A Fond Farewell From DEAD GUY Alum Josh Getzler!

Josh Getzler

As I have four or five times in the past, I am writing this post from Florida, where I spend my winter break each year. In previous years, I’ve used my final post before New Year’s to look back at the year, and to project where I might be next year this time.

This post, however, is a bit different, and somewhat bittersweet, because this is the last time I’ll be writing for Hey, There’s A Dead Guy in the Living Room. I think the decision to end the blog was correct—it’s hard to find something new to discuss every week, particularly when trying to keep it at least vaguely within the box of crime fiction or publishing, and I know all of us have deviated at different times over the years.

But for today, I’d like to discuss not the past year, but rather the past eleven. And while Jeff tells me that 2,500 words is awfully long for a typical blog post, given that it’s the second-to-last entry of the whole thing, I hope you will indulge me. So sit down, y’all, as my 14 year old daughter says; it’s Story Time With Josh.

I re-entered publishing in January of 2007, and at that time I thought the industry had been revolutionized by technology since my first foray into the business of books a decade earlier. In 2007 submissions and edits had all become digital, and conversations among agents, editors and authors had become rapid-fire exchanges of emails. As an (aging) assistant, I was no longer spending days Xeroxing manuscripts and putting them into boxes, but organizing inboxes and learning to use electronic databases to monitor editor moves.

Then, as I thought I was getting the hang of the new paradigms, another innovation/disruption happened: Amazon decided to turn its gaze to publishing, and created the Kindle. The decisions Amazon made in entering this world have certainly had the most affect on the publishing industry in this past decade—far beyond any other single aspect of the business. From the pricing models, through its competition with Barnes and Noble and WalMart, through its Agency Model contracts and legal battles with publishers to its decision to enter the scrum as a non self-publishing publisher (and its systems of paying royalties), Amazon beats out Publisher Consolidation and the near-demise of browsing in brick-and-mortar bookstores as the Biggest Thing of the 2010’s.

From a personal standpoint, I started in 2007 as an assistant to two (outstanding) agents, having just leapt from a business where I’d been the boss, with three children 8 and under, where I woke up every morning at 5:00 to read queries, and where I spent four months line-editing a 700 page thriller (that never saw the light of day).

As 2017 ends, I’m a partner of the six-year-old agency I co-founded in 2011 with Carrie Hannigan and Jesseca Salky. We have all seen our books hit the NY Times (and many other) best seller lists, including Carrie’s client Vashti Harrison’s amazing middle grade book about black women who made history, Little Leaders, which was #3 last week. We are up to seven people in our agency, and have reached financial stability. I represent more than 60 authors, and hit my 100^th deal announced on Publishers Marketplace this past year. My oldest child (who’s contributed to Hey Dead Guy several times) just completed his first semester of college, while my toddler girls from 2007 are now both in high school. If I tried to wake up at 5 AM to read a manuscript, I’d be asleep by 8 that night, which isn’t practical.

When I started back at Writers House in 2007, my expectation was that I’d be The Mystery Guy. I’d edited mysteries in the 90s at Harcourt, read more of them than any other kind of book, and figured I’d find my lane in that world. And while I’ve done that (expanding into pretty much all aspects of crime fiction, from cat mysteries to horror to historical thriller to contemporary spy novels to near future dystopic police procedurals), I realized pretty quickly that I needed to expand my sights to…Anything That Will Sell. But nine years after starting to take on clients, I’ve been able to consolidate into a few different genres that make up most of my submissions. As a way to discuss the past decade in publishing, I’ll include commentary while discussing each part of my list.

• Crime fiction, as above. This takes up probably half of my energy—or more, at different points when I’m flush with projects. I’ve sold more crime fiction than anything else, and it remains dear to me. I’m also seeing the most extremes of highs and lows with it at the moment. The low points began a couple of years ago, when Berkley and St. Martin’s Press—two of the most significant mystery publishers in the business—contracted their lists by ¾ and ½, respectively. Now on one hand, that was probably necessary: The shelves at B&N were filled with donut shop mysteries and knitting mysteries and knitting mysteries set in donut shops (with cats, of course), and the market was so glutted that it was difficult for many new authors to find their audience and break through. Additionally, while we thought that ebooks were going to replace mass market paperbacks--where mysteries typically found their audience--on a one-to-one basis, that didn’t happen AND the lower price of ebooks didn’t make up for the lost revenue (and many publishers began to release their mysteries in hardcover and trade paperback, which caused its own pricing issues and lowered sales figures—but that’s a whole different discussion for another time.) So there needed to be a bit of a correction. We are just beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel now, though not without quite a bit of pain. Many well-published authors found themselves without homes after many books. Many well-seasoned editors found themselves out of work after many years at a home. This caused a great deal of backup in the ability of the fine publishers still (or newly) publishing crime fiction (like Midnight Ink or Crooked Lane or Severn House or Henery House) to take chances on new writers, as they were populating their lists with veterans.

The upside was that these publishers DID work very hard to take up the slack. Additionally, for the first time, we were able to see digital first or digital only imprints of the big publishers begin to get traction. Whether Witness (HarperCollins) or Alibi (Random House) or Thomas & Mercer (Amazon) or several others, we have started to see real sales come from these imprints. (Of course many of these imprints compete very strongly on price deals, which sacrifice revenue per sale for quantity of downloads adding up to a decent stream. 1,000 books downloaded at $1.99 with a 25% of Net Revenue rate don’t match up to 1,000 books sold at $7.99 with a royalty rate of 8% of list price. ($250 vs $640, after a number of assumptions.))

Also, we are beginning to see the re-emergence of the mass market paperback, which will come as a boon to mystery readers who don’t like to use e-readers. The market, I suspect, won’t have the same share as it used to, but there are clearly many readers and large number of terrific writers, and even an industry as difficult to shift as publishing will respond to those needs.

Finally, we are seeing an increase (as all content providers are) in unusual deals in mystery stories, particularly where production is concerned. The number of new outlets for video has allowed mystery and crime fiction stories to be optioned, produced, and even reverse-engineered in record numbers. Hallmark Mysteries and Movies has become the Berkley Prime Crime of television, and Acorn TV (or ITV3) its source for British cozies and procedurals.

OK, so that’s a bit of a digest on crime fiction. For me, that’s a significant amount of my energy. The others are:

• Middle Grade children’s books. When I started back in 2007, I had a kid just entering the middle grades, and two bosses who represented terrific middle grade novels. But it took a chance conversation with a film producer who knew a guy with a book described as Harry Potter with Pirates (which turned out to be more like The Princess Bride with 13 year olds) to start me on the road to a strong list of books for tweens. I’ve grown to love these books, with their spunky heroes and heroines who are not yet jaded (much) but still can Get It Done. I like the humor and the Feels, and the fact that there is a greater breadth of story permitted there than in almost any genre. Funny thing to me was that I thought that once I got the hang of middle grade books, I could also rep Young Adult, but I found out that I simply didn’t have the same eye. So I now rarely look at books for older teens, but am definitely actively continuing to work on the middle grade.

The frustration on this side is that it is INCREDIBLY difficult to market these books. The intended market does not buy its own books, but needs to have parent approval and participation. And the lack of brick-and-mortar bookstores is preventing the kind of browsing with kids that led to finding the book NEXT to the book one is looking for (whether as an adult or a kid). And the old way for authors to get to their audience directly—by visiting schools and libraries—has been discovered by everyone, and it’s now more difficult to get those gigs and be considered special.

• Historical Fiction. I realized a couple of years ago that I was at a place in my career where I could start to concentrate on the kinds of books I really love. And being married to a history teacher for 21 years has made me more and more interested in learning about times and places I don’t already know about. And so many historical novels either cross over into crime fiction or deal with either politics or Royal Courts or Ecclesiastical issues that so I’ve spent a considerable amount of time finding and working on books set in times and places as disparate as 12^th Century Ireland, 16^th Century England AND France, 19^th Century Italy, pre WWI Russia and pre WWII Vienna, as well as Israel, Mongolia, Japan, Pre-Revolutionary New York and…you get the idea.

The issues here are that historical fiction is either crowded with titles (Henry VIII) or “too strange for the market” (even if it’s in the same location 100 years later). There is also a tendency for publishers to get gun shy when they have taken a big risk on an historical novel that doesn’t pan out, when there is popular wisdom that only a certain number of these titles will hit in a given year, and if one flops then every other book seen by that publisher will be compared to that one. Additionally, I’ve found in the past year that the pacing of so many of the historical novels I rep make for somewhat long books—it’s necessary not only to set the place but the time and where it is in history, and often a different voice. And as a result, editors will need to spend a longer time reading than they might with shorter books in other genres (or proposals in nonfiction). As a result, there is often a longer than comfortable time between submission and response to these books, which can play havoc on the rhythm of a sale. I’ve had more long-wait submissions in historical fiction than in any other genre, and it’s become a source of terrible frustration to my authors. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth it in the end, but it requires more patience and fortitude than in most kinds of books.

• Nonfiction: I got into nonfiction for two reasons: One old friend of mine came to me with her Work-Life Balance proposal, and because my authors tend to be both smart and in possession of day jobs they can write clearly and compelling about. These are the most straightforward books to work on, and their submissions tend to be of more reasonable length. If you had told me ten years ago that I would have a vigorous list of prescriptive books for (mostly) women about professional satisfaction, parenting, and small-I-inspiration, I would have been surprised. But not as surprised as if you’d told me that I would be pitching a proposal about the mission to Pluto—by the brilliant scientist who ran the mission—on the DAY his spacecraft flew by the Heart of Pluto and a photo of his mission would be above the fold on the front page of the New York Times.

So that is my list, with some relevant commentary on the market.

The past ten years have been fascinating. When I entered Writers House, after being in Baseball—with the Yankees (for God’s Sake), many people asked whether I was going to find publishing as exciting or interesting. And the truth is, while there were many great moments in baseball, the everyday life of my career in publishing has been more consistently happy and satisfying, even when I may be frustrated with a submission or displeased with an offer or wanting to tell off someone who may deserve it. The variety of books I’ve read, the fascinating people I’ve been able to interact with, the talent of the writers and editors and publicists and other agents. Man, it’s just so impressive.

And one of the places I was able to find a voice and meet people in has been Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room. Even if there were times I had to throw together a quickie couple of paragraphs on Tuesday at 11:30 after a long day at work and a night out, I had a great time talking mysteries and writing and business (and occasionally Bruce Springsteen). I get queries that talk about my columns, and I use both my own archives and some from my fellow Dead Guys in my class on publishing at NYU. So to Lynn, and Jessy, and Terri, and the many others, and most of all to my friend (and client) Jeff Cohen (hey, I get to acknowledge YOU for a change!), thanks so much for letting me be part of this terrific experiment in multiple-contributor blogging. I can’t wait to see what the next ten years bring—maybe we’ll have to have a reunion run, like an 80s metal band, and see where we’ve all landed. We can call it Mostly Dead. Which, as we all know, is still, if you work on it, alive.