an agent, you could hire a lawyer versed in literary law to look over your contract. The lawyers tend to push for things that aren't going to happen, but at least you'll know about any hidden pitfalls.

Because there are thousands of authors submitting to both publishers and agents, they don't like to have spent time reading something and working up an offer for rep or license and then finding out it's with fifteen others and they wasted their time. So the publishers want an exclusive submission from authors, if they are unagented, and put up with multiple submissions from agents because they have to because the agents have multiple authors. And the agents do not want to get in compete wars with other agents over authors.

The reality is that authors often skirt around these exclusivity commitments and I'm not going to tell an author not to do that. But one way you can manage it is by sticking in a business-like manner to the response periods the publishers and particularly agents tell you they aim for, and you can give them an exclusive for most of that time period. So if an agent's response period is two months on a partial ms. submission after query or a query packet, then when you're getting to the end of the two months and haven't heard, you can contact them about whether your stuff is still really being considered. If it is, you can then still leave it there if you want, or withdraw it, but the exclusive look is done and you can send it to the next agent. But that second agent is then not getting an exclusive and you may have a problem if both first and second agents want to rep you. It's a balancing act and it's still slow. Electronic submissions are faster processed, which helps.

Another question is about blogs and websites. I'm dabbling with putting one together and am looking at Wix, Weebly, Wordpress, and Blogger. Is there a "go-to" platform for SFF authors? I'd like a platform that I can both blog as well as put up sample chapters and other "freebies," that is fairly easy to use and versatile, but has a lot of nice theme options. I know: I want it all.
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There is SFF.net, which a fair number of SFF authors use. Wordpress is used by a lot of folk. If you're doing the basic free stuff, then there may be limitations on how you can set up sites, but I know that John Scalzi, for instance, is very happy with a pay package with Wordpress. Blogger is an old one mostly for blogs, but some may use it for sites. Wix is new and seems to be pretty aggressively advertising, and I have not heard of Weebly before, so they may be new. A lot of authors used to use LiveJournal for blogs and some still keep those, but mainly it's not very popular anymore. A lot of authors use Facebook and Twitter, and some do Tumblr as well. You don't have to do any of them. However, if you are working with a publisher, they're going to want you to do a website at this point.

Going back one post, my general response is a sense of just how much luck is involved in whether or not your book sells. I mean, if it is a good book, chances are you'll at least find a small readership. But for a book to be a hit, it seems that quality is less important than whether or not the book hits a particular cultural nerve or literary fad, and whether you happen to follow the "right" combination of steps to get your book to wider attention (which, in turn, involves no set formula). Maybe it isn't entirely luck, but it certainly seems to involve a good amount of it. Hard and quality work will get you published (eventually, some way or another) and read, but it won't necessarily lead to popularity or broader success.
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Luck is very much a part of what may happen in the fiction market, but not in the way that you are thinking of it. Luck is partly involved in finding a partner publisher to believe in and invest, in making people aware of a book's existence and in word of mouth happening obviously. But it's not luck of marketing and pretty packaging (although a nice cover doesn't hurt in SFF.) Again, fiction readers are promotion resistant. They don't give a crap about cultural nerves or literary fads. In SFF, they've been reading about the same monsters, myths and spaceship adventures for centuries. Murder mysteries have remained murder mysteries. You don't get any social status for reading a particular book like you do for owning an iPhone or a designer purse or the latest hot game or being the first to see a movie even. Nobody cares what novels celebrities are reading. It's not like other entertainment sectors. Readers like what they like and they all like different things. The market is broad and it could be a lot broader and that's how it grows. The fiction market is quite small compared to other products but it's loved. There are people who love Twilight and there are people who love The Kite Runner and there are people who love The Melting Dead, and sometimes they overlap and sometimes they do not.

There is no such thing as "quality" and "merit" because it is all subjective as to what is good and what is not, and no one thing runs the market. (And claiming you're more hard-working than other authors will not leave you with a lot of friends.) What mainly happens with a book being a hit is that a lot of people, one way or another, find the book and like the characters in one way or another and find meaning and entertainment in the narrative one way or another. And they talk about it to their friends. This is insufficiently sexy enough a rationale for a book doing well for most people, but it is very much what happens. You should certainly be aware of what is out there in the market and coming out, because fiction is a symbiotic market and knowing lets you be able to describe your work effectively with quick references. And you can try to write to trends if you want; some authors do. But publishers are buying licenses three to one years ahead of bringing the books out, and self-publishers put out fast and in mass quantities so it's every which trend.

Publishing folk will try to "guess" what might happen and what might be of interest, and authors keep an eye out for opportunities and drift from one sub-category to the next in the field they like, which means we often get clusters of authors who happen to end up doing similar stuff. But every sector of the market has to keep churning, and publishers -- and self-publishers for that matter -- are bad guessers. :)

Take vampire books. We always have a steady stream of vampire books -- hundreds, thousands of vampire books for decades and decades -- romances, horror, contemporary fantasy, historical fantasy, alien SF vampires, etc. Some of them sell and some of them don't. And even more thousands of vampire manuscripts get rejected by publishers as not right for them. But when a small group of authors doing vampire fiction do well and/or we get a phenom seller involving vampires, several things happen. First, because fiction is symbiotic, the publishers do extra marketing of their vampire titles to try and attract attention of readers of the hits. They also do it with other fantasy fiction, including epic sec world fantasy and science fiction that has nothing to do with vampires because an interest of more readers in fantasy fiction means some readers will drift browse outwards, but definitely some of their vampire titles. And the media does not like lone hits. They like to make articles about trends. So they make trends by bundling hits together. And this increased media attention helps attract readers to fiction, but it ignores most of the market and other hits.

So in 2003, 2004, you'd go ask agents and editors and pundits on panels what's selling in SFF, they'd say, well write a vampire novel, that's all that's selling. Except that wasn't true because reams and reams of vampire books were not selling to publishers and on shelves, in fantasy or fantasy romance. And publishers were buying other books than vampire books and putting them out and some of them were hits. Lots of dynamic things were happening in sec world fantasy and many sectors were expanding. But the media liked vampires and then they liked zombies, etc. Meanwhile during that period, SF was pronounced to be dying, again. Fantasy was all the publishers wanted, it was growing so big and SF wasn't, the readers were dying off in age, it would be abandoned, etc. But if you looked at the whole market, that wasn't true. Four years later, SF was rapidly expanding especially in the young adult demographic, and now it's a little star in the fiction market (and in other media,) and The Expanse is a t.v. show. So if you predicted the trend that SF was in eclipse in 2004, you were wrong. If you predicted that vampires would dominate everything, you were wrong, and if you predicted that vampire books would basically disappear out of favor, you were wrong because the vampires never die. :)

So no, a special snowflake of a quality novel will not only be a niche novel that can't be a hit because it doesn't hit some sort of cultural nerve. It may be a hit, it may not be. Most authors take a span to build up enough of a fan base to get to bigger numbers. Most of the authors who are sudden hits are utterly surprised by that happening. (A few believe that they did it with massive advertising, but they are wrong.) And luck is involved. Your publisher partner avoiding bankruptcy may be involved. Amazon soaking you for algorithm fees may be involved. Your spouse having a health crisis so you can't promote may be involved (though we hope not.) But it's not the luck of being a shallow trend-spotter, because look at all those different best-selling authors from National Book Award winners to erotica. Which trend is the magic key then? And why doesn't it work with every single book each of those authors puts out? (Because it does not.)

But that's not a bad thing. It's an opportunity thing. It means there's a wide pool that can be jumped into by anybody, that you are not sunk if you don't have the magic marketing formula or a lot of money. It means you can find an audience and build a career, big or small, and word of mouth can have phenomenal effects.

So I generally tell people to look at the market not to try to game it, because you'll fail and pull out your hair, but to see where what you are writing fits in it. Because you do fit in it somewhere. And you might sell in it too. And if you're not a white male in the West/English language market, or a male elsewhere, there are some things you will probably have to deal with/be aware of unfortunately, but there is still opportunity there. More than you'll get in any other area of entertainment.

I think I got all the questions, but let me know.
 
KatG said:
Big authors, including the self-pubs eventually, almost all have agents because they have lots of complicated contracts for a variety of different licenses and they need someone to help market, manage their business stuff, deal with contracts, collect monies, etc.
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King is one obvious exception. I believe he sacked his agent decades ago.

Personally, if I was a millionaire author, I'd rather have a lawyer deal with contracts than an agent who may have no legal training at all.
 
Thank you so much, Kat. I'm going to re-read tomorrow and perhaps come up with more, but will give a short(ish) response now.

I found what you said about trends, luck, and "gaming the market" to be particularly interesting because it addresses one of my own fears. I have absolutely no interest in trying to game the market like a stock speculator, so on one hand what you say is quite a relief in that I don't see a clear sub-genre for my book. It fits into certain broad categories (e.g. epic secondary world fantasy), but it doesn't have many clear comparable authors or books. My concern is that the broad categories it does fit into are currently dominated by certain tendencies (roughly characterized by "grimdark") that my book has only minimal elements of. It has some of them, but not to the extent that most of the big names in the broad categories.

So my concern and question is not "How do I game the market so I can write something that will be the Next Big Thing," but rather "does my writing have a market considering it doesn't fit current dominant trends in the broad categories it fits into?"

The take away for me is that I shouldn't worry about it. I should just write the best damn books I can, do my best to get them published, and then hope for the best.

Just for point of clarification, my book is the first in a projected five-book series that is, in a way, a harkening back to the New Wave (in terms of emphasis on philosophy and psychology) but in a fantasy context, and with a more contemporary approach and style. Something akin to Dune or Hyperion, but as a "big fat fantasy" series. Or something like that. The closest thing to that out there is probably R Scott Bakker or Steven Erikson, but both are decidedly more "grimdark" than my work.
 
Edward M. Grant said:
King is one obvious exception. I believe he sacked his agent decades ago. Personally, if I was a millionaire author, I'd rather have a lawyer deal with contracts than an agent who may have no legal training at all.
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You don't "sack" agents. You break up with them contractually and it's complicated. There are financial and business relationships that may continue after the break-up because the agent repped the author on various deals that then became sold products that still produce income.

King was discovered by his agent Kirby McCauley who did the deals for Carrie that broke King out and saved him from bankruptcy, and helped King set up the Richard Bachman persona he used for different projects. McCauley also repped most of the big SFFH names of his time such as Piers Anthony, Roger Zelazny and he launched George R.R. Martin's career. He was the biggest SFFH agent of the 1970's and 1980's, helped in the expansion of SFF and horror in general fiction, and consequently got very large as an agency at the same time that he had personal problems and health problems from diabetes. From that apparently came some trouble with financial accounts or some kind of deal -- we don't know all the details and with settlements we're not going to know. King left and a number of big authors left while others stayed. McCauley's sister came in to help run the agency and it stabilized. McCauley got the big deal for Game of Thrones in the U.S. apparently, starting Song of Ice and Fire, but after that he pretty much retired due to health issues and died a few years ago. Some of the license stuff with King may still be processed by that agency although very likely those rights were given up in the conflict resolution.

King went to another literary agent. I think it was Ralph Vicinanza, who had been foreign rights agent for McCauley's agency and left to start his own agency during the shakeout, but can't say for certain. (Vicinanza has also passed on.) King then signed on with his current agent, Chuck Verrill, who had been his long time editor at Viking Penguin but who left there to join as partner in the literary agency Darhansoff & Verrill. King would then leave Viking Penguin over the novel that became Bag of Bones in the 1990's, and he and Verrill set up an unusual deal with S&S where King took a lesser advance in return for larger royalties. What deals he does now, we don't know. King has in fact numerous agents because millionaire authors do not waste their time doing things like their own auctions with Polish publishers for Polish rights, and because King has product in every medium. And because he has a production company and many film agents involved in adaptations. I don't know who is repping Martin literary-wise these days but he also has multiple agents as he is also a screenwriter and works in comics.

Stuff sometimes happens. We had Nightshade grow too big with several bestsellers in SFF, mess up their books and collapse, which was a mess for authors on their list. That's why authors have to keep an eye on everybody they deal with -- nobody is going to take care of them. Agents are supposed to be looking out for author client interests and most of the time they do, but issues can come up when there are changes and new rights markets that produce issues nobody was expecting. It's a business relationship which requires both partners to work together.

Some agents are also lawyers, so you can look for those for your agent's list if you want. If you go with a lawyer alone, you want to have one who is versed in literary/copyright law because the ones who aren't take a look at the indemnities and warranties clauses even millionaire authors have to sign and freak out. Lawyers are very expensive and work by the hour and they are mainly good for contracts. But contracts is only one part of what agents do. And there are only a handful of authors relatively who are millionaires. Lawyers are often called in for certain kinds of big deals like dramatic rights contracts, but for most of the stuff agents are doing, you don't need a lawyer and agents know the contracts.

That again doesn't mean again that authors don't need to watch their agents, communicate clearly with agents and not be intimidated by their agents. But I've never worked more hours than I did as an agent. Burn out is common, and the money with most authors is low but can be steady. In the U.S. market, if you want to work with the big houses, you will need an agent.

Alchemist said:
It fits into certain broad categories (e.g. epic secondary world fantasy), but it doesn't have many clear comparable authors or books. My concern is that the broad categories it does fit into are currently dominated by certain tendencies (roughly characterized by "grimdark") that my book has only minimal elements of. It has some of them, but not to the extent that most of the big names in the broad categories.
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You're wrong, it does fit. You just haven't looked enough at the whole market. You are just looking at the bright shiny objects, and ignoring scope. Which is very common for authors to do. :)

As we went over in the Fantasy forum, what constitutes grimdark has always been a style within fantasy and sec world fantasy. But what happened in the mid-oughts to late oughts was an accidental literary movement where a cluster of authors happened to write in quite similar styles, themes, and some elements around the same time and a few of them were hits. People noticed the hits, noticed some of the others that were similar (or being pushed as similar for symbiosis,) and identified it as a movement which became called grimdark, a term borrowed from the gaming industry. While descendants of grimdark and the grimdark authors themselves continue -- because dark fantasy always exists in the market -- the literary movement itself is already done. And grimdark was only a small sector of secondary world fantasy. (And Martin's Song, while an inspiration for grimdark authors, is not grimdark.)

Remember, media likes to group things together and declare it a trend as a hook for articles (that includes fan media.) And they like to over-emphasize how big and important those trends are (so that the article is identifying an important trend.) Specifically, they like to say that the trend is dominating and squashing other types of fiction. And that's why science fiction/hard SF has been dying about 500 times in the last eight decades.

If you are not writing grimdark then you don't have to care two bits what grimdark or dark fantasy writers are doing. Instead, you should be aware of and try to read some of titles in sec world like:

N.K. Jemisin -- The Fifth Season
Kameron Hurley -- The Mirror Empire (I'm reading that now)
Katherine Addison -- The Goblin Emperor
Max Gladstone -- Three Parts Dead
Ken Liu -- The Grace of Kings
Django Wexler -- The Thousand Names
Elizabeth Bear -- Range of Ghosts
Saladin Ahmed -- Throne of the Crescent Moon
Robin Hobb -- any of it
Daniel Abraham -- The Dragon's Path (and his Seasons books)
Michelle West -- House Wars series
Michael Sullivan -- The Riyria Chronicles series
Helen Lowe -- The Wall of Night series
Kate Elliot, Trudi Cavanan, Cherie Priest, China Mieville's novels, etc.

These are bestsellers, category bestsellers, lead titles and buzzed about authors and you should be aware of them.

And newer ones as well. We just had an Author Roundtable in Fantasy with Michelle Hauck with her series first book Grudging, published by Harper Voyager in the U.S., and Stephen Aryan, with his novel Battlemage from Orbit. There are thousands of them and you can't keep up with them all, but you do need to have a wider view of the field and what is actually being published in it.

Fiction is a symbiotic market. Authors don't directly compete; they help each other sell. One hot trend does not wipe out other types of stories in the market. The market relies on variety -- and grows when it expands variety. Readers get attracted from some title or word of mouth and then some of them browse outward. Bestsellers don't shut you out -- they bring in lots of new readers, some of whom browse towards you and financing publishers to take chances on you. If publishers sold nothing but grimdark in sec world fantasy, they wouldn't make enough to keep the electricity on.

You are going to run into agents, publishing folk from operations small and large, authors and fan pundits who all have opinions about what will "sell" and what won't "sell." And they are too narrow viewers, and wrong. Writing something with vampires won't get you sold even when there are hits with vampires. Writing something with vampires won't keep you from being sold just because someone thinks vampires are done. And unfortunately, the narrow views tend to also include bigotry and the assumptions that the audiences are bigots en masse, like that women can't sell hard SF or Asian fantasy can't sell. Both of these assertions are dead wrong by market data, but you may run into stuff like that. And that has caused discrimination and problems, but authors are making headway. The difficult part is finding someone who likes your stuff and will take it to market knowing the market.

It helps, including with narrow viewers, if you know the market and thus can explain to them where you fit in it, showing that such things sell. They may still not be interested, or they might. Agents, editors and houses aren't all the same with the same interests and needs. Readers aren't all the same. So instead of treating it as a monolith where everything shifts in one direction -- which is not how it works -- you have to realize that it's a vast ocean of stuff. Lots of sec world stories play off Dune -- it's not that unusual.

So stop worrying on that point and start looking harder. :)
 
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