Literary larceny is a new ‘trend’ that is normalizing stealing from authors. Stealing from authors—or anyone for that matter—is NOT okay. I know, I know. Some topics I shouldn’t even have to blog about. I mean what’s next for blog topics? “The Great Wonders of Using Toilet Paper,” “Why Kicking Puppies is Wrong” “Top Five Reasons Not to Eat Tide Pods.”

Yet, here we are. I know I just posted, but this couldn’t wait. It’s…it’s a problem.

Some people—not all people—should be deeply ashamed that I even have to post on this.

What is literary larceny? Other than a clever use of alliteration? This is when people believe, for some odd reason, that it is perfectly okay to buy an ebook, read it in full then return it…and just keep doing this repeatedly without ever actually paying for a book.

According to the article Writers riled by Amazon offering refunds — after readers finish ebooks 4/3/22 by Rosamund Erwin and Liam Kelly:

The trend appears to be driven by users of TikTok, the video-sharing platform that has engaged many young readers through the hashtag #booktok. Videos about returning ebooks have been viewed more than 17 million times. Some users provide tutorials on how to return books after reading them.

The Sunday Times

I wish I were making this up.

It is bad enough some people are stealing, but then they go make How-To videos to help train NEW thieves?

Did Kindergarten teach y’all nothing?

Literary Larceny & Lending Libraries

Before we go any further, I’m no stranger to this topic. My blog ‘Pay the Writer’ went viral in 2015. I wrote the blog in response to an article claiming that buying used books supported writers.

Eh. Not really. It was part of the whole ‘exposure’ schtick. I asserted that if readers actually wanted to support their favorite authors, to try and buy something NEW because used books didn’t pay any royalties.

If writers don’t make any money, we cannot afford to keep ‘working’ as a writer. When I wrote that article, Huffington Post had all but single-handedly demolished most freelance work that once paid really, really well.

Just go open up your copy of Stephen King’s On Writing where he talks about how much he was making on magazine pieces while he was building his career.

In the 1980s and 1990s, magazines were paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars for well-crafted articles. But, by 2015, major sites like Huffington Post expected writers to work for ‘exposure dollars’ (as in FOR FREE) and be grateful anyone would deign to read our content.

***Meanwhile, Arianna Huffington cashed out to the tune of over $300 million in real dollars.

Why do I bring this up?

Two reasons.

First, many of my critics blasted me claiming that, if I didn’t support used bookstores (patently false) then clearly I must also hate LIBRARIES since people didn’t pay money to borrow a book.

So we don’t do this dance again, let’s check out how lending libraries work (pardon the pun).

Buying and returning ebooks nonstop is NOT even CLOSE to the same thing as going to a library.

Libraries can actually be VERY lucrative for authors. Contractually, libraries BUY the rights to the copies of the books on their shelves. The library can only loan out those books so many times before, BY CONTRACT, they must remove the book and BUY RIGHTS TO/COPIES OF A NEW ONE.

Yes, this was why the library charged you $75 to replace the $5 paperback you lost. They had to recoup what they had to pay the author.

The same goes for libraries who lend out ebooks. The library can only loan out that ebook a set number of times. Once they pass this number, the library has to renew this process if they want to keep loaning out the ebook.

Lending libraries are awesome. Writers make money. When writers make money, we can write MORE books.

Literary larceny is not the same as a lending library.

One is supporting authors and the other is a level of entitlement I cannot wrap my head around. Oh, and it’s stealing. There are massive short and long-term consequences for this.

My second reason I bring up this old post?

Normalizing Literary Larceny Bad

Expecting writers to write for free is not new. Like many other creative professions, we’ve been fighting this battle for a long time. But I addressed this entitlement back in 2015. Why? Because I spotted a pattern of behavior we needed to stop.

If people bought used copies and LOVED the book? AWESOME. All I asked was that they then please buy something NEW so the writer could pay her bills. No big deal.

Oh, but it WAS.

The sheer level of entitlement I encountered with that post absolutely FLOORED me. Apparently, I had some nerve. If I wasn’t making any money, then maybe I was a crap writer and needed to get another job. Writers were a bunch of whiny babies who needed a real career.

Sadly, I lost count of all the justifications for why it was totally appropriate to expect writers to work for free.

Far too many people utterly missed the point. Readers DID value what the writers created. They valued those books enough to buy them…used. My contention was simply that writers had to make money if readers wanted them to write more books. If readers wanted more books, then please buy something new.

Not rocket science. And not unreasonable.

***Creative professionals already give a ton of stuff for free (YouTube videos, memes, images on places like Pexels, blogs like MINE).

The problem, however, was this. The Internet had already started normalizing FREE and had unwittingly cultivated a culture of entitlement. I saw the writing on the wall. If we didn’t educate readers and allowed the entitlement to thrive, eventually it would be a monster raging out of control.

And here we are.

Btw, please don’t eat Tide Pods.

Don’t believe me? What IS stealing?

If I walk into one of the few remaining Barnes & Nobles and put a stack of books into three giant tote bags and walk out, that is STEALING. Oddly, if I walk into a used bookstore, load up a pushcart full of books, then walk out without paying, guess what that would be called? Again. STEALING.

In fact, I’m pretty sure if I strode into a library and loaded up bags full of books and just left? Probably considered stealing as well.

But, if I buy and return ebooks to my heart’s content and never actually pay to read any of those books. This is, oddly…NOT STEALING?

That’s bull sprinkles! Where did we get this math?

For people who are on a budget, check out books from a library. Sign up for Kindle Unlimited where you can read or listen to thousands of titles for a small fee paid monthly. Writers might not make as much but at least they’re not being flat out ripped off.

Look for titles the authors are willingly and knowingly offering for FREE. Writers are some of the kindest, most amazing people in the world. Generous to a fault. Ask me how I know.

Amazon, Step Up on the Stealing Stuff

Jeff Bezos all but declared open war on NYC Big Six publishing (Re: Amazon Publishing: The Road to Conquest & How Bezos Razed New York). Sure, Bezos began Amazon selling everything online but books, but he always had his sights on taking over big publishing.

Which, you know what? Fine.

As far as I can recall, he wanted publishing to be more egalitarian. He dreamed of a system where authors could be paid fairly. Those writers who produced a lot of content the public loved would be rewarded accodingly.

I’m all for that.

Amazon has done some great things. Not denying that. On this book stealing stuff though? Uncool. Seriously uncool.

Great, Amazon dismantled Big Publishing and crippled Barnes & Noble. That was part of the plan. But, after single-handedly burning our industry to the ground, I feel Amazon has a responsibility to all the authors they’ve displaced.

You don’t get to overthrow the literary leaders and take over the pack, only then to throw the pack under a bus.

Amazon wanted to remove a system with agents, editors and publishing houses—institutions that had traditionally fought for author rights—and that’s all well and good.

Now step up.

Amazon, I am NOT totally hating on y’all because that is just low-hanging fruit, not to mention largely erroneous.

I get it has not been easy. I’ve been here for the entire rodeo. I understand how much fraud y’all have had to discover and disrupt. From bots ‘fake reading’ KU books to bait-and-switch scams, to locating Chinese counterfeit books, y’all have done a lot.

But that’s the price of admission into the digital world.

Literary larceny is NOT okay.

Protect Your Writers from Book Theft

Yes, there are still publishers around and a smattering of bookstores. This said, by and large, most everything else book-wise has to be run through Amazon. This is why I feel this company has a moral obligation to protect their authors.

I get it. Bezos didn’t like Big Six publishers.

Amazon’s core arguments for bulldozing traditional publishing was because the Big Six were so ridiculously bad at business. Granted, that is a sound argument. But fast forward to now—where authors really have no other viable option where to sell their books—and Amazon’s brilliant plan is to enable people so blindly entitled they actually believe stealing is a friggin’ ‘life hack’?

Under the current guidelines, readers can return an ebook within 14 days even if they have read the entire book. Then, Amazon deducts the royalty from the author.

Granted, I like a solid return policy. I’ve been with Audible for almost four years and I’ve returned books. That is a privilege that comes with my membership, but one I rarely use. I’ve completed almost 340 titles since joining. Trust me. Writers are making a LOT of money from me.

Stealing is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

I like companies with liberal return policies. It makes life easy when I don’t have to fill out a stack of paperwork, submit a DNA sample, a horoscope and three letters of reference just to get my money back.

Amazon, you have been too nice. Walmart, Target, Sam’s and Costco all went through this, too. You give a generous return policy, but then there are those people. Those people are why we can’t have nice things.

Eventually these companies started taking down people’s driver’s license numbers. Return too much and too often? Banned from returning stuff….cuz it is a form of stealing.

Why am I calling out Amazon? Because this is a problem of SYSTEMIC PROPORTIONS and changing the return policy is a stopgap measure (until these @$$hats find a new way to steal books).

Systemic Stealing

In 2015 I wrote post after post after post trying to make people wake up to the growing sense of entitlement in our world. We have entire generations who’ve grown up on memberships and streaming services and being entertained 24/7 via the internet and social media. I don’t know if the people on TikTok even understand what they are doing.

I mean, in 2015 Salon dot com did a hit piece on me in response to ‘Pay the Writer.’ Used bookstores around the world vowed to ban my books. Readers vowed to never buy my books from used bookstores.

Um…huh? Wait no. Um never mind. *throws up hands*

People failed to grasp that writers didn’t make money off used books. Maybe the folks on TikTok don’t realize that returning ebooks is seriously hurting writers. I like to give the benefit of the doubt.

I believe in education.

For those who didn’t know any better before now? Please stop. For those who now know better and don’t care? Shame on you. Don’t complain when your favorite authors stop writing because they couldn’t afford to work for free anymore.

And, FYI, karma’s a doozy.

If anyone reading this is active on TikTok and sees these videos? Speak out. Report them. Let them know that literary larceny is NOT cool.

Know Your Worth

This is a conversation I have had many times on this blog. This starts with us…with writers. We have got to start valuing what we do and what we contribute. If we don’t value our books, who will?

This is why I have a very specific way of teaching how to build an author brand. Ideally, we want to use social media and blogging to cultivate an audience of fans. I teach HOW to do this in my book.

Fans would never even think of stealing from their favorite authors. In fact, fans will shut down stealing from their beloved scriveners. I know, because many of you guys have messaged me over the years to tell me when my books were being pirated.

Just know that it is okay to ask for the sale.

FREE is a legitimate marketing strategy. It is why I encourage writers to write series. Offer the first book (the loss leader) for free and, if you’ve written a good book, odds are good that people will then feel much more confident buying the rest of your books.

This is how authors make so much off me on Audible. I’ll listen to an audiobook, find out it is part of a series, then be willing to donate blood to buy credits to finish out the entire series.

All in all, just know you deserve respect. The world is NOT entitled to take all they want at no cost. You matter. Your work matters.

Literary Larceny & the High Cost of FREE

Returning ebooks might not seem like a big deal, but with most bookstores now shuttered, this is it. The end of the line. If we (fans, readers) fail to support the books and authors we love, they will go extinct.

Right now it seems there are so many writers and so many books. It seemed that way to sailors and Dutch settlers who wiped out the Dodo bird. At one time, hunters thought buffalo were as numerous as the stars, until they nearly obliterated them. Same with the whales, the wolves, the rhinos…and now the writers.

We should all be careful what we take for granted. It would be a sad day to wake up and there are no teachers, no dreamers, no thought leaders. All are like the Dodo bird, relics of a bygone era.

The future is now. Which way this goes is up to all of us.

To Do More About Literary Larceny

If you’d like to do more, please sign this petition to get Amazon to change their return policies. I know this is a MUCH larger problem, but right now we have to stop the bleed.

Literary larceny hurts everyone. In fact, creatives as a whole are really struggling. Some things I do to help support creatives? Pexels allows you to donate to photographers. I also support some of my favorite content creators by donating to their Patreon and I buy downloads of favorite songs.

If you do read a book (free or not) leave a review. Even if your review is short this jukes the algorithms and helps our sales.

And, because Harlan Ellison is AMAZING and this never gets old, you’re welcome (FYI there is language in this, as is to be expected)…

The post Literary Larceny & Why People Should Be Ashamed appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

This past week, Pearson, the owner of Penguin for the last half-century, jettisoned its remaining stake in Penguin Random House—the book publishing joint venture it formed six years ago with Bertelsmann, the German media group.

According to an article in MSN Money, End of an era for book publisher Penguin:

The company originally owned 47% of Penguin Random House when the joint venture was set up in 2013.

It sold a 22% stake in the business to Bertelsmann, its joint venture partner, for $1bn in July 2017.

Today it sold its remaining 25% stake in the publisher, again to Bertelsmann, for £530m.

Ian King, Sky News

With Borders dead and Barnes & Noble brought to its knees, Amazon is stronger than ever, and indie bookstores and mom and pop bookstores are coming back to life. We are, indeed, living in strange times.

Or are we?

Why So Quiet?

First of all, forgive me for this small segue. Maybe it’s I’ve been a bit off the grid. I’ve been very ill with pneumonia and my grandfather who raised me passed away unexpectedly right before Christmas.

I only knew about this article because one of my followers was thoughtful enough to pass it onto me via Facebook.

Thus, if my analysis is off the mark, I’m blaming it on the drugs. That aside, when I first began blogging, everyone was talking about THE BIG SIX. BIG PUBLISHING. If any major house did anything there was at least some article somewhere.

Yet, when I tried to do further research on this Penguin sale, the ramifications, what ripple effect this shift would have for authors, readers, the market….

Nothing. Not a blog or a blip or a boop. I even subscribe to The New York Times and couldn’t find anything.

ONLY ONE ARTICLE. The one I’ve linked to on this post. Otherwise?

*crickets*

So this is why I am confessing AHEAD of time to being on A LOT…A LOT of drugs, because if y’all have seen the flurry of activity and I missed it, please pass it on to me and accept my mea culpa ahead of time.

I don’t believe I’ve missed anything, though. It’s a sign of how much the industry has changed since I began blogging a decade and a half and almost two thousand blogs ago.

That, and excuse the tinfoil on my head, but the multimedia conglomerates had a LOT of egg on their faces with the whole nasty Barnes & Noble thing. Now that these staple houses are toppling like the proverbial house of cards?

*grimaces*

Not good optics. Maybe just me. Or blame the NyQuil.

Penguin Chic

Without a flurry of activity to derive a brilliant analysis from—gets cramp patting self on back—I went a different direction. If you read the article I linked to regarding the end of an era (apropos for ending the teens, I suppose) there is a very interesting history behind the creation of Penguin.

Thus, do we ever really END anything? Or is it as the book of Ecclesiastes tells us?

There is nothing new under the sun.

A young director at Bodley Head, Sir Allen, came up with the idea of publishing books for the same price as a package of ten cigarettes after waiting on a platform at Exeter St. David’s station for his train back to London.

Much to his chagrin, he had too much time and nothing to fill it with. No cell phones back then.

He lamented at the paltry selection of magazines and Victorian novel reprints. During that time, books were prohibitively expensive. About 8 shillings or almost $37 in modern currency.

Not only were the books during that time mostly inaccessible to the public, the publishers had to sell at least two thousand copies of any book to break even. Sir Allen had a BOLD idea. He wanted to offer more books at a MUCH lower price to a FAR LARGER audience.

Sounding familiar?

To offer the books at Allen’s comparably rock-bottom price, the publisher would have to sell almost twenty times the volume. BUT, everyday people would finally have better access to a vast catalogue of titles they’d never before imagined outside of a lending library.

Fancy that.

Penguin Breaking the Trends & Rules

Penguin’s early catalog included Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway. Penguin’s gamble, like Amazon’s, paid off big, because Sir Allen, just like Jeff Bezos, saw a gap in the market and he filled it.

Despite protests of renowned authors like George Orwell publicly decrying publishers having anything to do with this new venture—claiming that cheap books would only devalue them and people would cease to read and all of publishing would collapse—Sir Allen plunged ahead with his plan.

Penguin sold three million books the first year in business.

Apparently Sir Allen wasn’t the only one bored wandering train stations with nothing to read.

Penguin launched a non-fiction division, a children’s division, and, with the meteoric rise to fame and success, even made the bold decision to publish DH Lawrence’s banned title from 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, uncensored.

Fifty Shades of WHOA dass crazy!

This decision, of course, landed Sir Allen in court for breaking the Obscene Publications Act 1959. He (Penguin) was acquitted, the publisher sold a bazillion copies, and the rest is history (pretty much repeating itself).

Blogging Across Three Eras

I’ve had the unique challenge/blessing/curse of blogging about publishing since before the rise of digital. I began blogging in the aughts, then into the teens and now will continue into the twenties, assuming I don’t lick any light sockets in the next couple days.

My blogging adventure began on a site called Gather (probably now gathering cyber dust somewhere), then on MySpace. Then, that crashed and burned and I moved to the free WordPress blogging platform, then finally learned my lesson and moved to blogging on my own website.

***Take my blogging class. It’s on sale. Seriously, I did all the dumb stuff so you don’t have to. I will save you YEARS of stupidity.

I blogged about being an ‘aspiring author’ when our prime goal, our ONLY path, was to pass gatekeepers. There WAS no Kindle or Amazon.

Self-publishing was vanity press and meant plunking down over ten grand and all your self-respect and any respect from fellow authors forever and ever AMEN.

Vanity publishing was a death sentence in our industry, unless some stroke of John Grisham luck won you an appeal.

But I blogged on Gather and MySpace that social media WAS going to change the world as we knew it. I asserted that, for the first time in history, novelists had a way of creating an audience BEFORE a novel was even finished, thus vastly increasing odds of success (and was laughed at and y’all know the story).

If you don’t, pick up a copy of my author branding book Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World. It’s evergreen.

Platforms change, people don’t. Look up your ex if you don’t believe me .

Into the Teens

I kept yelling and howling that authors NEEDED to be on social media and was shut out. Kept telling the Big Six to PLEASE listen, that I could HELP them, help their authors.

As of 2011, I even had one of the most legendary agents in NYC representing me for Rise of the Machines, and even HE couldn’t talk reason into them. But, his guidance is part of why that book is so good—OUCH! CRAMP!—so there’s that.

No matter how much I blogged and begged, every prediction came true. Cassandra Syndrome seriously sucks sometimes. And no, I don’t really take pleasure in being right. It would have been nice for the right people to listen (though Amazon tweets my blogs)…sigh.

I don’t begrudge Amazon anything, because if people are going to do dumb business? Bye Felicia. It isn’t good for their authors. Dean Koontz saw that, which is why he signed with Thomas & Mercer.

It really wasn’t until a a few years after Borders closed that the New York publishers seemed to even wake up out of the fugue state and recognize that the Internet might exist (still weren’t ready to admit there was a threat).

In the aughts, we were dealing with the fallout of the dot.com burst, the disintegration of Web 1.0 and the rise of Web 2.0 out of its remains.

Web 2.0 was like a cute pet people fed but no one believed might one day bite back (despite many bloggers warning not to feed it after midnight).

Throughout this past decade, I’ve battled the FREE book boom, the exposure dollar debacle, the blog tour dystopia, and algorithmic alchemy. I’ve spent most of the teens on the front lines.

It’s been…exhausting.

In the aughts, there was the challenge to get writers to stand up for themselves, to realize they were a business. Now? I’ve spent the past five years reminding them they are WRITERS, not advertising agencies.

A decade and a half dedicated to educating us as artisans. Knowing enough about business to be effective, but remembering why we are here…THE ART.

Penguin is a Footnote, So What Now?

If there is anyone who can grieve Penguin or the change or loss of any of the publishers, I suppose it’s me. I’ve dreamed of being an author since I was a little girl who spent every cent of babysitting money at the closest B.Dalton.

My father loved books, my grandfather, my entire family. I have a first edition copy of Animal Farm I inherited from my Great Aunt Iris.

I started writing my first novel before I even knew how to spell any words. Too bad Amazon wasn’t around then, LOL.

My grandfather has died. In fact, I’ve lost now fifteen members of my family in just over five years (downside of an aging family). A family so large I couldn’t fit them into a picture in 2009, I can now count on one hand.

So I know how hard change and letting go can be. How tough it is to wrap your head around what the future will look like without the staples of the past you’re so accustomed to. What it is to be unmoored.

But, we grew used to a world without the mom-and-pops, the B. Daltons, the Waldenbooks and other small chains and gradually became accustomed to the giant stores. Then they started becoming too much of a hassle as we began shopping more and more on-line.

As more small Amazon stores open and the small indie bookstores boom back to life, we will recalibrate to a new normal. We’ll browse the used bookstores and see those bright (or faded) orange Penguin spines and smile with nostalgia just like when I find a picture of my grandparents and me from back when I was in high school.

Nothing remains the same, which is good. But some things never change, which is also good.

Markets, trends, what people want, tastes and preferences and buying patterns? Those change. It was the publishers JOB to pay attention to that. They owed that to the readers and most of all to the authors they had a contractual obligation to protect and make their product profitable.

The publishers (or rather the multi-media conglomerates who owned them and called the shots) had a duty to shareholders, and they failed.

That’s why they’re falling like a line of dominos. Mergers, sales, and acquisitions are happening far faster now that Barnes & Noble has been sold to a hedge fund because that sale decimated their cash flow.

Large preorders from B&N have been all that’s been keeping the lights on for years…and I have blogged until I am BLUE about how dangerous that was (so that’s enough on that).

Roaring into the 20s

We are writers, thus we tend to be on the nostalgic side. Much of the past fifteen years has been experimentation, growing pains and figuring out what works and what doesn’t, what we like and what we don’t.

Paper isn’t dead. But digital is alive and well. Sir Allen didn’t ditch the luxurious volumes that cost $37, he just made it where those weren’t the ONLY reading option.

People riding a train could get a small pulp copy of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms to read on a trip.

They had OPTIONS.

Same today. We can buy hard cover, paperback, audio, digital, etc. Maybe we have too many options, but that’s where quality writing and platform come into play.

Modern authors do face many unique challenges, but one major threat—I believe or rather pray—will soon fall away. Profiteers have invaded our profession en mass. There are far too many who are more interested in advertising and marketing than actually learning about story and craft.

This makes discoverability a nightmare, since—with over a million self-published books being released per year—the readers are being buried in Hell’s Slush Pile.

But, if history is any indicator, they will get weary and move on.

There is only so long one can churn out crappy books, work fifteen-hour days juking algorithms, toss out two grand a month only to make back three before you turn in your chips and move on.

I’ve been in this profession a LONG time…which is a lot to say these days. I’ve seen all the scams, all the grifts, all the types come and go. Writers—those of us who are here because we LOVE books, LOVE stories, LOVE to read and the written word and honor and respect the art? We’re hard to get rid of.

Contrary to popular belief, storytelling is the oldest profession .

We’ve been around since the cave days and we aren’t going anywhere. If we’ve made it through the invention of cave drawings, hieroglyphs, papyrus, the quill, the Gutenberg press, the newspaper, the radio, T.V., movies…Ms. Pac Man?

We will survive and thrive.

So raise a glass, toast to a new adventure, commit to your profession and to doing it honor with your work. Have some fun and ROAR into the TWENTIES!

***Since I have been very ill, I am extending all the holiday sales so y’all can go wild and treat yourselves!

I love hearing from you!

What are your thoughts? Looking forward to the 20s? New Year’s Resolutions? Thoughts on Penguin and the eery similarity to our modern adventures with Amazon?

Makes it all seem not so scary to me. I love hearing from you, especially since I have been sick and away so long. I MISSED Y’ALL!

And to prove it and show my love, for the month of JANUARY, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly.

I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages (5K words) of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or fewer). 

***I will announce December’s winner once I feel better.

In the meantime, PLEASE treat yourself to a class! We have a TON of classes that we will be deleting or putting into cold storage come mid-January (I’m extending the sales to January 15th since I haven’t been around to tell you about them during the holidays).

These will no longer be available after January 15th, so STOCK UP while you can.

NEW Year, New YOU! ROAR into the TWENTIES!

ON DEMAND Sales!

HIGHLY RECOMMEND–> On Demand: How to Write Deep POV

By #1 Best Selling Author Maria Grace! Normally $55 now $30

ON DEMAND Dark Arts: New Year’s SPECIAL Building Your Villain

Usually $55 and until January 15th is only $30.

Three hours of psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, pathology and how that applies to writing.

It is like the Behavioral Analysis Unit for Authors. Tres FUN! Villains are some of the most enduring characters in literature. Why not add your own legends to the list?

I’m also offering:

The Art of Character NEW YEAR’S SPECIAL: Writing Characters for a SERIES ON DEMAND

Normally $65 and NOW only $40.

FOUR hours of training on characters on how to develop characters that that can go the distance.

Bring on the Binge: How to Plot and Write a Series (ON DEMAND). 

Normally $65 and NOW only $40. Pairs PERFECTLY with The Art of Character for Series.

ON DEMAND! New Year’s Sale! Story Master: From Dream to DONE

Usually $55, now ONLY $30.

This class is to train you how to plot whether you’re a plotter, a pantser or a mix of both. It’s also a crash course in creating dimensional characters.

On Demand: Beyond Bulletproof Barbie

Usually $55 and now only $25.

This is a THREE-HOUR class on guns, knives, weapons, fighting, law enforcement (from local cops to international espionage) and more. Everything you need to build a bad@$$—male OR female—and get the details CORRECT.

Spilling the New Year’s Tea: On Demand Blogging for Authors

Usually $75 and now only $40.

Get prepped and ready for the new year, new you, new blog.

Bite-Sized Fiction: How to Plot the Novella

Use New20 for $20 off

Popular On Demand Classes

Need some help with platform and branding?

Branding: WHEN YOUR NAME ALONE Can Sell (ON DEMAND)

Use brand10 for $10 off.

For the complete list, go to the OnDemand Section.

***I will add more classes, especially from Maria Grace, in the coming days, as I get stronger.

The post Penguin SOLD: Publishing, Change & Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Oh MY! appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Unplugged and Internet-free. Sounds like heaven to me. Why am I posting on this? Well, someone in the last post commented and asked me to blog on how to sell books without the Internet or social media. If it was even possible.

#ChallengeAccepted

Is it even possible to sell books unplugged? Good food for thought. Of course, my first thought was, ‘Is it even possible to get unplugged in the first place?’

Funny to think that it wasn’t too long ago that a half-baked plot with a terrible love story captured our hearts. A horrible movie (by all accounts) made us all misty-eyed, because of these three words…

You’ve Got Mail...

I remember the giddy feeling whenever I’d hear that ping. Someone sent me an EMAIL. OMG!

I’ve got…MAIL!

Now? I’ve got mail.

*weeps and drinks straight from the Hershey’s syrup squeeze bottle*

I remember loving email.

Hell, I remember LOVING the movie The Matrix. You wanna know WHY I loved The Matrix? Because I wasn’t LIVING IN IT.

I miss being unavailable. My Yahoo email went feral about four years ago. It pees on the carpet and bites people, so we leave it alone.

Same with my Gmail. No matter how many systems and filters…the spammers find me.

There is no way I’ve found to remain unplugged…even a little.

Now? My business email is close to joining the Yahoo and Gmail. If I am not on my cell phone deleting spam messages like Satan’s version of Space Invaders?

I lose stuff.

No joke. I had to create another business email (which, of course, I forget to check). It’s a never ending game of Hell’s Whack-A-Mole.

Oh, and I recently got sick, and couldn’t cull the endless author newsletters I was force-added to against my will because so many @$$hat branding gurus swear by newsletters as the key to wealth and fame to the point they are SELLING email lists to total strangers.

People like me who want some unknown author’s free book about as much as I want a free upper G.I.

Kill. Me. Now.

#IWillNeverEscape

Unplugged Life

I’m a Gen Xer. We’re the sarcastic middle child who trusts nothing and no one, crushed and forgotten between the Baby Boomers and Millennials.

We’re young enough that we were a major force that set off the digital revolution. Yet, we’re also old enough to remember what life was like before computers.

Which is why we drink heavily or want to.

We remember what it was like to have to walk over to someone’s house, knock on a door and ASK IN PERSON if they wanted to hang out. Or, to CALL. And if the person wasn’t there, to have to…wait for it…call back LATER.

There weren’t even answering machines.

Hell, there wasn’t even ‘call waiting.’ You got a busy tone. Oh, the things my son (Spawn) won’t ever experience.

We lived our lives unplugged, not even knowing we were ‘unplugged.’

Now we track everything from packages to exes. These days, I can’t even have a conversation in the car that suddenly there aren’t ads popping up in my feed for something I was just talking about.

#CreepyAsHell

There was a time I TRIED to remain unplugged. I refused to use email and wanted all my bills on paper. I’d reset all the settings on my phone and clear browser histories, and… *taps out*

Problem is, everything is optional…until it isn’t.

Want to get really freaked out? Go read Fahrenheit 451. These days, I’m too old to mess with it and as a writer, I find great entertainment researching murder and poisons on-line just to see what sort of ads pop up on Facebook.

Apparently a LOT of ads for pre-paid legal, therapy, and hardware stores. I wish I were making this up.

Can We Even Live Unplugged?

Not to freak y’all out, but before we even posit the question if it’s possible to sell books off-line, we need to ask the critical question. Who’s even living off-line? Because if Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) is our target market?

Then there ya go!

But, even Ted communicated using the newspaper, which was the equivalent of the Internet during his day. He put out personal ads searching for a wife who wanted to live off the land, cut off from the world.

Wonder how many of us might take him up on that these days?

Considering that most of today’s population is glued to their phones, addicted to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs to the degree that specialists are treating new never-seen-before joint, back, eye, and psychiatric disorders….

Whether we like it or not, folks these days aren’t sharing word of mouth in person as much as they’re sharing among peers their on-line social circles.

***To be clear, this doesn’t mean they’re NOT sharing in person, just proportionally they’re sharing more on-line.

Additionally, people are shopping more on-line than in stores.

It’s why Cyber Monday has been beating out Black Friday by increasingly larger margins every year.

Not only are the deals better, but there’s also the added convenience. I’m just as guilty. For instance, Spawn’s birthday is RIGHT near Thanksgiving.

I didn’t have time to cook, work, write, clean, and shop for birthday gifts. So, I hopped on Amazon and ordered the game he wanted…which was delivered to my front door while I frosted his birthday cakes.

In sales, we had a saying, ‘Fish where the fish are.’ Safe bet the fish are schooling on-line.

Bookstores & Location

Though, for NOW, I think it will be tough to sell books unplugged, that trend should shift. The reason? Borders and Barnes & Noble decimated the indie and mom-and-pop bookstores.

Granted, CBS recently reported some good news (which I also predicted on this blog a few years ago *gets cramp patting self on back*).

The small bookstores are booming after being nearly wiped out, which is fabulous.

The problem is that the big box chains all but annihilated these small stores, and there is a LONG road back from the edge of extinction.

Consumers will eventually shop at bookstores, but, as the founder of Barnes & Noble realized only after it was far too late, shoppers tend to gravitate to the store that is closest and most convenient.

In the October 21, 2016 article in The New Yorker, What Barnes & Noble Doesn’t Get About Bookstores, Leonard Riggio, the man who bought Barnes & Noble forty-five years ago and turned it into a giant finally conceded this mistake:

The No. 1 consideration of where someone will shop is how close it is to where they are. It has nothing to do with pedigree or branding. If there’s no bookstore close to them, they’re more likely to buy online. If there’s one close, they’re more likely to buy if it’s a block away.

While we await the recovery of the local ‘Shop Around the Corner,’ odds are folks will mostly buy on-line. That’s business reality.

The Centrifugal Bumble-Brand

There are all sorts of gurus who’ll sell authors (or anyone) snake oil a sure-fire get-rich-quick scheme for using social media to make the big lists, sell so many books, etc. etc.

Mailing lists, pay-to-promote, ads, marketing campaigns, on and on!

I’ve never done any of this, and my blog gets well over a million unique visits a month, which is pretty good for a blog with such niche content for a niche audience.

My book and classes are fun and never go out of style because the focus is on people, not technology.

What captures people’s attention? How do we make them care? If we have to use social media, then how can we find our tribe? And have FUN and time to write books?

What can we do to attract those people who like what we like and are most likely to enjoy our content and probably enjoy our stories, too?

CLUE: How about post stuff they WANT to see and SHARE? Imagine that!

Technology changes, people don’t.

Whether we are plugged in or unplugged, how we interact with people is roughly the same if we want to be successful.

Even before social media, we didn’t like people who only talked to us when they wanted something.

We were NOT fans of people who were constant sources of drama, negativity, self-centered, manipulative, the list goes on.

We enjoyed people who made us laugh, who noticed US, who were genuine, who asked us about our day and our life (without an agenda) and who listened, instead of everything being about them.

Even before computers, we liked people who made us smile, who made our day better just being around them.

We ran from people who drained our energy, who took more than they gave. People hung out with people who shared at least some common interests, with just enough variety to add something new and exciting.

This has nothing to do with SEO.

Well, not directly. Humans are the same on-line as unplugged. They don’t want someone trying to sell them something all the time, etc. etc.

#Duh

Relax on social media. It’s really what we used to do off-line only on-line. Yes, we have to filter it, but we had to filter it at parties if we wanted to be invited back, right?

Remember, we aren’t trying to make EVERYONE happy. We CAN’T.

For instance, if you don’t have a dark sense of humor, you’re probably not going to enjoy my books either. I can’t please everyone. But when I please the right people—MY audience—they do the heavy lifting.

Like here…

Almost a thousand shares and I didn’t have to pay Facebook a dime. Here’s the thing. My goal is not to sell this blog or my classes or my books to EVERYONE. I can’t please EVERYONE, so I don’t try.

But I CAN please YOU….

And probably even you…

And you…over there.

Yes, I have seven cats. Actually six. My *whispers* dog, Pippa, thinks she is a cat. Don’t tell her.

Anyway, what were we talking about before all the funny cats?

Oh yeah…no social media.

How would we share cat memes?

That and right now I started a pretty hysterical (and morbid) thread on Facebook that might earn us all an FBI van for Christmas….

*tugs collar*

But the comments are too funny! See? No marketing gimmick, just people having some seriously dark and disturbing fun.

I write mystery, suspense and thriller so those are the sort of people who are my audience. Many of the people in the thread having a good time, I KNOW FOR A FACT are not writers. They are READERS (or potential readers).

Which means these are the folks who DO go over and like my fan page and who DO subscribe to my blog here.

#TrueCrime

Oops, I meant #TrueStory.

Anyway….

Storytelling Unplugged

I know I’ve danced around the question, though I’ve not meant to. Can we sell books without social media or the Internet? Sure.

But for most writers who break out in hives at the mention of sales, the idea of setting up a table in some store and hawking a book with a PayPal card reader pales in comparison to building a social platform.

Thus, the only remaining way to sell books off the Internet (unplugged) is through the quality of the story.

We must write something SO spectacular, so singularly unique and well-crafted that it stands out like the Hope Diamond perched, glinting in the sunlight, on a pile of rubbish.

It must be so brilliantly crafted that it generates a tidal wave of buzz among readers, and then eventually the booksellers in the emerging small bookstores. Stories that booksellers will not only stock, but will go out of their way to recommend to the browsing shopper.

Writing Unplugged

This said, judging from most of what I see? The future is not looking too bright for most writers.

With the rise of self-publishing, it’s been too easy to skip the hard parts….like learning how to write well.

When I began as an editor almost twenty years ago, the samples I received were trying to pass a NY gatekeeper. Now? Most wouldn’t pass 7th grade English.

It’s downright depressing.

I encounter far too many ‘authors’ who know more about advertising and marketing than they know about story structure, POV, pacing, scene and sequel, etc.

Instead of reading, taking classes, applying what is learned to writing and then rewriting and practicing, too many authors are fixating on-line.

They’re more concerned about building numbers on their mailing list, their book covers matching their Facebook headers than whether or not the ‘books’ they’ve already produced are even readable.

They spend more time worrying if they should shift to Instagram than trying to understand why no one’s buying their existing books.

The hard truth is great writers do what anyone who’s a master at anything does. They make writing appear easy just like an Olympic gymnast makes the parallel bars seem easy.

Writing a novel is anything BUT easy. This is a skill that takes time, training, blood, sweat, tears, mentorship, and probably part of your soul to even become moderately good.

When we skip steps—either out of pride or impatience—there are consequences.

The most common consequence is our book will die a lonely death in obscurity. What is ignored offline will likely never thrive online. So YES…

Book Sales Unplugged

The technically correct answer is that we’ve long passed the event horizon that any sale happens off-line…technically. We’re living in a world that, short of a zombie apocalypse or a. nuclear war, the Internet will be a factor in the sale somewhere.

BUT…before the Internet ever gets a vote. Before Insta-Snap-Chat-Face-Twit is ever part of the equation, a story starts with us. The author.

Every sale happens offline when we write the book. Then, when the reader reads or listens to our story and our story makes their heart beat faster, keeps them up all night and generates so much excitement they cannot WAIT to tell someone?

That is the books sale unplugged. We have to get booksellers excited enough to be a street team without us even having to ask or offer an incentive.

They’ll VOLUNTEER. The best sales are always a passion project anyway.

In the meantime, READ, READ, READ. WRITE, WRITE, WRITE. READ, WRITE, FAIL, REPEAT!

And know I’ll never fuss at y’all without offering help .

Go to THIS BLOG where I have a long list of resources—who aren’t necessarily me—to help make y’all better legendary authors (blogs, books, classes, etc).

Give yourself some goodies for Christmas.

I also have some treats, like a BRAND NEW class I’ve never taught before, and it turned out FANTASTIC. ON DEMAND Dark Arts: HOLIDAY SPECIAL Building Your Villain is usually $55 and for the next few days is only $25. Three hours of psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, pathology and how that applies to writing.

It is like the Behavioral Analysis Unit for Authors. Tres FUN! Villains are some of the most enduring characters in literature. Why not add your own legends to the list?

I’m also offering ON DEMAND! Holiday Sale! Story Master: From Dream to DONE. This class is to train you how to plot whether you’re a plotter, a pantser or a mix of both. It’s also a crash course in creating dimensional characters.

I love hearing from you!

And to prove it and show my love, for the month of NOVEMBER, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly.

I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages (5K words) of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or fewer). 

October’s Winner is Charlotte French.

November’s Winner is rachelwordsmith and thanks for the blog idea, too!

FYI, one page is 250 words. Calculate accordingly, please. Send your WORD doc double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 point font, one-inch margins to kristen at wana intl dot com. If I fail to respond within ten business days after sending, please know I am VERY human and send a follow up message. I may have lost your email or accidentally nuked it in my Hell’s Space Invader’s game.

In the meantime, PLEASE treat yourself to a class! We have a TON of classes that we will be deleting or putting into cold storage come January and will no longer be available. So STOCK UP while you can.

The BIG SPECIALS (other than what I mentioned above)

On Demand: Beyond Bulletproof HOLIDAY Barbie

Usually $55 and now only $25.

This is a THREE-HOUR class on guns, knives, weapons, fighting, law enforcement (from local cops to international espionage) and more. Everything you need to build a bad@$$—male OR female—and get the details CORRECT.

Spilling the HOLIDAY Tea: On Demand Blogging for Authors

Usually $75 and now only $40.

Get prepped and ready for the new year, new you, new blog.

New Classes

Tick Tock: How to Plot Mystery Suspense Series

Thursday, December 12th, 7:00-9:00 p.m. EST (NYC TIME). Use New20 for $20 off.

Can You Hear Me Now? Developing Character Voice

Friday, December 13th, 7:00-9:00 P.M. EST. Use New10 for $10 off.

NEW ON DEMAND CLASSES

Bite-Sized Fiction: How to Plot the Novella

Use New20 for $20 off

Why Are We HERE? Scenes That HOOK

Use New20 for $20 off

Popular On Demand Classes

The Art of Character: Writing Characters for a SERIES ON DEMAND

Use Binge10 for $10 off.

How do we create characters that readers will fall in love with, characters strong enough to go the distance? Find out in this THREE-HOUR class that also comes with detailed notes and a character-building template. 

This class dovetails with my previous class:

Bring on the Binge: How to Plot and Write a Series (ON DEMAND). Use Binge10 for $10 off.

Need some help with platform and branding?

Branding: WHEN YOUR NAME ALONE Can Sell (ON DEMAND)

Use brand10 for $10 off.

For the complete list, go to the OnDemand Section.

The post Unplugged Book Sales: Is It Possible to Sell Books Off-Line? appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

The winning edge is what all humans crave, whether it’s at work, love, life, or even just for that spot at the front of the line in Starbuck’s. People go to CRAZY lengths to gain that winning edge, especially when margins are razor-thin and stakes are sky high.

A long list of ‘doping’ scandals’ shook professional sports not too long ago, reducing rock solid reputations to dust. Corporate giants have fallen, their leaders thrown in jail because they chose shortcuts over creativity and ingenuity.

Insider trading. Backroom deals. Brokering in secrets.

Writing and publishing, sadly, aren’t much different. There are folks out there who sell packages that guarantee to make you (or me) or anyone with the cash or the card that clears a New York Times Best-Selling Author.

Wish I were kidding.

Ever since our profession has gone digital, it’s been far easier to game the system. Now, make no mistake. It was certainly NO meritocracy before. I merely said digitization has made it easier to game.

Though why anyone would feel proud of a ‘trophy’ they’d bought is beyond me. This said, just because some people are engaging in algorithmic alchemy doesn’t mean everyone is.

Plenty of room to earn our titles the good old-fashioned way.

We Are What We SAY We Are

I pull this trick on every conference I speak at. It’s a whole lot more fun (for me) if the audience isn’t filled with longtime followers of my blog.

The single largest hurdle many writers have to overcome—serious writer, not entrepreneurs using my professions as some scratch-off ticket to fame and fortune—is to actually CALL themselves writers.

I will ask for all the aspiring writers in the room to raise their hands. Then, once they do, I tell them to use that hand and slap themselves HARD and never call themselves that again.

Feel free to use the term ‘pre-published’ or if you’re an overachiever like me? ‘Pre-legend’ will work too. But for the love of all that is chocolate, ditch the aspiring.

This is a brutal profession and apologists will get eaten for breakfast. I’ve seen writers who’ve penned tens of thousands of words who still refuse to call themselves writers.

To be perfectly blunt, I am seeing a lot less of this than I used to with self-publishing as an option. But, that cloying insecurity is still there.

So long as we cling to the aspiring then we don’t have to write every day. Investing in training and classes is an option not a mandate. Reading books is a frivolity, not business training.

Aspiring writers will always be just that…aspiring. There is not implied action in that word. Pre-published presupposes a promise.

Additionally, we are what we do.

If I told you I was a doctor, but then you found out I never went to med school, didn’t have an office, had never treated a patient, you’d think I was a lunatic.

Writers WRITE.

Winning Edge: Preparation

Also, the day you decide you maybe want to make money doing this writing thing professionally, you need to invest in YOU and your business.

This means you need a website, to start building a brand, cultivating a platform (which is code for just keep talking to people and make friends on social media).

Yes, I hear the protest. But I haven’t even finished a book! All right. So you DO finish a book. Say you run into an agent who LOVES it. Do you REALLY want to try and pull a website/platform out of the ether?

Look in my eyes. The answer is no.

You’ll thank me later.

If you query traditional or a good indie and don’t have a website and platform, I can tell you right now that’s almost always an automatic trip to the slush pile. Also, if you publish yourself, where are you going to sell your book(s)? And to whom?

Trust me. I have done all the dumb stuff so you don’t have to.

Branding and building a platform is a) something only YOU can do b) you cannot buy one or outsource this task, either c) it can be fun d) it’s way easier and a lot less stressful when you don’t yet have anything for sale.

My book, Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World was written to be evergreen (meaning the content never gets old).

It works on any platform in any time period because my approach focuses on PEOPLE. Technology changes. People don’t. Don’t believe me? Look up your ex on Faceook.

You’re welcome.

I teach how to locate your future fans. Why do they like what they like? WHY? How can you find them, connect and cultivate a relationship that will endure?

If you want a winning edge, then building a strong cadre of people who care about YOU, your book and success will launch you light years ahead of those who believe they can simply throw money at a bunch of ads and buy email lists.

Winning Edge: The ‘Competition’

Here’s where I’ll probably sound like a jerk but I have no figs to give. Barnes & Noble is on life-support. It might survive, but will likely never again be a baller. Big Publishing hasn’t had a breakout novel in nearly EIGHT years now.

The glut in the market has become unmanageable. In the early days of self-publishing and indie publishing readers could discover the gems, but now it’s too much. As I’ve mentioned more than a few times, there are now over a million self-published books launched per year.

It doesn’t take a mathlete or an economist to appreciate that, if only 3-5% of the population considers reading to be a favorite past-time, that they simply cannot make it through over a million books a year to discover the gems.

But, good entrepreneurs are problem solvers. How can WE solve this problem of over a million books added to the market per year?

Well, the entities that allow self-publishing won’t likely do anything because even if a really dreadful book sells ten copies they’re still making a lot of money.

That, and I loathe handing power over to other people. I’m a tad of a control freak. Yes, I see your shocked faces.

The winning edge we have here is that most of those million plus books are unreadable GARBAGE.

Winning Edge: Quality Beats Price

Yes, in the beginning of the e-reader, we wanted cheap books because they were novel (*bada bump snare*). We still do, to a degree. I still believe that a digital book shouldn’t cost the same as a hard cover.

A hard cover costs in paper, shipping, it can be damaged and is perishable. This said, I am happy to pay a reasonable price for a digital book, just not $27.00.

Back to cheap books. We were enamored with .99 cent books and FREE books largely because NY was staffed with Luddites who didn’t realize the Titanic was sinking.

Instead of changing business plans…the band played on.

Amazon was more than happy to accommodate. But, after a while, the novelty wore off. Especially once we realized that so many of these books were unreadable junk—unedited, first-draft, digitized offal.

Much of what’s out there still is. And, traditional publishing, in trying to up their speed, has compromised a lot of quality as well. I’ve found myself reading a lot of older books (pre-digital era) because I can’t stand modern books.

If readers discover we put out QUALITY books, we will automatically be at the leading edge of the pack. The reason is readers don’t have time to sift through Hell’s Slush Pile.

Value the Readers’ TIME

Publishing has ALWAYS complained people didn’t read enough.

Those stupid radio programs are stealing readers.

That silly new television is taking readers.

Twenty-four hour news and cable! Stealing our readers!

Publishers have griped and groused that people didn’t read books and that was back when there sure as Shineola wasn’t over a MILLION friggin’ books hitting the market per year…most UNEDITED.

Most of the books for sale today? Forget passing a gatekeeper. Most couldn’t pass fifth grade English. But here’s the thing.

People are BUSY.

We are wanting them to READ. If we want them to read, the we need to make sure we’re valuing their limited time by offering them an escape…not a migraine.

I hate saying this, and honestly never believed I ever would. But if writers would do these three things, you would outpace probably 95% of what is for sale.

First, read A LOT of books. This would give you a vast vocabulary and you’d be able to study how masters of what we do use words to create emotions, atmosphere, effect, tension, etc.

Secondly, invest in training, conferences and/or read and study the top craft blogs and books. I gave a GIANT list on this post.

Thirdly, write A LOT. I was going to end the Plot Boss ON DEMAND tomorrow night, but since I am mentioning it here, I’ll go ahead and end it MONDAY. Because if you don’t take any other craft class take this one.

***If we don’t understand the structure of stories we’re DOOMED. This is a $55 class I’m offering for $25. You can get it HERE.

After years writing myself in corners, I dedicated to learning EVERYTHING about plotting because it confused the bejeezus out of me. Once I reverse engineered what I’d been doing all wrong, I devised a way to teach it where even me—a plotting dimwit—could understand.

You guys having seventy-six half-finished ideas in your computer doesn’t make you a stronger author. It makes you want to cry into a tub of ice cream and buy crap you don’t want or need on Amazon Prime.

Finishing books makes you better (and improves your confidence). Finishing sucky books leads to finishing good books and that leads to finishing incredible books…and THAT is the winning edge.

Remember QUALITY

A caveat of finishing. I’m going to reiterate the importance of study. Reading is vastly important. I cannot tell you how many ‘writers’ tell me they want to be a ‘New York Times Best-Selling Author’ but then in the same sentence claim they don’t have the time to read.

*primal screams*

If you don’t have time to read, then you don’t have time to be an author. Initially, I wasn’t keen on audio books. I had to train my brain.

I’m a writer, blogger, teacher, and a mom who homeschools. That, and, judging from the piles of laundry in my house, there might be people living here I don’t know about.

Sure, I had to get used to it. The books I particularly love, I buy again in paper. But, I can do laundry, dishes, clean, or stand in lines and listen to books.

I just want to be very clear on the finishing thing. There are plenty of writers churning out finished ‘books.’ But they aren’t books, they are 50,000-110,000 words with a cover.

What we practice is what improves.

If we don’t read great books and take classes from those who can improve our skills, what we are doing is practicing bad writing. We’re getting better and being terrible writers.

***Btw, it doesn’t have to be me. Look to that link and the GIANT LIST I gave y’all of incredible teachers and blogs.

And I am not picking on anyone. Every artist who desires mastery brings in an expert. I played clarinet from grade school into high school. Starting in 6th grade, I met with a top clarinetist from the Dallas Symphony once a week and she ran me through grueling drills.

No matter the art—painting, dance, music, sculpting, etc.—even if a person is self-taught most seek out masters to help them improve in some area (at least the ones who want to be the BEST do).

Winning Edge and Finding Your Pace

Some books are like fine wine, and need time. They require a certain climate, fine weather, nurturing and an aging process. Michael Crichton, Larry McMurtry, Ken Follet, Amy Tan, etc. didn’t churn out books every two months and no one expected them to so.

Granted, some of the greatest works of literature were actually written VERY quickly (as I pointed out in my tongue-in-cheek post ‘Real Writers Don’t Self-Publish). Not all writers have the same pace. Not all stories require the same operational tempo.

Stephen King has written works that took eighteen months and others that took only a few days.

Publishing isn’t One-Size-Fits-All, or at least it shouldn’t be. But we are still enduring the birthing pains.

This said. With this drive for writers to push out content faster than a cartel meth lab, quality has taken a major hit. It’s also deluding a lot of people into believing they can take shortcuts.

That what we writers do is not an art, an artisan craft, a skill that requires YEARS and DECADES of training, learning, practice, classes, reading, and training to refine.

I believe we’ve gone far enough down this digital highway to come to a crossroad where we’ll need to choose.

When I began my journey years ago, the greatest hurdle I had was to get authors to understand we were in the entertainment business and that half of that word was business.

Now that has flipped.

We are still in the entertainment business, entertainment being half of that word. And I am actually excited about that, because I LOVE teaching craft.

*throws glitter*

Granted I love teaching branding and social media but my methods are beyond unorthodox and actually use your creativity.

Others might want to lobotomize your imagination, whereas I want you to let your muse out of the classroom and so she/he can have Field Day every day. Lord, all this algorithm, dashboard, metrics…

Is it me, or does it feel like our poor muses have been trapped in a standardized test since 2012?

*gagging sounds*

Summing Up the Winning Edge

We can look at this bloated, dreadful market and see doom, or opportunity. For those ready to seize advantage, it’s pretty simple.

• Own being an author. You’re an artist and an artisan.

• Start building your space. Plan for success. For discounted web-hosting with white-glove treatment, go HERE and tell them I sent you for a special author rate. TechSurgeons caters to a lot of authors. The big web hosts won’t necessarily care if your site gets hacked at three in the morning, six hours before before your book launch, but TechSurgeons WILL. If you’re already with a different host, they can move you over easy-peasy.

• Get a copy of Rise of the Machines or take the On Demand Branding Class. You can also go through my archives for free to learn all you need to know. What I teach is very simple and VERY effective…oh and FUN.

• Read, A LOT. Watch a lot of movies, television, series. Take notes. Study dialogue, characterization, vocabulary, subtext.

• Go to that list I provided and treat yourself to some of those resources. Read those blogs and take their classes, too.

• Take some Bad Lamb Academy Classes. They’re designed to give you the winning edge. I have a couple of SWEET specials listed below (and ALL our classes come with recordings). It’s going to take more than one or two classes to train y’all into any semblance of mastery, which is why we work hard to make these affordable. Recordings allow you to go back over material.

• Once you’ve read the books and blogs and taken the classes, write A LOT. Practice is a whetstone that sharpens the winning edge.

• And finish. Then repeat. Be a FINISHER.

What Are Your Thoughts?

I believe the pendulum is swinging back the other way. The glut of everyone wanting to market and advertise their way into best-selling author status just isn’t panning out like it used to.

I feel we are getting back to the basics of ‘Can you tell a GOOD story?’

Does that make you excited? What are some of the areas you find yourself neglecting? Do you struggle claiming that you are a ‘real’ writer and so you put everyone and everything ahead of writing and honing your craft?

I love hearing from you!

And to prove it and show my love, for the month of NOVEMBER, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly.

I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less). Will announce October’s soon. Finally back to feeling ‘normal-ish’ from the bronchitis.

In the meantime, PLEASE treat yourself to a class!

So the BIG SPECIALS

On Demand: Beyond Bulletproof HOLIDAY Barbie

Usually $55 and now only $30. This is a THREE-HOUR class on guns, knives, weapons, fighting, law enforcement (from local cops to international espionage) and more. Everything you need to build a bad@$$—male OR female—and get the details CORRECT.

On Demand Plot Boss: Writing Books Readers Want to BUY

Sale on this class ENDS Monday.

New Classes

Why Are We HERE? Scenes that HOOK

THIS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22nd, 2019. Use New20 for $20 off.

Tick Tock: How to Plot Mystery Suspense Series

Tuesday, November 26th  7:00-9:00 p.m. EST (NYC TIME). Use New20 for $20 off.

NEW ON DEMAND CLASSES

On Demand Dark Arts: Building Your Villain

Use New20 for $20 off. Discount good until November 28th.

On Demand Bite-Sized Fiction: How to Plot the Novella

Popular On Demand Classes

The Art of Character: Writing Characters for a SERIES ON DEMAND

Use Binge10 for $10 off.

How do we create characters that readers will fall in love with, characters strong enough to go the distance? Find out in this THREE-HOUR class that also comes with detailed notes and a character-building template. 

This class dovetails with my previous class:

Bring on the Binge: How to Plot and Write a Series (ON DEMAND). Use Binge10 for $10 off.

Need some help with platform and branding?

Branding: WHEN YOUR NAME ALONE Can Sell (ON DEMAND)

Use brand10 for $10 off.

For the complete list, go to the OnDemand Section.

The post The Winning Edge: In a Glutted Market, How Can Authors Stand Apart? appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Pay the bookseller. Novel idea. Sort of like my whole idea that we should pay the writer. Alas, every time I study the book industry, no one in charge seems to understand why paying those pivotal to your business is kind of a big deal.

I was going to blog on something else, but this morning I awoke to the New York Times article:

Can Britain’s Top Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble? James Daunt fought Amazon and rescued the country’s biggest bookstore chain. Now comes Chapter 2.

For me? This is not CHAPTER 2, it is a steaming pile of Number Two.

Call of Doody: Battle of the Books

First of all, this NYT title is grossly inaccurate and misleading. Daunt might have rescued the UK chain Waterstones, but his rescue plan had very little to do with directly combatting Amazon.

In fact, it was precisely because Daunt didn’t engage with Amazon that Waterstones managed to regain financial footing.

One of the single largest business decisions that killed Borders—as well as Barnes & Noble—had to do with crap tactics. Both giants engaged the competition (Amazon) on terrain where their adversary held almost total dominance.

*throws history book at screen*

The Internet reminds me of Russia. Only those born to it prosper and only fools believe they can win a war against the harsh elements they’ve never studied let alone mastered.

Bezos was only too happy to let Borders try to invade. Amazon hunkered down, and Borders ended up eating all their metaphorical horses before they finally starved.

Did B&N learn? Nope. And the oil froze in their Nooks.

Maybe y’all think I’m being melodramatic, but…

In my recent blog post Amazon Publishing: The Road to Conquest & How Bezos Razed New York, I mentioned how Borders was struggling but doing okay, until they broke the deal they’d made with the devil Amazon and got the bright idea to go it alone on-line.

Can anyone say, ‘Waterloo?’

Similarly, Barnes & Noble—apparently visited by the same ‘Bright Idea Fairy’—launched the Nook, and hemorrhaged over a billion dollars.

Why? Because they didn’t learn from Borders and believed they could win a land war in Asia book war on-line.

*pictures Amazon sitting inside near roaring fire drinking vodka and playing checkers*

What Daunt Did Well

So let’s just get some facts straight. C.E.O. James Daunt didn’t rescue Waterstones because he took on the big, bad Amazon. Amazon wasn’t why the Waterstones stores were bleeding out.

Daunt went head to head with traditional publishers. Publishers were killing the bookstores.

Daunt forswore the $38 million in ‘co-op fees’ which gave the publishers the power to display the selection of books they liked and wanted to sell. Problem was that what the publishers wanted to sell rarely coincided with what customers wanted to BUY/READ.

The co-op fees, enticing as they might have been, were undermining sales overall. Daunt was savvy enough to appreciate that bookstores wouldn’t survive if they kept putting the publishers’ desires ahead the customers’.

Daunt also gave Waterstones a heavy makeover. They didn’t all look alike. Some were big, some small, some didn’t have the name Waterstones at all.

***Went a little Dr. Seuss there.

Cutting the Co-Op

The co-op system was an albatross. Publishers were smitten with their Buy Two Get the Third Free but, according to Daunt, customers rarely found the third book they wanted (FREE or not).

Waterstones, at one point, was returning TWENTY PERCENT of their inventory for remaindering.

For those who don’t know how traditional publishing operates, the physical bookstore system is consignment-based.

Publishers send books they believe will sell. Booksellers, however, eventually return unsold books to publishers at the publishers’ expense.

But also at the booksellers’ expense because failing to sell TWENTY PERCENT of your inventory is—to use a fancy business term—bad juju.

Bookstores lose money, too, because they have to pay their staff to rip off covers and box them to ship back to the publishers. Time that could be better used selling books.

With Waterstones shipping back roughly a FIFTH of all inventory, this translated into millions of dollars in losses (for both parties) every year.

To continue was madness. Got it. Yay James Daunt.

Daunt vs. Traditional Publishing

Daunt finally convinced the publishers to work with him and offer a discount on all the books, not just those hand-selected for specialness.

He then started changing up all the stores, making them resemble the smaller independent stores of yesteryear.

Each location had unprecedented control over which books they stocked and where.

“He’s (Daunt) essentially created a series of independent bookstores with the buying power of a chain.”

Tom Weldon, Penguin Random House U.K.

After untangling the co-op albatross from around Waterstones’ neck, the chain dropped from TWENTY PERCENT of inventory shipped back to publishers down to FOUR PERCENT.

***Currently, according to the NYT article I’m referring to today, Barnes & Noble averages TWENTY to TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT of inventory is returned to the publishers.

#OUCH

The Oblique Attack: Atmosphere

Daunt ditched the co-op payout, empowered the individual stores to curate their own inventory, thus making each location highly unique and individualized. For the most part, each bookstore’s inventory currently reflects the community it serves.

Waterstones also made a big deal out of making their bookstores a place people wanted to go and maybe even stay awhile.

This is probably the only area I’d grudgingly concede Daunt ‘fought’ Amazon.

Because for me, the fight really hasn’t ever been with Amazon. Bezos, from the beginning, wanted to create a system that catered to readers. That a book would become popular because readers enjoyed it.

This idea that a small group of of intellectually isolated elites could choose what the rest of the country wanted to read was absurd.

For those isolated elites to then insist the books they enjoyed should comprise most of a bookstore’s inventory, despite regional, cultural and linguistic differences? Height of hubris.

And we’re somehow shocked that B&N returns an average of 25% of its stock?

So, with everything thus far, I agree a thousand percent that Daunt did an excellent job.

But here is where we begin to part ways.

Who is Achilles James Daunt?

When you open the NYT article, there’s this smart picture of James Daunt next to a fairly misleading title (as we’ve already discussed).

The only direct jab at Amazon is in reference to creating stores with atmosphere as opposed to a quick on-line transaction.

Whatever. They DO know Amazon is opening stores that are catering to local tastes, preferences and offering all sorts of cozy feel-goods and extras, right?

Right?

Anyway.

The first third of the article is inspiring, and refreshing. After ten years ranting on my blogs, it’s nice to see someone making sound business decisions for a change.

I was impressed that Daunt had no problem going head-to-head with the major publishers. I liked that his new approach lowered waste, increased profit, and that he’d streamlined staff to allow time for the stores to recover.

Then we get to the second part of the article….

*heavy sigh*

The article gushes on and on about Daunt, how he’s the son of an ambassador, how ‘he joined the corporate finance department of J.P. Morgan in Manhattan, shortly after graduating from Cambridge University in 1984.’

Um, all right. Interesting stuff.

How though he loved the money, but ‘his wife, Katy Steward, recoiled at the prospect of 40 years of dinnertime stories about stock swaps and high-yield bonds.’

Ok. Yeah, sounds like a total drag.

We learn that the very wealthy Daunt has an unusual approach to his globe-trotting family vacations that he takes with his wife and two children.

How they’ve backpacked through Romania, Ethiopia, and Cuba blah blah blah.

All well and good. I found it interesting and the article would have been fine had it ended here.

But it didn’t.

For those who kept reading, this pseudo-personal profile gave the last third of the article a…’Let them eat cake’ vibe.

Same $#!&, Different C.E.O

Borders died because they got greedy. Barnes & Noble imploded because of greed. Traditional publishing (namely the multi-media conglomerates that own them) are dying off out because of…y’all guessed it, GREED.

What all these folks have in common, was they believed they could prosper while shivving those who mattered the most.

Namely, the writers and the small bookstore chains, the indie and mom-and-pop bookstores…and finally the actual book sellers (the retail people).

The Big Six didn’t want to wait on golden eggs, so they let Borders and Barnes & Noble talk them into gutting the goose that eventually cooked all their geese.

That is a serious gaggle of @$$hattery right there.

***For those who don’t know what I’m referring to, go HERE.

Granted, Daunt’s plan is doing a ‘better’ job of getting lesser known authors in front of readers. The writers are doing ‘better’ under this new model.

Better being a relative term.

But, what I simply cannot understand is how NO ONE in charge gives a rip about the second most important person when it comes to selling books.

The retail folks on the floor and in the trenches! What is WRONG with you people?

Pay the bookseller!

When the people who work for you have to launch/sign a petition to ask for a living wage? Call me pissy, but I don’t want to hear about bougie trips to some place called…Jura.

And I don’t give a single fig about how you argued with an Italian showroom designer—at a posh London restaurant—about how the perfect angle of a book on display should be three degrees not four.

Let’s circle the wagons back to what really matters.

You Can’t Afford to Raise Their Pay?

Can anyone in this industry MATH?

By Daunt’s own admission, the percentage of remaindering has dropped sixteen percent. Sales are up, waste is down. Employees are selling books instead of boxing them.

So…why not reward them?

Daunt also agrees the starting pay is ‘rubbish,’ but then he loses me. To increase pay would cost $6.2 million the company doesn’t have.

Even though, according to the April 2nd, 2019 article, James Daunt says pay row obscures ‘decent progress’ at Waterstones via The Bookseller:

Under Daunt, Waterstones has returned to profit, reporting a pretax profit of £20m on sales of £386m in the year to end April 2018, and Daunt said the current fiscal year would see continuing improvement. But he said the business remained fragile.

Philp Jones

If I am understanding correctly, Waterstones went from dangling over the precipice of imminent bankruptcy…to now boasting $16.4 million in pretax profit on $317million in total sales.

That massive improvement can’t be leveraged to raise a paltry $6.2 million to keep the workers who made this gain happen from walking out the door?

Y’all can’t, I dunno, offer profit-sharing?

All righty.

Better Pay is Possible if a PRIORITY

Daunt, to my dismay, takes a hardline stance with the employees. His idea is that employee pay will increase incrementally over time, once someone proves they are loyal or some crap.

According to the New York Times article, Daunt claims that, “…the point is to provide an incentive to stick around, even if that means stinting on those who will not.”

Who will not.

All right, so they can’t make a living wage to eat and have a roof over their heads, but if they leave for a job that pays them better…they just weren’t committed enough?

What I dislike immensely about the Daunt Payment Plan is it’s directly related to time served. And I quote:

“We pay people more if they are committed to us than if they are only staying for a year.”

C.E.O. James Daunt

But maybe they’re only staying a year because they can’t afford to remain in a job with such low pay. A thought?

Also, let me get this straight.

If a brand new bookseller is always on time, never absent, hustles hard and sells a ton of books for only a year, he/she is still paid crap because they’ve not been there ‘long enough.’

Yet, another employee who maybe still lives at home and has no dependents, who has the means to stick around for the pay boost is rewarded…even if that person does the bare minimum to remain employed.

Ok.

Time alone is a terrible metric for measuring the value of an employee. But that’s my POV.

The Benefits of Higher Pay

Galen Emanuele’s article, Why You Should Pay Your Employees as Much as You Can articulates this beautifully. But, this is basic common sense.

First of all, better pay attracts and keeps exceptional employees. This drastically lowers turnover and the cost of hiring and retraining a continual stream short-term of replacements.

Treat your employees better…and they do a better job.

*shock face*

Don’t take it from me. Check out Fortune’s Top 100 Places to Work.

This article in Business Insider uses Costco as a prime example. Costco employees cite pay, benefits, and job security as the main reasons they love what they do.

On top of this, Costco actively creates ways for employees to grow and move so they CAN envision Costco being their career.

I can personally attest to how successful Costco is at employee retention. I’ve been shopping at three-four different Costco locations over the past fifteen years. I know the names of most of the employees…because they’ve been there for YEARS.

Costco offers premium pay and benefits from DAY ONE.

Not, ‘Hey if you’ll endure an undeclared number of years of crap pay, maybe there will be a little something shiny in it for you at a later, undisclosed date.’

How can staff be productive if they’re busy looking for a better job or worrying how to pay the food bill?

Daunt would do well to think about his priorities.

Oh, James Daunt is mad about how certain Waterstones locations have installed additional power outlets for university students ‘who consume more power than coffee.’

He has no problem with Waterstones providing free electricity to a bunch of students who are there for the free power and free wi-fi and who aren’t buying books.

“We’re playing the long game…When those students are rich and famous, they’ll buy books from us and the cost of the electricity will be paid back in spades.”

James Daunt

But taking the hit to pay employees better? Rewarding them for how far Waterstones has already come?

Trusting that better pay will make them feel valued and thus will inspire employees to be more passionate, enthusiastic and evangelical ISN’T a worthy long-game investment?

So letting students sponge off the light-bill totes doable, because they might buy books ONE DAY when they’re rich and famous (because books are like Porsches and polo ponies).

Enabling users and takers is a super smart plan, but paying employees who’ve already created value and who are only adding MORE value is a horrible business decision.

Want to Save B&N? Pay Matters

Daunt would be wise to remember that Barnes & Noble isn’t out of the weeds yet. Far from it.

If leadership continues this trend of paying/rewarding workers as little as possible—then bragging in the New York Times about exotic family trips around the world—Amazon will poach Barnes & Noble’s best talent.

How do I know this? It’s what they’ve been doing for a DECADE.

The Big Six, Borders & Barnes & Noble didn’t value the mid-list author, and Amazon happily picked up those authors and offered them better pay. As of a month ago, Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer poached Penguin Random House’s biggest author, Dean Koontz. How?

Hint: Better pay.

***Koontz is only the largest of a number of big-name authors who’ve already defected because they want to continue having a career.

Amazon is already opening physical bookstores that are smart-stocked, and offer a cozy feel and bells and whistles. Sorry, Mr. Daunt but you don’t have an edge there.

Besides, does Daunt actually believe Amazon won’t happily poach the best of B&N’s employees the same exact way?

By PAYING them more?

And this all seemed so promising.

Daunt has already demonstrated creativity and tenacity in other areas.

I believe he can use the same imagination and fire that rescued Waterstones from tanking, and use his mad skills to figure out some way to properly compensate those who grind daily in the bookselling trenches (quickly…NOT in a decade).

For what it’s worth, we writers value our bookseller advocates and cannot thank you enough. We appreciate your passion and all you sacrifice to promote reading and our books.

As for the big bosses…

No One Home

The article closes with Daunt bemoaning how Waterstones’ employees never pick up the phone. He notes that a sign of progress is when he can call a location and someone answers.

Fewer than half of the Waterstones’ locations passed this metric.

And the band played on the phone rang on…

Announcements

TOMORROW, I will be teaching Bring on the BINGE: How to Plot & Write Series. Series are a fabulous way to build a fan following AND make really excellent money (when done well). This class is 2.5 to 3 hours long (and YES, all classes come with a FREE recording).

We’re going to cover all aspects of how to write a series, the different types of series, and so much more.

As I mentioned last post, Maria Grace will be teaching Taking the Plunge: How to Write Deep POV on FRIDAY. This is TWO HOURS of professional instruction about how to ROCK Deep POV.

Treat yourself! Feel free to wear this to class .

The post Pay the Bookseller! Why C.E.O. James Daunt Won’t Save Barnes & Noble appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Gatekeepers have always served a crucial function, albeit a function we (readers) might not have paid much attention to until recently.

I liken gatekeepers to dams. Manmade dams serve multiple functions. They keep the good contained (e.g. robust populations of fish), and they also give us a way to control water flow and prevent disaster.

In Texas, we get a LOT of flash floods.

Rainstorms almost always hit hard and fast—too fast for the ground to have time to absorb all the water. Flash-flooding can do tremendous damage…which is why we build dams.

When a storm hits and dumps six inches of rain in a half hour, the lakes and rivers rise at terrifying speeds.

The dam is what keeps that water contained until it hits a dangerous level. At that critical point, the dam starts slowly releasing so many millions of gallons of water into special canals and floodplains to prevent the lakes and rivers from breaking their banks (or the dam).

Without a dam, the lakes and rivers could rage out of control and wipe out everything nearby—homes, businesses, animal habitats, etc.

Gatekeepers Contain the Good

I spent most of my youth—and my babysitting money—in a B.Dalton or a Waldenbooks. Back then, I had no idea how much I took for granted.

Sure, I ran into my fair share of bad books, but bad books back then meant something entirely different.

A ‘bad book’ in 1987 was one that didn’t resonate, or, for some reason, failed to hook my interest. Maybe the characters were too shallow or the plot was too predictable. I might have put a book down because I didn’t care for the voice or style.

All that time, a book being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ was almost always wholly a subjective construct, a matter of opinion.

Thanks to gatekeepers, I never had to quit reading because a book had so many typos I couldn’t concentrate. I never once gave up on a book because the horrendous grammar made my brain bleed.

If I read a mystery, I could expect the story to possess an actual mystery plot (structure).

Bad thing happens–> MC gets involved–> clues here–>red herrings here–> ends with mystery solved.

I couldn’t have imagined I’d one day pick up a mystery written by an author who didn’t even know mystery possessed its own unique structure (yes, that has happened).

Authors understood genres and knew where their stories would fit and why and the standard expectations from readers. Today?

*weeping sounds*

The Modern ‘Bad Book‘

The digital age changed everything. And before anyone shouts me down, I believe self-publishing has done a lot of good.

The problem, however, is we may have hit a point that self-publishing could start doing irreparable harm to our industry. A bad book from 1999 is not the same creature as the bad book of 2019.

Gatekeepers caged the bad book in 1999 and put it down before it could bite anyone, unlike the bad book of 2019.

Nope, that sucker’s laying eggs.

It’s a series.

To put it bluntly, it’s always been an uphill battle to get people excited about reading.

In an age with texting, social media, video games, YouTube, Candy Crush, and Netflix, it’s possibly harder than ever.

But, here’s some food for thought.

Twenty years ago, teachers, librarians, publishers, authors and readers bemoaned how people didn’t read. Yet, when I was a kid almost ALL the books in stores and libraries had passed the gauntlets of the gatekeepers.

Think about it. Publishing had to hustle and pray for readers even when the pool of books to choose from had all been thoroughly edited, proofed and vetted.

Now, people still aren’t reading, but the pool of books is a) exponentially larger and b) the general quality is embarrassingly low.

These days, I’m not putting a book down because of a stylistic preference. I’m throwing books across the room because the author didn’t bother doing basic research—research that didn’t even require a trip to a library.

Just GOOGLE it!

Many of these ‘authors’ skip learning the most rudimentary basics about how to write fiction (or even non-fiction).

Then, to give me a paper cut and pour lemon juice in it? They flood my email with marketing and newsletters. What’s worse? They don’t write or edit their newsletters any better than the tripe they package as books.

Seriously. I wish I were exagerating.

Here are two screen shots (below) from an actual author newsletter. I received this in my business email last week (a newsletter I didn’t sign up for, for the record).

This author’s newsletter promises to show me how to make the most of my time, but the author doesn’t even value my time enough to run a simple spell check.

The industry push for authors to churn out this massive, unrelenting barrage of content has piled up into a tidal wave that’s now careering across the publishing landscape faster than the speed of wifi.

LOCK THE GATE!

Y’all know what tsunamis are full of?

Trash, junk, dead things, garbage, fecal matter, disease, and pretty much anything dangerous, deadly or disgusting.

Literary tsunamis aren’t much different…except they keep coming bigger and bigger with no sign of stopping (short of unplugging the Internet).

Gatekeepers & The Literary Tsunami

We NEED gatekeepers. Just last year, there were over a million novels self-published.

Before the digital age, publishers only released a certain number of books per year per genre, and for good reasons.

Limiting titles gave them time to perform proper editing and proofing. It also prevented over-saturating any one genre, or flooding the market with too many choices.

Perhaps the author querying actually had a fabulous vampire book. Problem was, the agents knew they wouldn’t be able to sell it to an editor, because the publishers had already bought five other vampire books.

Agents don’t make money unless an author makes money. For an author to make money, her books have to SELL.

It was already a challenge to sell a vampire book with three, five or even ten other competitors that same year.

What about now? With three hundred other vampire books released in the same year? Or three thousand?

One of the most glaring weaknesses in the modern publishing business model is the lack of stopgaps to control the flow.

Kristen Lamb (quoting herself)

We cannot keep dumping the slush pile on readers and task them with hooking the book we all want to read.

Why not put them in a boat and ask them to reel in a nice swordfish to hang on the wall while riding on a tidal wave of cars, homes, and overturned septic tanks?

Readers as Gatekeepers

Let’s suspend reality for a moment and pretend that the million books self-published in 2018 were all the same quality as books in 1987. Cool.

But it’s still over A MILLION NEW BOOKS.

In the comments on the last blog, there was a lot of discussion about readers as gatekeepers. I totally agree that the old way of gatekeeping was far from perfect. A lot of excellent books (authors) fell through the cracks.

Self-publishing has breathed new life into old genres and resurrected the short and long forms from the dead (e.g. poetry, essays, short stories as well as epic high fantasy, epic historical, epic any story that requires 120,000+ words to tell).

Alas, despite all the good, we must face the bad.

There’s a reason the last runaway breakout novel was in 2012. I firmly believe the success of Fifty Shades of Grey spurred an explosion in self-publishing (the bad kind).

This Literary Power Ball Winner not only encouraged green writers to skip even learning the craft, it also attracted scammers, counterfeiters, and algorithm con artists.

All this aside, though, I find it more than a little appalling that we (writers) should expect our consumers to be in charge of quality control.

It’s like opening a restaurant, and instead of the owner checking inventory, he makes it the customer’s responsibility to ensure the chicken they ordered isn’t rotten.

Author Gatekeepers & First Line of Defense

WE are the first gatekeepers. It’s OUR duty to learn our craft and create a product worthy of a spot in the marketplace. Authors hold a moral obligation to make certain we’ve done all we can to ensure our product is fit for reader consumption.

Anyone who’s a new (pre-published) author? Take classes, read craft books and study writing blogs. Get professional feedback. Trust me. You’ll save time and money by learning how to write well.

For those who self-publish? Self-publishing means you’re the publisher and you make all the profit, but also incur all the expenses.

***Just so you know, editing and proofreading are two completely different things.

There are various types of editing we might need—substantive editing, developmental editing, line-editing, etc. This is NOT cheap (though it is a business expense).

Y’all can look here for the industry standard rates. Make sure to check websites and organizations who keep track of scammers and seek recommendations from people you trust,

Normally, I’d recommend Preditors and Editors, but they’re rebuilding their site. In the meantime, y’all can refer to The Science Fiction Writers Association’s Writer Beware page.

Editor Gatekeepers

An excellent editor can make all the difference in the world and keep us from publishing too soon.

Editing will be expensive if your MS requires a lot of substantive or developmental editing simply because it takes incredible skill, patience and TIME to repair flawed plots or faulty character arcs.

Keep in mind that it takes an average of 12-15 hours to read a book. This is the time it takes to read a fully polished work.

With a draft, we (editors) have to slow down…a lot. And, when I edit, I will read that book at least three times. This is why I rarely do long edits. Most writers aren’t prepared for the expense…and I’d also rather play in rush hour traffic.

Granted, there are ways to mitigate this cost.

Sure an editor can fix typos, punctuation, subject-verb disagreements, remove echoes, repair punctuation, and evict passive voice, but that only makes the bill that much bigger.

Kristen Lamb (quoting herself again #NotWeirdAtAll)

Knowledge is power, and skill is a GIANT EDITING DISCOUNT.

Publisher/Mega Author Gatekeepers: The Next Line of Defense

I made this suggestion years ago, but it seems the only one to somewhat listen to this suggestion has been Audible (which is Amazon-owned).

Our author brand is our lifeline. A brand is any time a name alone drives sales. Traditional publishing is in big trouble, but they do have a way to recover. They still own almost all the current household brands.

My suggestion?

Ditch the ghostwriters/’coauthors’ approach and start authentically investing in the next generation of authors.

Thus far, in my POV, publishers have just been been devaluing their mega-brands and mega-franchises.

In an effort to keep pace with Amazon, the remaining publishers have been using ‘coauthors’ to pump out a gazillion titles all bearing a household name.

Sometimes, this ‘coauthor’ gig means the mega-author oversees the book and the process (e.g. James Patterson). Other times, the ‘coauthor’ is pretty close to a ghostwriter (unless Robert Ludlum has been sending messages from the other side since he passed away in 2001).

The problem isn’t necessarily with using a known brand to help sales. Rather, my criticism has to do with presentation.

If you look at the covers, these books are continuing to build brands that are already household names, while the writer (who probably did most of the work) earns only a small spot at the bottom.

Robert Ludlum passed away eighteen years ago. He doesn’t need anymore help building his name. But Joshua Hood? Joshua sure could use a break.

Same with this book (below). The cover ALREADY states James Patterson is The World’s #1 Bestselling Writer. Great! So why not throw Brendan Dubois a bone? Too much to ask?

Granted, they’re doing a little better. This is the latest James Patterson and we can actually see the coauthor’s name.

What if there was a way to maintain/build James Patterson while simultaneously building/grooming David Ellis to one day be just as big as Patterson?

Wait, there is! I blogged about it in 2012.

Designer Publishing

My idea is an all-round winner for all. The mega-authors maintain their legend status and use their influence as a nursery to grow the next generation of household names.

Legacy publishing can put out quality books, revitalize their stable of authors, and make readers super happy.

My main gripe with the current pseudo-ghostwriting approach is that there’s no solid consistency. I never know what I’m going to get.

For instance, I used to read a lot of James Patterson books. Unfortunately, it got to the point that the voice (and even quality) varied so vastly from book to book that I simply gave up. I didn’t have time to mess with a grab bag approach.

As to Ludlum, when a monarch dies he/she passes on the crown. In publishing, why should a mega-author get to keep his or her ‘crown’ forever, even after leaving the mortal coil?

Admit it. Kinda unfair. Okay a LOT unfair.

If Kylie Jenner Can Do This, New York Can

If Kylie Jenner can put her brand on everything from tooth whitening strips to lipgloss to clothes, then NY can do something similar.

Use brand trust in a good (modern) way.

The Slush Pile Sorting Hat is a disaster, and Jason Bourne only has so much mileage left. Use the big fish to protect the little fish until they can get strong enough to thrive on their own.

Work Smarter Not Harder

Audible is doing it. If they can have a Reese Witherspoon Book Club, then why can’t traditional publishing have a Stephen King Masters of Horror Club?

***Not that I am dissing Reese Witherspoon’s taste in books, but I want to read what makes Gillian Flynn, Tana French, Neil Gaiman, or J.K. Rowling stay up all night reading.

Anyway, agents locate the books and pitch them to the mega authors (or their agents). Then, the mega-author gets to say yay or nay on a book they’re endorsing.

The new authors have the honor of landing THEIR books in a premium line. What’s better is that the new author has a far greater chance of selling a lot of books.

Bookstores can even shelve these designer lines in the same areas to make it easy for readers to discover a new favorite author.

With a nudge from a big brand, the new author can build his/her own name, brand and reputation until it’s successful.

These designer lines could include everything from short works (novellas) to longer works (series). The main difference would be the unknown author’s name would be in GIANT font.

The literary gene pool gets fresh new author DNA. The megas make a percentage off of royalties in their line (and can also write their own books). And the best news?

We now have a new form of gatekeepers, so readers will have at least ONE place they can look for a quality read. Algorithms are vulnerable to fraud and can be gamed. This method, however, allows authors to once again earn a respected title.

I have more ideas, but we’ll leave those for another day.

Suffice to Say…

Self-publishing can continue on. If our MS doesn’t make it past the gatekeepers then we can see how it fares self-published.

But the idea of reaching out to trusted names and letting them assist as gatekeepers holds a lot of appeal (does to me).

Just reimagine Oprah’s Book of the Month. Make it J.K. Rowling’s Book of the Month. Can’t hurt to try. The mega-authors then can be part of the solution to this growing problem.

Seriously, if I am a trusted brand, I’d be really picky who received my endorsement. And I’m fairly certain that if I recommended great new books/authors? My existing fans would love me for saving them from the tidal surge…the glowing one that’s teeming with three-headed fish books.

What Are Your Thoughts on Gatekeepers?

I LOVE hearing from you. Maybe y’all have some ideas to throw out about how we can add some sort of quality control. I know the old way had a lot of flaws but this new way is giving me apoplexy.

Let’s crowd-source this problem, LOL. It’s certainly an issue that needs to be remedied.

***Btw, if you look to your right in the sidebar, we have some brand new classes coming up. Bad Lamb Academy is replacing W.A.N.A. so I can merge all the sites in one spot. And, since I am a well-known troublemaker, Bad Lamb works.

Refuse to behave.

Anyway, I’m teaching a BRAND new class about How to Write Mystery, Suspense & Thriller this coming Thursday, and I recruited a fabulous instructor to teach an Introduction to Science Fiction on Friday. We also have more classes next week. Recordings are included for free.

Y’all will meet Maria Grace next post! She’s not only a brilliant craft teacher. She’s published twenty-three novels and is crazy good at the business of this business.

Short notice, I know. But we’ve been working eighteen hour days moving everything into one spot to make it easier on everyone.

Just FYI, I’m extending the CLEARANCE sale a little longer, until new classes begin. We need to test the new Event Espresso license and this site’s functionality (we’ve updated everything). If you need a good plotting or character class, NOW is the time to get it.

I have to free up space on our servers. All my classes are detailed and average 2-3 hours. These are On Demand classes you can watch at your leisure and have fun while you learn (for classes, scroll down).

****For NEW classes, look in the footer.

This not only is to help you guys get the training you need (affordable summer school), but it will open up room for the new recordings of new classes.

Please take advantage of the sale! I rarely drop prices this low.

After July 17th, these classes will no longer be for sale (and will be slated for deletion).

Some, I will offer again later in the year. Others? I won’t be offering again the same way (will be likely splitting them into two classes because they ran long).

Thanks so much for your support!

ON DEMAND CLEARANCE ON BRANDING & CRAFT CLASSES!

Available until July 17th, 2019

CLEARANCE Branding, Social Media & Sales Classes

ON DEMAND T.K.O. BUNDLE: Branding, Blogging & Sales for Authors

$99 (Regularly $165)

ON DEMAND Brand Boss: Branding for Authors

$35 (Regularly $55)

ON DEMAND Sales for Writers: Sell Books Not Your SOUL

$35 (Regularly $55)

ON DEMAND Blogging for Authors

$35 (Regularly $55)

Also Offering:

ON DEMAND Social Schizophrenia: Building a Brand WITHOUT Losing Your Mind

$35 (Regularly $55)

CLEARANCE Craft Classes

Plot Boss: Writing Books Readers Want to BUY!

$35 (Regularly $55)

Fiction Addiction: The ‘Secret’ Ingredient Readers Crave

$35 (Regularly $55)

Story Master: From Dream to DONE

$35 (Regularly $55)

The Art of Character: Creating Dimensional ‘People’ in Fiction

$35 (Regularly $55)

Beyond Bulletproof Barbie: Creating Strong Female Characters for a Modern World

$35 (Regularly $55)

The post Gatekeepers & Good Books: Trophy Fishing in a Literary Tsunami appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

The breakout novel. All authors want to write one, and all agents want to discover one. Why? Because the breakout novel is the story that tips the scales.

This is the novel that not only ignites avid readers to read MORE, but it also propels ordinary people to do the unthinkable.

It makes them want to read, too!

These stories turn those who normally wouldn’t read a book—unless it was required or there was a test at the end—into book evangelists.

****These people may claim they ‘hate to read,’ but they told everyone who’d listen about Twilight .

It’s True, Most People Aren’t ‘Readers’

This really isn’t anything new. I know it’s super popular to whine that people just don’t read books anymore.

They’ve been singing that same sappy BS song since I was a kid…during an age when there was no Internet—let alone social media—and cable was for rich people.

Daytime T.V. sucked, all television turned OFF at midnight, movies played at a movie theater (no VCRs), and you had to beg your parents to take you to a video arcade if you wanted to play games.

Yet, even back then, when one would think this would have been the Golden Age for everyone and their mother to be reading books?

It wasn’t.

I was a weirdo because I loved to read.

But just because someone doesn’t identify as a reader doesn’t mean he/she won’t read. It simply takes the right book to hook them and then reel ’em in.

‘Readers’ Have ALWAYS Been Outliers

Before the 20th century, most people weren’t even literate. Reading was a hobby reserved for wealthy people who had the funds, education and free time to indulge in fantasy.

Sure, once humans got into the late 19th century then careened into the 20th, the number of readers increased because of higher literacy rates. That and industrialization increased household incomes and offered the average person more free time.

Pulp fiction got its start with the much-esteemed Charles Dickens and this form of storytelling really picked up traction in the early part of the 20th century.

This type of fiction gave the general public access the larger-than-life stories with exotic and sexy characters.

Ah, but it wasn’t ALL roses and unicorns.

Books still competed with work, chores, radio shows, television, bowling, newspapers, discos, roller rinks, and sports.

Ultimately, the insatiable ‘avid reader’ has pretty much always loitered on the fringes of the bell curve.

The guy with the football never got wedgies. Just sayin’.

This is why most book marketing plans are utterly ineffective (unless one counts wasting a crap ton of time and money). Writers are all looking for the readers.

Where are the readers?

They gear all their social media and marketing to 3-5% of the population (the population who eat through books).

Bad news is this folks. The self-proclaimed avid readers aren’t the consumers that turn books (and their authors) into legends.

Who does?

The 93-95% of literate people in need of being educated or entertained who would NOT list reading on their Top 10 List of Fun Things to Do.

These consumers are the hardest to convert to readers, which is why most writers (and ‘marketing experts’) all go for the low-hanging fruit.

The Breakout Novel Breaks the Rules AND the Bank

The breakout novel is the novel that breaks the rules. These are the books readers never knew they always wanted, and ‘non-readers’ never believed would interest them in the first place.

Often, breakout novels reimagine a genre, mix genres, and/or flip the script on the mouldering tried and true genres.

Bloody Good Idea

For instance, Anne Rice didn’t invent vampires. Vampires have been around a LONG time.

Yes, even before the IRS was created.

Bram Stoker allegedly patterned Dracula (published in 1897) off a real historical figure, Vlad the Impaler. Myths and legends about vampires thrived in Eastern Europe as far back as the Middle Ages.

Though there were countless tales of the vampire as monster, Anne Rice wanted to write a different sort of book. What was it like from the vampire’s perspective?

And Interview with the Vampire was born.

Initially, no one wanted to publish the manuscript. Rice faced countless rejections. No one cared about stories FROM the vampire’s POV.

Finally, ONE agent loved the idea and took a chance, and pretty much all modern vampire stories from The Lost Boys, to True Blood to Twilight can thank Ann Rice.

And this genre upheaval wasn’t only limited to vampires.

The concept of casting monsters and creatures as the hero (or even anti-hero) EXPLODED in novels, television, film, and pop culture after Interview with the Vampire skyrocketed in success.

Boys Just Wanna Have Fun

J.K. Rowling reimagined Young Adult Fantasy when she decided to cast a young boy as her protagonist. Agents told her this was a terrible idea, because ‘boys didn’t read.’ And tween and teen boys definitely didn’t read.

***Maybe because all the YA books were girl books? Whatever. *rolling eyes*

Rowling, despite pressure to change Harry into a female protagonist, simply stuck to her guns and kept pressing then—BAMMO—the legend that is The Harry Potter franchise was born.

This success opened the YA door wide, and the genre took off.

Harry Potter was a breakout novel that not only redefined the genre, but it inspired everyday people and got them excited about reading.

The ‘NON-READERS.’

They’re the folks who’d rather be stuck in the DMV with no air conditioning than be forced to read a book…BUT they own every single Harry Potter (in hardcover).

50 Shades of WHAT?

As much as this pains me, Fifty Shades of Grey is traditional publishing’s last big breakout novel. The trilogy wasn’t discovered by a literary agent, rather it was picked up then rereleased by Vintage Books in April, 2012.

As I mentioned earlier, breakout novels will often defy convention and reimagine older, existing genres for a modern audience.

E.L. James certainly did NOT invent erotic literature, but her series certainly sparked renewed interest (and a LOT of controversy) in an old genre.

But let me remind you, Fifty Shades of Grey was the last massive breakout book for legacy publishing (and they picked it up only after it was successful as fan fiction then self-pub).

This means the market has gone over SEVEN years with no new breakout author.

That isn’t good.

Things Have GOT to Change

I recently blogged about the dismal fate of Barnes & Noble. Borders is long dead and B&N is no longer a baller. The independent bookstores haven’t had long enough to return to full strength.

This is scary.

The Big Six got in bed with the big bad wolf box bookstore and gutted their author middle class. NY publishing also never changed how they did business, and thus linked their survival to these mega-stores.

With their MASSIVE overhead and grossly inefficient methods, they had to have those multi-million-dollar preorders to keep the lights on.

But Elliot Management Corps. will be closing those giant B&N stores and they will be replacing them with smaller stores more reminiscent of the old days of B. Dalton.

Those guaranteed orders to fill ginormous twenty or thirty-thousand square foot stores are going away, and the mom-and-pop and indies aren’t yet healthy enough to make up that differential.

This spells serious financial trouble for what remains of legacy publishing. If they ever needed a breakout novel (author)?

NOW is that time.

Amazon’s Got a Bad Moon Rising, Too

Sure it was all fun and games when they weaponized writers against our former masters. They allowed everyone and anyone to publish (and I’m, personally, very grateful for that). But, this created a very different problem.

We NEED gatekeepers. There were over a million novels self-published just last year.

Of that number, how many do you think paid for professional and rigorous content editing and proofing?

This ‘Dump the Slush Pile in the Reader’s Lap Plan’ isn’t going to work. It’s already failing. If the major publishers who actually vet books collapse, then Amazon will take a massive hit unless they can figure a way to sift through those millions for books that are even readable (let alone any good).

I am glad Amazon is opening brick-and mortar stores, but they are smart-stocking these stores using algorithms. Part of that is a really good idea (one NY maybe should have thought of using).

Certain books/authors are more popular in certain areas (e.g. Tom Clancy is super popular in Florida, likely because of the dense population of retired vets).

It makes sense to see what is selling best in what state, city, etc. then use that data to decide what earns a spot on shelves.

But this method of stocking is rife with pitfalls.

Algorithms can be juked, and are gamed all the time. In fact, Amazon spends a ridiculous amount of time and resources combatting those cheating the system (largely China).

It’s one thing when Amazon is contending with ebooks and no physical copies are involved. But what about when those books are printed?

Rise of Plagiarism & Counterfeit Books

A recent New York Times article ‘What Happens After Amazon’s Domination is Complete? Its Bookstores Offer Clues‘ is the stuff of author nightmares:

Amazon takes a hands-off approach to what goes on in its bookstore, never checking the authenticity, much less the quality, of what it sells. It does not oversee the sellers who have flocked to its site in any organized way.

This has resulted in a kind of lawlessness. Publishers, writers and groups such as The Authors Guild assert that counterfeiting of books on Amazon has surged. 

David Streitfeld, via ‘The New York Times’, 6/23/19

It’s also being speculated that China Lit is hiring workers who are able to speak English, then using them to convert older successful books into ‘new’ ebooks.

The workers take those mothballed titles I mentioned in the B&N post—the ones that hit the New York Times and USA Today best-seller lists a couple decades ago—and they’re copying the story but changing the titles, then names of places and characters and enough wording that the plagiarism software doesn’t detect the forgeries.

Then, the books are loaded on KU as NEW titles…and this is how they’ll bankrupt the whole shebang.

Careful What You Wish For

Amazon got what it wanted and brought The Big Six to its knees, but now? They’re going to have to get serious about policing what they publish.

Amazon, much like what remains of legacy publishing, NEEDS a breakout novel. The reading world is desperate for a new book (or series) that is evocative, innovative and exciting to come along and revive those of us who’ve all but given up.

…and maybe inspire the next generation to read something other than text messages.

That Breakout Novel Could be YOURS

The problem with the past ten years is that learning better ways to market and advertise a book has taken over learning how to even WRITE one.

As a result, the overall quality of books has suffered.

When big publishing (rather the multi-media conglomerates in charge) kicked the author middle class to the curb, many authors quit writing. Others gravitated to self-publishing and indie.

Those authors who made it out with their backlists did well (REALLY well) self-publishing…until readers ate through their entire catalogue.

Now, many are struggling to write novellas, to be included in anthologies and put out short works to keep the fan fires burning. They’re overloaded trying to do it ALL on their own.

Like the rest of us, they just want to write great books.

These older authors came of age in a paradigm that gave them TIME to create. They had TIME to research, time for revisions and time for thorough edits without the pressure of churning out stories like a Play-Doh Un-Fun Factory so they ‘wouldn’t be forgotten.’

***FYI, no one forgot James Michener between books.

Alas, there is something to be said for books that take TIME to write, and the way things are?

Quality will only go down even more…if that’s even possible.

Hot Pocket Novels & Microwave Fiction

The indie, self-pub Amazon model has made it to where authors can’t take their time. They can’t write a book a year, or every eighteen months and make a living.

Many of those who are still traditionally publishing have chosen to also become hybrid authors (publishing other works via self-pub or indie). They have to in order to make a living.

But I think the novelty is wearing off (or hope it is)

Readers are growing weary of microwaveable fast-food fiction. Authors who initially could write to demand are burning out.

NY isn’t fooling anyone with ‘James Patterson’ releasing zillions of books every year. There are only so many good ghost writers, and those folks are wearing out, too.

That and the fans (okay maybe just me) are getting tired of stories that lack consistency in voice and quality. I enjoy James Patterson’s books, but I gave up because I never really knew what to expect.

Not to mention the generation of fans is aging out. Sure NY can keep hiring ghostwriters for the mega name brands, but those readers are aging out as well.

I’ve actually started reading classics because it’s increasingly harder to find books with a pre-digital age level of quality.

Granted, breakout novels can be fast-drafted (Fahrenheit 451), but a Harry Potter or Dune or an American Gods takes TIME.

Unless a new breakout novel comes along, the industry as a whole will suffer.

***Which is code for ‘opportunity.’

I do believe the pendulum will soon swing back to a semblance of sanity (and I have ways we could accomplish that but leaving for another post).

Forget the Money

For anyone reading this who wants to be the author of that next breakout novel, here’s some advice. Money is WONDERFUL, but too many people are fixated on profit at the expense of product.

The secret to success? Look at any market and see what’s missing and fill the need. And the world NEEDS more fantastic books.

What Are Your Thoughts? I LOVE Hearing From You!

I miss the days authors had TIME to write incredible stories. Do you think the digital age’s relentless pace is harming the industry?

Do you think there is a way Amazon (and others) can reestablish some form of sifting process? Establish gatekeepers again?

I love hearing your thoughts!

Just FYI, I’m extending the CLEARANCE sale a little longer, until new classes begin. We need to test the new Event Espresso license and this site’s functionality (we’ve updated everything). If you need a good plotting or character class, NOW is the time to get it.

I have to free up space on our servers. All my classes are detailed and average 2-3 hours. These are On Demand classes you can watch at your leisure and have fun while you learn (for classes, scroll down).

****For NEW classes, look in the footer.

This not only is to help you guys get the training you need (affordable summer school), but it will open up room for the new recordings of new classes.

Please take advantage of the sale! I rarely drop prices this low.

After July 17th, these classes will no longer be for sale (and will be slated for deletion).

Some, I will offer again later in the year. Others? I won’t be offering again the same way (will be likely splitting them into two classes because they ran long).

Thanks so much for your support!

ON DEMAND CLEARANCE ON BRANDING & CRAFT CLASSES!

Available until July 17th, 2019

CLEARANCE Branding, Social Media & Sales Classes

ON DEMAND T.K.O. BUNDLE: Branding, Blogging & Sales for Authors

$99 (Regularly $165)

ON DEMAND Brand Boss: Branding for Authors

$35 (Regularly $55)

ON DEMAND Sales for Writers: Sell Books Not Your SOUL

$35 (Regularly $55)

ON DEMAND Blogging for Authors

$35 (Regularly $55)

Also Offering:

ON DEMAND Social Schizophrenia: Building a Brand WITHOUT Losing Your Mind

$35 (Regularly $55)

CLEARANCE Craft Classes

Plot Boss: Writing Books Readers Want to BUY!

$35 (Regularly $55)

Fiction Addiction: The ‘Secret’ Ingredient Readers Crave

$35 (Regularly $55)

Story Master: From Dream to DONE

$35 (Regularly $55)

The Art of Character: Creating Dimensional ‘People’ in Fiction

$35 (Regularly $55)

Beyond Bulletproof Barbie: Creating Strong Female Characters for a Modern World

$35 (Regularly $55)

The post The Breakout Novel & Why Publishing is Desperate for the Next BIG Thing appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

My last post, Barnes & Noble SOLD: Goliath Has Fallen & What This Means for Writers, was a long and detailed journey explicating precisely how we’ve all ended up at this spot in history—writers, readers, bookstores, booksellers, publishers, investors, etc.

The big-box bookstores are dead for good until some @$$hat forgets what a bad idea they were and resurrects them again.

In the meantime…

Now that Borders is a distant memory and Barnes & Noble a recent casualty, many of us find ourselves balancing, terrified, on the precipice of the unknown.

This time of transition possesses a particularly acute terror reserved for pre-published and published authors.

Yet, in light of all this upheaval, I challenge authors to learn from New York Publishing’s—‘The Big Six’s’ mistakes.

One mistake in particular.

Authors are NOT Bookstores

New York failed to remember its identity, and that was the critical node that set off the cascading system failures.

Legacy publishing (namely the multi-national media conglomerates calling the shots) forgot that publishers were in the STORY and INFORMATION business.

As mentioned in my previous blog, legacy publishers were NOT in the ‘protect the paper industry’ or the ‘prop up incompetent book retailer’ business. This mission drift was a fatal one that steered them straight into the metaphorical rocks.

Publishers forgot they existed as edification and entertainment dealers. They had a simple three-part mission:

I. Explore, unearth and expand any and all forms of potentially valuable content.

II. Connect that content to any media distribution channels with potential for profit.

III. Nurture profitable avenues and locate any stagnant business tributaries. If these sluggish channels couldn’t be revived expeditiously, eliminate them before they festered.

PRIME DIRECTIVE: Publishers existed solely as gatekeepers, winnowers, distributors, and cultivators. They were there to PROTECT their RESOURCE (the authors), so as to best SERVE the CONSUMERS (audiences).

That was IT. Yet, they forgot their purpose and it cost them dearly.

Storytellers, Educators & Entertainers, Lend Me Your Ears….

Now, talking to my fellow creatives and content creators. I’ll simply use the term AUTHORS from this point on for the sake of simplicity.

Authors do love bookstores, but we are not in the bookstore business.

Yes, this is actually vastly important to remember.

Bookstores exist because of us and not the other way around. Authors existed long before bookstores and we’ll be here long after bookstores.

To reiterate. Authors are in the content creation business. Distribution is a whole other matter.

I know a lot of commenters expressed feelings of depression, dismay, discouragement after reading my last post. Today, I want to remind you who you are.

Authors, this is not our first rodeo…personal extinction.

My POV? Storytellers are actually the oldest profession. Or how else could the other alleged ‘oldest profession’ get enough business to brag about being the OLDEST profession?

But I digress….

Authors didn’t start out with large publishing houses that possessed a global distribution network to disseminate our work printed in fancy paper books to stores.

We evolved from bards, crones and sages who passed on stories and knowledge orally, namely through song (e.g. Psalms) then later via theatrical performance (e.g. the Greek tragedies).

In other parts of the world, some clever folks invented pictograms and ‘authors’ adapted. We either learned how to draw or made fast friends with someone talented enough to tell our stories using pictures of CATS.

Pyramids? Talk about EXPOSURE.

Later, Western civilization adopted this thing called ‘an alphabet’ from the Phoenicians.

***This alphabet gave authors the unique ability to point out how dismally ironic it is that the word ‘phonetic’ is in NO WAY spelled phonetically.

#HukdOnFonixWurkdForMe

With symbols, authors crafted the epic poems like Beowulf:

Authors have evolved from stories held only in memory to capturing them in pictures, to finally adopting abstract symbols that represent words and concepts.

Yes, it’s witchcraft. Can’t have spelling without a SPELL.

Think of it. To this day, authors create people, places, events, universes, empires, and religions that have never existed before we thought them up.

We do ALL this using various combinations of twenty-six letters.

More like twenty-three letters because Z, X, and Q are next to useless. Q always needing to borrow U to get anything done.

***rolling eyes***

The plain fact is that authors have ALWAYS had to find new ways to sing for their supper. In the beginning? We LITERALLY did this.

As time went on, we learned to attract patrons then publishers and producers who would financially support our art.

Suffice to say, we’ve had our world shift plenty of times and we’re still here and always will be (for those strong enough to survive the transition).

Bookstores & the Death of a Dream

A major reason Barnes & Noble’s fall has hit many so hard it is represents another dead dream. We’re grieving. It’s hard enough to do what we do without also fretting over the business side of the business (especially when they can’t seem to get their act together).

I think it’s fair to claim most authors have been in a perpetual state of terror (peppered with brief windows of hope) for far too long.

If you’re like me, maybe your sparkle’s been dimming and it’s taken everything not to give up.

Was writing even worth it anymore?

The big-box bookstores that were supposed to be so wonderful, only managed to crush our childhood dreams.

We mourned as we bade farewell to the bookstores that kindled our earliest desires to write. After the long good-byes, we moved on to a new normal.

I know I spent hours wandering the aisles of Barnes & Noble reconceptualizing what ‘making it’ looked like. Okay, so I’d never see my books in B. Dalton’s or Taylor’s or any of the small mom-and-pop bookstores from my youth, but that was life.

Fair was a weather condition.

I don’t know about y’all, but I imagined book signings, launch parties, my novels on pretty displays in actual bookstores. Yes, even Borders or Barnes & Noble.

Then Web 2.0 and the digital revolution arrived. NY and the big-box stores had every opportunity to maintain dominance. Instead, they rearranged deck chairs on the Titanic and pretended everything was jolly.

The Band Played On…

Like most pre-published authors, I fantasized about real author events, the ones where I’d read aloud to devoted fans from my latest book. I’d hug, shake hands and answer questions as I signed beautiful copies of my work fresh out of the box.

Those were the dreams that kept me going in my darkest hours when it made no sense to keep on writing. When everyone called me foolish and told me to get ‘a real job.’

I don’t think a single one of us daydreamed about favorable algorithms, a massive email newsletter list with a solid open rate, or a depressing spot for ten copies of our book on a Costco bargain table.

And I sure as hell never dreamed of working like an organ-grinding spider monkey for fractions of KU pennies.

None of us did.

This was why I wanted to point out how LONG ‘authors’ been around. We’ve been through major changes.

We took our lumps, hunkered down and waited it out as we learned how to thrive in a world with new rules. Every time our world has been turned on its ear, we survived and thrived…because we ADAPTED.

***For some eye-opening history of our industry, I recommend my posts ‘Real’ Writers Don’t Self-Publish and ‘Real’ Writers Don’t Self-Publish Part Two.

Change is Scary but Necessary

Publishers have faced similar apocalypses as well. Just think of all those monks who had to start hipster microbreweries once Gutenberg came on the scene.

Thanks a lot, Johannes. Now EVERYONE can be published.

***throws up quill and inkwell***

That, or they had to go to Vatican night school and learn how to type set.

While it’s impossible to wholly ignore the recent thanatoid shroud that’s settled over our industry, keep in mind that endings aren’t always a bad thing. Authors, of all people, should appreciate this.

Without endings, there can be no beginnings.

Any system that grows unchecked is wide open for disease, decline, and death. This is true in nature, in business, and even with bookstores.

Personally, I am GLAD Barnes & Noble finally bit it. They’ve been ‘dying’ for a like a friggin’ decade…so fair to say I’m way past over it.

Yes, it’s the end of an era—blah, blah, blah—but now we can finally move on!

The System is SICK

I’ve already relayed the long list of chronic ‘illnesses’ that plagued NY and spelled the decline if not death of The Big Six.

***Which originally was comprised of Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Hachette and other large traditional publishers, for those who don’t know.

I think the only issue I didn’t explore in any depth was in regards to the negative impact of so much talent pool inbreeding. Sure, being a blue blood has plenty of perks, but plenty more perils to go with them.

By publishers and elite lists propping up The Author Aristocracy decade after decade, there weren’t any new authors being folded in for younger generations to fall in love with.

I believe this is why we saw such an explosion in the Chick Lit and YA (Young Adult) categories that neatly paralleled the overall decline in numbers of readers.

Younger people didn’t want to read the same authors their parents loved. They couldn’t relate to the worlds, characters, and story problems in a Danielle Steele romance or a Clive Cussler techno-thriller the same way previous generations had.

There’s a fascinating article, Bias, She Wrote: The Gender Balance of The New York Times Best Seller List.

Take a look at The New York Times top authors by decade from the 1980s to present day. You’ll see the same names over and over, the list shrinking and almost no new talent and NO young talent making it to the top.

Seriously

Obviously, this puzzled me, so I asked my super smart friend Cindy Dees who’s a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of fifty suspense and thriller novels (and a hybrid author) about J.K. Rowling and why she didn’t appear in these metrics.

Cindy’s answer?

‘J.K. Rowling blew up the NYTBS list so hard in 2001, they created an entirely new category for her to pry her out of the #1 spot.‘

A Tale of Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores & Bias

We already know that the big-box chains pre-negotiated which authors and what books would be allowed in the stores.

Yet, even as they were dying, Barnes & Noble continued to largely discriminate against indie authors and their books…even those that were selling better than their traditionally published counterparts.

My early social media books We Are Not Alone: The Writer’s Guide to Social Media and Are You There, Blog? It’s Me, Writer were top performers.

Yet, I can’t tell you how many times I received frustrated emails from fans who’d gone into their local B&N to order a paper copy and were sent away (even though my books were listed with Ingram and had the appropriate ISBNs).

My perennial branding guide for authors, Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World has never graced a B&N shelf even though it’s earned almost a hundred and eighty positive (4 and 5 star) reviews.

I’ve actually keynoted at large events where the on-site B&N bookstores refused to order my books.

…which is kinda weird when you’re the one people have paid to see.

I know I’m not the only successful indie author who’s faced this challenge with brick-and-mortar stores (even ones that weren’t Borders/Barnes & Noble).

Brick-and-mortar stores are going to have to be open to selling good books, and stocking authors readers love and want regardless of pedigree.

First, we need fresh blood in the literary gene pool if people are going to ever get excited about reading again. That and our profession is about to marry a cousin and start playing banjo.

Secondly, consumers are searching for something fresh. What are the really getting? This meme says it best….

Digital Disease

Traditional publishing isn’t the only entity that’s created a mess. Sure, legacy publishers bred a certain kind of author to the point that, while they’re super pretty, they’re also prone to hip-dysplasia, neuroses, and they bite.

JOKING!

…mostly.

In the digital realm?

Amazon and other digital outlets have allowed untrained, unvetted, unteachable wanna-be writers to breed book titles faster than bunnies on fertility drugs.

In permitting this, they’ve dumped ‘History’s Largest Slush Pile’ into the readers’ laps.

The past several years have marked a time of unparalleled fraud where one’s ability to game algorithms and probe for cheats in the system for profit has trumped learning craft.

There are too many ‘writers’ more interested in mastering advertising and marketing instead of buckling down and learning about story-craft. They churn out ‘book’ after ‘book’ and can’t understand why readers aren’t lining up to throw money at unreadable junk.

An author’s job is to inspire, enlighten and entertain. We serve the reader (audience), not the other way around.

Audiences are under zero obligation to financially support poorly written, unedited wish-fulfillment fraudulently packaged as a novel.

The reason most ‘books’ aren’t selling has less to do with any lack in marketing or advertising budget, and a hell of a lot more to do with these so-called ‘books’ being an affront to the English language (and possibly other languages as well).

Spray paint a dog turd gold and all you have is a golden turd. The book industry stinks because we’re all up to our chins in literary turds hiding under fancy covers.

We all long to discover a new book, not step in one and have to scrape it off our Kindles.

Invasion of the Professional Amateur

This is a message for creators as well as publishers and bookstores.

Consumers will not tolerate a marketplace with such poor self-governance much longer.

Not when Netflix exists.

Amazon (and other digital outlets) need to get their act together and put in some sort of EFFECTIVE gatekeeping to restore faith with consumers.

As far as I can tell, the desire to offer some semblance of quality control was (is) a major force behind Amazon’s push to open brick-and-mortar stores.

The objective is to smart-stock stores regionally. Stock local authors and titles that sell well in that region regardless of pedigree.

Even Barnes & Noble 3.0 is looking to employ similar tactics in the near future. Waterfords’ C.E.O. James Daunt managed to resurrect the dying U.K. giant by changing how they did business.

He ditched the cookie-cutter standardization and let the managers of each store run their location almost like the owner of an independent bookstore.

According to a recent article on Inc. Hedge Fund Buys Barnes & Noble. It Could Be Very Good News for Customers by@MindaZetlin:

It (Waterstones) also pays close attention to what customers want in different locations—including a Russian language bookstore within its Piccadilly store, staffed entirely with Russian speakers.

Daunt plans to do the same with Barnes & Noble 3.0.

Wow! Who would have thought? A Barnes & Noble with books translated into Spanish staffed with Spanish-speaking employees in El Paso, TX?

***clutches pearls***

Meanwhile, Control What We Can Control

Yes, the publishing industry is a complete mess, but this mess is temporary.

A lot of the chaos today was the inevitable consequence from decades of bad business decisions (as well as the largest shift in communication since the invention of the Gutenberg press).

For generations, authors didn’t have a voice in the business of our business.

Now, we do.

I’ve been preaching since 2008 that WE ARE THE BRAND. Our brand—comprised of name, reputation and products (books)—is our most valuable asset. When our name alone can sell books, we don’t care who’s in charge because readers will come to US.

Does anyone really believe Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Nora Roberts, George R.R. Martin or Debbie Macomber will suddenly have their careers capsize because Barnes & Noble isn’t what it used to be?

Of course not.

Fans will simply search out bookstores and sellers who carry their favorite author brands.

Guess What? Writing is a JOB

Authors are in the entertainment business. Note the second half of that word is business. The new bookstores want to stock great stories/books readers want.

Our job?

Write the great stories/books readers want and build an online brand that cultivates a following and makes us easy (for bookstores) to find.

Brands are VITAL, especially in an age of a billion options. A brand is a promise. It guarantees a certain level of quality without the consumer (readers or bookstores) having to do a ton of research or thinking.

A good brand saves TIME.

In a world with limitless choices, we default to who we know and who we like.

Consumers look to Maserati, Honda, Ralph Lauren, Spalding, Harley Davidson, Levis, Hellman’s, MAC, Bulgari, Rolex, Apple, etc, etc. because they trust the name says it all. The name implies a certain level of implicit quality.

Case in point: Bergdorf’s versus Walmart.

Brands allow time-starved consumers to quickly locate what they want/need. Most of us are willing to spend the extra dollar or two on Heinz 57 ketchup instead of trying the cheaper catsup.

We don’t want to risk being disappointed.

The beauty of a brand is that we (authors) no longer have to compete solely on PRICE. Our names become valuable, so we can avoid the race to the bottom of who can give away the most for free or nearly free.

We DO OUR JOB & Help Bookstores Do Theirs

If we want to be a successful (or at least respected) author, it’s incumbent upon us to learn the nuts and bolts of our profession.

I can’t count how many ‘published books’ I’ve seen that wouldn’t pass high school English, let alone a NY gatekeeper.

Serious authors learn grammar and how to spell (or hire those who can correct it for them).

I get there are those who are hopelessly dyslexic or who simply never mastered spelling or grammar. But, professionals are aware these are weaknesses and plan accordingly.

They don’t use ‘I’m a terrible speller’ or ‘I don’t understand grammar’ as a pass to publish books that give readers a brain bleed.

Serious authors embrace education and training.

There’s that old saying, ‘What do you call a writer who never gives up? Author.’

Great quote but VASTLY outdated. It’s from a time there were gatekeepers to pop bad writers on the snoot until they either gave up or got better.

These days, practice is essential but we need training, too. Practice is not enough.

If I go hit ten thousand golf balls without any training on how to swing a club, it doesn’t make me Tiger Woods. It makes me an idiot who likely needs a good back surgeon.

And before anyone shouts me down, if you were accused of murder would you hire a person who never attended law school to represent you?

How about hiring a mechanic who’d never successfully changed oil to repair your transmission?

But he’s seen every single Fast & Furious movie twenty times! Why so judgmental?

And yet, there are writers who brag about never reading fiction (even their own genre) and gloat about how they’ve never read a craft book or taken a class.

Too often these same ‘writers’ are mystified why their books are not selling.

Must be the marketing plan. Not a big enough budget.

Anyway, once we learn how to write, and create a superlative product(s), we then have to cultivate the platform and create the brand.

Though hopefully you’re doing all this simultaneously.

Trust me, you do NOT want to have a book ready for sale and no platform and no brand. What is a brand?

A brand is when a name alone has the power to drive sales.

Tiffany & Co.

Neil Gaiman.

Deepak Chopra.

Again, writing great books is a HUGE part of the job, but the other part involves creating a platform and brand. This is also where I hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But all I want to do is write the books.

Don’t we all?

A properly constructed brand only grows stronger over time. Authors with a solid brand have freedom, flexibility, resilience, and they also have a lot of very lucrative ways to bring in income other than books.

J.K. Rowling became a billionaire because of her brand. She didn’t make over a billion dollars on book sales alone.

Her Harry Potter brand earned (and continues to earn) hundreds of millions from movies, merchandising, and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, and more.

There are some amazing changes in the industry, and a solid brand is what makes the difference between missing the train and driving it. Within the next few years, it will be the best time in history to be a trusted author.

I won’t discuss all those avenues here, though I do detail some of them in my classes.

The Bookstores of the Future

Will have the same goal as all bookstores in the past—connect readers to books they’re willing to BUY…then come and BUY MORE.

Suffice to say that bookstores will have to be able to FIND an author before they can decide if they like the author.

Barnes & Noble has already proven that stocking shelves solely with legacy published novels is no panacea. Too many known and beloved authors are not coming from the traditional path.

Bookstores will have to get a good mix of authors from all origins if they hope to be competitive.

This means that those managers in charge of the new Barnes & Noble stores, the upcoming Amazon brick-and-mortar bookstores, as well as the managers of those indie bookstores that have been thriving despite the on-line competition will stock the authors (books) they like and KNOW (code for they have a brand).

This could be any one of you guys, so no long faces anymore.

I truly believe we will see new gatekeepers emerge and the up-and-coming bookstores will do a lot better job. Hard to do a crappier one.

Eventually I believe a spot in bookstores will be part of what separates the professional from the poseur.

This said…

An Insider Tip: Publishers haven’t had a major disruptor (a runaway game-changer) in over FIVE years. 50 Shades of Grey was the last dark horse, and publishers are desperate for that new author who breaks in and turns the world inside out…in a good way.

This disruptor could be you. Why not?

In the meantime, our job is to write excellent books readers will love and cultivate that on-line brand and platform.

Feel free to get a copy of Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World if you want a step-by-step book how to build a resilient brand that grows as you grow.

I created the book to be evergreen. It doesn’t rely on technology and is technophobe friendly (and funny). Social media changes, but humans never do.

OR you can scroll down and I have a long list of On Demand craft classes AND social media, sales and branding classes on CLEARANCE. Summer sale!

Everything y’all need to make your mark in this next phase of bookstore history .

What are your thoughts?

I LOVE hearing from you!

Are you tired of the digital revolution and the giant landfill of crap? Weary of all the focus on gaming the system instead of writing good books?

Tired of a system that almost FORCES authors to fixate on gaming strategies instead of solid writing?

Are you excited that the remnant independent bookstores and new, reimagined indie bookstores are on the rise? Does this news help ease the depression/panic you might have felt last post?

While my next post likely will tackle gatekeepers of the future and the reinvention of bookstores (in more depth) what are your ideas?

What are some ways that we can establish some NEW and hopefully IMPROVED system of finding the diamonds buried the literary landfill?

Thanks SO MUCH for all the comments last time. I promise, we’ll get back to shorter posts once the smoke clears.

Just FYI, I will have to free up space on our servers. All my classes come with a free recording. This said, I’ve put selected recordings on CLEARANCE until new classes begin.

This not only is to help y’all get the training you need (affordable summer school), but it will open up room for the new recordings of new classes.

Please take advantage of the sale! I rarely drop prices this low.

After July 17th, these classes will no longer be for sale (and will be slated for deletion).

Some, I will offer again later in the year. Others? I won’t be offering again the same way (will be likely splitting them into two classes because they ran long).

Thanks so much for your support!

ON DEMAND CLEARANCE ON BRANDING & CRAFT CLASSES!

Available until July 17, 2019

CLEARANCE Branding, Social Media & Sales Classes

ON DEMAND T.K.O. BUNDLE: Branding, Blogging & Sales for Authors

$99 (Regularly $165)

ON DEMAND Brand Boss: Branding for Authors

$35 (Regularly $55)

ON DEMAND Sales for Writers: Sell Books Not Your SOUL

$35 (Regularly $55)

ON DEMAND Blogging for Authors

$35 (Regularly $55)

Also Offering:

ON DEMAND Social Schizophrenia: Building a Brand WITHOUT Losing Your Mind

$35 (Regularly $55)

CLEARANCE Craft Classes

Plot Boss: Writing Books Readers Want to BUY!

$35 (Regularly $55)

Fiction Addiction: The ‘Secret’ Ingredient Readers Crave

$35 (Regularly $55)

Story Master: From Dream to DONE

$35 (Regularly $55)

The Art of Character: Creating Dimensional ‘People’ in Fiction

$35 (Regularly $55)

Beyond Bulletproof Barbie: Creating Strong Female Characters for a Modern World

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The post The Death of Ye Olden Bookstores & the Author Identity Crisis appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Goliath has fallen. The leviathan Barnes & Noble, the big-box chain that reinvented retail and defined a generation…is no more.

SOLD!

Reuters announced early last Friday that the hedge fund Elliot Management Corp. would be purchasing the former book giant for roughly the equivalent of Kim Kardashian’s jewelry allowance ($683 million including debt).

This bold move marks an end to the once-dominant book retailer’s status as a publicly traded company.

After almost a decade of abysmally stupid business decisions and plummeting sales—and me blogging and b#@!$ing about it the entire time—this buyout feels like a mercy killing to me.

Someone might finally save Barnes & Noble from itself.

***I secretly suspect this buyout was the only option left after Mary Kay declined to sell cosmetics alongside records, movies, toys, stationary, gifts, knick knacks, coffee, candles, essential oils and everything else NOT BOOKS.

#sarcasm

Now that the former mega-retailer’s fate is in the hands of the Elliot Group, perhaps Barnes & Noble can go back to being a…wait for it…wait for it… *whispers*…a bookstore.

Failure in Leadership

Yes, today I feel ranty. I’m angry. No, I’m past angry and onto livid. I’m not the sort of person who enjoys saying ‘I told you so.’

First, I agree wholeheartedly with the Bloomberg Opinion. I don’t quite know the future of Barnes & Noble, because they can’t keep blaming everything on Amazon.

Yet, before we focus on that bugbear, I’d like to take an opportunity to call out those in publishing leadership. Why?

Because when Barnes & Noble sneezes, we all catch cold.

And that fact just ticks me off.

In order to understand exactly how delicate of a time we’re all in (writers), it’s imperative I paint a full/accurate picture of the colossal mess we’ve been handed.

First, publishing is a business.

Might have been a good start for the powers that be to have remembered that.

This said…

To offer any reasonable projections, it’s critical for us (writers) to properly appreciate the sheer scope of the incompetence that’s led us all to this place.

Here is how leadership should work. Yes, even in publishing.

PLEASE NOTE: Most of the major houses we once referred to as ‘The Big Six’ operated under the directives of multi-national conglomerates and giant media companies. The agents and editors and everyday people in the NY (New York) publishing trenches are NOT the ‘leadership’ folks I’m calling to the carpet.

***Looking at you, CBS***

Back to leadership. First and foremost…

Protect the Resource

The top echelon/leaders in charge of the publishing business had ONE job. Protect the writers. Simple. If there are no writers, then there is no content (no stories or information). No stories or information (books), then publishers and bookstores are irrelevant.

This is NOT rocket science.

Take care of writers (resource) and readers (consumers of said resource).

NEWS FLASH:

Publishers were NOT charged with preserving the paper industry or protecting/rescuing incompetent retail outlets….especially at the expense of their most valuable resource (writers).

About Those Authors

From all indications, the powers that be ‘forgot’ that writers play a fairly important role in the whole publishing process.

They aligned with the big-box chains and, in doing so, brokered deals that lined their coffers while simultaneously decimating the author middle-class.

Authors who’d previously been making a living wage under the B. Dalton (smaller chain and independent bookstore) model suddenly had to polish up the resume.

Why?

The Raw Deal

Under the big-box model, selection and variety ruled. Shelf space was precious and finite, meaning these mega-stores didn’t carry those extensive backlists like the old independents.

Problem was, those backlists had once been the bread-and-butter for the working author.

Under the new big-box model, the stores would only stock the backlists of the top earning authors (because those were guaranteed to sell).

The New York publishers (a.k.a. ‘The Big Six’—Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Hachette) and other large traditional publishers used this business reality to justify mothballing the backlists of virtually all authors who weren’t household names.

It’s Just Business

This meant instead of an author earning royalties off, say, fifteen books, they could only earn royalties off their most recent title.

Many authors witnessed decades of work vanish along with the small bookstores that supported them.

Not only did this change mean a DRASTIC pay cut, but it also meant these authors had no viable backlist to cultivate existing fans into future fans. There was no longer a way to truly earn their way into household name status.

It was a formula to fail.

If fans wanted the mid-list or multi-published author’s earlier books, they had to go find them in secondary markets (used bookstores, garage sales and all places where the author wasn’t paid).

That was bad enough, but, when e-books became a viable option, NY had a second chance. An opportunity to do right by their authors.

They could have resurrected those titles at least in e-book form.

Alternate Ending

When Amazon first came on the scene, Borders was still alive and Barnes & Noble dominated the bookselling industry.

Yet, when Amazon launched the first affordable & user-friendly e-reader (the Kindle), early adopting readers found themselves in a conundrum.

They had a new gizmo where they could read all the books they wanted…but there weren’t all that many books. In fact, far too many of the available e-books were unvetted garbage that wouldn’t pass high school English, let alone a NY gatekeeper.

This didn’t have to be so.

NY possessed a ready arsenal of thousands of mothballed titles, novels that had already been thoroughly edited and market tested.

If The Big Six didn’t want to discount their new titles on Amazon? Fine. But they could have field-tested the efficacy of the digital model using backlists that weren’t doing anything but taking up space.

***Many of these books even had earned the coveted titles of USA Today and/or NY Times Best -Selling Book.

Amazon would have had good books for their customers to load on their new Kindle device and they’d make money.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

The mothballed authors would have been happy because they’d be back earning money off books liberated from cold storage.

NY could have not only made money (and happy writers) but they could have also used the backlists to appease Amazon and gather critical data to guide future business decisions.

Did they want to keep offering ebooks on Amazon or maybe create their own publisher sites for e-book distribution?

Was this e-book thing really just a fad?

The E-Book Gold Rush

Alas, instead of creating a Big Six controlled e-book division staffed with eager college grads to format books and flood Amazon with gatekeeper-approved books, NY decided…

E-books were evil.

And that readers would always want paper and a ‘browsing experience’ in an oversized store with ridiculous overhead.

Publishers initially handed backlists back to the authors because they believed these books were worthless. They truly believed e-books were a fool’s pipe dream and a fad (though did nothing to test this opinion).

Ah, but when those spurned authors started converting their cast-off backlists INTO E-BOOKS…and making a boatload of money?

With readers desperate for good e-books, these authors started making far more income than they ever had being traditionally published.

This e-book gold rush ignited a mass exodus of multi-published and mid-list authors…right into Amazon’s welcoming arms.

That’s Gonna Leave a Mark

NY was suddenly in BIG trouble. The next generation of ‘household names’ had historically been cultivated, groomed then promoted from the ranks of the mid-list.

But the mid-list authors, after years of loyalty, got fed up with being treated so poorly…and so #ByeFelicia.

What did the publishers do? Did they see the error of their ways and make an e-book division strictly for backlists?

Maybe even broker a deal that if enough e-book copies sold, a book/series could garner a fresh print run?

Nope.

They Did THIS Instead

Publishers changed all the contracts to make it where authors no longer had rights to their backlist…ever. Those backlists would remain the property of the publisher indefinitely to do with what they wished.

Including nothing.

A once-devoted author pool suddenly turned bitter (for very good reasons). Not content to starve, a large portion of the traditional talent went rogue.

They cut their losses and began self-publishing. More than a few created indie houses of their own that were more efficient and geared toward the digital marketplace.

The authors who’d once made money for NY suddenly became additional competition (with Amazon’s blessing).

Ironically, The Big Six unwittingly financed Amazon’s rise as a publishing powerhouse.

What’s insane is that most of the traditional authors had ZERO desire to leave. They’d been publishing traditionally for years, even decades. Going it alone meant a lot more work and a STEEP and highly technical learning curve.

…from a group that feared e-mail.

Most of these authors simply wanted to just write the books like they always had.

Ah, but when faced with starvation? You serve the master who feeds you.

In a dismal twist of fate, NY helped self-publishing transition from ‘shunned last-ditch of the hack wanna-be writer’ into a viable and respectable publishing alternative.

Genius.

About Those Indie Bookstores

The Big Six didn’t treat the smaller chains/indie bookstores any better. It didn’t matter that small chains, indies, and countless mom-and pop bookstores had been the beating heart of publishing since its inception.

These stores promoted authors, held events and book signings. They pushed literacy, actively sold books and made The Big Six what it was.

Oh, but how short the memory gets with big new friends with deep pockets.

The Big Six participated (obliquely) in the virtual extermination of the small independent bookstores.

Kristen! How can you say that?

Uh. Math. The larger the order, the deeper the discount. Doesn’t take an economist to to do that calculation.

Without the purchasing power, the smaller chains and mom-and-pop indies couldn’t compete. They steadily died off until only a tenacious remnant remained.

***Refer to the movie You’ve Got Mail.

This was all well and good before Web 2.0.

Goliath is a formidable ally until someone bigger, meaner and hungrier comes along.

As I detailed above, NY had countless opportunities to adopt a different business model and didn’t. They ignored all the data, and pretended the marketplace and consumer buying patterns hadn’t changed since the 90s.

Ultimately, NY continued to support the big-box stores at the expense of authors (talent) and smaller bookstores (their former allies).

Goliath versus…Skynet

All of this was utterly unnecessary. It isn’t as if people like me (and those way smarter than me) haven’t been jumping up and down screaming DANGER! for over ten friggin’ years.

I’ve blogged my fingertips bloody begging NY to see reason and turn things around. I even wanted Barnes and Noble to listen and change their ways (for reasons I’ll explain in a moment).

Ugh.

There Were SO Many SIGNS

It wasn’t like the folks in charge didn’t see Amazon’s way of doing business had more red flags than an Ashley Madison dating profile.

The Big Six got sucker-punched as early as January 2010 when Amazon removed the BUY buttons from all the Macmillan titles. The next red flag? When a ‘mysterious’ glitch temporarily removed the BUY buttons off ALL the Big Six titles—Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Hachette.

The NEXT of many red flags? Amazon (allegedly) removed virtually all the discounts on Hachette titles, according to a 2014 article in Forbes. I could go on, but y’all get the point.

Short of a weird rash that wouldn’t go away…

Red Flags EVERYWHERE

To be clear, I am not Amazon-bashing (yet). But just the examples above clearly demonstrate how legacy publishing refused to acknowledge how completely vulnerable they were.

For instance, maybe it really was a glitch that temporarily removed ALL The Big Six’s BUY buttons.

***And maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot.

But, giving the benefit of the doubt—and assuming Amazon wasn’t flexing digital muscles to make the old dogs sit and stay—any one of these episodes alone should have been a major turning point in how The Big Six did business.

These were the crucial moments, the pinch points.

Publishing leadership should have thrown everything they had into innovating and making darn sure no one ever again had the power to grab them by the tender bits.

Everything is Okay, Nothing to See

After ALL this, did the major publishers innovate? Perhaps listen to analysts and bloggers and update their business plan? Maybe remove its parasol and bustle?

No.

Did they pay attention to the digital tsunami that had already obliterated Kodak, Radio Shack, Blockbuster, Sam Goody and Tower Records?

Nope.

Did they pay attention to why Borders went bankrupt? Hot wash it to make a better plan? No.

Did they pay adequate attention to the fact that Barnes & Noble has had FIVE C.E.O.s in the past FOUR YEARS, each one increasingly more incompetent than the previous?

*screams silently*

Wasn’t anyone in charge concerned that Barnes & Noble was shuttering an average of twenty-one stores a year as of 2017?

That the only way Barnes & Noble stock valuations could have dropped faster would’ve been to strap them to The Titanic?

Short of using sock puppets to act this out, I just…literally can’t even.

There was a time those in charge of big publishing could have learned and retooled.

If they’d cared about their writers—or listened to those agents and editors so loyal they were practically working for slave wages to maintain some sort of quality control—this whole Barnes & Noble situation might not gall me the way it does.

They could have been a contender. Could have changed. Instead?

They doubled down with Barnes & Noble, a company so inept it couldn’t find its own @$$ in the dark with Google maps and a service dog.

The Future of Barnes & Noble

Bloomberg Opinion’s Sarah Halzak said it best in yesterday’s post:

“…perhaps it is inevitable that Barnes & Noble is a smaller, less influential retailing force now than it was at the height of its powers. But it was not preordained that Barnes & Noble has become as irrelevant as it has.”

Barnes & Noble has squandered opportunity after opportunity to change their fate. Clearly the brick-and-mortar bookstore is a valuable concept or Amazon wouldn’t have gone through the trouble it has to open stores of its own.

Alas, the brick-and-mortar model wasn’t the problem…and privatization may or may not be the answer.

The Privatization Pickle

Unfortunately, Barnes and Noble is still in trouble. Privatization is no panacea. Yes, it can be a viable shield to reorganize, rebrand and regroup. More often than not? Privatization is a harbinger of death and for sound reasons.

Too often, the weight of a private equity buyout is simply too much burden to bear.

We’ve seen this sort of debt load crush once-robust brands such as Toys “R” Us, Wet Seal, The Limited, and, most recently, Payless Shoes.

Even the former office supply giant, Staples, faces an uncertain future. The Sycamore Partners, who acquired the struggling leviathan roughly two years ago, had initially planned on rebranding and splitting the giant into three.

Now? Sycamore seems set on simply cashing out.

According to a recent Bloomberg article by Davide Scigliuzzo and Eliza Ronalds-Hannon:

“Sycamore Partners is looking to take most of its cash out of Staples Inc. through a recapitalization that will saddle the company with roughly $1 billion of additional debt…”

Sadly, the most valuable thing about Staples might be its debt.

Now that a hedge fund has acquired Barnes and Noble (and its debt) this is a tenuous time. They wouldn’t be the first giant beheaded under the PE (Private Equity) sword then parted out, the rest left to the scavengers.

Some Good News

Barnes & Noble (and the publishing industry as a whole) can breathe a small sigh of relief, namely because Elliot Advisors (namely C.E.O. James Daunt), possesses a solid reputation for rescuing completely incompetent book chains.

According to a recent (June 7th, 2019) article by Alexandra Alter and Tiffany Hsu in The New York Times:

“The acquisition follows Elliott’s purchase of the British bookstore chain Waterstones in June 2018. James Daunt, the chief executive of Waterstones, will also act as Barnes & Noble’s C.E.O. and will be based in New York.”

Daunt actually has a stellar reputation in publishing and ran his own chain of bookstores—Daunt Books—before he went on to acquire the U.K. version of the bookstore big-box, Waterstones.

James Daunt—using creativity, vision, and common sense—rescued Waterstones from bankruptcy and made the stores profitable again.

He hopes to do the same with Barnes & Noble.

***I highly recommend the The New York Times article detailing all this. I imagine many of Daunt’s solutions will seem eerily familiar for those who’ve followed this blog any length of time.

A Small Celebration

Personally, I’m thrilled Barnes and Noble FINALLY has a) someone who knows the book business in charge and b) a leader with an actual success record.

Seriously.

Because this was me envisioning the old Barnes and Noble hiring process for C.E.O.s…

Have you recently driven a household name into the ground?

Yes.

Have you any experience bankrupting a perfectly salvageable company?

Yes.

Do you know ANYTHING about books or publishing?

No.

You’re HIRED!

Party’s Over & Back to Business

ALL this said, there is a reason I’ve taken y’all the long route from where the book business started fracturing in roughly 2006 to where it sits today.

We (writers) have to hope and pray that C.E.O. James Daunt can deliver or we might all be spelling Amazon, M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y.

Amazon (or anyone) having total control should be scary for all authors. But, it is a particularly frightening scenario for indie and self-published authors, because many aren’t repped by agents with the legal know-how to fight a large machine. 

Oh, I suppose we could sue, but Amazon has armies of high-powered attorneys to make a lesson out of any of us who tried.

I know this sounds a little Orwellian, but if Barnes & Noble tanks for good and any meaningful competition evaporates? What’s to stop Amazon from having ‘technical errors’ that just happen to lose YOUR books?

Food for Thought

What’s to stop another BUY BUTTON ‘glitch’? What’s to stop them from demanding we all sell our books for $2.99 and if we don’t comply, we suddenly start having ‘technical errors’?

What’s to keep Amazon from demanding we all flash mob and act out King Lear with jazz hands?

Okay, maybe that’s going too far.

This was why I began this post the way I did. Publishing leadership (those powerful media companies) should never have allowed our industry to devolve to such a piteous state.

We are now ALL vulnerable.

Remain Vigilant

I know expectations are riding a fresh high, but remember they were riding high with Staples, too.

If Barnes & Noble doesn’t salvage something out of this mess, it could be catastrophic for legacy publishing.

Remember, to finance operations, the remaining legacy publishers NEED those bulk orders that stock the Barnes and Noble brick-and-mortar stores.

They also *winces* need orders from those mom-and-pop stores they once ‘didn’t need’ and—with help from their besties Borders and Barnes &Noble—damn near killed off.

Wow, that has GOT to be an awkward conversation.

At the end of the day, if the Elliot Advisors hadn’t ridden to the rescue, the entire U.S. legacy book industry could have collapsed. Some other investor or corporate raider could have bought the whole shebang…then promptly held a yard sale.

***Refer to the movie Pretty Woman.

Sure, Amazon sells legacy published books, but they don’t keep a large amount of stock and buy as-needed. They don’t do the large preorders that keep the lights on and employees paid.

This is still a blow because there will be a major contraction. Barnes and Noble will have to consolidate and lose a lot of fat.

Translation?

The remaining stores will likely be consolidated and many closed. Excess inventory will be sold off to reduce the debt load. This is all necessary to get back in the black.

If they fail to adequately reduce overhead and debt, they could very well find themselves in the same pinch as Staples…where their debt is their most valuable asset.

In Conclusion: Put on Our Big Writer Pants

It’s all kinds of fun to play armchair analyst and blame greedy multi-national media conglomerates for our sorry state. Yet, while ‘the suits’ certainly hold a lot of the blame, they don’t have all of it.

Just like Barnes & Noble can’t keep blaming everything on Amazon, writers can’t keep blaming everything on everyone else.

There is no Publishing Sugar Daddy. I know many writers who want to ‘only write books’ and not worry pretty little heads over that icky business stuff. This is a recipe for disaster.

Trust NO ONE.

Becoming a mega-author won’t fix our problem anymore than winning the lottery will replace our retirement fund.

Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) is close to broke after his literary agency’s accountant embezzled $3.4 million. The famed agency Donadio & Olsen has now declared bankruptcy. Meanwhile, their former accountant is free after posting bail.

Ironically, Palahniuk had suspected something fishy a few years ago but suspected piracy. He never thought (as if anyone would) to grill those who were being paid to handle his affairs.

If we want to thrive in the new publishing paradigm, we have GOT to be educated and know the business of our business, regardless the path we choose.

We also have to write excellent books. The more books we write and the better they are, the more negotiating power we’ll have.

And, finally…y’all knew I was going to end up here.

An author brand/platform is not an option, it is a LIFELINE.

The ONLY way to Amazon-proof ourselves is to create a passionate and vested following who will buy our books no matter where we list them.

Then, if Amazon (or Barnes & Noble, or Joe-Bob’s Book Barn or whoever) ceases to be a good business partner?

We can…leave. Yay!

***falls over***

***brains all over laptop***

I hope you enjoyed and I LOVE hearing from you!

What Are Your Thoughts?

Other than this post is long. Trust me, I KNOW. But, hey, encapsulating fourteen years of the publishing business into one post is no easy feat.

Do you feel a bit less terrified now that you know Barnes and Noble might just pull through?

What are your thoughts, concerns, ideas for what we writers can do differently in the future?

Are you hopeful? Disillusioned? Confused? Frustrated? All of the above?

I hope this post has helped y’all gain fresh (and balanced) perspective of where you sit in the greater scheme of publishing. Yes, it’s a tumultuous time in publishing, but while industries change, humans never do.

Humans will ALWAYS want stories and information.

So long as there are humans, there will be educators, inspirers, and storytellers. Our industry might be a mess, but our jobs are secure.

Long live the dreamers!

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ON DEMAND Brand Boss: Branding for Authors

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ON DEMAND Sales for Writers: Sell Books Not Your SOUL

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The post Barnes & Noble SOLD: Goliath has Fallen & What This Means for Writers appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Play to win. For me, this is a tough phrase. Maybe it’s culture or society or sunspots, but ‘winning’ feels like a suit cut for someone else. No, worse.

Playing to win feels more like the pants I once wore to a conference. Even though they were too tight, I wore them anyway believing they’d ‘stretch out’ once I moved around a bit.

But they didn’t, and after a while they were uncomfortable…no, they were cutting me in HALF.

I couldn’t breathe, my kidneys hurt, and my lower back ached so much I didn’t hear a single word of the lecture.

All I wanted was to rush to the restroom, unbutton the pants and use my hair tie for some give so I could breathe (women know what I’m talking about).

I didn’t feel pretty in those pants I’d worked so hard to ‘fit’ into. Didn’t feel confident or sassy. No, I was miserable and beating myself up for not choosing the stretchy pants I usually wore.

Stretchy pants would never betray me like this. Lycra doesn’t judge. Spandex understands.

We’ll get to Amazon, Legacy NYC publishing, the book industry, etc. But, we can’t understand why any organization is failing (or winning) unless we take time to understand the people who comprise that organization.

***Fair warning. This is a longer post, but a vital one. Creatives are at a critical turning point in our industry where we must make tough and educated decisions if we hope to make it.

Too many of us want to remain comfortable because fitting into something new is uncomfortable…no, excrutiating. Often it will take a lot more work, work we don’t want to do. Perhaps work we feel we shouldn’t have to do.

Maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe it’s unfair, but sadly fair is a weather condition and guess what?

A storm is coming.

Play to Win (at Letting Others Win)

I can’t speak for men, but as a female the whole ‘play to win’ thing was almost always discouraged when I was growing up. First, I was the oldest and thus almost always in charge of entertaining a little brother and (usually) three smaller cousins. Mainly keeping them alive.

Standards for childcare were far lower in the 80s. Thank GOD.

Anyway, being far older, it was kind of a dirtbag move to go all aggro on a six-year-old during a game of Candy Land.

Not that I didn’t try.

I joke I’m NOT Type A. I’m Type A+, because I did the extra credit unlike all y’all other slackers .

***’All y’all’ is correct grammar in Texas, FYI.

This said, my competitive nature was not always appreciated. There were plenty of times some adult figure chided me, instructed me to let the younger ones win once in a while.

Kristen’s Brain Even at 10: *LET them win? This…is…SPARTA!*

School wasn’t much better. I was reading Tolkien by fourth grade. I’d finish my work in a fraction of the time it took my classmates, and apparently that was not a good thing.

If I tried to read or draw, I got in trouble even though I was being quiet. Apparently, I was supposed to sit still and do nothing instead of cracking open the Heinlein book I’d swiped off my dad.

*face palm*

One time, I worked my entire reading workbook during the forty-five minutes allotted for a single assignment. My teacher, upon discovering my infraction, sent me to the place I would spend most of my growing up years…the hall.

True Story: I don’t even recall what my 3rd grade classroom looked like, but I DID figure out innumerable ways to entertain myself by making out patterns carpet.

It didn’t take long to figure out that I needed to wait a certain amount of time before I turned in my test. If I turned in my test when I actually finished, there was hell to pay from the teacher.

Teacher: Stop showing off. You are making the other kids feel bad.

Me: No, I am not showing off, I was finished. Also, for the record, ‘I am making the other kids feel BADLY.’ It’s an ADVERB. You JUST taught this. How are you a teacher?

*just heads to hall to my spot*

I was terrible at the whole inside words staying inside back then, too.

Play to Win (at Your Own Risk)

School taught me to hide any academic excellence. If I wanted to learn at the speed I craved, I had to work around the system. Learn on my time, not school time. Makes total sense.

And I did. I had all kinds of hobbies growing up—reading encyclopedias, reading the dictionary, playing with my microscope, using my chemistry set.

Sorry about that chlorine gas.

Being a complete nerd, I was socially awkward (and not much has changed). I never understood the nuanced ways of girl tribes, only that they generally required an outcast (usually me).

Since I didn’t fit in with the girls, I tried sports. Very confusing. Apparently when a boy nailed someone in the face in a ‘game’ of Dodgeball that was winning.

If I did it? I was being ‘mean.’

HUH?

The only team sport I was any good at was soccer. Problem was, there was no girl’s team. Much to the coach’s chagrin, he had to let me try out for the boy’s team, and it was brutal.

Hazing.

Loved…every…second…of…it.

Those boys tossed everything they could at me. I was bruised, bleeding, and even knocked out once when I blocked the opposing team’s shot into the net…with my face (NOT intentional, but hey it worked). Yet, I pressed on through tryouts.

When it came time to see who made the team, however, the coach cut only one player.

Me.

On the bright side, the boys on the team nearly mutinied over me being cut. They’d thrown everything at me and I was one of them, part of the team. I’d earned the spot because I was someone who played to win no matter what. The boys tried to protest, but it was 8th grade and—again—the 80s.

I’d like to say it got better in the 90s, but not really. In college, I encountered several professors who chastised me for being the only one to answer questions in class.

Me? I fired back that they really should have been shaming the rest of the class who didn’t respect them enough to do the assigned reading.

When I graduated, I went to work in sales (as much of a meritocracy as one can find in the workforce…usually). However, I once stepped up to present our product line to an audience of waiting (and agitated) clients because the manager in charge no-showed.

Afterwards, even though the customers were thrilled, another manager (female) pulled me into a back office. She informed me I was never to do that again if I wanted to remain at the company.

Me: Never again do what? Sell a lot of stuff?

Her: Women aren’t taken seriously in business, especially in the South. Leave the corporate stuff to the men. In the meantime, you’re pretty. Be affable and make others feel at ease and leave the presentations to the guys.

Horrified, I told her she needed to get out of her time machine. It was the 90s not the 50s, and quit that day.

Play to Win vs. Play to ‘Not Lose’

My Jiu Jitsu hands.

My mom was and is a hardcore Scandinavian woman (tough). When I was seven, a male visitor didn’t get his way. He raised his hand to slap her (big mistake)…

…while she was cooking.

Good way to DIE mistake.

Without blinking, she swung that hot cast iron frying pan into him like she was going for a grand slam. Whooped him with that pan THROUGH the screen door and all the way to the street. He never returned and my mom was my hero forever and ever.

My father loved strong females. He enrolled me in martial arts when I was four, was the one to rig his old Navy sea bag for me to use to train to fight and toughen my hands. Being former military, he believed I needed to be able to protect myself. That and…we’re from Texas.

According to my parents, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do or be. Thus, the world was a very confusing place when it kept putting me in the penalty box for doing my best.

Odd message. Playing to win is for others. If you play to win, expect to pay a price.

Be nice. Be sweet. Share. Winning is not nice to others.

And you know what? I bought that pile of bull sprinkles until very recently.

But no more.

We don’t get what we work for, we get what we negotiate.

Death by Nice

Notice I used the word nice. Nice and kind are different. Kind has a spine. It IS possible to play to win and not be a jerk, bully, thief, etc. In fact, when we diminish our own light so as not to ‘outshine others’ everyone suffers.

Nice snuffs out the light so others don’t notice they are in darkness. Kind lends a flame so everyone can live in the glow.

Playing to WIN is good and you want to know how I know this?

Amazon is damn near taking over the globe in almost every arena from movie-making to groceries to music.

Personally, I’m fairly sure Amazon IS actually the foretold SkyNet. Good news is when Amazon finally assimilates the human race, I have Prime, so I get free shipping.

Meanwhile, the Big Six have steadily become the Not-So-Big-Five and I believe might even be down to the Spiffy Four.

While Amazon is expanding at a record-breaking pace, NY Publishers are condensing, shrinking, reorganizing, and living on the grace and passion of those sainted professionals who will work UNGODLY hours for crap pay solely because they love books.

***Bless you agents and editors.

Meanwhile, Amazon isn’t having to rely on volunteers willing to give up their lives, work for a fraction of what they’re worth for ‘the cause.’

Wanna know why?

Business has been in a cage match since the rise of Web 2.0., and while Steve Jobs (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Bill Gates (Microsoft) and others have been throwing punches, the former contenders have been too busy shaking 20th century snow globe, too mesmerized by the past to even protect their face.

While bloggers like me have shouted warnings for over a decade, the industries we love have refused to get in the fight and play to WIN.

We kept begging for someone to step up and get into the 21st century, for publishers to recognize they were (are) in the story and information business…not the PAPER business. 

Play to win. Better, still?

Play to Win in the Business You’re Actually IN

Amazon didn’t care HOW consumers wanted to consume a book: print, hard-cover, soft-cover, digital, used, new, audio….JAZZ HANDS. If the customer wanted a story acted out by mimes and was willing to PAY for it? And it could be profitable?

Amazon was ON it.

All the while, the big publishers clung to the Big Box model even as Borders was collapsing. After it died, not much changed. I detailed a lot of this in a post in January of 2018 when I AGAIN laid it all out:

From 2008 to 2017 B&N was forced to close an average of 21 stores a year. In 2008, they had 798 stores and as of September 2017 B&N was down to 634 stores, according to Forbes.

The latest CEO in a string of failures has come up at least one answer to what ails them. Barnes & Noble needs…smaller stores.

*sounds of Kristen railing at the heavens*

Excuse, me. Did I stutter?

So in 2016, Barnes & Noble hired the former C.E.O. of the office supply giant Staples (Demos Parneros) even though he had ZERO book industry experience. This was also the guy whose business expertise launched Staples to unprecedented success….

…wait, no that’s wrong.

Mea culpa.

No, Staples had to hire another C.E.O. to save the company upon Parneros’ departure, because according to The Street:

As of May 17, 2017, Staples held $526 million in long-term debt and had total liabilities of $3.2 billion, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Sounds like JUST the kind of business visionary B&N needed to hire; one with the skills to lead an already flailing company(Staples) billions more into the red.

In all fairness, these numbers are a year after the C.E.O. left, but I feel it’s reasonable to extrapolate that the company didn’t go from raging success to the 8th Circle of Business Hell in less than a year.

Oh, but there’s more….

Granted, Parneros did have the bright idea that B&N needed smaller stores. Points for him.

But these days, instead of B&N planning how to WIN in the book BUSINESS (or any business), they’re embroiled in so much drama they should have their own reality show Big (Box Store) Brother.

Hmm, kinda catchy.

B&N fired Parneros for ‘alleged sexual misconduct.’ Sighs. Parneros claims this is all a smear campaign and untrue and the only reason B&N wanted to oust him was for something I’ve already forgotten.

Anyway, according to an August 2018 article in The New York Times explicating the Parneros drama of ‘alleged sexual misconduct,’ the mudslinging and lawsuits over wrongful termination…THIS is what stood out to ME (and probably SHOULD have stood out to B&N, too):

Barnes & Noble’s stock price has fallen 60 percent over the last three years, and the chain has struggled to reverse years of declining sales and foot traffic. In the last decade, the company has closed more than 150 stores, leaving it with a base of 633. It waged a losing battle with Amazon, losing more than a billion dollars on its Nook e-book business.

Even as independent bookstores have bounced back and Amazon has expanded into brick-and-mortar retail (which, incidentally, I predicted would happen in multiple 2012 blogs), Barnes & Noble has still failed to recover ground.

After ALL this, Barnes & Noble is considering just selling itself.

Doesn’t sound like playing to WIN at all.

Playing to ‘Not Lose’

In my not-very-humble opinion, NYC was so accustomed to being THE Publishing Pantheon, that they didn’t do so well when the rise of e-commerce and Web 2.0 cast them down to Earth.

Instead of being on the offense, sticking and moving and learning how to play the new game and dominate it?

They wasted precious time trying to rekindle ‘The Good Old Days’ and protect their besties Borders and Barnes & Noble at all costs. They couldn’t fathom a world where they weren’t the leviathans…and Amazon used their Big Box BFFs’ bulk to crush the life from all of them.

How ironic that the movie You’ve Got Mail has now come full circle.

Joe, you really SHOULD have listened to her. And AMEN, Kathleen!

Hollywood…I mean Amazon (or Netflix) should make a You’ve Got Mail 2.

In it, Kathleen Kelly reopens her indie bookstore Shop Around the Corner. She stocks the new store by buying the (ironically) bankrupted Fox Books’ store inventory for pennies on the dollar. But she is NOT a jerk.

She’s thoughtful enough to offer Joe a job purchasing office supplies, furniture, decor and specially requested books for her shop…from AMAZON.

Back to US

Anyone who’s read my blog over the years knows I have ranted, raved, offered suggestions and ideas to help legacy publishing and even big box bookstores. I’ve begged NYC to play to WIN.

Yet, here we are, the business landscape eerily similar to the late 19th century and early 20th century (when we transitioned from the agricultural age to the industrial age).

Once again we teeter on the edge, risk falling into the grip of ‘New and Improved’ trust giants and robber barons (as we transition now from the industrial age into the digital age).

From my post in 2012, Amazon: Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts:

Amazon right now is in the courting phase with writers, and it is using us (writers) as a weapon to kill our former masters. Ah, but if Amazon really gets its way…what then?

When NY is razed and Amazon has no real competition, do they have to keep giving us the same sweet royalty rate? And they already have a nasty reputation. They pulled that little stunt with a publisher who dared to cross them. Two years ago, they removed all the ‘Buy Buttons’ off all the Macmillan titles. 

So, if Amazon will use the brass knuckles on a major publisher that crossed their path…what about us? The little guys? What happens when a writer miffs them and they unleash the gorilla?

The giants are rising and why? Because they play to win. Or as Joe fox would have said, they’re willing to…

Go to the Mattresses

As writers, do we play to win or play to ‘not lose?’ Tell me any game, any sport where one can WIN playing strictly defense.

We’ve got to start taking this seriously. If you’re a writer, then you are a business. Trust me, Apple doesn’t work for exposure dollars and neither does Amazon.

Why should we?

Writers PAY to hear marketing experts tell them that, to be successful and make money, they should give away free bookmarks, free bags, free flair, free downloads, and free books. Give a FREE prize for someone giving them a free email.

They should speak for free, blog for free, give interviews for free, and work for free. Oh, one suggestion and I actually heard this from a promotion expert. 

Give a FREE bottle of wine with your book.

I wish I were making this up.

In what universe do ANY of these ideas make mathematical sense?

Last I checked 0 + 0= 0. And 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0= 0.

And zero is the least of our problems since bookmarks and prizes and books and time all have a cost. If these folks can’t grasp that no matter how many zeros one adds together, the SUM is STILL ZERO?

I can’t even broach the concept of how one adds negative numbers.

Besides, isn’t that how 21st century Apple became the mega giant it is? It gave away iPods and iPads for enough exposure and THEN consumers suddenly were willing to stand in line for ten hours and drop $900 for a new iPhone?

….maybe not.

FREE Should Never Really Be FREE

Some free is fine, even necessary. FREE can be an amazing business strategy when used properly. When we play to win, FREE is NEVER actually FREE. It’s built into the price, or it’s actually a quid pro quo (something for something).

FREE can be a way the seller rewards the consumer in exchange for the consumer’s willingness to agree to a greater financial commitment (e.g. all purchases over $100 and shipping is FREE).

FREE is also something used to entice consumers into a longterm financial commitment. Apps do this all the time. Get a week free of all the meditations you could ever want, and after that FREE week, the app will be $7.99 a month (charged via iTunes). Cancel when you no longer want the service.

Your first trial month of Netflix is free, but after that Netflix costs money every month. On and on.

These are examples of FREE with a plan, FREE with dignity and design and a goal toward a profit.

Free without strategy is just begging sans the obvious tin cup.

Y’all are SO MUCH better than that kind of free.

We Have a Write to WIN

Yes, creating art takes time, work, training, tears and a lot of hard work. It takes love that surpasses reason along with stretching ourselves and learning new things.

Sacrifice, self-discipline and all the tough stuff. Pretty much like it’s always been. Only we now have new roles, roles we are wise to learn either so we can a) do them ourselves or b) be educated enough to spot talented teammates from smooth-talking cons.

We’ll be able to discern experts from “experts” (those folks still pushing marketing and social media strategies older than my favorite yoga pants).

This is how we play to WIN.

And yes, maybe this seems all doom and gloom, but I’m not in the candy business. It’s a Brave New World where artists (currently) have little to no protection.

But, good news is—as is usually the case—the pendulum is swinging back the other way with some things moving in our favor (I’ll talk about these in some of my upcoming classes, not my blogs).

Other good news? Legacy publishing still has a pulse and a place, but they have got to start playing offense. Play to WIN. PLEASE!

***Seriously, call me.

There are new business models emerging where creative professionals are being paid. Additionally, there are ways to Amazon-proof ourselves. Again, not bashing Amazon. Yet, while Amazon is great for the moment, but we need to have a structure in place that does not rely on us needing Amazon (or any ONE entity).

If Amazon fails to remain a good business partner/decision, we should be in a position to move on and have a plan for exactly when and how to do that.

For the traditional publishers, this IS your Rocky IV. 

Amazon is Drago. Drago killed Creed (Borders) and you’re down. I get it, and totes understand. And Drago has the advantage of all this scientific equipment and super high-tech training, but suck it up, get in the snow and drag some logs.

Y’all didn’t rule the world for a century for nothing. Remember who you were.

Champions.

As for the writers. Excellent authors (creatives) deserve an audience of givers, fans, and die-hard supporters. We deserve better than a race to the bottom of who can give away the most for the least. To do this, though?

Play to win. I know you can do it. It’s going to be uncomfortable and possibly scary, terrifying and painful. For a lot of us, this is new or not new but still terrifying. But we can change, grow and train how to be in it to win it.

Now, go play some Eye of the Tiger and get back to writing that book.

MARCH’S AWESOMENESS (CLASSES)

ON DEMAND: A Ripple in Time: Mastering Non-Linear Plotting

Taught by Kristen Lamb, $55 Delivered to YOUR computer to enjoy at your leisure.

SALES: For Those Who’d Rather Be In Witness Protection

Taught by Kristen Lamb, Thursday, March 12th 7-9 PM EST $99

Social Schizophrenia: Building a Brand Without Losing Your Mind 

Too many voices telling ALL THE THINGS! AHHHHHHHH!

Taught by Kristen Lamb, Friday, March 15th, 7-9 PM EST ($55 General Admission/ $195 GOLD)

***Yes, I will be teaching about Instagram among OTHER new business developments in this class.

Harnessing Our Writing Power: THE BLOG

Taught by Kristen Lamb Saturday, March 16th 2-4 PM EST $55 General Admission/ $165 GOLD)

Story Master: From Dream to Done

Taught by Kristen Lamb, March 28th, 7-9 PM EST ($55/$349 GOLD)

Fiction ADDICTION: The Secret Ingredient to the Books Readers CRAVE

Taught by Kristen Lamb, Saturday, March 30th 2-4 PM EST $55

The post Play to Win: Authors, Empires & Why Amazon is Killing NYC Publishing appeared first on Kristen Lamb.