Mark, I'd be happy to indicate the inaccuracies and issues from the article linked to above. I’ll snip out the parts which don’t concern me to preserve bandwidth here, and out of respect for the copyright holder of the original article.
Overall, my feeling is that you’ve taken a lot of the rhetoric that we usually hear from vanity publishers who are pushing their POD-based, editor-free “publishing services”, and then used them to justify e-book publishing. This isn’t comparing apples to oranges: it’s using oranges to dismiss apples in favour of pears. While this sort of argument might appear reasonable to people who aren’t well-versed in the ins and outs of publishing, it reveals all sorts of logical holes to anyone with any real publishing experience, and can only count against you in the end.
Like others, Mark Coker, a Los Gatos entrepreneur and aspiring novelist, has learned about the challenges facing new authors — many of whom never get published.
There are several good reasons why most new authors don’t get published: most of them never actually finish anything; and the majority of books that DO get finished are dreadful. Only a small percentage of books are good enough to be published.
…aside from a handful of blockbusters, the few books that make it to the shelves of bookstores rarely stay there. If books don't sell well enough, they are sent back to the publisher and very quickly go out of print.
“Most books” don’t end up on bookshop shelves: that’s because there are all sorts of books which are unsuitable for bookshop placement, like text books, government reports, and so on. However, if we’re talking about books like memoirs and novels, then bookshops are still the best place for them to be sold if you want them to shift in any decent amount. And while individual copies of books which don’t sell well enough are sent back to their publishers, that doesn’t automatically mean that the book will go out of print: those two issues are completely separate. Books are returned every day because the booksellers get their ordering levels wrong: that doesn’t necessarily mean that those titles aren’t selling anywhere, just that they’re not selling in that particular shop. When a book goes out of print it’s because the publisher has made a commercial decision which is usually based on sales across the whole territory, not on returns.
A The process for most published books is that an author finds an agent, the agent sells the book to the publisher and then it takes anywhere from 12 months to 18 months to see that book published in stores. And then once that book is in stores, it's got just a couple of weeks to sell while the bookstore can still return the book for a full refund.
There’s a reason for that delay between submission and publication: books have to be edited, designed, and marketed; and printing takes time too (as does shipping the finished books over from the printers if a non-domestic printer is used). All this takes time: and if you’re aiming for volume sales you can’t afford to skip a single one of those initial stages.
I’ve already dealt with returns, but the idea that books have just “a couple of weeks to sell” is pretty silly. This can be true in some genres, like high turnover romance: but most books spend far longer than that on the shelves before they’re returned.
With Smashwords, the author owns the copyright, owns all the rights to the work and sets their own price for the book and the sampling privileges.
Any author owns the copyright to their own work as soon as they create that work, and they retain it even after publication, no matter which publisher they use, unless the publisher has a pretty nasty contract, or it’s work-for-hire (also known as writing for a flat fee). However, authors can’t retain all the rights to their work once it’s been published, because the act of publication uses up first rights, so they’re gone for good on publication in any form. And it’s those first rights that most commercial publishers want to sign up, which makes subsequent publication much more difficult for anyone who uses your service.
The author receives 85 percent of all the sales and we take a 15 percent cut.
I realise this is on e-books, which I have no experience of. But bearing that in mind, I still have concerns. This is of net, right? And how do you define net? Because if it’s not made absolutely clear then it’s a potentially a very bad deal for the writer; and even if it is a good deal, writers won’t be able to tell. We’ve recently seen YouWriteOn insist that its author royalty of 60% net was a vast improvement on the royalty rates offered by commercial or mainstream publishers, but it has actually worked out to between 8% and 14% of cover price, which is pretty similar to those mainstream presses.
I designed the service to put authors in complete control over their work.
Which implies to me that they can expect no professional editing or design, no industry expertise or guidance, and no professional, competent sales or marketing either. Control is not a good thing when it replaces expertise.
My wife and I wrote a novel about six years ago. We signed on with one of the top literary agencies in New York City, and after about two years they were just unable to sell our book.
Your experience is a common one. Something like half of all new clients that literary agencies take on end up not selling anything. Incidentally, one doesn’t “sign on” with a literary agency, one submits and if the agency sees something good enough in the work, it offers representation. I’m curious: who was the agent you signed with? That might well have some bearing on your experience.
It was a difficult experience for us to be rejected that way because we had shown the book to multiple readers, and people really enjoyed the book.
The people who you show your work to are, with all due respect, likely to be biased in its favour: if they’re your colleagues, your relatives or your friends, how likely are they to say that it sucks? And if they’re your colleagues, and your book occupies a genre related to your work, then they’re going to identify more with that genre than most people would. Especially if you’ve taken real-life events and fictionalised them, as you did: it’s likely that your colleagues recognised several of the episodes you wrote about, and so had a greater emotional involvement in them that other less involved people would feel.
I found it frustrating that a publisher would stand in the way between us and our potential readership. And it dawned on me that the system just doesn't work for authors.
The publishing system works fine, so long as you realise what the market is. Good publishers are in the business of selling books to readers, not in selling their services to writers. The publishing business works just fine for the writers who are good enough at writing strong, commercial work: it isn’t quite so good for people who can’t write well, or who won’t write commercial texts.
If authors feel that the system doesn’t work for them, they have to consider what their goals are, and how realistic those goals are given their ability and attitude; and consider the full implications of the alternatives to mainstream publication.
If you look at book industry sales over the last five years, traditional paper book sales have stagnated. They've only been growing 1 or 2 percent a year for the last five years. And then over the last few months we've seen book sales drop off dramatically. Starting in September book sales fell off a cliff, down about 20 percent. And then October and November were equally bad. But at the same time, over the last five years, electronic book sales have surged, growing at a compound annual rate of over 50 percent. E-books are now the fastest growing segment of the book publishing industry.
I was confused here: when you said, “But at the same time”, were you referring to sales of printed books in the period of September, October and November, or to sales over the last five years? Because it’s not clear at all, and very confusing. And a small logical point: a market which is still growing, albeit at a low rate of just one or two per cent, cannot be said to be stagnating. Either it’s growing, or it’s stagnating, but not both: the two terms are mutually exclusive.
E-books might be “the fastest growing segment of the book publishing industry” (and without wishing to appear snarky I’d like to see you cite your sources for that particular piece of information: I like to read solid publishing-related research): but that’s because it’s a new technology. Of course the e-book market is growing more quickly than the printed book market: it’s so new it’s not reached its full potential yet. But that doesn’t mean that its potential is going to rival printed books in the near future: it takes a completely different sector of the market place. Your implication is that e-books are going to take over from printed books, but I see nothing to suggest that this is going to be the case in the near future—certainly not in the next five or ten years.
MARK COKER
Age: 43
Birthplace: Berkeley
Company: Smashwords (www.smashwords.com)
Position: Founder and CEO
Previous jobs: Founder and former president, BestCalls.com; owner of Dovetail Public Relations
Education: B.S. in Marketing from U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business
Family: Married to Lesleyann Coker
Residence: Los Gatos
Other interests: Hiking, gardening, traveling (has been to 20 countries and 49 states), hanging out in bookstores, collecting books, angel investing, advising startups. He is on the advisory boards of GetQuik of Sunnyvale and Flat World Knowledge of Nyack, N.Y.
FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT MARK COKER
1. In 1999, he founded Bestcalls, a Web service that opened up conference calls to small investors. The company was acquired in 2003 and is now owned and operated by the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.
2. He and his wife, Lesleyann, a former reporter for Soap Opera Weekly Magazine and a local actress, co-wrote "Boob Tube,— a novel about the dark side of celebrity culture (published on Smashwords).
3. He enjoys finding new mountains to climb and has bagged peaks as diverse as Mt. Kilimanjaro (19,340 feet) in Tanzania and Mt. Pico (7,713 feet), the highest point in Portugal.
4. He raises homing pigeons and chickens.
5. For 15 years, has owned Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley PR firm.
All that's very impressive, and you're obviously a capable, intelligent man: I'm particularly impressed by your climbing record. But nowhere is there any indication that you know enough about publishing to be able to start up your own publishing endeavour. Publishing is a difficult business to get to grips with even when you've worked in it for twenty years or so, as I have, and judging by your comments in the article, you've still got a lot to discover about it.
There. That’s why I didn’t like the article, and said it contained "misleading information, [and] pure misinformation". I hope I've helped. And I do wish you well: I've been very impressed with your attitude here, and hope it stands you in good stead.
