Why anyone can succed at publishing, or why publishing is failing

Just an abstract scenario, because I don’t want to get anyone (or myself) in trouble:

Publisher owns print rights to backlist title. Publisher does not promote said title, resting on the title either selling well on its own or rotting. Publisher has first dibs at electronic rights, fumbles them with a bad offer. Other publisher secures e-rights by offering a competitive deal. New publisher promotes same backlist title, blows it out of the water. Promoting ebook leads to collateral sales of pbook; also gets mentioned in industry news as a huge success. First publisher gets upset about accidentally succeeding, even to a minimal degree, calls the agent that represents the title, and complains about how first publisher didn’t get the ebook rights.

Yes, this really happened, like right just now, today.

Hint, first publisher: YOU DIDN’T GET THE EBOOK RIGHTS BECAUSE YOU WEREN’T PROMOTING THE TITLE AND DIDN’T OFFER FAIR ROYALTIES. Now quit harassing other people for your bad business practices and get back to work, such as it is.

Also, as a note, the phone call from the agency at your bequest to ask why their title was doing noteworthily well led to new business for us. So thanks, I guess.

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On all sides, publishers are uncompetitive. They offer bad deals to their producers, pay too much for the internal services they offer to secure those producers, and then can’t figure out how to make peace with their retailers, any retailer. Only one of these facts has been in the news for the last few years, but make no mistake, all three are true.

These facts are the exact crazy-person reasons that makes me think anyone with the slightest business sense can get ahead in this industry, and also, why publishing is going down the shitter.

Amazon.com: Tags Customers Associate with This Product

The “tags” that appear on Amazon product pages are user-generated tags and can be as helpful or spiteful as any user comment. Publishers and individual authors have no control over what tags customers associate with any given product.

The best practice one can do, if one is so inclined, is to navigate to the “Tags Customers Associate with This Product” section of the page and select ONLY the tags that are true or beneficial. This will weigh the selected tags heavier against the malicious tags.

To be frank, if this were going to have any significant impact one way or another, it would require thousands of selections instead of ones or dozens, and recommending this course of action to your authors would probably help them to feel more in control but otherwise waste their time. In fact, the most memorable use of this feature was to flag books as “DRMd” or “DRM-free” to help tech-savvy customers make purchases that reflect their ethical values. People do still flag products this way, but I haven’t known a massive push on this front for years. This makes me feel relatively certain that the impact of user-generated tags on search functionality and product discoverability is minimal.

These user-generated tags are in no way related to the tags publishers associate with their products at submission, which will always play the primary role in search functionality and product discovery. It is likely that your publisher has either good or good enough practices in place for their own distributions, but you may always query your editor about what metadata they’re associating with your book. Like most decisions, however, I would not recommend using your marketing instincts to try any correct their decisions; instead, consult with someone who knows about SEO before reacting to your publisher’s information. Being informed instead of reactive will help everyone involved.

 

The fate of indices in an ebook world

Indices are a problem across ebooks. Page numbers are no longer relevant in a digital space, which in itself makes 90% of an index immediately useless. To address this problem in books with simple indices (one page reference per item), publishers sometimes delete the page number and attempt to link the item to its corresponding reference (links being the digital equivalent to page numbers: faster, but not smarter). Creating these links is manual work that is both expensive and prone to error.

The more complicated the index, the more complicated the solutions to translate it for digital use. For example, the indices often contain multiple page references per item. Should publishers keep the page numbers as a means of having individual items to link to each particular reference, knowing that page numbers no longer apply? Regardless of what solution is reached here, since the linking is manual work, the more complicated the task becomes, the more expensive and the more prone to error the task becomes.

To be honest, of course, creating a digital index is not any more manual or prone to labor than creating a physical index, but digital publishing, though booming, is nowhere near the point of paying the sums of money that index experts (fairly) demand, and the basic reading experience that current devices aim for actually preempt putting anything close to this effort into a product. (Tablet publishing is another beast, perhaps to come to bear, but perhaps not, consider my solution below.) Therefore, we rely on the same companies to whom we outsource our digitization work, which itself even poses problems in titles that contain only narrative text and share the same escalating problems of complexity.

To respond to the index problem, I recommend implementing a solution to aggressively remove all indices from all titles. You may not feel like this is a perfect solution for your books, but let me offer the primary positive reason for which we made this decision.

All ebook readers (devices, apps, and other instances) have search functionality. Readers will have varying comfort levels searching for important terms, trained by their use of Google and other search engines. The solution is not perfect but is actually more likely to return what the user was looking for than an index, especially when you consider the human error that goes into making the digital index.

The ability to search for relevant terms is synonymous with a level of comfort with technology assumed in owning an e-reading device and provides an opportunity to improve reader experience without notifying them that a more frustrating option (a digital index) could also have been available.

YM&S: Professional ambitions, part 1 part 2 – Publishers Lunch

When I first got on to Twitter about 3 years ago, I made a comment about some business and how their product was disappointing me. That business responded to me personally and publicly, asking me what they could do to improve. There are a number of ways any given person could respond to this—what I would have called at the time at least atypical—interaction with a business; my reaction was surprised distrust. But businesses use Twitter as a low-cost customer survey system all the time—my reaction was only a sign of what a n00b I was to the network.

Again, my existence has recently been acknowledged by a business I mentioned by name: Publishers Lunch. (Such is a symptom of the power of blogging plus Google Alerts: if you mention them, they will browse.) I said in my last blog post that to get mentioned by them by name was one of my professional ambitions. Well, they mentioned me by name!

I’m decidedly excited about this because I’m refusing to react as I reacted as a Twitter n00b back when. I could construe the actual mention, “[Keep trying, Greg Freed]”, as sarcasm, something I would otherwise be likely to do because a lack of context defaults to snark, my primary form of casual communication. But instead, I’m taking it as at least one of my previous employers took it: as a light hearted joke and maybe even encouragement.

I mean, I don’t know the Publishers Lunch people (I met one at a barbeque once) and they don’t know me, but we both take publishing seriously, which is where the ambition and mention both find their source. But something I consider strange happens when I tell people in publishing about this particular ambition: the general reaction is to kind of sneer and ask why. And I can understand this reaction from people who have received the honor before: like any award, it must lose its luster after you win it. And I can understand this reaction from people who assume they’ll be worthy of a legit mention some day: publishing is small, and insulation can give rise to snootiness bordering on arrogance.

But I am neither of these types of people; neither established nor confident of my coming establishment in the industry. I am a southern semi-intellectual who bought access to this particular echelon through a master’s program, and there’s every chance that if I don’t assign goals for myself, nothing will ever happen for me.  And if one is going to begin assigning goals, baby steps are the best way to start. Leaps and bounds only occur once you’re really settled, really rooted to your place.

I want to thank Publishers Lunch for this mention. Getting mentioned by the industry-leading news magazine is only a baby step to someone like me, someone who consistently over-reaches, constantly takes bites bigger than they can chew. But what Publishers Lunch did here was to divide one of my first steps into more manageable pieces and then give me one of them as a gift: I have been mentioned by name in Publishers Lunch. Now I just have to get mentioned in earnest, which was the only goal I saw before.

You see? Now, because of their generosity and humor, I feel like I’ve made a kind of progress and success, which I wouldn’t have otherwise felt. And that’s the outcome of attaining an ambition. If this were a video game, this would be an achievement I’d have earned through just playing the game.

Have you ever set a professional goal that’s been looked down upon by others? Have you ever achieved part of a goal that you didn’t realize before was a goal in parts? Tell me about it in the comments below!

YM&S: Professional ambitions, part 1 – Publishers Lunch

Now that I’ve found a niche of publishing to call my very own, several professional ambitions have become defined in what was previously a very vague landscape. Planning things out before hand isn’t really my style: one of the reasons that I fared so poorly in academia qua academia—I have habituated myself to solving any problem I find myself, and I can precipitate problem I’ve suffered before, but solving a hypothetical problem that hasn’t actually appeared yet always feels to me like an utter waste of time. Not that doing so doesn’t have its place—I certainly appreciate others who have this tenacity for precognition—it’s just not something I spend time on or could succeed at if I did. Like painting: I love the visual and appreciate what I can understand of what I see, but the rest is lost on me though not without its own purposes outside of my biases.

So then, too, my professional ambitions. Being in publishing for a good many years now and having studied it both as a professional and academic, one of my ambitions is to make it I to Publishers Lunch, the primary form of industry news, an email sent on a daily basis with a summary of the news available on Publishers Marketplace.

This ambition has already split into steps, or degrees. My first goal was just to get mentioned in some way. Well, not only has my employer received several mentions since I started working there, projects over which I’ve had direct professional control have ended up there as well. And I had an increasing level of control over each project, so each mention is more satisfying than the one before it, a pleasant escalation.

So what’s the next step of this single ambition? To get mentioned by name, of course! Something like “The brilliant Greg Freed who has shown an unerring tenacity for generating book-quality books for the ebook market, has hit another homerun with this series, showing e-publishers and electronic producers everywhere that not only can high quality be attained but soon will be expected by customers everywhere.”

Like most of my dreams, an unmitigated delusion of grandeur, of course, that I do my damndest to live up to. And I won’t be sad if I fall a little short: falling a little short inversely implies quite a lot of successful movement. Which connects this next step in the Publishers Lunch ambition to another ambition of mine, which I’ll address in my next post!

Have a great day doing whatever it is you do, and DREAM LARGE. Share your ambitions in the comments below.

YM&S: Moving to the city

I wish to address two problems as briefly as possible: how Ashley and I responded to moving between cities under a crunch, and that people post their responses to their situations too quickly, which makes it difficult to gauge how accurate any given response is.

Ashley and I moved to Jersey City from Dorchester, MA in August 2010. In some ways, it was better than my move to Boston from Dallas because I had more lead time to know it was coming (two months vs. two weeks). On the other hand, having a significant other I had to consider made the going more difficult.

Ashley provided these challenges:
-that we disagreed on when we should move
-that I needed to get a larger place than I might otherwise have looked for
-that she brought two cats
-that she needed to be able to commute to Montclair, NJ for school

So we needed to find a place that was pet friendly, large enough for two people, a medium-sized dog, and two cats, and within a reasonable commute from Montclair. I, of course, intended to work in the city proper. The most ideal choice for this arrangement, geographically and by available transit, was Newark, but we have enough friends and family knowledgeable about Jersey to warn us off of that choice (crime, neighborhood quality, etc). So we were limited to Jersey City or Hoboken.

Hoboken has an average rate, for one-bedrooms, between 1300-1600 and can cost more depending on how nice you want to go. Downtown Jersey City is in the same price range, and Ashley and I were trying to keep our rent closer to $900-1200. Therefore, Jersey City Heights was the most ideal neighborhood.

However, Ashley was working and attending school, and I was piecing together my memoir for submission to Emerson, and we were tight on cash regardless of the time constraints, so we could only realistically make one trip to Jersey in order to make our decision. We decided to go with real estate agents since we couldn’t research any of the places ourselves, and we set up three appointments with three different agents (not ideal, but all of the agents were returning different locations so it was difficult to limit the appointments to one). We also scheduled to see a fourth apartment, shown by the building manager instead of an agent. As the date came, all of the agents cancelled, so we were left with only one appointment: the one shown by the building manager.

In most cases I would recommend this tactic, all considered. You get to meet the person responsible for your apartment’s upkeep, and no agents means no negotiating over fees means that you can keep discussions about price limited to per month and utilities. The apartment we saw was nice enough, but the neighborhood put me off, as did the manager, but choice was not on our side at that point: Ashley loved the unit, and we decided that we would do whatever it took to make at least the first year work. So we signed the papers, for better or worse.

Over the six months, my hesitation about both the neighborhood and the building manager proved pretty true to point, so I always urge you to trust your instincts insofar as your situation allows you to. Jersey City Heights (the cliffs above Hoboken) provide good access to Manhattan but only decent access to Hoboken–the 87 bus is not reliable but is the only constant mass transit down the cliffs to the city. To get out to Montclair, Ashley has to get the 87 into Hoboken: it comes only on a sporadic schedule, maybe on time 1 out of 3 time slots, and those changing day by day. NJ trains seem to be reliable, though, so there’s that, at least.

Therefore, when you move to a new city, be sure to thoroughly research your neighborhood, your landlord, and your transit situation. If you don’t have an adequate knowledge of these variables, you’re putting yourself at risk of a shock the moment you land.

YM&S: Young, Mobile, and Social

I’m going to start a new strand of blog posts in a new YM&S category. Ashley and I had a fun time in Boston, a town both of us knew different parts of, and we’ve enjoyed discovering Jersey City, Hoboken, Montclair, and New York City. YM&S posts will be about discovering our new home or remembering the old, hopefully to help out people who are following in the same or similar footsteps.

More to come soon, probably tonight.