The Changing Paradigm for Writers

the Amazon jungle

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For years, the established procedure for an unpublished writer was fairly straightforward: find a publisher who looks at unsolicited manuscripts or find an agent.

Ordinary People by Judith Guest was an unsolicited manuscript and was published to great reviews, fantastic sales, and was made into a movie. But that outcome was rare. Today, I don’t think there’s a traditional publishing house anywhere that takes unsolicited manuscripts. Everything must go through a literary agent.

In the past,you queried agents until you found one that asked to see your manuscript,  and if the agent liked it, then the submission process began. I found my first agent, Diane Cleaver, through a referral from another aspiring writer who had met her at a writers’ conference. She had recently left Simon & Schuster, where she’d been an editor, and was looking for clients. The first five novels I wrote didn’t sell. My sixth novel, In Shadow, sold on its 24^th submission to Chris Cox at Ballantine Books.

Today, there aren’t 24 publishers left in New York. There are five conglomerates with multiple imprints.

Part of the former established procedure when a book was published was to schedule publicity. Books by authors paid huge advances (Stephen King, for instance) were promoted and publicized. Books by midlist authors got far less – a few bookstore signings.

It was a fine idea when there were multiples chain bookstores and many independent stores.  Now, there is one large chain left – Barnes & Noble, with Books a Million trailing behind it in second place. Borders is defunct. Little Professor is history. Walden Books is long gone. Brick & mortar chain bookstores may eventually go the way of the dodo bird, just as brick and mortar record stores and video stores have. 

There are several stellar independent bookstores that will still be standing when the dust settles: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, and The Tattered Cover in Denver, Colorado. But chains? It doesn’t look good.  In fact, the other day a writer emailed me about an article he’d read that Barnes & Noble might close its doors in early 2015.

The other part of the established procedure was to attend writers’ conferences, my favorite part. You networked, made friends with other writers, traded publishing stories, and spoke to a group of attendees about your book, your work. You signed and sold books. This part of the established procedure still exists.

When the Internet came into being for the general populace, the landscape for writers began to shift.  When Google and Amazon were born, when ebooks became a viable venue and not just a passing fad, when the iPhone was born in 2007, when social media exploded, the landscape changed dramatically. Suddenly, you didn’t need an agent to get published. You didn’t even need a publisher.

If you wanted to write, you wrote and published the book yourself through any number of venues that have cropped up in recent years. One of the largest of these venues is smashwords. You still had to market the book, of course, but it didn’t entail sitting in a bookstore for a signing and hoping that people showed up.

Amazon, the behemoth, may prove to be the nemesis for traditional publishing, but it’s an absolute treasure for writers, although there are plenty of writer who disagree. Here’s why I think Amazon is the game changer in publishing:

In traditional publishing, where the books go to an actual physical bookstore, the publisher sets the price of the book. From that price, the author receives between 8-15 percent of the cover price. For a paperback selling for $6.99, the author receives about 56 cents per book. For a hard cover selling for $25, the author receives $3.75 a book. Then there are agent fees – usually 15 percent, taken out of the author’s money. For that $6.99 paperback, that means the author is actually receiving about 47 cents a book. Not bad if you sell 100,000 copies and not bad IF the publisher is honest about their accounting procedures.

Now, let’s say the publisher publishes your book as an ebook and overprices it at $12. From that, you receive 25 % of the cover price – $3. And then your agent takes 15% of that, leaving you with $2.55 Except, oh wait. If you’re being paid on the net price, it means that the publisher first deducts the 30 percent they pay to Amazon, so that leaves $8.40  from which you’re paid your 25% – $2.10. From that, your agent deducts 15%, leaving you, the writer, with about $1.75.

Scratching your head yet? Wondering where the rest of that money goes?

Now, let’s say that in this changing paradigm for writers, you’re fortunate enough to connect with a visionary company that is signing up authors with extensive backlists. These authors have gotten their book rights reverted to them. And this company, Crossroad Press,  brings these books back as ebooks and audio books, at no cost to the author. They also publish original books in trade, hardcover, ebooks and audio.

They do the covers, scanning, formatting and uploading to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Kobo, for free. They price the books reasonably – $4.99. Let’s call it $5 for math purposes. And yes, they pay Amazon and the other online stores their 30%,  – so we skim $1.50 off that $ immediately. BUT – and it’s a huge BUT – they pay the authors 80% of the money they receive.

So from the $3.50 Crossroad receives after Amazon’s cut, the author receives $2.80 for each ebook sold. And there’s no agent cut involved because the contracts for many of these backlist titles were negotiated in the days before ebooks. For new, original books, there aren’t any agents fees because you’re dealing directly with the publisher.

In the changing paradigms for writers, the Internet, ebooks, and social media are the locomotives of change.

Not surprisingly, traditional publishing companies have clashed with Amazon. Publishers want to set their own prices for ebooks, balk at the steep discounts Amazon offers, and Amazon wants a bigger cut of the sales. This whole issue has already gone to the U.S. justice department after the five main publishers were accused of fixing prices on books in collusion with Apple.

But now, Hatchette Books and Amazon are butting heads and Amazon has retaliated by not offering pre-orders for books published by this company. Bestseller lists are compiled from pre-orders, so this means that Hatchette sells fewer books. Bestselling authors are outraged.

But the bottom line here is that the traditional publishing model is flawed and Amazon has exposed that flaw.  

Amazon sells 41 percent of all new books in the U.S., making it the largest single book retailer in the country. Arguments are made about how books are “culture” – as opposed to business products – and do we really want a business selling culture?  Please. It’s a specious argument.  The publishing industry in the U.S. is about profit. It’s a business, just like Amazon.  To a publisher, an author is only as good as the sales of his or her last book.  How is that about “culture?”

Other concerns I’ve heard: what will happen to “culture” when Amazon controls 80 percent of the book market?  What will happen, I suspect, is what usually happens – some start-up company will see a niche that can be filled and will come up with something new that will grow and flourish. Competition will still be the name of the game.

For writers, there’s now greater creative freedom. No one is telling you what you may or may not write. What you produce is your vision, no one else’s. You can let your muse run wild! How is that a terrible thing?