Quote: (01-25-2016 12:21 AM)Pride male Wrote:
Does this also apply to the book writing game? If you want to become a big author do you need to sell your soul for fame and fortune?
Big Publishing doesn't want your soul, and does not know how to bring you fame and fortune. All Big Publishing wants you to hand over is the copyright to your work for a minimal sum. With that in hand, it can fuck you over after you're dead just as well as Satan.
As I've said before, Big Publishing -- what I class as the Big Five based in New York -- doesn't actually know how to sell books. 7 out of 10 of their new authors only break even or don't make their money back. And they are not stuck for material: it's estimated for every 1,000 submissions made to a publisher,
one will be published. Mind you, that's not the chicken scratchings of five-year-olds. Oh, wait, you thought editors or submissions readers in publishing houses select books on literary merit? Nah. There are so many stories of good, solid writers who are just fucking unlucky enough to get a bitch on her period when she reads their book, or even
have a book accepted for publication
and then get it rejected because the editor championing the book left the publisher. Or half a hundred other fickle, bureaucratic, mindless reasons.
To make matters worse, you will
never get published if you submit to more than one publisher simultaneously, and they take unacceptably long times to actually bother to write back to you (when they do.) Half the time when they
do push a new author (as opposed to an established one) the public just doesn't buy.
For this astronomically stupid business model to work, it requires two essential things:
(1) Oligopoly conditions on contracts with new and established writers
(2) Stockholm Syndrome for those writers who actually get a publisher.
(Don't take it from me. Go to John T. Reed's site and see him talk about his experiences in the nonfiction trad-pub world. Go to Joe Konrath's blog and start reading. Konrath had eight novels traditionally published before eventually giving Big Publishing the finger and going down the Amazon and/or self-publishing route. Unlike most large novelists --another case of Stockholm Syndrome-- he's happy to publish the data of his sales and thereby his income, which is in the six figures.)
As said, oligopoly conditions rule the day in contracts with new writers. You're paid maybe ten percent if you're lucky as a new author and you give away a shitload of rights for the privilege. Don't like those terms? Try going to one of the other four of the five, because they all have the same paltry conditions (down to the same contract), and the same difficult-as-fuck conditions to satisfy before you can get control of your books back off them (for example, a common condition is that you can't get your copyright back until your book is out of print. Problem is, e-book versions
never go out of print. Therefore you never get the copyright -- arguably the most valuable part of your book -- returned to you.)
It doesn't necessarily get any better for established authors, either. For every Stephen King whose down-homie, aw-shucks bullshit catches a trend and manages to cut through to people with shallow liberal leanings, there are dozens of midlist authors whose income never gets near six figures, and is often damn lucky to hit five. Indeed I would lay you good odds that much of the seeming high income of most "bestselling" authors is an illusion, with certain authors who benefited from irrational public mania for one book (EL James, Dan Brown) the exceptions that prove the rule. I'll bet you good money no bestselling author makes as much money as you think he does.
Why, you might wonder, do more authors not stand up to this bullshit?
Ah so, grasshopper. That's when we get to the Stockholm Syndrome part of it. The Author's Guild earlier this year (i.e. less than 20 days ago) actually published a demand that new authors' book contracts be renegotiated, that they have better terms. The Author's Guild includes a lot of bestselling authors: Stephen King, Dan Simmons, John Grisham, etc, etc. Hooray, you might say, the authors united will never be defeated, etc. Here's the problem:
it's the first time in roughly fifty years or more that these guys ever publicly protested against the conditions in new authors' contracts!!!
Before that letter, the principal job of the Authors' Guild was to churn out anti-Amazon screeds and arselicking columns about how they understood publishers had life so hard, especially when they were negotiating with Hachette (one of the Big Five). Amazon (much as I distrust it) is the most dangerous opponent the Big Five have ever faced, because they made a conscious decision to bring down the role of the Big Five as "gatekeepers" of "Serious Literary Fiction". They did this by publishing and supporting e-books and bringing down the price of those books drastically. Amazon allows anyone to self-publish and lets the market sort out who gets sold and who doesn't, and takes a tiny cut in comparison to the gouging of Big Publishing. If you want more Amazon cheerleading, like I said, Joe Konrath's blog provides a pretty compelling case , but the point is: authors as a group shut the fuck up and took the pennies they were given by Big Publishing, big authors or not, because they had no real alternative. And after a while, if you have no other options, you get to like the shithead boss who treats you like crap, because he's the only one who pays you money. Stockholm Syndrome, as I said. Amazon is now providing an alternative, and Big Publishers are running scared as a result.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm