Dear BookBiz Santa
By M.J. Rose | December 20, 2011 |
(Clarification: I’ve collected these requests from more than twenty authors I know – these are not my gripes about my own publishers- M.J. Rose)
Dear BookBiz Santa,
- Please give us sales numbers we can actually understand. Make royalty statements as clear as possible re: HOW MANY BOOKS we have actually SOLD.
- In the same vein, it would be nice to know more often than every 6 months how we’re doing sales-wise. And no, not just Bookscan numbers, which can at times report only up to 60% of our sales.
- We’re not crazy, please don’t treat us as if we are. If we seem upset at times, consider that this might have something to do with being in a career where we have very little control over whether our books are accepted, edited, publicized, distributed, promoted, reviewed or bought. We can work on a book for five years and the publisher can make decisions that will effectively kill it in five minutes. This tends to make the author a little tense.
- We know that every editor shepherds about 150 novels a year but each author only writes one. So when it comes out, could you think about picking up the phone and congratulating us? Or heaven forbid sending flowers. Or a bottle of the bubbly. (And thank you to those of us who already do this!)
- To you it’s just one more book, to us it’s about three years of work. We need to feel valued. We’re sorry that the money we were paid on signing doesn’t hold us over emotionally all year long. Writers can only write when they are emotionally full, so feed us please? If you like a story, let us know.
- Please don’t tell us that you are going to base your marketing efforts on how many Facebook fans or Twitter followers we have. The way those sites work – ony 20%- 30% of the people who have signed up to our pages or who follow even see our posts/tweets.
- Can we stop with the lies? No lies of omission. No lies of commission. Do not lie to us about how many ARC’s you are sending out. Do not lie to us about how many books you are shipping. Do not lie to us about running ads.
- We are people. We get hurt. We bleed. We cry. We scream. It’s our one and only career. Please give us a chance to help it along.
- Can you lower the amount of promotional money you use on the brand name writers? They’re already bestsellers, and they’ll continue to be bestsellers without the million dollar publicity campaigns. Could you throw some of that money to us?
- Isn’t it about time to end returns? Stripping and remaindering books is one of the stupidest practices in retail. Shelf times are becoming shorter, there’s no incentive to sell books from either the bookstore or the publisher sales reps, and the amount of money wasted is staggering.
- Can you keep us in the loop of how our book is doing? We have a vested interest in its success, and we can do more to help it succeed than you might think.
- And last but certainly not least…
isn’t it time to raise the royalties on ebooks! You know it’s not fair. We know it’s not fair.
Love,
M.J. …and more than twenty authors
What’s on your Dear BookBiz Santa list?
Photos courtesy Flickr’s katerha, and M.J. Rose and Santa
M.J. Rose is the international and NYT’s bestselling author of several novels and two non-fiction books on marketing. In 2005 she founded the first marketing company for authors, AuthorBuzz, and is the co-founder of BookTrib and Peroozal. She’s a founding member of ITW.
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MJ,
Clever post. And here is one more for the list from me:
Dear Bookbiz Santa, please publish my book.
Thanks again and happy holidays.
Oh, this comes to me at such a perfect time! Thank you, MJ.
In addition to the humor and truth in this post, it’s such a good reminder that even with the bumps and bruises we suffer as writers, we have each other. Y’all are a mighty fine group of people, even when you’re all black and blue and Band-Aided up.
Happy holidays! May Santa or God or The Publishing Industry or The USPS or Amazon.com bring us ALL what we want most.
Dear Book Biz Santa,
Can you please suggest to authors like J.A. Konrath that its time to dial down the rhetoric and stop telling the rest of us we’re idiots for sticking with with traditional publishing? We actually have made reasoned decisions. We do know what we are doing. We have editors who make our books better, pr depts who get us reviews, sales forces that get our books in stores, marketing departments who create ads and run them. Many of us not only get nice advances, we get steady royalties. That we want to build our careers or manage them differently does not make us fools. Why the need to build himself/themselves up by trying to pull us down? Methinks there might be too much protesting going on in indie land. Santa. Can you get them to mind their own business for a while and lay off the vitriol?
I’m loving the diversity of the comments so far. This post reminds me that the work of writing a book is like the Energizer Bunny … it keeps going and going and going. Thanks Santa!
Dear Book Biz Santa,
Can you please help my publisher understand that my blog and PR efforts take almost as much time as writing the book and the chances of me finishing a sequel in less than a year are close to nil! Could you also put the kebash on snarky tweets about writers from certain literary agents. Even if they don’t rep us it makes their whole industry seem disreputable.
Dear Santa,
Can you make my 7th rewrite be the ONE?! Sprinkle some Elf dust on my ending or something, please. Oh, and while you’re at it, would you mind beta reading and copy editing for me?
You know, when you have the time. (Dec. 24th would work, as everyone knows you have one of those time-stretcher thingies.)
David,
Nice list!
Although I’m published with a small publisher, I also self-publish. Part of the beauty of self-publishing is that I get to know how many books I’ve sold and can see my sales progress in real time. That would take care of 1, 2, and 11.
Regarding #6, hey, 20% of 500 is more than 20% of 100. So it’s not a bad idea to have more social media friends…just a thought. ;0)
If Publishing Santa doesn’t come through with this I might go the other direction and sacrifice a goat.
OP–That’s a “nice” way of giving it to them.
MJ, you almost make the case for self-publishing! Then Steve makes the case for traditional. I’m sticking with Jonathan Maberry, I think he’s got it figured out.
Well, hi all…I’m just getting into this game of being a writer. My first novel is in its, let’s just say gizzilionth, rewrite. I used to work in a large independent bookstore. I know first-hand about the stripping because I did it. Made me sad to look at the piles and, yet, I went on to become a writer. I hope to become an author one day. Preparation and a frank discussion are necessary. Don’t like the nitty gritty, but now I know more about what happens. Thanks for being open.
Great post. Agree, agree, agree! C’mon book-biz Santa, make our day!
MJ, your post reaffirms that we writers are a tribe with shared joys and frustrations. Thanks for airing.
PS: Jonathan, I celebrate you thinking outside the box. Hmm, you’re a writer unboxed. Sound familiar?
BookBiz Santa Workshop
North Manhattan, NY HOHOHO
Dec. 21, 2011
Dear M.J.,
Reviewed your wish list. No can do.
Why don’t you ask for something that BookBiz Santa can actually deliver? I mean, frequent and accurate royalty reports? When someone figures out how to pull together the data from a zillion different vendors, PLUS foresee exact returns, I’ll be happy to do that.
As if.
Lower the amount of promo money given to best sellers? Uh, why? To spend it on a useless-but-ego-stroking ad in the New York Times Sunday Book Review for some midlist author?
Yeah, right.
Raise e-book royalties? Not on your life. For years–nay, decades–nay, centuries–we had to lose money on 80% of the books we published. Margins were razor-thin. Now AT LAST we got some honkin’ fat profits. The unit cost of e-books is, thank god, about the same as a stick of gum. And now that we FINALLY have a way to make REAL MONEY you…what?…want us to give it to authors?
Ha!
“We bleed”?? Awww, boo-hoo. Try bleeding red ink for three years, see you YOU feel. (Yeah, Hachette did okay with Twilight but I’m not Hachette, okay?)
Sorry, M.J., you caught ole B.B. Santa at a bad moment. Not feelin’ too generous this year. Of course, it looks like a good Christmas season is shaping up. And who knows–? Perhaps the economy will even turn around in time for the election next November. Could happen.
If you’d care to resubmit a revised wish list next year, I’ll be happy to take a look. Until then, Happy H-Days!
All best,
B.B. Santa
For the record, Donald, the very last thing in the whole world I’d do with money to market a mid list author is take out an ad in the NYT BR.
Totally kidding around, M.J. Enjoyed your post and wondered what B.B. Santa would say in reply. He’s been pretty cranky this year, I find!
[…] M.J. Rose doesn’t stop there. She has nine more Dear BookBiz Santa points on her note at Writer Unboxed. And if I were her publishers, I don’t think I’d […]
These are not my requests to my current publisher- these are requests I’ve gathered from 20 authors about the biz in general!!!
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