Janny Wurts on Slow Burn in publishing

[Teresa Edgerton]

But there's a reason those small and mid-sized publishers got taken over by big corporations: they were already struggling to make money. They couldn't compete with the bigger publishers that could exploit economies of scale. A small publisher today run the way publishers were run 25 years ago would not make money.

I wasn't talking about the small to mid-sized publishers. I was talking about the larger publishers that had previously been bought up by medium-sized corporations that allowed them to run their companies with little interference. Then the smaller corporations were bought up by the gigantic corporations and things began to change.

And right now the small publishers are the ones who can afford to publish the books that the bigger publishers would have published 25 years ago, knowing they aren't going to be blockbusters, and they can do this because they don't have the huge overhead or CEOs at vast parent companies expecting them to contribute their bit to obscene salaries and severance packages. So actually they do run their companies rather like publishers did a quarter of a century ago.

 

[psychotick]

Hi MWagner,

Mostly I agree with you, but one change. The midlist isn't dead. It's just slowly moving across to the indie world. And being joined by many fresh faces.

That's another of the inevitable changes in this revolution. Trade publishers can and are offering less to their authors unless they are the top tier. And a midlister with a name can improve his income by going indie if he works out how to do the entire publishing thing. It's a learning curve - but it's not insurmountable.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I thought this article may be worth revisiting, especially after the subject of "slow burn" came up elsewhere in the forums.

Another interesting point from the original piece I'd overlooked before:

Steven Erikson’s Malazan had an early debut in the USA, was abandoned by the original publisher, and remained available only in the UK, until a re-launch a decade later reintroduced him to the marketplace. Malazan’s first readers were few and scattered, and no matter how enthusiastic, the buzz over simpler, coming of age quests incited the numbers. A work now lauded for extreme complexity and adult almost passed by the wayside.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

This illustrates the great advantage of plugging away and developing a back catalogue regardless of "success" - you never know when something is going to rise up and bite you on the bum.

 

[E.Maree]

The most important thing about social media isn't the technology, but the communities. And those communities are vast herds chasing the new shiny. Those herds aren't interested in sharing enthusiasm for something that has been out for five or six years already.

This doesn't really match my experience online at all. There's always a lot of talk about the 'hot' new reads that year, that's a natural side-effect of the industry hyping up the new releases, but books from years ago still get plenty of love.

A lot of my reading buddies actually specialise in recommending niche reads, regardless of publication year. Maybe I feel like a demon romance today, or a contemporary f/f YA, or a book including depression in a fantasy setting. I'll ask, and I'll get recs. We bond over niche interests more than anything else -- myself and my friends are particularly fond of diverse genre SFF and feminist SFF.

And on a very active Facebook group I'm in, people show up wanting odd niches all the time -- a 'man in a hood on the cover' fantasy, something grimdark without sexual violence, something with angels but without a religious focus. They ask, they get.

This is not uncommon at all. There are thousands of us readers who work like this in the SFF social community.

So, the New Shiny is what evolved out of the New Weird...?

This is very clever, and I love it.

The way that bookstores and publishers use it, a book has only a couple of months to make its mark. If it doesn't do well enough almost immediately, it might be pulled from the shelves in a matter of weeks. The big chains that kept books on their shelves much longer than the smaller ones before them alleviated that somewhat. (But in the US Borders went under and B & N has severely cut back the number of their stores, so not much help from there anymore.) But there was and is still the problem that the people at the publishing house who keep track of these figures will not buy the next book by an author even if the present book has done well over a period of several months, if it did not sell enough books during that specified period at the beginning. (This happened to Katharine Kerr at one point, but fortunately another publisher picked her up and continued to publish the series.) Note that before computer tracking the publishers would not have had figures on the book immediately, so that by the time they did have sales figures, those sales would encompass several months instead of just weeks. Because of this, they were interested in books that had "legs" -- that continued to sell at a respectable rate (or even became more popular as time went on) so that the sales added up nicely -- and not just books that made a big splash at the beginning.

With computer tracking, a lot of midlist authors were squeezed out, or changed their names. For some their initial sales under their new names did well enough for the publishers to keep them on and give them the chance for word-of-mouth to bring in more and more eager readers, establishing a new career (for instance Megan Lindholm writing as Robin Hobb -- cover art by Michael Whelan in the US and John Howe in the UK didn't hurt) but others did not manage those big initial sales figures and went under again.

THIS. This is so important. Scottish-Californian sci-fi and fantasy writer Laura Lam has spoken candidly before about how her publishing career hit a really bad patch because her first week of sales (on the second book in the Pantomime series) wasn't enough, and they cancelled the third. That particular publisher, though reputable, was in financial difficulty and closed shortly afterwards.

Thankfully, she's back on her feet and kicking butt with a new sci-fi/thrilled novel False Hearts out with Tor, and Tor are re-publishing the Pantomime series in full.

I'm really glad. She's an excellent writer, and does so much for the local writing community in Scotland with talks and spends a lot of time giving advice to fledgling writers like yours truly. She deserves every success she gets.

I did some searching online and I see that there are plenty of "writer's co-operatives" but they are not what I meant at all. They seem to be only talk-shops and writer's circles to support writing, much like the writing forums here at Chronicles do.

These definitely exist, I've seen a few. Usually they aim at self-published authors with a track record or a common link like genre or a local writing organisation, and services provided included: bulk purchased ISBNs, Bookbub promos, and NetGalley slots as well as general advice. Well worth it if you can get in one.

These books don’t just need word of mouth, these books need champions, people to push them ever after everyone else has moved on. Until communities clean themselves up, allow for a higher barrier to entry, and cut the crap, its going to be nearly impossible to stand out within all the noise.

This really stood out for me - in the comments section.

Quality is such an underrated thing.

If I ran a co-op I'd put emphasis on editing above all the other guff, trusting in a core team of skilled editors to steer the co-op right. A guarantee of quality and reputable editor involvement.

Cover artists too -- a small, core team of trusted artists who we know will meet the deadlines and create great work.

But hey, I can't even afford to get my own work pro-edited, so it's all pie in the sky thinking right now.