Means of Production

[update: for those of you--unlike me--who can read text on screens for long periods, Amazon introduces the Kindle]

If you've been following the posts and comments, you've seen the various prognostications on the future of publishing. A person could go on forever on the topic...so I will.



In the world of mystery writing, there are both fan organizations and conferences and writer organizations and conferences. [image via Malice Domestic.]

Recently, one of the largest fan conferences, Malice Domestic, changed the rules regarding participation in its panels, insisting that panelists be "traditionally published." This, along with a new list of approved publishers from the Mystery Writers of America (being published by an approved publisher is necessary for "active" status in MWA), has created quite a to-do in the mystery writing world, bringing to light as it does questions of the relative validity of various routes to publication.

Before I talk about the finished product, that lovely book we tuck into our bags, keep on the nightstand, flip through in the tub, before I ruminate on how it appears, and how we get it into our hot little hands, I want to back up a few steps.

Back when I was in college, I had a typewriter. It was the old kind, the kind with the long "legs" beneath the numbers, which would get stuck if you typed too fast. My mother had the fancy version, the IBM Selectric with the rolling ball that could "remember" a whole paragraph of text. (I was never sure what you were supposed to do with that paragraph of text it remembered, but I wasn't very technically inclined at the time.) I wrote everything by hand. I would cut papers into bits and reorganize them, pasting them into the appropriate order before typing them, or, if I were running particularly late, pasting them together once they had already been typed, then photocopying the finished product.

And although I wrote my 119,000 word fantasy novel by hand, I would never have considered attempting such at thing before 1986, when I got my first computer. Just the knowledge that I can edit the text once it's in there is incredibly freeing.

The switch from typewriter to computer is a change in the means of production. The product still looks the same -- black print on 8.5" x 11" paper, with one inch margins, etc--but the route is different. And the new route has made the end product much more accessible. Just ask your average editor or agent. Back in the late 80's, when I sent my fantasy novel to a couple places, you could expect to hear back from the agent or publisher (no, you didn't need an agent, not even for the bigger houses) in a reasonable length of time.

So the slushpiles grew. [image via Sean Lindsay's writing demotivators.]

Getting words onto paper became easier. Manuscripts proliferated. Submissions increased geometrically, and publishers began insisting authors get agents. Because while the quantity of submissions they got increased daily, the quality did not. People became more prolific, but not more talented, and people who would never have considered attempting to get a novel published suddenly had dreams of fame and fortune.

You see, once upon a time the act of writing the novel proved, in and of itself, that the writer was dedicated. The very thought of writing, typing, correcting, re-typing...the process was so daunting that no sane person would undertake it.

Nowadays, producing the manuscript is the easy part. So much so, in fact, that a woman I know said in the course of an instant message conversation yesterday: "My brother just finished writing a novel. Now he doesn't know what to do with it." Only the fact that I had to leave the room prevented me from telling her that now he'd done the easy part. Because when it's the first book, writing it is the easy part. At least that was my experience, and the experience of most of the people I know, which is why all of us have one--if not more--manuscripts in boxes under the bed that will never see the light of day.

Later on, it gets harder. There are deadlines and expectations you don't even think about when you first set out to get that first story on paper.

But let's say you do get that first story down, or the second, or the third, and you finally get it to the point where you think you want to get it published. What's next?

I'd say you want to see it in print, but that's not the only route to publication nowadays. For lots of people, particularly in particular genres, eBooks are a major means of publication.

Some possible ways to get published:

• Self-publishing. And by this I mean the most literal form; you take responsibility for everything from printing through distribution.
• Vanity Presses/Subsidy Presses. This is pay to play. You don't have to do the work, you just pay someone else to do it for you. Once upon a time, you still had to do all the distribution and promotion for yourself, but the biggies in the vanity press game these days do that for you.
  
• eBooks. Here I mean publishing through eBook houses, as opposed to the eBooks put out by "traditional" publishing houses as part of print contracts.
• Small Press publishing. Small presses range from those with sterling reps to those run by scam artists. It doesn't always take a lot of research to figure out which end of the spectrum a possible press falls into, but a lot of them fall somewhere in the middle, and you have to be careful with those. It can be just as hard to get a contract with a reputable small press as it is with a big house, but you often have a different relationship with the publishing house.
• Big Publishing Houses. (Some people refer to these as "New York Publishers.")

I'm sure I am leaving something out, but those are the ones that come to mind right now. I've tried to put these in order of some combination of the following factors: how likely you are to make any money at all, how much of the work of publication you'll have to do yourself, and how likely you are to see your book in a bookstore.

Obviously, if you publish via eBook, you're not going to find your book in a bookstore. You may, however, make a fair amount of money, particularly if you are in one of the genres popular with eBook readers, like erotica. And, occasionally, an eBook publisher makes the jump to print, as did Ellora's Cave.

What a lot of people don't realize, however, is that most of the other options listed above also won't get you onto bookstore shelves. Mass market paperbacks, put out by major publishing houses, almost certainly will, though there's no guarantee your book will stay on those shelves very long. Some small presses get their books into chain stores, but most do not. (Please note: there's a big difference between a small press, and a minor imprint of a big publishing house.)

And now we're back to the means of production question.

The vast majority of books produced by anything other than the "big" publishing houses (Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, etc) are published via Print On Demand technology. That is, they are printed when ordered, not warehoused someplace. (Please note: POD is a technology. Vanity publishers use it, true, but so do legitimate, traditional publishing houses. POD is not synonymous with subsidy publishing.)

Pretty soon, I think POD is the way everything will be published. And every consumer will know it, because they'll go online and order their book (in their choice of format--mass market pb, trade pb, large print, hardcover...) and it will be ready at a kiosk somewhere ten minutes later. Frankly, that's the only method of producing books that makes sense, and the technology is basically available already.

Does that mean people won't be scrambling over one another for contracts with the "biggies" in publishing? Nope. I've talked to enough aspiring authors to know that lots of people believe the level of competition will go down, but I have to disagree.

Let me just grab Clare's futurist cap and put it on over my psychic cap so I can explain.

Under the 90% rule, which states that 90% of everything is crap, most manuscripts never deserve to see the light of day. Given what I've read on agent and editor blogs over the past several years, I'd have to say that formulation is generous. So somehow there has to be a way for the average consumer to decide between the selections in the bookstore kiosk. Do they go with choice A2002 or B1097? Perhaps X53?

Certainly, the availability of excerpts will help. But I think the power of brand loyalty cannot be discounted. I'm already there, though primarily in a negative sense. I don't care how tempting a plotline sounds, I will not buy a book published by certain publishers because they publish nothing but garbage. Does that mean that something put out by, say, Berkley Prime Crime is guaranteed to be good? Nope. But it sure has a better chance of being good than something by...well, I won't name names.

So the more things change in this new future of publishing, the more things will stay the same, at least as I see it.

(When I get my head out of NaNoWriMo, I'll post a bibliography for anyone who likes reading about this kind of stuff and has more time than they need.)