Sunday, July 22, 2012

Appearing At Harrogate - The Plot Thickens


I’m just back from the Harrogate  Crime Writing Festival – three days of talks and events involving some of the country’s top crime-writing talent.  Why was I there?  Truth be told, I’m writing a short story called Inspector Zhang Goes To Harrogate where my Singaporean detective solves a locked room mystery in the Old Swan Hotel where the festival is based.

While I was there I appeared on a panel called 'Wanted for Murder: the e-book', where a group of us discussed ePublishing, a subject I do know a fair bit about.

It turned out to be quite a surreal experience.  Fun, but surreal.  Running the festival this year was Mark “Scaredy Cat” Billingham, one of the best writers in the business as well as a top stand-up comic.  Mark came over to me in the green room before the panel and had a quiet word with me. Basically there is a danger of the panels turning into a luvvie love-fest and he wanted me to take a view and be a tad confrontational if at all possible. He wanted the panel to be the talking point of the festival.  I’m never one to duck a good argument so I said I’d go for it.

In the chair was Channel 4 presenter Mark Lawson, and on the panel with me were a publisher, another writer who hasn’t sold many eBooks, an agent and a bookseller.  It was pretty much going to be four against one from the start.


                                                         Me and writer Matt Hilton at the festival



What surprised me was how the audience seemed so set against cheap eBooks.  Rather than taking my view that books are best sold at a price that readers find attractive, the general feeling of the audience seemed to be that books were already – as one man said – ‘cheap as chips’ while Norwegians had to pay £40 for one of Jo Nesbo’s books. When I explained that I had sold half a million eBooks last year, most of them for less than a quid, I was surprised to hear a few boos and hisses rather than the applause that I had expected.

The most surreal moment for me came when the President of the Publisher’s Association, Ursula Mackenzie, was trying to defend their policy of maintaining eBooks at a high price.  Basically she was saying that books needed to maintain their value and that 20p and free eBooks needed to be stamped on.

I understand her view, but I’m a big fan of selling eBooks at lower prices providing you can get high volumes of sales. And I’m happy enough to give books away if it helps to bring in new readers.

So I explain to Ursula – and the audience – that I can write a short story in five days and am happy to sell that at the Amazon minimum of 72p which generates me an income of 25p.


CORRECTION


At this point in my blog I mentioned a comment that I remembered had come from Ursula about earning 5p a book.  Having heard the recording of the panel I realise that I had misremembered this and the comment was made by Mark Lawson. I owe Ursula an unreserved and total apology for this and I will be writing to her personally to apologise. Truly my memory let me down and I am so so sorry. I can only think that the stress of the panel caused caused my memory to play tricks on me.


The point I wanted to make - which applies to Mark's comment and not to anything that Ursula said - was that of course I don’t work for 5p a day.  My Inspector Zhang stories sell about five or six hundred copies a month. Each. So one story sells 6,000 copies a year. So over the next ten years it could sell 60,000 copies which means I’d get £15,000, which is £3,000 a day.

Mark turned to the conversation around to the cost of books and how much went to the publisher, and asked Ursula to justify why the publisher’s took the lion’s share.  She put forward the old arguments about editing and marketing and I tried to explain that with eBooks, an author with a large fan base can use fans to edit and proof-read.  Everyone seemed to think that meant I thought writers could do away with editors, and of course that’s not the case. But not every writer needs a hard edit, some writers need little more than proof-reading and fact-checking and that can be done through fans. And my Jack Nightingale series is edited by a full-time editor on my agent's staff so those books need very little editing by my publisher. Yes, I know that some authors need a lot of editing. But I don't.  

The audience were quite strange when I talked about piracy, and I thought I was about to be lynched when I said that I regarded pirates as helping to market my books.  Someone shouted ‘Tosser!’ which was a bit harsh. What was a bit surprising was that it seemed to come from Mark Billingham’s direction.

I didn’t really get a chance to explain what I meant, which was a pity. Of course mass piracy would destroy publishing and destroy my income. But controlled piracy, where pirated books represent a small fraction of the total books available, can be a help to get a writer better known.  My opinion is that readers who buy pirated copies wouldn’t buy the real book anyway. But once they have become a fan, they might. The reader who starts off buying a pirated copy of one of my books might move on to buying hardbacks. It happens.

But I didn’t get the chance to say that. I did meet a lot of self-published writers at the festival – writers like Kerry Wilkinson, Allan Guthrie, Mark Edwards and Louise Voss.  All have stormed up the Kindle charts selling low-priced books.  I’m not going to put words into anyone’s mouth but I can tell you that most of the self-published writers I know have no fear of piracy and most embrace it.  Publishers don’t get it.  They don’t get the whole DRM thing either, where eBooks are ‘protected’ except of course they’re not.  Ursula, representing the publishers, was vehement that DRM was a good thing. Even traditionally-published author Steve Mosby tried to explain that DRM doesn’t work and isn’t fair in that it stops a reader transferring a book that he has already bought between different devices.  But Ursula wouldn’t have it.  I should say at this point that I was talking to one of the really big names at the festival and he has a Kindle and he has a neat little program that removes the DRM protection. I would love to tell you who it is but my lips are sealed!

Ursula was easy to argue with, as was the token agent, Philip Patterson. He was a lovely guy and I do feel guilty about blind-siding him with the question that most writers have – what exactly does an agent do to earn his 15 per cent when a writer sells most of his books through Amazon with whom there is almost no room for negotiation.  He didn’t come up with an answer and I did apologise to him afterwards.  The simple fact is that if a writer is self-publishing eBooks then he doesn’t need an agent.  Of course if that self-published author is then approached by a publishing house, that’s when you do need an agent in your corner.

What was strange is how a couple of agents started tweeting quite nastily about me.  One wondered how I would sell my foreign rights without an agent.  That’s a good question. I’d sell them myself, it’s not difficult. And in my experience, foreign rights barely cover the 15 per cent of the main UK deal.

Frankly I think publishers and agents are going to have a difficult few years as the whole eBook business works itself out.  And so are the book sellers. But of all the people on the panel, other than myself of course, I thought that the token bookseller was the guy who was most ready to take advantage of it. He was Patrick Neale of Jaffé and Neale Bookshop in Chipping Norton.  He’s a very smart guy who really understands his trade.  I think that the large book chains, the ones that are left, are going to be in big trouble soon but guys like Patrick can survive and prosper.  He’s seen a boom in hardback sales, but is also selling coffee in his shop and looking to profit from eBook sales. It was clear from listening to him that he is adapting his business to take advantage of the way books are changing, as opposed to the publishers who are fighting to maintain the status quo.

I guess the reason the audience were so unsympathetic to my views on piracy and low prices is because they weren't my core readership. I guess the big question is how my views would be received by a younger audience.  Hopefully they wouldn’t shout ‘tosser!’

Anyway, Mark Billingham came up to me afterwards, shook my hand and agreed that we’d achieved our objective – the tweets were already flying around the world and the festival was buzzing. Oh, and I pretty much finished Inspector Zhang Goes To Harrogate.  Much as I’d like the victim to be an overweight agent with badly-dyed hair, it’s an author who meets an untimely end.  And yes, I’ll be selling it at 72p.

29 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds a bit like Daniel in the Lion's Den. Congratulations on keeping your cool and attempting to let logic prevail in what must have been a trying situation. In reading your account there was a bit of a comedic aspect however. I envisioned a lynch mob of elder females hurling epithets like "tosser" as they formed the noose. Glad you escaped unscathed. Keep up the good work.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wow - when I read the tweets I really wished I'd been there to put in my two pennyworth - was there no support from the audience at all? SOME of them must have been successful self-pubbers. Well done for rising to the challenge (but not the bait) - I think Mark Billingham owes you a pint!

    Eva Hudson

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've arrived rather late to this party so I'm a bit behind the power curve. I am totally gob-smacked at the roasting you got. I'll freely admit that I have a problem with the Kindle and is surrogate siblings, but that has more to do with a romanticised attachment to books (or an old-fashioned one). As a "wanna-be" published writer though, I embrace the whole ebook mentality. I won't go on about the benefits of it, I realize that you are more than aware of that. Still I congratulate you on having the testicular fortitude to play 'Daniel' to the prejudicial lions den.

    Michael Smith

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Stephen, thanks for your report from Harrogate. What a clueless & venomous response. Astonishing in its ferocity altho maybe not. People who feel threatened lash out.

      Since when is cheap (affordable) a bad thing? Especially quality books priced so many, many people can enjoy them. And then buy the next one and the one after that. What's good for writers isn't so great for publishers & agents, that's for sure.

      Delete
    2. Oh Stephen, they just don't get it do they? I e-publish because, although publishers like my books and the way I write, they don't think the stories will sell. So, if I make money e-publishing they are losing out. Unless they come to their senses of course!!!

      I would like to sell my books at higher prices but as an 'unknown quantity' the only way I can sell them is cheaply.

      Delete
  5. Interesting report Stephen and as a bookseller turned writer I have a VERY vested interest in how the market pans out in the coming years. I believe publishers are walking deaf dumb and blind into oblivion with the kind of daft repsonse you received from Ursula all too typical of the attitude. I reckon a lot of new authors and a fair number of those already established have worked out the finances for themselves now. IF you get to a point where your book is accepted - and it's increasingly a big IF these days with publishers opting for promotable bright young things - the chances of getting a hardback print run above 1000 is probably fairly small. By the time an agent has scalped off 15% I reckon most authors will be able to afford one night at the Savoy Hotel on the proceeds - while downstairs in the Grill publishers and agents will be jugging it large working out the profits on the next bag of porno crap to hit the Tesco stands.
    I did the rounds of the agents (ignoring the ones that specified that they didn't handle manuscripts if they had been mailed out to other agents) and waited months while they may or may not have read them before sending the ms back with an unsigned letter headed Dear Sir/Madam. I realise now that all this has been a fool's errand in search of a fool's gold. With the developments in e-book production I am now just about ready to upload my first novel priced at £2.99 or thereabouts on which I will get 75% commission on sales. And how it sells depends, like traditional publishing, on many factors - the difference is that I shall have control of the marketing and publicity and not be reduced to one line in a publisher's general catalogue with no budget for publicity. The social networking sites now give the author a handle on the tiller and a lot of authors are beginning to clock that they are just as good a helmsperson as the traditional publisher. If the book is no good it will rightly sink into oblivion but word of mouth (like in the good old days of genre publishing which got Minette Walters and Colin Dexter up and running) if the book is worthwhile can do much more for an author than bunging a handful of wad at advertising - not that that happens much these days. The author now understands that they don't have to be a mute standby in the job of getting themselves around and THAT is what the publishers still don't get.

    I wish I'd been there. There are plenty of authors that promote themselves with 99p or even free (limited period offer) books and as far as I can gather are doing pretty nicely.
    Keep on trucking!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Good for you - wish I'd been there. (I'm female, not quite elderly yet, and happily eBook publishing with increasing success!) I've noticed this kind of response before now and it always gobsmacks me a bit. I can understand when it comes from publishers and agents, but can never understand when it comes from writers. In the same way that I can never understand it when my fellow writers say 'How will writers ever make any money?' Er... when did any but the lucky few make any money from trad publishing? Been there, done that and got several worn out teeshirts. The Society of Authors' most recent analysis reveals that most professional writers make rather less than £5000 per year - on average - from their writing. I can only assume it's like birds who grow to love their cages and are afraid to fly out of them. Incidentally (although I feel like whispering it, since it elicits a similar vitriolic response among my writer friends) I'm quite relaxed about a measure of piracy too. But then my son is a professional video game designer, and he's taught his mum all about it!

    ReplyDelete
  7. The publishing industry in the UK is even further behind that of the US. I've been e-published for ten years now, and my income has increased every year. Unlike you, my main income comes from digital-first publishers, all but one US based, and their sales are very nice, thank you very much, and their royalty rates much better than the main publishing houses, making a viable choice between self publishing and digital first.
    But when you tell people how much you earn, they flat-out don't believe you. The old publishing model isn't that old, really. Twentieth century. But it's like it's been around as long as Caxton's Bible sometimes. Especially in the UK. Maybe the demise of Borders in the US helped to move things along a bit.

    ReplyDelete
  8. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  9. You're like a crucifix to a vampire, Stephen, a successful ebook writer/publisher on the same platform as the publishing establishment. Well done!

    ReplyDelete
  10. I've actually earned over a million US dollars selling eBooks in the past 18 months. I don't care about number of copies sold, I care about my P&L.

    Agents have a role in subrights, but as Amazon expands, and Apple already have over 30 foreign markets, even that role will diminish.

    Authors create story which is the product-- not a book. Readers consume the product. Everyone else is in between. They need to add value to getting the story to the reader or else they have no role.

    ReplyDelete
  11. An interesting experience Stephen.

    But it's not just the ancient publishing houses that are replete with Luddites and King Canutes. The majority of aspiring writers still dream of 'being picked' by a traditional print publisher, and then doing nothing else but wait until the money rolls in.

    Fact is, eBooks are the future, because all that matters in the end is (1) a well written Story, and (2) a system that helps that story be found by readers who are prepared to pay a little for instant access to it.

    Anything that supports this dual process will flourish. Everything else is simply going to fade away.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As one who is floundering with her back list in this perplexing but exciting world of e-publishing, I am in awe of those who are so successful and wish I knew how to generate more money. Thank you for your candid attitude and such an entertaining blog. Re Harrogate, I am not surprised. Another venue and I wonder if the response might have been totally opposite.

      Delete
  12. my books are on e books. People tell me they love books for their tactile quality and their smell. I do not write to be sniffed. If I did want people sniffing my products I would be a florist

    ReplyDelete
  13. @Stephen: good for you!

    @Anita: if you haven't done so already, I suggest you take a peek at David Gaughran's Let's Get Digital, a straightforward and indeed inspirational guide to self-pubbing.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Thank you for bringing this debate to the forefront. I now use KDP to publish my books and have sold more copies in six weeks than I sold in a year for all my other books put together.As long as a self-published book is well edited and proof read before release then readers area happy. I've finally making a reasonable return on my writing and enjoying the process again. I don't need an agent or traditional publisher anymore.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I'm with you, Stephen. Someone talking sense about the whole crazy e-book scenario at last. If I'd been at the festival you'd have had one supporter, for what it's worth.

    ReplyDelete
  16. It'd be good to go next year should support be needed, but I have a feeling that the people booing and hissing your views this year will have changed their tune in 12 months time...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I doubt I'll go back, Mark. My work there is done... :-) But writers who think that the world owes them a living are in for a rude awakening.....

      Delete
  17. Stephen, I am a small publisher in California, and I was intrigued by your post. I tend to agree with you on most points, actually. High-volume/low-price is likely to make you a lot of cash over the long run. But you said something that I found to be very interesting on a lot of levels. Your premise seems to be that an author with a large fan base doesn't need publishers/agents/editors. I'm sure that's true. But how did you develop a large fan base in the first place? As I am not familiar with your career---nothing personal---I don't know if you were "traditionally published" before you came to self-publishing. If you have been traditionally published in the past, and you are capitalizing on the fan base that was developed for you by your publisher, then I think it is appropriate for you to give credit where credit is due. Please don't misunderstand. As an author myself, I really don't see the upshot of giving away more than half "my" profits to a publisher who does nothing. But as a publisher, I know that I do many things that benefit my authors---like invest in their work, pay for editing and cover art and audience-building, and the author never pays a cent to publish what they worked so hard to create. So, having said that, what is your advice to an unknown author who has two choices---sell their work now for pennies and hope they become recognized, or become published by a publisher, develop their fan base while developing their craft, and then take their fame with them when they strike out on their own? How can someone with no track record become you, sir?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's complicated, Steven. There's no doubt that having an established fan base helped sell my self-published eBooks. But there have been plenty of writers who started with a zero fan base and have sold hundreds of thousands. You have Amanda Hocking in the US, we have Kerry Wilkinson and Nick Spalding in the UK. You'd need to ask them what they did to go from nowhere to stellar stellar sales in a matter of months but my view is that if you write good books and a lot of them and offer them at a reasonable price, they will sell. My advice to any writer is that they should first approach a publisher. As you say publishers can do a lot to promote an author and to help with the production process. But if the closed club that publishing has become won't let you in, then you should try self publishing. If you want to lean about my career, drop by www.stephenleather.com :-)

      Delete
  18. A very amusing article Stephen, I've also been amazed at the rather bizarre reception to the simple statement of being an indie self publisher of e-books at a reasonable price. I'm not sure what causes this out flow of vitriol from such a large section of the publishing market but I'm well and truly past trying to explain marketing 101 or even the advantages of a polite business manner to them. Instead I'll push on keep writing and stay an indie. Good luck I'll cruise on by amazon and check out your books. Regards Gregory House

    ReplyDelete
  19. A very interesting read, Stephen, and I now wish I hadn’t decided to skip Harrogate this year. By coincidence, someone also just sent me this link:
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/there-will-be-no-more-professional-writers-in-the-future/article4441060/%3Cbr%20/%3E

    I understand what the author is saying, but it makes me think of King Canute. The argument seems to be that published writers like yourself should stop selling vast amounts of books cheaply, and writers (like me) who can’t even get an agent to deign to read their work should stop self-publishing, so that those writers being published in print can continue to receive big advances. Aye, right…

    ReplyDelete
  20. Speaking from personal experience, there are books that I've downloaded and bought afterwards. There are books that I bought then downloaded the ebook. There are books I haven't bought after downloading and never finished reading. And there are books I've read so many times I had to buy again. There are all sorts of pirates out there or rather file sharers. The only point I disagreed with you was when you said pirates won't buy a book they downloaded. They will and they will buy the printed copy too. Build a fan base, connect with your fans, be an awesome human being and you will never have a problem with file sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  21. 95% of people will give something back (if given a chance) for something they value¹. Copyright infringement is about the 5%. Don't worry about them. Worry about how to make it easy from the 95% to give you something.

    ¹ http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/interview-dr-love-paul-zak

    ReplyDelete
  22. I actually blogged a bit about the DRM thing today, having run head-smack full-on into the most annoying thing about it. For anyone who cares, here's the URL:
    http://markterrybooks.blogspot.com/

    I completely agree with you about agents and publishers being on (at least) the short-term losing end. Possibly long-term, but who's to say? I think agents are in real trouble, frankly. I never felt my former agent (I fired her recently as I shifted primarily self-publishing) did anything to deserve the 15% she got, and neither one of us got much from the relationship at all. And I never could figure out why her having contacts with a film & TV agent amounted to a big cut of anything at all.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Excellent post Stephen, you're debate at Harrogate has taken on almost legendary proportions on the internet with a lot of people seemingly ready to knock down the door and offer you up to a stake. I have spent a lot of time reading and studying your thoughts on publishing and how to get a good book out there. It has shaped and informed my publishing journey. I can only thank you for that as this level of interaction for one of the UK's top selling authors, I think only Lee Child pipped you this last year, is very rare. Neil Gaiman was recently talking about the piracy thing and echoed exactly what you said. I paid for a professional editor for my Thriller but I paid a 'friend' price to a editor I know for the short stories I'm about to publish for free.

    Looking forward to reading Nightmare.



    ReplyDelete