Eye on the Prize: Driven to Digital Distraction

Why You Need to Deal with the Publishing Business

Porter Anderson

All authors ever since “the beginning” have needed to know about the business of publishing. This includes you.

Authors today need a Newer Testament, one that contains just two commandments:

1. Thou shalt not hide from “The Industry! The Industry!” as I call our ever-excitable business.
2. Thou shalt seize the digital tools and trade of tomorrow and thus prosper.

My father, the Methodist minister, always more theologian than pulpit pastor, would want me to tell you that the best verse in John 1:1 is this one: “And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehends it not.”

God knows it’s hard for many authors to comprehend the benefits of the digital light that burns so blindingly into the farthest-flung reaches of modern publishing. Left to your own devices, you can’t get a word in edgewise on your manuscript because the beepings and burpings, the pop-ups, the e-mails, the Facebook follies, the towering tweeterie, the lurid Instagrams, and the uninteresting Pinteresting all make you want to back the car over your smartphone and microwave your tablet.

But technology is not known for marching backward. That “landline resurgence”? Yeah, not so much.

And like the Lord, the digital dynamic gives and it takes away. Yes, it has taken away some of our ability to focus, to lose ourselves in the reverie of our words, to “just write.” It has also given us the power to know how many books we’re selling, converse directly with our readers, and monitor and understand the complex, staggered, and reinvigorated industry in which we work.

Publishing has now entered a state of continual change. That won’t change.

In that change lies your best chance to succeed.

More and more, the token of professionalism among authors will be their knowledge of their industry. Whether you are trade or independent, sumptuously published or formatted on a shoestring, readers shall know you by your business savvy. Or they won’t know you at all.

As Werner Erhard, founder of the est consciousness-training program, told us, it’s easier to ride the horse in the direction it’s going.

GO FORTH, AND MARKET THYSELF

In the beginning? The thundering beauty of the Book of John makes no reference to the holy literary agent, nor the celestial editor, nor the leather-and-gold-leaf cover design, nor the pearly royalty statements totted up by Saint Peter, nor even the Multitude of the Heavenly Host, to whom we refer today as Sales and Marketing.

But don’t miss the fact that the Bible has been propelled into untouchable status as the planetary bestseller by the most successful word-of-mouth campaign in heaven and Earth. A mighty street team is Christianity.

The Wycliffe Global Alliance of Bible translation organizations reports that there are 554 versions of the complete Bible, with scriptures available in some 2,932 languages. And yet Wycliffe also tells us that in the Bible’s success, “God is accomplishing His mission through His power and through partnership.”

“Partnership?” You bet. Even His Holiness, Pope Francis, turned to the earthly powers of a publisher for his own first book project. Pan Macmillan’s Bluebird imprint announced late in 2015 that it had secured the U.K. and Commonwealth rights to Oonagh Stransky’s translation of the Pope’s The Name of God Is Mercy. And there was much rejoicing in the boardroom, too. (Random House brought it out in the United States.)

And yet, on a day-to-day basis, you hear pushback on all sides from authors who “hate marketing.” They blanch if you say the words author platform. They waste precious writing time participating in blog gossip fests about “how hard it is to sell yourself.” Quiz those folks gently. You’ll find that these are usually the same authors who are embarrassingly clueless on industry issues that affect their work and their livelihoods. They send you long-outdated blog posts from amateurs to prove a point. They tweet incessantly about their books—to other writers but not readers. They dash away—“my Love in the Backyard is calling!”—as if you’re supposed to (a) know the title of their work-in-progress and (b) give a damn.

Please chant it now with me, the call of the amateur: “I just want to write.” That’s actually an excellent mantra. If you’re a hobbyist.

If you want to sell the stuff, read on.

Ironically, business avoidance may be more pronounced today, in our so-commercial era, than in the past. Think of how much mythology gets passed around about “back in the day,” when publishers were publishers and marketing departments jetted authors around for well-managed book tours on flying carpets of full-page ads in the Times. Right?

Wrong. The cult of “I just want to write” is all ours. More than five hundred years of authorati have known that they lived or died in the Kasbah, not in those sylvan Maxfield Parrish temples of androgynous creativity with the tall pillars and see-through togas.

“Capitalism per se and the market forces that both animate and pre-suppose it aren’t the problem,” writes publishing entrepreneur Richard Nash in his masterful The Business of Literature. “They are, in fact, what brought literature and the author into being.”

In the beginning, Nash tells us, meaning before Gutenberg invented the you-know-what:

Indeed, it was thought in the mid-1400s that the advent of the Gutenberg press would be “an economic disaster for the writer,” Nash tells us. But in fact, he writes, “The supply of writers in no way withered. … The sixteenth-century printers’ shops became magnets for people with something to say, as would the eighteenth-century coffeehouses that followed.”

CLASS UP YOUR ACT WITH SOME BUSINESS SAVVY

Writer Unboxed contributor Jane Friedman, in her keynote address at the 2014 Grub Street conference, The Muse and the Marketplace, reminds us that Dickens was a tireless businessman. (Serials, right?) And she reminds us that Mark Twain made more money from the lecture circuit than from his books. Would that man have loved TED Talks or what?

It gets better: Twain had subscription agents going door-to-door to sell his books. The Morgan Library & Museum included one of the sample cases these front-porch sweet talkers used to tote Twain’s writerly wares up and down the streets of America. Maybe you think you know Twain’s writings, but it’s not all river rafting and fence painting. I’ll bet you’ve overlooked The Successful Agent, 1865, which contains his instructions to the sales team:

In her keynote, Friedman quoted the nineteenth-century publisher G.H. Putnam: “When literary workers complain, it’s because they don’t understand the business of making and selling books, nor their actual rights and obligations.”

FACE THE WALL

And while smart authors have always been scrappy businesspeople and the other kinds of authors have always complained, “I just want to write,” there actually is a reason that all this seems so much more acute today: the Wall of Content. It’s rising fast and stands in front of you, a sheer rock face made up, by some estimates, of as many as 700,000 new self-published titles annually—before we even count trade titles—in the United States alone.

And e-books are forever. No more “out of print.” It’s all in your readers’ faces. It’s standing in your way when it comes time for your audience to find your books.

In the U.K.? Samira Ahmed, hosting BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, recently put it this way: In 2012, just one year, more books were published in the United Kingdom than were published in the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and the first half of the twentieth century combined.

Only perhaps digital photography can rival what’s happening in digital publishing. As film and big cameras and expensive photo-finishing techniques have been overtaken, the point-and-shoot world has overwhelmed what had been a richly layered industry of craft and expertise.

And in publishing? I’m going to let Internet analyst and consultant Clay Shirky take the heat for me. As he says in his book Here Comes Everybody: “The future presented by the Internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?’”

I know, I know, I know. It’s not considered appropriate in our fair culture to call people amateurs. And be assured that even if you’re a newcomer to the field, if you’re reading this book and seriously considering this discussion, you’re on your way toward professionalism. Good for you, and stay with us. Professionalism is nonnegotiable. That’s what it’s going to take to rise above it all, because amateurs are buzzing like bees on a honeycomb on that Wall of Content. They are rock-climbing enthusiasts in the extreme, baby, and they’ll kick you to the bottom of the hill. They have less to lose than you do—because it’s not a career to them. It’s just something they think anybody can do. Write a book? Piece of cake.

Don’t tell them the truth. Self-publishing is easy. Self-selling is not.

It’s the only secret you’ve got. Mass amateurization (to use Shirky’s word) is upon us, and your ace in the hole is getting past that “I just want to write” thing and embracing the fact that if you don’t get some business backbone, you’ll end up in that big heap of amateurs at the bottom of Mount Content.

Dude, digital is your answer, not your problem. Digital is your friend.

EMBRACE THE DIGITAL DYNAMIC, EVEN BEFORE YOU PUBLISH

Here’s how digital giveth and taketh away:

1. For authors, digital means that your mother can create a thing online that looks just as good as a book created by Penguin Random House almighty. You may know that what your saintly mom has written is tripe, much as you love her, but a consumer does not. If she can post a halfway-decent book cover thumbnail image, she can sell The Book of Okra to people who actually believe she’s a chef.
2. For smart authors, digital means that they can track the following:
   • developments related to book retail, whether print or e-book, online or in stores
   • major initiatives or changes at traditional publishers
   • controversial articles or posts being discussed in the author community
   • new publishing industry reports and statistics
   • updates on lawsuits or legal issues pertaining to authors
   • new services or companies serving (or preying on) the author community
   • new sales to traditional publishing houses, which can help identify the movers and shakers in the agenting world and new trends in publishing
   • emerging developments in publishing strategies and successes

That list of good moves for modern authors comes from an informational piece that Friedman and I have created for savvy authors, the ones who know what they don’t know. We put out a private subscription e-mail (digital!) newsletter, The Hot Sheet, for authors who want to get down with their businessy selves and get exactly the industry news they need, the advice on what to do about it with “no drama, no hype,” as we say, no need to mosh in the blog pits of the Internet inferno trying to suss out a scrap of trustworthy analysis or news. And there are more assists like this in the digital realm, Horatio, than you may realize. Professional authors are pulling down vast knowledge and capability from the cloud every day.

Why do you think publishing houses are now scrambling to develop or upgrade author dashboards for their writers? Thanks to the Bezosian Beelzebub in Seattle (Amazon.com, for those not yet in the know), publishers have been pressured to provide actual sales data (mon Dieu!) to their authors. No longer is the royalty statement that even your agent can’t read acceptable. Amazon proved long ago that technology can tell an author what sold, where, when, and for how much.

Now we’re talking digital. And you’re going to pass up that kind of information because “I just want to write”? Okay, but then don’t forget that you can shut down all of those beepings and burpings with systems like RescueTime that let you close off programs and apps that interrupt you—for exactly the length of completely focused, uninterrupted writing time you crave. That’s digital, too. Digital at your service.

Digital is the sensible readings from industry players like literary agent Kristin Nelson, whose Pub Rants series is full of no-nonsense, real-world advice, like when never to query an agent: “I can tell you right now that on our first day back [from the holidays] we get 600+ queries. Hard to stand out in that flux.” (Did I mention the Wall of Content to you?)

And digital is marketing. At your fingertips.

Instead of spending an hour complaining with your friends on a Facebook page that you hate marketing, why not consider some of the advice that marketing smart man Pete McCarthy offers at Logical Marketing? He’ll tell you about finding “adjacent communities” to the themes in your work in an effort to reach out to likely buyers.

Take an online course on revamping your dated and badly designed website, monitor a webinar discussion from the Alliance of Independent Authors, or follow a site like Writer Unboxed, where assertions are tested in civil, friendly comment discussions you can engage with. Strategize a marketing plan for yourself; don’t just upload and run.

“E-books! Throw ’em up on the Web!” is author and instructor James Scott Bell’s line that makes rightful fun of that misguided approach to faux marketing.

“If you build it, they will NOT come,” the agent Rachelle Gardner is telling her clients these days. “You must promote it.”

Are you thinking of self-publishing because you don’t want to query agents and editors in the traditional publishing system? Then get your door-to-door samples case ready. Listen to Gardner again: “What would be the point of self-publishing a book if you have no intention of promoting it? Who will buy it? With millions of books available for sale at any given time, what’s your plan for letting people know that yours exists?”

Look, many authors these days cling to an idea that the publishing industry is none of their business. Day and night, you can find them online, banging on about the unfairness of expectations that they “do marketing” and “be PR people.” But the fact that you can get online and find those gripe fests means that you can also get online and find the resources, the people, and maybe even the crowdfunding you need to give your stuff a chance to punch through the Wall of Content.

As the digital dynamic transforms the industry—of which you are a part, if you want to sell a book through trade or indie channels—business sense is your best currency. Publishers need author-partners, and that’s one reason to be hopeful about the kind of contract reform that the Authors Guild, the Society of Authors, and other advocacy groups are agitating to bring about. You can be an author-partner, a team player, an agent of your own success.

Because after the beginning, it wasn’t enough for the Word to be only with God. It had to get out there. Your stuff has to get out there, too. And you’ve got an unholy Wall of Content to contend with if you have any hope of drawing attention.

Your career is your business, and “I just want to write” will make you forgettable before you even start. Authors-in-progress—before they have a single sentence ready to sell—need to come to terms with the truth: Life in the marketplace is success in the making. So stop resisting. Take your seat among the congregation of the professional, entrepreneurial authors of today.

Otherwise your career will never get past “In the beginning.”