And the book biz changes…step by step. Ultimately the folding of bricks and mortar mega-stores is, imho, likely to continue, ultimately leaving the indies who deal in used and new and used; the online sellers who ship; and the e-books. And the pirates.
What this also does is mean 30% of Borders’ buying is now lost to publishers, who are hurting with every such event, and ultimately to writers, who are hurting right along with them; and the bankruptcy means whatever Borders owes publishers and other vendors across the board won’t get paid. Neither will the writers, of course.
Interesting times, my friends. I got a check the other day that is only 10% of what that check used to be. A 90% pay cut is pretty steep, let us tell you.
And now we’ve got a myth floating the internet that out of print means public domain. The pirates are flourishing on that supposition. They’re encouraging readers to scan and offer up out of print favorites…when almost all backlist is out of print, because of the publishing crisis.
How nice!
Sad times for those who love books, like myself. Thank God we have our libraries, just checked out a copy of your Collected Short Fiction. I am really enjoying the stories and novellas. Sunfall stories are great. Thanks.
Libraries are beginning to offer e-books as well as the traditional codices. At least, my local library does, and so does the one my niece (in a Kansas City suburb) uses. The selection isn’t great, yet, but that should improve over the next year or so.
So far, Project Gutenberg, Jim Baen, and Closed Circle have supplied me with more e-books than I can read. I still support the living authors I enjoy by buying their work in hardcover as those come out. (I have a complete set of Cherryh first editions and the collector in me isn’t going to stop adding new books to that shelf any time soon.) How this will play out when I favorite author (besides the CC ones) produces a new e-book-only work, I don’t know.
I don’t buy ebooks yet; I likely will, sometime in the future, when I eventually acquire an IPad or similar device. Not being a first-on-the-bandwagon type when it comes to new technology, I’m happy enough feeding my hoarding habit with paperbacks and the occasional trade paperbacks.
Reading about the situations others are facing re: stores closing and therefore selection getting limited, I feel fortunate to live in the same city as the Sentry Box, an independent store which the manager of tells me is the largest remaining SF/F specialty store in North America. I buy most of my books through them — including the non-SF stuff, since he’ll order anything he can get through his distributor for me. (If you’re looking for a rare backlist title, you might try him. He had original never-sold 2.95 Hal Clement books on the shelf — still! — just a couple of years ago. A walk-in will get that price, although if he has to ship it, there’s a 5.00 minimum. Also, their online catalogue isn’t always accurate; I call if I see a 0 in the available column.)
It is so *nice* having that kind of personal relationship with a bookseller. There have been half a dozen new and used booksellers in this city that I’ve used over the years, and the SB is the only one still in business. They’re part of a large gaming store business, though, so maybe they’re still around because they don’t have to rely just on the books.
And now we’ve got a myth floating the internet that out of print means public domain. The pirates are flourishing on that supposition. They’re encouraging readers to scan and offer up out of print favorites…when almost all backlist is out of print, because of the publishing crisis.
We had this issue come up in the media zine world several years ago. There were two gals out there in cyberland whose philosophy was: By granting the editor/publisher of a zine the right to publish a story, the story had been “set free”, and they had the right to put up any previously published zine story on the net. A lot of zine writers were not happy. Some didn’t want the hassle of being on the Net, and others had used their stories to test drive ideas they wanted to work up into real books to try and sell to a publisher. We yelled. We screamed. We begged. But they ignored us and went happily on their way. But since fanfic plays in somebody else’s playground, we had no legal standing. Hopefully, the concept of copyright will assist professionally published authors to protect their rights to their work.
Again — piracy might be one of those issues that the major author organizations can take a stab at. (But while it’s won some piracy victories, the RIAA hasn’t made much of a dent in the music and video piracy business.) A couple weeks back, I read about a new application that can serve as bit torrents for books. And believe me thee, something like that will hurt bookstores every bit as much as it does authors.
I have a real love/hate relationship with POD (print-on-demand) and e-publishing. It’s good in the respect that a publisher might keep books in print longer than they would otherwise, or that enable an author who has regained rights to his/her work to sell copies of that work without dealing with creating and maintaining a physical inventory of product. But the big drawback is that any moron with a computer and an internet connection can call himself a publisher.
Neil Gaiman’s interview with a different take on the piracy issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI
The problem is, when a legal department tells a pirate to desist, he simply uses the immense ‘space’ you can get nowadays on a server to create a new domain name and migrates his whole operation over to a new site. He may have several of these, and rotate them. A little computer expertise, the push of a key, and he’s Doing Business.
Until the feds decide copyright matters, there’s no penalty if you should find out where they are: if there were a prison sentence for it, it would slow down the pirates. But NOT the ones set up in other countries.
And scam artists abound. Amazon hosts a batch that simply collect all wiki articles on a topic, use Amazon’s authoring service, and will, yes, for a fee, deliver them to you bound as an Amazon book. Or in e-file. The titles they give are often book titles on which these articles were written. There is one of mine up there that claims to give you 30 of my books for 29.00 or the like—which is all the wiki’s regarding these books—and I’ve protested to Amazon to get them to remove it, but they want me to jump through legal hoops to do it. Amazon, in short, does not investigate the legitimacy of the copyright so-called-holder, but wants to investigate the real copyright holder when they protest. Made me madder’n a shipful of kif, I’ll tell you. I told them where to put that notion, and I don’t know if they’ve ever taken that batch off—but the same people are doing it to every other writer named in wiki, and they’re not based in the USA.
Like it or not, once a book or any piece of writing is put into machine sensible form it is ready for release in the wild.
I is not fair or just to the author but I do not see any real way of preventing it.
A certain site and others have no desire to prevent theft of intellectual property.
Would Ms. Cherryh be better off becoming an English instructor at a college and just write for herself?
>Would Ms. Cherryh be better off becoming an English instructor at a college and just write for herself?
J.R.R.Tolkien, who was a college professor, was not amused when in the 1960’s a (US) paperback publisher (Publisher A) discovered a loophole in the U.S. Copyright Laws and beginning publishing The Lord of the Rings without paying royalties. He somehow managed to get a rival publishing house (Publisher B) to bring our an authorized edition of LOTR and pay royalties. The story ends happily as Publisher A let his edition go out of print (and, I believe, eventual paid JRRT some royalties).
Off hand I can think of only four stf writers who were college professors of any subject, Tolkien, Lewis, Asimov, and Williamson. I am sure that there must be others. Only Asimov and Williamson can be said to have been prolific, and the majority of their work was written either before or after their professorial days.
A couple of snipped comments:
“But the big drawback is that any moron with a computer and an internet connection can call himself a publisher.”
“Like it or not, once a book or any piece of writing is put into machine sensible form it is ready for release in the wild.”
This is so familiar. In the record business we had these conversations 25 years ago. The moron with a computer in his bedroom put many recording studios and record companies out of business. And we are still trying to figure out how to cope with it. The large professional recording studio is dead. Perhaps 90% are out of business compared to 25 years ago. That’s inside baseball but the general public knows what happens when music becomes data: Napster, iTunes, unlimited perfect copies forever.
iTunes is now the local record store and if today’s paper-NY Times read online (mea culpa)-is true it wants to be your local bookstore and magazine rack. Publishers are resisting but can you resist what may be the salvation of you business? Without iTunes the record-sorry, music- business would be as dead as the dodo.
And in that sentence is the crux of the matter. Are publishers in the business of selling books or what’s printed on the page in whatever form people want? Record companies thought they were in the business of selling flat black plastic things or aluminized polycarbonate discs when they were really in the business of selling content-music. But they didn’t realize that-Steve Jobs did. Will he do the same to the publishing business? Good question.
Once again Gorge Santayana proves to be prophetic.
Phil Brown
In the days when books were first ‘published,’ it worked like this: Vergil got a patron (Augustus) who paid his bills while he wrote, and when the book was done, there was a reading, a big social event, and Augustus got to invite everyone, and have a party; and then everybody wanted copies, so they had a publishing house (consisting of a hundred literate slaves who sat at desks and wrote as the Reader read the book aloud: early Xerox) and more slaves who collated, pasted (into scroll form) and bound (put in a leather case))—the pricier books were copied by people with the better handwriting.
We may be down to that. You guys are Augustus, by reason of buying our books, and we’re sort of a cross between Vergil and the publishing company, only the copiers is us. 😉
CJ wrote: And scam artists abound. Amazon hosts a batch that simply collect all wiki articles on a topic, use Amazon’s authoring service, and will, yes, for a fee, deliver them to you bound as an Amazon book.
Oh boy, oh boy, do those scam artists abound. It used to be that all you had to do was avoid anything “published” by Carlton Press. Nowadays, I have to research every publisher that isn’t one of the Big 7 or a certain bunch of respectable small presses.
I don’t know how many wannabe “authors” I’ve refused to hold book signings for. A lot of those so-called publishers will not accept returns. Almost all of them force the so-called authors to act as their own distributors. And the poor schmucks are so grateful to be “published” that not only will they pay for the privilege up front, but then act as their own distributor. some of these wannabes go so far as to actually hire publicity agents. Many mystery conventions have made the decision to not allow authors whose publishers are not recognized by the Mystery Writers of America to participate in panels.
Amazon, in short, does not investigate the legitimacy of the copyright so-called-holder, but wants to investigate the real copyright holder when they protest.
Wow. Just wow. On the other hand, I am not the least bit surprised. Jeff Bezos strikes me as not caring who gets in his way. (He’d make a great kif leader.)
Nosendove wrote: Would Ms. Cherryh be better off becoming an English instructor at a college and just write for herself?
CJ is one of a handful of writers who can actually make a living as a full time writer. In the mystery field, a lot of the writers write before and after mundane jobs. Many of the women are stay-at-home moms writing in between loads of laundry, vacuuming, fixing supper and carpooling kids. They make just enough money to supplement their husband’s earnings so that they don’t have to work out of the home. Another bunch are retirees who didn’t start writing until they had retired. (This leads to a big problem of an author getting a popular series going, then dying before the series is completed.)
The big payout for many non-best selling writers is the recognition and praise they receive from their fans. Many writers have told me that it’s not so much the money (although the regular cash infusions are nice) as the pleasure they receive by interacting with their readers.
PhilBrown: I admit it: I’m one of those iTunes people. I collect orchestral movie sound tracks — Hans Zimmer, John Powell, etc. But there are a couple of studios that specialize in re-releasing out-of-print sound tracks. When something I really want shows up, I grit my teeth and send them money. LOL!!!!
And just to show that short sightedness isn’t confined to the arts consider the railroad business.
For many years they thought they were in the business of moving rail cars from here to there. Turns out they were really in the business of transporting goods from here to there. Big difference.
Phil Brown
My point about being a teacher is that perhaps Ms. Cherryh could earn a better living – or one with less stress. While I like and enjoy, and buy, her books, her health and sanity are more important.
It may well be that the future for writing will be a part time thing, either before or after the daytime job.
As a current teacher, I can say definitely that there would NOT be less stress in teaching. It has nearly killed me and ruined my health and threatened my sanity.
Most teachers don’t do this for the money and it’s a good thing because there is not much money in it, at least in my location. With a master’s degree and 11 years experience I make much less than 40k and cannot afford the health insurance. In 11 years’ time, our salary has been frozen for 3 years at a time, not once but TWICE without even a step increase. When I did buy the health insurance, I took home LESS money EACH year.
It’s too bad because the kids need someone who can teach them, but my days are numbered. It’s get out or die.
I quit teaching not quite a full jump from suicidal from the stress. To this day I can’t walk into a school building without having ‘combat nerves’ kick in: it takes me days to relax. And I still, when going places with large crowd pressure, can’t help checking hands and body language for weapons and situations…not because I didn’t trust my students: it took that to do what I needed to do and protect them. That’s what teaching is like.
Then I am so glad you quit!! You know exactly where I am right now!! It takes two weeks of summer break for my shoulders to relax down from the level of my ears. (And, we might have 4 weeks off in summer off but we don’t get paid for it. Nor is our day 8 to 3.)
Teachers are a valiant lot who are not paid a third of what they ought to be. My pre-deductions salary back in 1966 was 6,000 a year, with a Masters. By the time I’d given up in 1979, I’d worked up to 10,000. With a Masters plus. No, it is a profession that gets a lot of admiration for selfless devotion, but no just recompense for hours spent. Voters will pay extravagantly for doctors and buy 40.00 seats at a stadium or 100.00 seats at a play, but believe that operating on their children’s minds is not as critical as, say, dealing with the same child’s overbite.
The terrible thing about teaching, too, is that most parents expect the teachers to parent their children. I worked in the school system in Virginia as a translator, and seeing the children who were no more than trophies to their parents – it made me swear off the thought of teaching, as much as I would like to help children grow and become good humans.
Voters believe that teachers make TOO much money and Boards will listen. However, let a voter’s OWN child go through college and post-grad work in any field at GREAT expense and they naturally expect that child to earn a decent living. Not to mention the continuing ed. that is required but not funded, or a token “stipend” is provided.
It’s not the money- as Ragi-At-Heart noted, it’s the environment and ridiculous stress that’s done me in.
We were just told that the evaluations and student test scores of all teachers must be submitted to the state and the Feds. Test scores will be the only criteria to determine if one is “effective” and if you get to keep the job, your pay is based on that. NOT RIGHT when I have 50-60% OF EACH class that WILL NOT WORK and parents won’t make them. In fact, parents complain/curse/threaten physical harm AND non-physical damage/bully/lie in wait in darkened hallways in the early morning or late evening/block a teacher’s car door with their car so the teacher cannot get out so a harangue can be delivered….Some of this has happened to me and some to teachers on my team but it is all true and I have witnessed it. A co-worker was knocked to the floor when she was 7 months pregnant by a PARENT at a different school system. I am getting OUT. Please pray that a job is in my future.
Been there. Just clearing the stairs of gang members is an every-four-hours stress, and parental conferences with nutcases will just ruin your week. I had one parent call me at home, late, to tell me she’d just improved her highschool teen by a beating because he’d eaten a cupcake intended for his sister. He was a quiet, shy and frightened boy. Lord knows what ever became of him. I had a bleeding student fleeing gang attack run in mid-hour into my classroom for protection, which means I had to tell my students (mostly sophomore girls) to hold the door locked while I went out in the hall to throw the gang out. In this case, they weren’t students: they were gang enforcers, with records. I still can’t believe I did that. And for the munificent sum of 10000 a year before deductions for taxes, dues, health care, which let me about 8000 to live on.
When you do quit, there will be a period where you so acutely miss the students—but the notion of being able to relax and quit combat-mode will take hold, and you’ll feel so much better. It’s a lot like being a law enforcement officer—the job itself is more than a job; but you will find there is life outside. Health insurance is one of the biggest issues. Try to get hired where you can get it. And take any job to pay the bills until you can get the right job. Something will come along that you can do if you keep your antennae up.
“When you do quit, there will be a period where you so acutely miss the students—but the notion of being able to relax and quit combat-mode will take hold, and you’ll feel so much better.” I am already in the wistful, what-it-could-have-been phase but when I waver, something so stressful/scary/ridiculous happens that I am glad I am heading out. I had planned to retire as a teacher! I have taught part time at the community college and hope that I can continue to do that. It won’t pay all the bills but maybe enough for the DSL so I can keep participating in this discussion list 😉 My antennae are up and something will come along.
Lee Modesitt is a sometime English professor in Utah, but maybe that’s because a) he enjoyed it, and b) it gives him lots of stuff to write about on his blog! [eg this recent post]
Reading all this about how badly the publishing industry is doing makes me wonder, whether I will have anything to read when I am old… I cannot imagine myself buying an e-book. I’ve seen some e-book readers at the local book store, but they did not appear very attractive to me. I do not know anyone who actually owns one of those things. Are they more popular in the US than here (Germany)? Or are we just a little behind in this respect?
Currently I buy all English language books I read at the German amazon. I do so only for the reason that they have all books available or the shipping is just a couple of weeks and that they are cheaper then ordering the books at the local book store. All German language books I buy at one of the local book stores: I can actually see the books and browse for new writers. They have the same price as the books on amazon because of the “Buchpreisbindung”, meaning that books have a set price here an may not be marked down in regular sales. That way I can support the local book stores and hopefully help keeping them in business.
Readers are becoming very common. They have several nice points: they can take any document in pdf format. They’re very light, easy to hold like a book. They have adjustable size print. They’re always ‘on’, so when you flip the cover open, it’s got your ‘place’ from last use: you just have to flip a toggle and they’re going. They don’t often require a recharge. And you can store a thousand books in a device that only weighs a few ounces and access them on the subway, in a waiting room, wherever.
The United States has a problem in distribution of physical books because of its size: there is a lot of desert and empty land and farmland between, say, New York and Los Angeles, and most of the people live in very scattered little towns. Getting books means shipping to four or five distant points, then reshipping from there to hundreds of other points, etc. It’s two thousand three hundred miles between, say, Seattle and Dallas, with a whole lot of sagebrush and rock in between, and precious little rail service. So getting a book to Spokane means shipping by truck from New Jersey to Memphis, close to 1000 miles, then to Dallas, say, 700 miles, then to Seattle, 2300 miles…then back to Spokane, 300 miles. If it didn’t go through Salt Lake City instead, and then to Seattle. That’s a long way to ship a box of books. And it costs quite a bit. Amazon US sits in Seattle, so the same problem going the other way.
CJ: Just out of idle curiosity, when your agent sent you your check, did she (or he) happen to mention why your check was so puny? Were sales just that putrid, or were the major chains making massive returns to try and pay down their bills? And is there a line item for how many electronic copies sold directly by Penguin to consumers?
It’s been steadily declining for a number of years. I know exactly what’s going on with the distributors and even with Amazon—I’ve done signing for them, I’ve met them, even been in that mysterious Seattle warehouse. Right now, one of BOrders’ major creditors is Penguin, and Borders is likely either to hold a fire sale on the titles, including any new ones—thus potentially screwing my numbers (which the beancounters will hold against me, meaning other distributors will adjust their orders downward based on the raw figures of total last sales, not the reasons for them, like one of their own going belly up and refusing to pay its bills) —BUT the bright side is, Borders may not have ordered MY next book yet, so that would be good. I think. It could mean those books never ship and get stuck in an in-house limbo of where are they? for the next 10 years—or at least until tax time forces Penguin to count them…. if they’re not already in a warehouse somewhere, never to be called for—our industry is Sooooo screwed up. Nope, no accounting from Penguin about e-copies sold. Nobody wants to admit in any traceable wa to e-figures, even—or especially—to the writers, whose compensation is based on copies-sold.
CJ — I’m confused. (Not that that’s anything new.) You’re saying that if Borders has a fire sale of its Penguin stock, it will be charged against you. I don’t understand how that works. I understand that if Borders returns any hardbacks of yours that they currently hold, Penguin will ding your sales, credit Borders, then remainder out those returned titles, you will not get anything from the remaindered sales. You also get dinged for every strip cover Border returns. But if Borders keeps all copies of everything in stock, how can Penguin’s accounting department count those copies against your sales?
Do you think Penguin will count every unpaid for title, then deduct those copies from their authors’ accounts as if Borders had done a physical return? Or do you think Penguin will do one of those “remainder in place” thingies? (I haven’t worked in a general bookstore for over 15 years, so I don’t know if the publishers ever do that any more.)
On the other hand, I’ve been in this business for twenty-some years, and quite frankly, nothing any publisher does surprises me any more. I just shake my head and keep on keepin’ on.
One of my customers was totally flabbergasted by the millions Borders owes all the major houses, and wondered why Penguin let them go for so long. I tried to explain the facts of bookselling life to him, but he still didn’t get it. He kept trying to compare it to his father’s small retail business.
I can’t say about Borders, but I know I ordered Betrayer last fall when my rep came around with the spring list. (This is why booksellers get a little confused some times; we’re always a good four or five months ahead of today.)
No, if it has a fire sale, of course Penguin will lose money, so it will be harder for me to get advances from them. If Borders returns them, then Penguin will deduct it from any advance I earn. It’s the distributors, however, who will count up copies sold…AND copies ordered, so if Borders has already ordered the new Foreigner book, but declines or reduces delivery, those will be counted against me as returns, too; and of course books returned aren’t sold, so the actual ‘sold’ figure will go down, and the distributors always order what you SOLD last time, not what they shipped, so if Borders doesn’t get its act together and accept that shipment (if they ordered it) they’ll have another Penguin debt, and I get 0 sales from that source on that book, which means the distributor would, theoretically, reduce the next Foreigner book order for ALL its customers. Crazy. Yes.
Not to give Ms. Cherryh bad memories – do you have to teach in high school – how about a college setting – and not freshmen English either.
Or any other job you would like to do.
I would hate to read of the starvation of the quite popular author due to lack of royalties.
Or perhaps some other kind of writing.
If you can’t make a decent living from your writing – and you should – then what can you do?
This is an expression of concern.
Most writers, most artists, do not make a fine living from their art sales. Even successful artists (such as writers) rarely make bundles of money. Ms. Cherryh isn’t likely thinking of throwing in the towel, and isn’t necessarily thinking of taking a second job to boost her income. She’s simply stating what’s happening in the industry and with her and other authors individually. The economy is affecting everyone these days. The publishing industry and related skilled crafts are facing seismic-level changes brought on by technology, social change, and the economy. These changes have been going on since at least the early 80’s with the increase in personal computers used for those skills. If one follows other blogs and podcasts and forums, one finds the situation is rippling its waves everywhere, and authors and other industry professionals are scrambling to make sense of the changing landscape and chart a new new course to make it through the storms. But they (we) will get through it, and fans will get through it too.
Does anyone think we are headed back to a time when most stf writers will have a day-job that pays the bill and writing will be a hobby/supplementary income?
If a writer with three Hugos and a large back-list is struggling, these must be terrifying times indeed for Joe Midlist.