It's interesting how symmetrical the news can be sometimes. This past week, the publishing business was all abuzz with two amazing tales, which dovetail each other almost perfectly.
The first, in which Barry Eisler said in an interview with Joe Konrath that he had turned down a $500,000 (or higher) offer in favor of self-publishing, dropped many a jaw in the pub biz, and was hailed as a game-changing moment. From now on, apparently, all books will be self-published and everybody involved in making paper books should look for work in the upholstery field, assuming you can't Kindle a sofa.
The second story involved a self-publishing sensation called Amanda Hocking who signed a four-book deal worth over $2-million with St. Martin's. Ms. Hocking, who is 26 years old, believes that she won't be the last to go this route, but that it will not happen very often.
No kidding.
Now, I haven't the slightest thing against self-publishing. I am far too chicken to go that route myself, as I am convinced that I'd spend however many months writing my heart out and then promote it well enough as an e-book that six people would purchase it at a greatly discounted rate. I have very little confidence in my own promotional skills.
(For example, did you know that AN UNINVITED GHOST, the second in the Haunted Guesthouse Mystery series, will debut a week from tomorrow, on April 5?)
But I do find the uproar amusing. Now, I am a bad enough member of the publishing community that, quite frankly, I'd never heard of Amanda Hocking before this story broke (courtesy of Sarah Weinman at Galley Cat and the New York Times). I follow the publishing industry (outside of my own books, which I watch like a hawk while agonizing over each change in Amazon's meaningless ranking system) as closely as I follow the cricket scores from Ipswitch.
These stories, however, caused enough of a brouhaha to catch even my apathetic attention. And the venom that was spilled in each case, and on each side of each argument, was quite the entertainment extravaganza.
Where some saw Eisler's move as the absolute end to the physical book as we know it, I'm willing to believe that Stephen King will still be sending his door-stopping tomes out on paper for the foreseeable future. And until Steve no longer sees a buck in traditional publishing, there will be traditional publishing.
Meanwhile, Ms. Hocking's assent (or lateral move?) to a pulp-and-covers publisher was either seen as a betrayal of the rising self-publishing tide or an affirmation of it, given that someone who started as a self-publisher was now commanding millions from what will always be known, it seems, as a "New York Publisher." (Who knew you could publish an entire city?)
Frankly, I don't care if they take my words and send them out in smoke signals, as long as I can make a living doing this instead of working. And while some authors will chide me for agreeing that self-publishers can--under the right circumstances--make a very nice living, others will complain that I should cut my ties to the old guard and get out there with the Kindle crowd ASAP.
(Actually, nobody's going to get after me about any of this stuff, because I am still flying so far under the radar I could probably make it into Libya undetected even today.)
But watching the ongoing debate about whether ebooks will make book books obsolete, whether publishers are going the way of the dodo and we should all become independent contractors gets sort of depressing in the end. We can go back and forth about how we love the feel of a real book in our hands or about how authors don't need the protection of The Man to express ideas. We can talk endlessly about the gatekeepers acting as restrictors of great talent or protectors of the public from honestly lousy books. And from one point of view or another, all those positions will be defensible. The question becomes, then, why we should care.
The bottom line for me is that I'm going to keep writing books with whatever stories I think are worth spending the time and effort on telling. And if a publisher wants to give me what I consider to be a fair price for my stories, I'll sell them to a publisher. If no publisher wants to give me that price, I might consider doing the whole thing myself, but I will admit that I'm a chicken, and might be too spooked (see oblique reference to AN UNINVITED GHOST) to go off on my own--or not. When the time comes, I'll make that decision, or it will be made for me if I wait too long.
Right now, more power to Barry and Amanda, who appear to be passing each other in a revolving door. When I'm offered at least a half-million for a book, I'll let you know what I really think about this whole thing. Because until then, I won't really know, myself.
Oh and by the way: AN UNINVITED GHOST will be published a week from tomorrow, on April 5! Just in case I hadn't mentioned it before.
And for those of you who follow keywords to blogs you might not have read otherwise: Qaddafi, Obama, Charlie Sheen, Elizabeth Taylor, Stephen King, Sarah Palin, foolproof diet, sex, Barry Bonds, Glenn Beck, Justin Bieber, Jon Stewart, X-Men, Doctor Who, Lady Gaga and of course, AN UNINVITED GHOST.
