The Author's Journey

27 Jan 2010

A beyond-all-expectations conversation with K. at Oceanview. She is definitely on board, so it’s two down and one to go in terms of team building. In retrospect, I created my own difficulties by not giving M. and K. more credit – particularly M. So many of the people I have dealt with in business over the years were stupid that I tend to assume the worst, which is probably not to my advantage. In any case, I now “get it.” I understand the selling process, and that means I can figure out how to help it along.

Basically, there are the chains, the independents, and the online sales channels. For the chains and independents, the first key objective is getting books on the shelves. Oceanview uses conventional sales reps for the chains. Each rep represents somewhere between five and ten publishers, probably closer to five is my guess. The reps actually visit the buyers for the chains face-to-face and pitch their “Fall line” (or whatever season it is) one book at a time. So the importance of a single line that encapsulates what a book is about is huge. (Mine is, “It’s a thriller about a college student who gets addicted to one of those online role-playing games.” More about that in another post.)

Based on the cover, the pitch, and the publisher’s reputation, the chain buyers either buy or don’t.   The buyers, I have heard, revel in their power. With bigger publishers, where the buyers and employees of the publisher deal directly, the buyers often agree to place an order only if the publisher changes the cover design.

The bottom line for me is that there is no way to influence this situation.

The independents are a different story.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a couple of weeks.

December 29, 2008

Kimberley uses a lawyer to negotiate her contracts who refuses to have any contact with “the author.” I feel like I’m the victim of stereotyping, as though authors, simply by virtue of the work thye do, must be difficult, irrational people who could only get in the way. I don’t like this situation, but at the same time I see its merit. There is truth in most stereotypes, and I know very well that every extra person involved in a negotiation makes getting a result more difficult.

Instead of complaining, I do an end run. I call Oceanview’s CEO, Susan Greger. I explain that I’m not going to be involved in the negotiations, and actually don’t want to be. But… this lawyer works for me, and ultimately has to do what I say. So don’t hesitate to call me if you come to an impass. I want this deal to happen.

As it turns out, they’ve already had one exchange and it went well. “Don’t worry,” says Susan, “She’s just doing her job. As a matter of fact, she actually helped me with a couple of things in our standard contract that made it better.”

All is well.

January 28, 2009

The contract arrives, and, as I anticipated, it is awful. I have never seen a contract that so favors one side over the other, and I’ve seen plenty. I have to grant Oceanview first right of refusal on my next book (not so bad in itself), but I also have to agree to the same terms as Fortuna. There’s no “best seller clause” that allows me to renegotiate if Fortuna sells millions of copies, gets reprinted in 17 languages, etc.

Equally bad, they only pay me royalties once a year, in the year after I earn them – which means that it could be six years from the time I started spending substantial time on the book before I see any money beyond the advance. As a first time author, I have no leverage in this situation.

I sign.

February 11, 2009

A celebratory lunch with Kimberley, again at the Buckeye. How time marches on. Phil is not with us because he has left Halsey-Reece. In fact, he has left publishing altogether. Kimberley doesn’t even know what he’s doing. She suspects he’s uncomfortable communicating with her since she put so much energy into grooming him and he just skipped out. There is no rancor in her voice as she tells me all this, but I wonder.

I bring up the matter of the outrageous contract. “I know, I know,” is her response. Most of what I object to has become standard industry practice.

And what about the missing best seller clause?

“Don’t worry. If Fortuna is a best seller, we’re going back to the table.”

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a couple of weeks.

November 6, 2009

I can’t stop thinking about my conversation with K at Oceanview, and now I know what’s bothering me: We don’t have a strategy to win. Instead, we have a list of activities that are carried out for every book, and once that activity is checked off, we’re done.

The first thing that’s missing is numerical targets. The second is a differentiation between “push” and “pull” activities.

Push marketing is about getting product on the shelves. Barnes & Nobel has a slogan that “It’s about getting the book into the customer’s hands.” That’s push marketing. You try to influence the distribution channel. I know how this works in supermarkets or semiconductors, but I’m not so sure about publishing. For example, are there slotting fees? (These are fees you pay to get your cans of soup or bottles of gourmet salad dressing on the shelve at Safeway.) There’s so much I don’t know!

Pull marketing is about creating demand. This I can do. The launch event, if I can pull it off, will create buzz. My website will help. So will the trailer. And I am working on exploiting Facebook, LinkIn and Twitter. We need to get lucky with book reviews.

The team at Oceanview needs to start thinking this way.

Perhaps more than anything, we need a roll-out strategy that enables us to focus on markets where we can win, and then leverage the results. In general, distributors and retailers of anything only care about one thing when they make decisions about whether or not to sell a product: has it sold somewhere else?

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

December 5, 2009

Oceanview has hired a new person to handle book signings with the chains. I give her a welcome call and, “since we’re talking” she suggests that it’s as good a time as any for her to collect information about me and my book. It’s one of about twenty books she will be working on in the next few months.

It’s a discouraging conversation. She reminds me – and I know I’ve said this about others – of a real estate agent or perhaps a printing company rep. Of course, her job is ultimately selling books, and she probably should have that superficial perky brightness that so many women in sales cultivate. However, I must say she doesn’t strike me as particularly knowledgeable. And our conversation about book signings revolves entirely around local independents, and by local I mean the San Francisco Bay Area. She asks me if there are any bookstores that would be good locations for signings. She asks me. I say in so many words, “I write books. I don’t make lists.”

I do learn from the conversation that there is rather intense competition for the privilege of setting up a card table in a book store and sitting behind it, hoping somebody will come by and buy one of your books. (These are called “meet-and-greet” signings, in contrast to readings.) You have to work at it even to get the opportunity.

There’s a term in sales: low-hanging fruit. These are the sales opportunities you go after first, the easy ones. I don’t fit into that category. Given my “platform,” or lack thereof, I’ll be lucky if I get any help from her at all.

I realize that if I’m going to get any results from the Oceanview marketing organization, I need to sell the wonderfulness of Fortuna much more effectively. I think the key is getting them to understand the significance of the trend towards online gaming as an alternative to watching TV. It’s huge. Millions do it. And it’s a phenomenon that hasn’t been well covered in the media.

I think what I have to do is launch the book in Second Life. That will attract some interest.

November 19, 2009

The initial designs for my web site simply don’t look anything like what my designer and I talked about. There are issues about the size of various items that I don’t fully understand. (It’s very complicated. If you have two pictures that start out at different sizes and you shrink them down to the same size, they may not have the same resolution, which will make the site look amateurish.) I realize that I haven’t thought through what information needs to be there, at least as clearly as I should have. In other words, it’s a mess. We’re going to have to go back to square one.

Meanwhile, I’m in despair about the lack of a winning game plan. The way K has formulated the problem, the only way to get distribution is to show up at book stores for a signing even, and book stores will only schedule signing events for authors a) that are known or b) are local. In other words, my only shot at selling any books is in the San Francisco Bay Area. As I think about that, I can imagine that Bay Area success could be leveraged. Distributors will listen if a book is doing well regionally. So if K can say, “Fortuna is a best-seller in San Francisco, buyers in Boston, Chicago, Austin, etc. might listen. But then the question arises, How will she get that data? Does it even exist any more, now that metropolitan newspapers are shrinking down to zero and no longer have the resources to tabulate local best-seller lists?

All of this is what’s called “push” in marketing lingo. Push strategies are designed to get product on shelves – to push it out to consumers. There’s a second strategy, pull, which attempts to get consumers to seek out the product, e.g. to order it from a web site. That, I gather, can come from reviews. Who will review Fortuna? How can I get on the air? On the crucial blog? It’s hopeless.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

November 18, 2009

New, and again discouraging exchanges with the people at Oceanview in charge of promoting my book. I have to admit that part of my negativity results from being lectured about how to present myself in a sales situation by a cheerful, bright woman who is nonetheless younger than my daughter and doesn’t have one tenth the experience that I have selling things. “You have to be outgoing, etc. etc. etc.” But there’s something else. It’s the math.

I asked K. what the best-case scenario would be in terms of book appearances for me: number of appearances and books sold per appearance. Her response was 65 appearances in one year (best case) and 25 books sold per appearance (also best case). So… 65 appearances x 25 books = 1625 books x $25 = about $40,000. My commission is based on gross revenues to Oceanview. Say that they get $12.50 on each book, which is a generous assumption. So, maybe the gross comes out to around $20,000. Of that, I get 8 percent, or $1,600, or $24 per appearance, about $8.00 per hour. Oh, and by the way, I get that about a year after I earn it.

That’s annoying. But the fact of the matter is, I don’t mind doing the signings. In fact, I can’t think of anything more fun than personally selling my books to the people who want to read them. Actually meeting my audience!

What drives me crazy about the above is that nobody has a game plan to win. The way sales works is this: You set a global (i.e. overall) target of x many sales this year. Then you break it down into a) quarters and b) regions or sales units. Then, ultimately, you assign every sales person a quota. You can also assign targets based on activities that aren’t person-specific, e.g. so many sales from this direct mail campaign, so many sales from participating in this trade show and so on. But one way or another, you figure out in advance exactly how you’re going to reach your target. And we don’t even have a target

I suppose if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

As a first time author with a book about to be released, I have asked myself more than once whether I would have been better off self-publishing. I have a unique perspective. My day job is marketing, which not only involves figuring out how to sell products to a target market, but also the designing and printing of brochures, “white papers,” direct mail pieces etc. that actually do the selling. I also do quite a bit of consulting for PR firms. And of course, I’ve designed and/or written the copy for dozens of web sites and blogs. I’ve also written and pitched stories to the media. I’ve even run companies somewhat larger than my publishing house.

In other words, short of literally operating a printing press, I have the skills to self publish. And, were I to succeed, I would make about ten times as much money per book sold.

Today I’m going to share my analysis of what I’m getting by following the conventional publishing path instead, along with some rough estimates of what these publisher-provided services would cost if I had to pay for them. The bottom line: For a novelist, following the conventional path makes sense.

Editing. It’s my belief that, no matter how good you are, you need an editor. At minimum, you need a copy editor just to find the dozens of typos in your manuscript. I personally got a lot more than that – from my agent, Kimberly Cameron. She made numerous substantive suggestions, many of which made the book more salable and, I would argue, quite simply better. The cost if I had hired someone: About $5,000.

Cover design, page layout and  printing. In theory, you could design your book cover yourself, which is what I did (with a significant contribution from George Foster who designs covers for Oceanview). But, realistically, most people will need to find a designer. There’s nothing all that tricky about it. You could get a decent result for under $1,000, perhaps less. There are plenty of software programs that would enable you to convert your manuscript to a printable file. Most of the formatting is automatic, although it’s still a substantial project, as you have to double-check every page. I’m guessing that I could get someone to do that work for about $1,500.

Finding a printer is easy. I found one in about fifteen minutes in central Washington (a relatively rural area where I figured the overhead for a printer would be low). If they had printed 3,000 hardback copies of my book it would have cost between $15,000 and $18,000. For me, that would not be a trivial sum. Of course, Oceanview footed that bill.

Public relations. There are plenty of PR companies and individual practitioners who specialize in publicizing books. A typical package, which would include a press kit plus distribution of press releases, interview offers and the like would cost between $3,000 and $5,000.

The sub-total here is somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000. There’s more – notably the warehousing, selling and physical distribution of the book, but I’m running out of space. And even with all sorts of cost-cutting, e.g. printing a paperback instead of a hardback, doing the PR yourself, the costs are substantial, and with a publisher, all the work is done by experts.

I would hardly say that self-publishing isn’t viable. In fact, for non-fiction it may be the best path, particularly when combined with a well-designed web-based sales strategy. But the traditional route, for all its aggravating moments, is still a pretty good deal for fiction writers.

Ellis Weiner has written a hilarious piece in the “Shouts & Murmurs” section of the New Yorker (October 19, 2009) called “Subject: Our Marketing Plan.” The piece is in the form of a memo from Gineen, a fictional promotion director at “Propensity Books” to the author of a book that Propensity has bought. If you have recently sold a book, hope to sell a book one day, or just want to know what it’s like, this is must read material. The only problem is that, for real writers, it’s not funny. It’s painful.

It would be wrong to give away Ellis’ jokes. But I’ll quote briefly to convey an impression of the whole.

“To start: Do you blog? If not… It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.”

The theme of the piece is that today’s publishing companies expect an enormous amount of work from authors, everything from creating web sites and writing blogs to hitting on celebrities for blurbs to planning their own schedule of personal appearances.

Every writer I’ve talked to has complained – or at least taken note of – how much of the process of selling a book has been transferred from the publisher to the author. As I’ve noted earlier, publishers have also transferred a lot of work from their internal acquisition staff to literary agents, e.g. the substantial amount of initial editing that is typically required to get a book to the point where it’s publishable.

The question that is bound to eventually arise has to do with what the business community calls “value add.” In a tight economy, anyone who’s doing business with any other entity – a publisher, a distributor, a retail outlet – is bound to ask the question: What value is entity X adding to the process? Just to make sure the concept is clear, here’s an example: Distributors in the manufacturing segment add value by providing manufacturers with a sales force. You sell your valves to half a dozen distributors, and they in turn go through the hassle of selling those valves to the hundreds upon hundreds of companies that will actually use them. In addition to providing a sales force, distributors also keep inventory in stock (which costs money), handle the mechanics of quoting, invoicing and collecting the money, and deal with the endless details of any sales transaction, including post-sale complaints.

So, in this light, what value to publishers add to the process. The answer from this writer’s view is, plenty. In my next post, I’ll share some of the math.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

I got a call out of the blue the other day from Susan at Oceanview letting me know the ARCs  (author’s review copies) were on their way, and yesterday the pages arrived. The are what we used to be called galley proofs or, more commonly, “gallies.” It is very difficult to read them carefully, I have been over this ground so many times. This morning I managed about ten pages. And I found the kind of little errors you’re supposed to find: a line that is indented one extra character; a paragraph that is not indented; a space missing in an ellipsis. I also find that I am very happy with the book, and frankly amazed that I was able to create the many little details that give the book its unique ambience.

Meanwhile, the web site is progressing. And I have written a script for a movie-like “trailer.” One of my neighbors is a professor in the drama department at St. Mary’s college, which is about ten miles away from Berkeley, and he will line up actors. I think I can get a shooter from the Berkeley public access TV station, or maybe it will be a student from St. Mary’s. Christopher St. John, my former protégé who is now a very successful creative director, will assemble the clip in Final Cut Express, which I don’t know how to use.

I don’t mind all this extra work. In fact, it’s fun. But I wonder how writers who don’t have my kind of background manage. While I can’t do online promotion perfectly, I can get by. I understand the tools, and I have been extremely lucky in finding people to help me.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

September 4, 2009

The final proof of the cover arrived in my inbox this morning. Or, I think it’s the final. Any hidden agendas about the color, the finish (glossy vs. matt), the type or anything else would have appeared by now.

I am very pleased. The art director fixed the type, which was my main concern. He added a new wrinkle – some art directors just can’t stop fiddling – but it made things a little better, and definitely not worse. If I still had an ad agency I would hire this guy in a minute.

Getting the cover almost seemed like a reward for sending off the final copy edits, although the two processes aren’t connected.

I dislike dealing with copy editors so much – even when it’s for my own good – that I put off dealing with the last sixty pages for at least three weeks. The manuscript just sat there on a table. But finally I faced it, and indeed there were unpleasant problems to deal with.

I had gotten some of the dates wrong.

Every section of Fortuna has a time and date, and five of them were obviously wrong. Worse, it wasn’t obvious how to fix them. I had to carefully read each section, the section before it, and the section after it. (It’s been so long that I don’t really remember when all the events happen.)

Beyond that, the process was about accepting or rejecting capitalizations, italicizations, commas and the like. The copy editor’s comments were in red ink, and I either left them or wrote “NO” with a thick blue fiber-tipped pen. The manuscript had two or three “NO’s” on almost every page. I should have enjoyed this power, I supposed, having had my work edited in ways I didn’t like for years. But in fact, I felt bad.

For some reason, the editor-in-chief wants everything to happen on paper, not “on the computer,” as she expresses it, so I had to send the only copy in the world to her via snail mail. I should probably have made a photo copy, but I didn’t want to spend the money. So I just shipped it overnight, which is the safest way. The cost: $67.00.

I am going to end up losing money on this book.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.