What I've Been Doing

I've discovered that the best way to help a series as long as mine stay fresh--and keep myself sane--is to take periodic breaks and do other things. So I decided to take a few weeks between finishing Sebastian #12 and starting #13 and devote the time to bringing out my old historicals as ebooks and POD (print on demand). Given the number of people now self-publishing, I thought, How hard can it be? Answer: HARD!

I decided to start with Midnight Confessions and Beyond Sunrise. Their galleys and copyedited pages drowned in Katrina and the files were zapped into nonexistence by last year's Great Computer Crash. So I had the paperbacks scanned. Some people have great success with this process. Here's a sample of what I got back:

Imagine 400 pages of that. I almost quit right there.

But I persevered. I've now read over the danged things so many times my eyeballs are bleeding. Do you know how hard it is to spot an "I" that has been turned into a "1"? (Actually, in the passage above, the "1" should be "she"!) And of course because I am who I am, I rewrote them a tad . . .

And then there's the covers. Days and days spent analyzing cover trends, visualizing possibilities, and pouring over stock photo sites looking for just the right images. (Hint: the right images don't exist.) And then my publisher pitched a fit over me putting "C.S. Harris writing as Candice Proctor" on the covers, so the first cover I had made--a really lovely one for Midnight Confessions--is currently languishing in limbo while I calm down. But I can give you a peek at the one I'm having done for Beyond Sunrise. This is just a proof and may be modified some yet, but here's what we have so far:

I'm now working on The Last Knight and Whispers of Heaven. Fortunately I had those manuscripts saved to disks. Unfortunately we're talking these disks:

But yes, you can still buy an external disk reader for these dinosaurs and yes, the current version of Word reads them. Sort of. My cover designer now has the images for these two projects and says she'll have proofs to me by the end of the week. But I still need to write the cover copy/blurbs. And that is HARD, too.

If nothing else, this exercise has given me a new and profound appreciation for what my New York publishers do for me--and I haven't even tried to upload the dang files yet! But I'm also getting ready to bring out Confessions of a Dead Romance Writer, which is the unpublished (and admittedly rather weird) manuscript I wrote between my historicals and the Sebastian series but never managed to sell to New York. And the fact that I can now get it out there makes this seriously trying self-publishing struggle worthwhile. I think.

But never fear, come the first of February I'll be devoting all my time to Sebastian again. After all this, it will be a relief to get back to him!

Strange Goings-on in the Publishing Industry

The publishing world is all aflutter this week, thanks to two contradictory and coincidentally timed occurrences.

On the one hand, NYT bestselling thriller writer Barry Eisler announced that he was walking away from a half-million dollar, two-book deal (that’s $250,000 a book) with St. Martin’s Press in order to self-publish in e-book format only. (I'd like to note without being catty that this contract represented a considerable step down from his previous contract with Random House.) Seems SMP wouldn’t concede to Eisler’s demands for a higher percentage of e-book royalties; Eisler got mad and walked.

Eisler has a long (emphasis on long) post about why he did this on his blog here . He makes a lot of good points about the publishing industry—my personal favorite being that the industry is outsourcing much of its work, such as weeding through the slush pile (a task now performed by agents since most publishers refuse to accept unagented submissions) and promotion (we all know how much authors are expected to do their own self-promotion these days) while retaining the same share of profits. (Can I add copy writing to the list of out-sourced tasks?) And I do think it’s disgusting that authors get less than 15% in real terms of e-book sales. Since the cover price of e-books is lower than that of hardcovers, the rise in e-books is seriously hurting authors’ take home pay.

However, I’m not one of those (many, many) authors jumping up and down, applauding Eisler’s move and saying, “Oh, this is such a good model; let’s all dump our publishers and self-publish e-books for $2.99.” According to Eisler, authors who stand up for print publishing—which he derogatorily labels “legacy publishing”—are suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Personally, I think Eisler left several factors out of his calculation. First of all, he foresees the sales of his books continuing at the same pace ad infinitum. In my experience, this just doesn’t happen. There is a huge burst of sales when a book is first released, then the sales trickle off month by month. By my reckoning, he would need to sell something like 400 e-books a day for 300 days before breaking even. In order to achieve these sales, he will be lowering the price of his e-books, which of course he can do since he’ll be getting 70% of the price rather than only 14%. It’s been proven that e-books with lower prices get higher sales. However, if everyone lowers their price, that benefit will evaporate. And then "legacy published" authors will be left with 15% of that much lower price, which will work out to considerably less than 50 cents a book. Thanks a lot, Barry.

Secondly, not everyone has an e-reader. Not everyone wants an e-reader. Barry Eisler fans without readers will either have to go through a cumbersome POD rigmarole, or look for new authors. Which do you think is more likely?

Thirdly, while publishers don’t do as much promotion as we’d like them to, lead titles (like Eisler's) do get promoted. For one thing, publishers pay coop to put those books in the front of stores and in the newsagents in airports. I’ve heard that airport bookstores are getting unhappy because businessmen will walk into their stores, browse the newly released hardcovers, then walk away and download the e-book. Much easier than flying with a big hardcover. But if an author's new release isn't in Hudson’s News, those businessmen are going to pick up the newest release by some author who has stuck with the “legacy publishers.”

There are other factors at play here: I can’t see Hollywood or foreign publishers combing the ranks of self-published writers looking for their next blockbuster. Eisler, of course, already has foreign publishers, who will not doubt continue to print his books. Interesting he’s still willing to work with overseas “legacy publishers.” Of course, he needs them to pay for the translators. (You can read Eisler’s rant about the cover his French publisher gave one of his books here. Now, I’ve complained about covers in the past, but this is just, well, wow.)

Ironically, the day after Eisler’s bombshell hit the news, Amanda Hocking, who recently created shockwaves by making over a million dollars on her self-published e-book young adult vampire series, signed a reported two million dollar contract (four books, roughly $500,000 each), with—double irony—St. Martin’s Press. Amanda, the guru of self-publishing in e-book format, evidently believes the “legacy publishers” still have something to offer her. You can read Amanda’s take on the controversy here.

Update: Historical romance author Connie Brockway is also "going rogue" and is leaving Avon for the world of self-publishing. You can read her take on the subject here.