As I said earlier, the most basic purpose of book promotion is to let people know that your book exists, why they might want to pick up a copy, and where they can get it.

Some authors aren't keen on promotion. They might make a brief announcement on their blog, webpage, or mailing list, then put their noses back to grindstone, focusing on The Work. They rely mostly on the kindness of strangers, friends, and their publishers to get the word out.

Many other writers spend countless hours talking their books up at conventions and on message boards. This tactic can work well for gregarious authors with enough social depth perception to avoid becoming annoying. And if they fundamentally enjoy chat-and-post, the time involved may be an energizing boost that enables them to get back to The Work with renewed vigor and enthusiasm.

However, many writers are introverts. Shy, some painfully so. Chatting up strangers at conventions leaves them nervous and exhausted, and even making unobtrusive promo posts on message boards makes them feel tired and uncomfortable.

A shy writer at a convention often ends up needing a few hours of "quiet time" between panels. Sometimes, gin is involved. Or good Scotch if the ruggedly-coiffed Richard Dansky's been by to commiserate and fill her glass. Either way, she sits there in the comforting dimness of the hotel room gathering her nerves. Slight boredom sets in. She grabs the freebie bag she got at registration and pulls out the souvenir program book. If it looks nice, she starts to thumb through it. In between the fan articles and dedications, she sees shiny advertisements for books from big-name authors.

She touches the ads wistfully. So many nice, pretty books adorned with blurbs, the covers doing all the talking to potential readers ... she wishes her publisher would take out some ads for her books.

And then she has a thought: maybe she could take out some ads on her own?

The good news is, she (or her publisher) can! The bad news is, an ad campaign will take varying amounts of time and money -- a lot of time if you don't have much money, or a lot of money if you don't want to (or can't) spend time on things like ad creation and statistics analysis. But the good news on top is that smart, well-targeted ads actually do work.

Many writers first consider taking out ads in convention program books or in magazines they read. If you want to suppport the publication or convention in question, taking out an ad may almost be a no-brainer, especially if you've already made enough writing money that you're worried about owing taxes at the end of the year. An ad is a legitimate business expense, and you'd be paying money out to the IRS anyhow, so why not help out projects you like by renting adspace? In that light, the fact that the ads might raise awareness of your book and increase sales is just the cherry on the sundae. If you're working with a publisher of any size, they probably already have ads you can request through email and then just send along to the publication.

But if you don't have a tax burden to defray, and if you don't particularly care about the welfare of the convention or magazine in question, you'll want to give things a harder look.

The problem with print ads is that:

1. Unless you take out just one ad at a time, you never really know if a specific ad is working, unless you get the oh-so-rare message from a new reader: "I saw an ad in Weird Tales and I bought your book and wow I really love it!" Otherwise, you're reduced to sending a bunch of "Are we there yet?" type messages to your publisher to see if there's been any uptick in sales.


2. Print ads put a burden of memory and action on the reader that probably won't end in a sale unless it's reinforced with word-of-mouth from friends or a bookstore employee, etc.

In his post "What The Nuns Didn't Teach Me", Richard Dansky talks about what he and other book store clerks observed as the Pattern of Picking Purchase:

1. If the book was face-out and the cover was appealing, the reader might pick it up.


2. If they picked it up, they might scan the front cover for the title, the author, and any blurbs that might have made it to that side of the spine.


3. If they liked the cover, they might flip it over to read the back-of-book blurb.


4. If they liked the back-of-book blurb, then they might be interested enough to crack the book open and read a few pages.


5. And if they liked those few pages, they might then buy the book.

Many people lose interest and put the book aside at each of those steps. Just think of the front-end attrition for people who glance at a magazine ad for a book and think, "Hey, that sounds interesting." Those people then have to actually remember the name of the book, then get in cars and go to bookstores, where things go crashing to a halt if it's a title the store doesn't carry.

It seems to me that the Web is a much more reliable place for readers to find books, and so Web advertisements can reduce many of the barriers between learning about a book and deciding to pick up a copy.


>> Go on to An Author's Introduction to Advertising - Part 2

Labels: advertising, bookstores, publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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(<< Go Back to Part One)

Some people hate advertising in general and despise Web ads in particular. I can certainly sympathize; my inbox overfloweth with spam. I fondly remember the good ol' days of Netscape 1.0 when the Web was a cozy, ad-free place mostly populated with hobbyists and college students. And I'm well aware that Corporate America has done damage around the world by promoting mindless consumerism, harmful goods and pernicious social and sexual stereotypes through advertising; kids are particularly vulnerable. For instance, researchers have found young girls often develop eating disorders the more they're exposed to advertising (references). Google ads are filled to the brim with scams that prey on the naive (I personally see red every time I see a vanity publishing scam).

But your book isn't a scam, is it? You worked as hard as you can on it, poured your life into it. It's not wrong to tell people about it.

Will your book get negative backlash if you take out a web ad? If it's an attractive, honest ad, and you don't, say, advertise your erotic horror novel on a children's cartoon site, probably not.

But there's still a risk. Most people who hate web ads with a passion do the logical thing and install ad-blocking software, regardless of whether this hurts the sites they enjoy or not. A few of them will condemn any product -- good or bad -- that is promoted through advertising. They condemn any site -- good or bad -- that hosts ads.

So if you think the true target audience for your book is mostly composed of pedantic, judgmental lit snobs, then yeah, you might want to avoid ads altogether. And if that's the case, "Hey, guys, my new book came out!"-type message board promos aren't going to pass muster with that crowd, either. You're probably stuck waiting for word-of-mouth to materialize.

Fortunately for me, those folks probably wouldn't ever pick up my humor collection, so the publisher and I decided to give web ads a try through the Project Wonderful system. PW mainly runs on web comics sites but also delivers ads to speculative fiction magazine sites like SFReader and Greatest Uncommon Denominator.

It's been a learning process for sure -- one big thing I learned is that web comics readers actually do buy "real" books. Another thing is that actually paying for ad space often yields better results than participating in free banner exchanges. Most people who host an exchange banner stick it down at the bottom of their pages where hardly anyone will see it. Conversely, people who are participating in Project Wonderful often put the ad slots in highly visible locations so that they'll be worth more. The trick is to hit a good balance between cost and exposure.

Anyhow, since the publisher's refined his tactics, monthly sales for my book have quadrupled. There are a lot of elements you have to orchestrate to have a successful web ad:

1. You need an attractive ad.

Every ad system allows you to run text ads, but text ads in my experience are a usually a waste of time and money. People just tune them out. Graphical ads do much better. Colorful ads do better than monochrome ads, and ads that move do better than static ads. This is all Psychology 101 stuff -- we're wired to pay attention to movement. The key is to avoid obnoxious colors/movement. Having an ad move too slowly to catch the eye is bad, but setting its frames to flash by too quickly to read is worse. We've all seen those horrible mortgage ads featuring panting sows and dancing people from the uncanny valley. Obnoxious. Avoid.

Some sites are so put off by moving ads that they'll only take static ads. Furthermore, different sites have different sized slots (see PW's templates page for more info). So, you'll need multiple ad sizes, and this is where graphic design skills and proficiency with programs like Photoshop and Adobe Image Ready come in handy (GIMP is free and great for static images, but I've found making animated ads is far easier with Image Ready). If you don't have these kinds of skills, and if your publisher can't provide ready-made ads, you'll have to hire a graphic designer. If your budget is limited, at the very least get a banner ad and a leaderboard ad. A square ad wouldn't hurt, either.

Aside from fitting into different ad spaces, having a variety of ads at your disposal lets you see what works and what doesn't. A specific ad might get a listless response at one site, but work very well on another. So, get multiple ads made if you can.

What should you put in an ad, or tell your graphic designer to put in the ad? The title, cover art, and author names are mandatory -- you want these things prominently displayed so that potential readers who don't click through might recognize the book and pick it up if they see it in a store later. Short, lively review excerpts are good -- no more than a dozen words in a single frame. Less if possible.

It helps if your ad has a "hook". Why would people would want to read your book? Is it funny? Exciting? Scary? Sexy? Informative? Try to convey that in the ad. The goal here, other than to make people aware that the book exists, is to entice them to actually click on the ad to learn more about it.

2. You need an ad host.

Some popular book sites, like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books or Ralan.com, provide their own ad hosting and offer flat rates for buying ad that will appear on their site for a set period of time, usually a month at minimum. While these $50-for-a-month type arrangements can be a good deal, you're locked in -- you can't usually swap an ad out for a different one if it performs poorly, and you surely can't cancel it and demand a refund unless the site goes down or there's another problem on the host's end.

Furthermore, you'll experience click-through attrition on ads that stay up a while on sites that have a regular daily readership. You might get 100 clicks the first day, 75 the next, then 50 the next day, and so on until you're only getting a few clicks each day toward the end of your ad month.

So, there's a lot to be said for sites that take ads through auctions like the system Project Wonderful offers. A banner ad slot on a popular site might be going for $50 a day ... but my publisher doesn't have to buy the space for an entire day. He can just bid up enough to secure the ad during lunchtime, spend a few dollars to get a couple thousand exposures and a couple hundred click-throughs, and then cancel the ad and let someone else have their turn in the slot.

Once you're buying space through an auction system, you'll start considering taking out ads on sites that are new to you. Use basic common sense in evaluating them. Does the site get a lot of traffic? Are the site's visitors likely to be interested in the genre you're writing in? Do many of them appear to be readers? Are the ad slots featured in visible places, and are they limited so that the page isn't crawling with competing ads?

3. The ad needs to go someplace useful

What do you want to achieve with the ad? Do you want to promote a particular book, or do you want to promote your whole catalog? Whichever you want to do, make sure that the page the ad sends people to is attractive, informative, easy to navigate, and loads quickly. Good review blurbs are a must. Free samples of the book are extremely useful - few people are willing to take a chance on an author they've never heard of before if they don't have the chance to read some of it first.

In my experience, you get the best results if you send people to a place where they can read excerpts and then actually buy the book, such as its page on a major, consumer-trusted seller such as Amazon or Chapters. This works best if the book page has at least a couple of positive reviews featured on that page. So, when you or your publisher are sending out books for review, don't ignore people who mainly post on Amazon or other bookstore sites. They do have value.

Barnes and Noble and Amazon pages also have additional value in that they provide sales rankings. While these rankings involve a lot of secret voodoo and are hard to translate into real numbers, they do give you an idea if a book has actually sold copies or not that day. And being able to track sales greatly protects you from click fraud and other shenanigans from dishonest ad hosts.

4. You need to monitor your ad's performance

Okay, you don't have to monitor an ad's performance. If you're awash in cash but not much time, you can just throw money into ads and hope for the best. But if your budget is limited, it helps to pay attention to what works and what doesn't.

You need to know some jargon going in. A CPM is not a type of missile, and CPC is not an ozone-destroying chemical. CPM is the cost for 1000 loads of the ad on the site's pages. A raw CPM refers to overall page loads; a unique CPM refers to loads presented to individual visitors as determined by their internet address. CPC stands for "cost per click". Paying for ads based on pure click-throughs is a bad idea (see the next paragraph) but watching the number of click-throughs in conjunction with the number of impressions is helpful for determining if the ad is reaching an interested audience or not.

A lot of potential advertisers are concerned about click fraud -- that is, a single person spoofing different IP addresses to make it seem like real site visitors are actually clicking through when they aren't. A slightly lower-tech version of this is a webmaster who's enlisted minions to click on new ads as they appear on the site. This is a legitimate worry. But if the site is high-traffic and it seems legitimate (ie, not a link farm) you probably don't have to worry too much, particularly if you give the ad a test run and see that it's generating results in terms of your book's sales ranking. We use Titlez to keep track of Amazon rankings, and it's been very handy for the purpose.

Remember Richard Dansky's observations about potential reader attrition? That applies just as much to web ads, but at least there are fewer steps for them to go through. Of the people who see an ILDB web ad on a high-traffic science fiction comic site, maybe 2% or 3% might click on it. Of the people who click through, another 0.5%-3% might actually buy the book then and there (the statistics I have indicate that more people apparently come back later and buy the book from another vendor, or put it on their wishlist, or bookmark the site, etc., but for direct sales it's between 0.5%-3% depending on how the wind's blowing and if Mars is ascendant and Venus is in the House of Pancakes).

By my calculations, if 5,000 people on the aforementioned comic site load up a web ad, 2-5 of them will end up clicking through and buying the book in one fell swoop. So if an ad goes out to 2,000 web surfers and the Amazon numbers don't improve a little that day, we know the ad isn't working.

Ultimately, you need to run some test ads, then crunch numbers. How much is a single sale worth to you? You need to know this before you can go further. Figure out how many clicks and exposures you probably need to get to earn that single sale (and bear in mind that some days you'll do all the right things and still not get a bite). If the ad on the site is going to cost more than you'd get for that sale -- don't buy it.

I've seen Facebook ad hosts bragging about a fifty-cent CPM - that is, a buck for 2000 ad impressions. In my experience, that's actually pretty bad, unless the site's visitors are mainly composed of the sort of people who buy the kind of books you're selling. My publisher generally ditches an ad that gets worse than a $0.30 CPM, unless it's highly-targeted. It's entirely possible to find CPMs of 10 cents or even less in Project Wonderful.

Likewise, he looks for low costs-per-click. More than 10 cents is bad, 3 cents is good, one cent is awesome and if you find an ad at that rate, you should ride it for a while to see what happens. At three cents per click, my publisher spends $3.00 to have 100 people hit the book's page. If just one person buys the book, he's broken even; if a statistically-probable 3 people buy it, I've personally earned enough in royalties to go get a burrito.

And that's pretty cool.

I hope you've found this introduction to web advertising helpful. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to this, so it's all pretty daunting at first, and it's definitely work, but it can generate good results. And you don't have to stand up in front of a crowded room of strangers or drive five hours to do it.

Labels: advertising, bookstores, publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

Abuse of the first sale doctrine is fairly rampant in the small-press bookselling world. This is a real sore spot with me, and is going to take some explaining, so get comfortable.

You have possibly encountered on-line booksellers who offer copies of books (often books they did not themselves publish) for outlandish prices. I myself have seen copies of my Cemetery Dance collection Things Left Behind going for as much as $1,750.00 (which, by the way, is a good deal more than I received for writing it; not bitching about what Rich Chizmar paid me for it, not at all, but I would dearly love to have more than one copy of my first book but that ain't gonna happen because I can't afford the prices many places are charging for it). The sold-out release of Borderlands 5 turned up at several on-line auctions within days of its publication with bids starting -- starting -- at between $200.00 and $500.00.

There are some who mistakenly think this sort of thing is illegal; it isn't. It is allowed under what's know as the first sale doctrine.

According to Section 109 of the U.S. Copyright Act, whoever first purchases the physical copy of a copyrighted work (a book, a DVD, VHS tape, CD, etc.) has the right to do with that copy whatever they want, including transfer ownership of that physical copy in any manner they choose. They can give it away, sell it to some place like Half-Price Books, or offer it up for on-line auction. The doctrine deals with the physical object, not the intellectual or artistic expression contained within. For more info, read Lucy's article "Why you can rent a novel but not a music CD".

Here's what pisses me off about this: there are some booksellers and individuals who will purchase and hoard multiple copies of a book with no concern for the work, the author, or the work's fans -- they couldn't give less of shit about the quality of the stories or the novel. What they're concerned with is obtaining as many physical copies as possible because (as was the case with Borderlands 5) a particular book might sell out very quickly, and they, in turn, can sell their copies at a price that is sometimes as much as 700% higher than what they paid for it originally.

When confronted with their unapologetic avarice (and avarice it is, make no mistake about that), they will inevitably defend their actions by claiming that they've every right to turn a profit on their investment...and then probably have the nerve to bitch about having to pay four bucks a gallon for gas because OPEC are a bunch of greedy bastards. What's wrong with this picture?

Understand something: I am not condemning specialty-press publishers like, say, Donald Grant, who produce exquisite (and justifiably expensive) limited editions of books geared toward book collectors -- those rare birds who have a deep and abiding respect both for the physical object and the work contained within and who, it should go without saying, can afford these editions. Nor am I condemning any specialty-press publisher who at a later date offers up copies of a book they've previously published at a higher price: after all, it's their product, and if they can find a buyer for their product, more power to 'em.

I am also not condemning those who offer up for auction or re-sale books with the intent of using the money to assist others who are struggling with financial hardship or to fund charity drives.

My problem lies with those who buy books solely for the purpose of re-selling them at obscenely inflated prices so as to fatten their personal pockets just because they can.

No, it isn't illegal, but in my book it is (and always will be) reprehensible and immoral. Which is why I do not buy books from sellers who engage in this practice, be they on-line or in the dealers' room at a con. As far as I'm concerned, it's price gouging if I see a book selling at more than twice its original asking price. I'm not completely unreasonable about this; I realize that booksellers have to make a certain amount of profit to stay in business and cover basic operating costs, so doubling the price of a sold-out or out-of-print book strikes me as equitable and fair, but beyond that -- I walk away.

And God help 'em if they have the nerve to ask me to sign any books for them so they can jack up the price even more.

Labels: bookstores, GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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Just to recap, in my last post on this subject I detailed my first two suggestions for promoting your book:

1. Write the best book you can.


2. Don't get stuck with a bad cover.

The things I'm discussing in this post are mainly of concern to authors and editors with small-press books. So, if you've had the good fortune to score a deal with a big house, you can skip this one.

3a: Make sure your book's listed at Amazon.

Once the cover's set, check with your publisher to make sure the book will be listed on Amazon.com. If your publisher is a small specialty press, a little (or a lot) of wheedling may be necessary. But if you've got more than 300 books to sell after preorders have been accounted for, it's best to get the book listed on Amazon.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Amazon.com; some of you may have a hate-hate relationship with them. If so, I sympathize completely. Amazon demands a 55% commission on top of account setup fees, and they've been bullying POD publishers into using their Booksurge service instead of LSI and other printers. Amazon is the 80,000-pound gorilla of book sales, and they've been taking full advantage of their status, often to the detriment of small publishing companies.

So, I understand a small-press publisher's desire to tell Amazon to go blow; the publisher's got their own site and can sell books through their own secure shopping cart just fine, so distribution's covered, right?

The problem is, for many prospective readers, if your book isn't on Amazon, it's as if it just doesn't exist. Your book's being available at the publisher's site won't help if a reader has never heard of the publisher before and is therefore reluctant to release their credit card info to them.

So: if your book's not on Amazon, you will lose potential sales. Also, because so many other sites grab book information directly from Amazon's feeds, your book's absence from that site means it will also be absent from a bunch of other sites.

(Side note: because book information posted on Amazon gets distributed far and wide, double-check that the publisher is posting accurate, complete information about your book from the start. The publisher can make changes later, but I've noticed changes often don't propagate to Amazon.uk and other sites. It's better if the book description is correct from the beginning).

I'll be discussing Amazon more in future posts, but for now, the basic goal is to make sure your book is listed. If your book is a small-run limited edition from a specialty press, the cost of selling the book on Amazon might not make sense. But if you've got more than a couple hundred books to sell, get the book listed on Amazon (and price it to compensate for their commission), or else be prepared for slow sales.

3b: Make sure your book's listed in WorldCat.

WorldCat is a gigantic database of books in libraries around the planet. WorldCat gives you basic publishing and authorship details about a book and tells you how you can borrow it for free through Interlibrary Loan. If you're the least bit of a library geek, you already know it's very cool, and you probably already wanted to be in WorldCat just on general principle.

If your book's not on Amazon, getting it listed on WorldCat is important. Why? WorldCat is the other main source of information about books that websites like Bookmooch and LibraryThing refer to. It cuts to one of the most basic goals of promotion: making sure potential readers know your book exists. Getting your book listed in as many places as possible is part of that goal, and WorldCat helps you achieve it.

Furthermore, if your book's not in WorldCat, to the librarians of the world it's as if your book just doesn't exist. And since librarians can be some of an author's strongest allies, you want to make sure they can easily reference your work.

How do you get a listing in WorldCat? In theory it's pretty simple: just make sure that at least one Worlcat-member library immediately gets a copy of your book when it comes out.

If you're an established author, there's a good chance your local library already knows about you and is planning to order a copy of your latest book (and if your local library doesn't know about you, shine your shoes, brush your teeth and go make friends with the library staff).

But if this is your first book, or if your local library's suffering from funding cuts, chances are good you will need to donate copies of your work if you want specific libraries to carry it. On the plus side, you can write the donated books off your taxes. On the down side, this usually isn't quite as simple as popping a copy of your book in an envelope and mailing it to the library (if you do this, your unsolicited book may go straight into the box of books culled for the next library book sale).

First, find out who the acquisition librarian is if you haven't done so already. Drop him or her a polite, professional email to tell them about your book and to ask if the library would like a copy for their collection. Make sure to mention that you are a local author and that your book is not self-published. Otherwise, if you and your publisher are unknown to the librarian, he or she is very likely to assume you're self-published and the answer is probably going to be "thanks, but no thanks."

Libraries have only so much room on their shelves, and to avoid being inundated with amateur work most patrons will never check out, many have explicit policies against accepting self-published books. Some may send an email back to you asking for evidence that your small-press publisher has produced a certain quantity of books; don't take this personally. Just politely send them back the information they've asked for (above all: don't piss off your local librarian).

Be prepared for a "thanks, but no thanks" response no matter what; a library may be in the midst of downsizing their collection or undergoing renovation and they may not be acquiring new books. Again, don't take this personally; follow up with a thanks-for-your-time email and query the next library on your list.

Once you've moved past the probably-small list of local libraries who'll look favorably on your work because you're a local author, you'll want to have a more formal press release to send out to promote your book. But to put together a good press release, first you'll need some good book blurbs and review excerpts ... but that's a topic worthy of its own post, and I'm out of time.

Labels: bookstores, publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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My husband was recently interviewed by a reporter from his hometown newspaper. He got a ton of website traffic from the feature they subsequently ran on him, and he was contacted by old friends he hadn't heard from in 20 years, and that's all good.

However, the staffer who interviewed him -- a reporter who is not an intern, and who has written dozens of features for the paper -- asked a truly jaw-dropping question: "So your books are self-published?"

This was the second question she gave him; she asked it in the same tone as the first, which was to ask if he was from Newark. In other words, it wasn't really a question, but more a statement of perceived fact she was double-checking.

This question floored us because:

1. It showed she hadn't done basic preparation for the interview and taken two minutes to do a Google search and find out that he's professionally published 20 books, etc.
2. It showed she profoundly misunderstood the process of becoming a professional fiction writer.

Gary, being the nice guy he is, gently told her that pro fiction writers don't self-publish and explained why. And he thought that would be the end of it, until he saw the feature in the paper and read this line:

"The author has never self-published because a lot of book stores will not carry self-published authors and it also can be expensive."

The reporter was likely on a strict word limit, so her including that line struck us as strange and unnecessary. In subsequent discussion on Livejournal, our friend Mehitobel made a comment that I think nailed it on the head:

"See, that's just a weird-ass line. I can see someone ignorant of publishing, or even so jaded with local author profiles that they expect a local author to have self-published, asking about it in an interview. But the line quoted above from the article suggests to me that the reporter may actually view self-published books as the norm, better, or more ambitious. It's like she has it backwards."

It's possible the reporter had been listening starry-eyed to some life coach who told her he'd sold a ton of self-published books and that self-publishing is the right and proper thing for an entrepreneurial spirit to do. If you are a self-help guru, evangelist, TV star or some other celebrity, sure, you can self-publish a book as an adjunct to your public speaking engagements and do very well. And independent comics artists have long been admired for DIY books. But if you're a non-celebrity trying to become a pro fiction writer, self-publishing is more likely to hurt than help.

I don't consider self-publishing to be synonymous with vanity publishing. Vanity presses are scam artists preying on the hopes and dreams of the naive; however there are places like Lulu.com that are straightforward, useful print on demand services.

I don't consider writers who choose to self-publish their work to be "cheating" or lacking in intelligence or moral fiber or anything like that. Want to make a book of love poems as a Christmas gift for your sweetie? Planning to put together a calendar or anthology to support a charity? Have you written an RPG rulebook or other game supplement you want to get into peoples' hands? After you've done your homework, does Lulu.com or a competitor seem to be the most economical way to get your project into print? Go for it.

But if you've got a novel or even a short story collection and you aspire to a larger audience than your circle of friends, you really ought to reconsider.

I know several people who've self-published poetry and fiction books. They're nice people. Most of them did it because they were frustrated by the long, tedious process of submitting their work to and being rejected by traditional publishers. I can certainly sympathize with their frustration.

But 99.99% of the time, if your goal is to establish yourself as a legitimate author and put yourself on a track to a career as a writer, self-publishing is going to be a costly mistake. The only time it's not a mistake is if you're an experienced publishing professional and you know you have the resources to produce, promote, and distribute a good book that can adequately compete with the 400 other books that are published every day.

But people who write pro-quality books almost never have to turn to self-publishing; they generally only do it if they have very specific, well-considered publishing plans in mind and want complete control of their projects. If a pro has a book that the big houses deem unmarketable, he or she can usually find a small press willing to get the manuscript into print.

The average advance for a novel is $5K or thereabouts. It might take you months or even years to finish your first book. It could also take you years to squirrel away that much money if you work an entry-level job. So let's think of finishing a publishable novel as the equivalent of having slaved away to save up $5,000.

If you told me you were taking your $5,000 and going to Las Vegas, I'd probably ask if you were going to splurge on a fun vacation.

If you replied, "No, I need more money; my bank doesn't pay enough interest, and the stock market's too darned complicated. I'm gonna hit the casinos and turn this five grand into fifty grand!", I'd think it was a phenomenally bad idea and try to talk you out of it. Yes, you could get lucky at the slot machines and come home with a fat roll of cash, but the odds are you'd come home hung over and broke.

If on the other hand I knew you were a statistics prodigy with an eidetic memory who'd been consistently winning regional poker games, I'd think you had a real chance. If you then told me how you were sure you could keep the casinos from figuring out you could count cards, but knew you might be wrong and detailed a plan to escape quickly and safely with your winnings, I'd think it was a daring scheme and congratulate you.

The notion of being a rebel writer self-publishing your way to grand authorial success is as bright and shiny as Vegas. But unless you're very talented or very lucky, it's just not going to pay off in a career.

I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir here. But based on the reporter's questions, some people might need to read this.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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N-Wing says According to this and this, the two biggest book costs are distribution and printing, both of which are essentially $0 for electronic formats. In a very small sampling, some ebooks were cheaper and some more expensive than paperbacks. Lets mention this greed thing again.

My reply: I'd have to know which ebooks you're referring to before I could posit a reason for the price difference. A few publishers price electronic versions and print versions exactly the same so as to not undercut print sales. However, many publishers do give their e-books lower prices than their print books.

But the price points are a bit irrelevant, because ebooks have largely been failures except when you're dealing with romance, erotica, porn, and technical documentation. Romance/erotica/porn readers tend to consume a whole lot of books, and e-books are cheaper and psychologically easier to discard than paper books. Plus, e-book readers provide the ultimate brown paper wrapper to prevent the other people on the commuter train from seeing garish covers featuring vast tracts of mantitty or heaving cleavage. Technical documentation ebooks sell well because the people who buy them mostly need tech books for quick, specific reference and don't intend to read large sections in one sitting as they would with novels or long nonfiction.

But, sales show that most readers of other forms of fiction and nonfiction prefer to buy books as physical paper objects. This may change in the future if better, cheaper ebook devices become available, but so far, the fastest way to produce a book that almost nobody will read is to release it in ebook format. Yes, some people enjoy reading long works on their computers; most demonstrably do not.

My first story collection was an ebook entitled Blood Magic which cost $3 (which fairly represented the cost of cover art, layout, etc.) as a download on Fictionwise and $6 in CD format (which fairly represented the additional labor/materials involved in putting the CD version together). My current book is a trade paperback that costs $18.95 at most places. You would think that a $3 collection would sell way better than a $19 collection. However, in the 6 months that Sparks and Shadows has been available, it has vastly outsold Blood Magic, which was available for 5 years. I've heard from a lot of other writers who've had similar results. I've also heard from publishers who got started doing electronic editions but who turned to print after they kept getting messages from customers who said they'd buy more if only the books weren't so expensive to print out.

Labels: bookstores, publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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(Go back to Part One: Why New Books Are So Expensive or Part Two: Why new textbooks are so expensive)

spiregrain says According to Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, printing and binding a 100 page book costs $1, which is less than the admin cost of lending and taking back a library book. See here for what this might mean for book sales and lending models for public domain books.

My reply: It would be awesome if small press books could be produced for $1 a copy. Based on what I've seen, though, a 100-page perfect-bound book (that is, a paperback with a spine) on decent paper done through a reputable POD print shop will run $2.40-$2.75 per copy, depending on things like setups and proof changes. This is assuming the book has a glossy color cover and a B&W interior. More pages equals a higher per-book cost, of course.

If the publisher were able to order books in large volume, he could get the desired perfect-bound books for a cheaper per-book price from an offset printer -- but the publisher would have to order a minimum of 5,000 copies to even begin to get the per-book price down below $2.50 a copy.

To get it down around $1, he'd have to order 20,000 or so. Aside from requiring an investment of $20,000 from the get-go, that's a heck of a lot of books to store and process. Most small presses are 1-to-5-person operations and they don't have warehouse space, nor the funds with which to rent any.

And then there's the issue of being able to sell all those books and recoup the printing investment. The average small press short story anthology sells 150-500 copies. A fiction collection or first novel from a literary writer published by a university or specialty press may comfortably sell 1000-3000 copies. An established, award-winning literary poet who gets his or her collection used as part of the curriculum of college poetry classes can probably sell 1000-1500 copies; most other poets sell far more modestly. So, 20,000-copy print runs just aren't sustainable for many book projects, and so $1 books just don't happen.

On the other hand, the publisher could produce 100-page B&W saddle-stapled 5.5"x8" chapbooks on his own for less than $1 a copy if he considers his own labor to be free. This will require ready access to layout software, a copy machine and the proper folding/stapling equipment or an actual booklet-making machine (some models run about $10,000 new). The publisher will also need lots of time and a fairly large room dedicated to his assembling and storing the books. Chapbooks are most cost-effective if the publisher works for a company that owns a big copy machine and he or she can negotiate with that employer to bring in his/her own paper and toner to do print runs.

While the resulting booklets may have a charmingly DIY look, they are not going to be aesthetically competitive with perfect-bound books with glossy color covers. And it's hard to generate even 500 copies of a book this way. I've known several small-press publishers who started out doing chapbooks and 'zines by hand; most all of them eventually got tired of the labor involved and switched to using commercial offset printers or POD when they could.

(Go on to Part 4: Book distribution and printing cost too much. Why don't publishers switch to e-books?)

Labels: bookstores, publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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(Go back to Part One to read about the mass market paperback pricing mentioned here)

I've heard from a couple of people who don't believe that the economics mentioned in Part One work for textbook prices.

I look at the biology textbooks I've used -- which have been massive, sturdy hardbacks with lots and lots of illustrations and photographs (pro photographers expect to get paid) and color ink and slick paper -- and I see pretty high production/printing cost right off the bat.

Specialist nonfiction of any kind pays much better than fiction, and publishers have to pay more to interest a professor in producing a textbook that will take a lot of his or her energy and time away from teaching and research (in some cases, choosing to write a textbook may actually harm a prof's career because a textbook doesn't "count" the same as other scholarly publications that may take much less time to write). The publisher might, for instance, have to recoup an advance of $40,000 or so across 5,000 copies, and I don't think it's greedy to expect $40K for authoring a book that takes a lot of expertise and several years to write. And finally, distribution will still be expensive no matter what kind of book you're producing.

According to the National Association of College Stores (NACS), Collegiate Retailing Industry, Higher Education Retailing Market, the breakdown of each $1 of an average new textbook's price goes like this:

Paper and printing: 32.1 cents
Distribution: 22.9 cents
Marketing: 15.3 cents
Author's income: 11.5 cents
Shipping: 1.3 cents
Publisher's operations: 9.9 cents
Publisher's income: 7.0 cents

So in the case of textbooks, printing costs more than distribution, and marketing and the author get the other big hunks of the cheese. The publisher ends up making about $5 profit from each copy of a $70 textbook, which costs about $22.50 to print. Percentage-wise that's not hugely different from what you get with a mass-market paperback.

(Go on to Why can't most publishers print books for $1? or Book distribution and printing cost too much. Why don't publishers switch to e-books?)

Labels: bookstores, publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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The other day, I was in Barnes and Noble when I overheard a college student in the literature aisle say, "I'm not paying twenty bucks for this!" followed by the slap of an 80-page poetry collection being forcefully returned to the top of the shelves.

I'm sure we've all been feeling a bit of sticker shock at the bookstore, particularly if you are old enough to remember when pulp novels actually did cost just a dime.

So, why have new books gotten so damn expensive? Don't publishers realize they could sell a lot more paperbacks at $4 a pop than they can at $7 a pop?

The simple answer is, yes, they do, but the reality isn't simple. A book's pricing is based largely on how much it's costing the publisher to get into the readers' hands, and there's a lot that goes into that.

The basic formula goes like this:

author advance + design + printing + distribution + profit = price

At this point, you may be shaking your fist at the authors and muttering about how greedy they are. And I'm here to tell you that the author advance is often one of the smallest pieces of the book pricing pie. The advances offered by publishers to writers can vary hugely, as can the royalty percentages. But since I know what several mass market publishers generally pay and know their print runs, let's look at a theoretical mass market paperback publisher called Bighouse.

Most Bighouse paperbacks have a cover price of $6.99. An average Bighouse author may be offered an advance against royalties of $2500 and his or her book will have a print run of about 30,000. The publisher will hope that the book will actually sell about 25,000, and the rest of the copies will be stripped and returned¹. At 25,000 copies sold, Bighouse will have made back all their money from the advance, and they probably won't owe the author any more money (clauses stipulating the publisher's right to keep reserves against returns is a diabolical bit of contract evil that I'll address someday in another article).

So, regardless of the royalty percentage dictated in the author's contract (which will probably be around 7.5%), simple math tells us that in this case, about ten cents of every book sold goes toward paying the author's advance.

Ten cents. Whoa. That's not very much, is it? So that means that Bighouse is making a huge profit on every book, right?

Not exactly. There's the cost of editing the book, laying it out, proofreading the final copy, printing galleys, and paying for cover art and cover design, but since they're a big publisher and have full-time staff, this will cost them less per book than it would a small press publisher. I don't have hard numbers for this, but let's assume that it's about $2500 depending on how speedy the staff is. Either way, that's still not a big slice of the book pie.

Now comes printing time, and paper's much more expensive than it used to be. I've heard from a fairly reliable source that your average 350-page paperback costs about $2.25 per copy to print ... provided the books are ordered in batches of 30,000 or more. The per-copy price for small publishers, whether they go with an offset printer or a POD company, will be much higher, simply because they can't buy in volume. A certain amount of the printer's cost is purely the cost of setup, and that's the same price whether you're ordering 100 copies or 100,000.

So, from purchase to production to printing, a $6.99 paperback has cost the publisher about $2.50. Big profits time for the publisher, right? Only if they get to sell all their books directly from their own warehouse. And they don't: they need to send the books to distributors like Ingram so that the books get into bookstores.

And distributors like Ingram and Amazon.com generally want a 55% commission from the sale of every book they handle. Fifty-five percent, kids. Smaller bookstores may only ask for a 40% commission, but the big boys want 55%.

So, out of the $6.99 paid by a reader for the paperback at Amazon.com, $3.85 goes straight to Amazon. Once you subtract that and the direct production costs from the book, that leaves a whopping $0.64 "profit" per copy. If they've struck a deal and only have to pay a 40% commission, the "profit" rises to the kingly sum of $1.69 per copy.

But much of that $0.64-$1.69 isn't profit at all. Remember those 5,000 books that didn't sell? Those still had to be printed, and the publisher most often doesn't get them back. The bookstores rip the front covers off the unsold books, dump the books themselves in the trash, and mail the covers back to the publisher for credit. The book returns alone in this example would eat up $0.45 of the $0.64, leaving a mere 19-cents-per-book profit. And some portion of that 19 cents needs to be used to pay the other departments at the publishing house that aren't directly involved in production, such as the acquisitions department and the legal department, but most especially the marketing department.

After all, the marketing department is responsible for stuff like designing and placing ads and sending authors on book tours. They can make or break the book. I didn't include the book's marketing cost in the original equation because this is a very elastic cost for paperbacks. Sometimes a big publisher goes whole hog to promote a book, but sometimes they quietly release it to bookstores and let nature take its course.

Marketing costs take many more forms than paying an intern to set up author signings or paying designers to create the ads you see in magazines and newsletters. Do you ever stop to browse through the stacks of new releases placed prominently in the fronts of bookstores? That's not usually the staff sharing their new favorites; the publishers of those books pay to get their copies up front where people can see them.

If you want a number, though, possibly two to fifteen cents out of every dollar spent on the book (see below for statistics on textbook costs) goes toward marketing. But let's say that the publisher in this case has decided to back the print run with a bit of promotion, and they pay to get the book placed well for a week in stores and take out some magazine ads. The marketing budget takes up 50 cents per copy. And so if you subtract 45 cents for unsold copies and 50 cents for promotion from $1.69, the publisher gets $0.74 profit per book in a better-case scenario. But it could just as easily come to a $0.31 per book loss in the land of the 55% commission, or if there are a lot of unsold copies.

So in the end, it's the distribution costs that are the biggest expense of a paperback fiction book, followed by the cost of printing. No fiction publisher can refuse to deal with Amazon.com² or Ingram and expect to get their books into as many hands as possible, so they have to factor those big 40%-55% commissions into their book pricing.

(Go on to Part Two: Why new textbooks are so expensive, Part Three: Why can't most publishers print books for $1?, Part Four: Book distribution and printing cost too much. Why don't publishers switch to e-books?)

---

1: The number of copies printed and released versus the number of copies sold is called the "sell-through rate". An 80% sell-through rate -- that is, 80% of the released copies sell and 20% are returned -- on a mass market book is considered very good. Anything above 80% is awesome. I'm actually using an 83% sell-through rate in my example; most books will not sell that well, so the cost of paying back the author's advance would eat into the 64-cent profit outlined above.

And again, the 80%-as-excellent-sell-through applies to mass market books. Small press books with much smaller print runs may require sell-throughs of 90%-100% for the publisher to simply earn back the production and promotion costs. Or, a seemingly-unreasonable cover price: $20 for an 80-page poetry collection.

2: HW Press refused to deal with Amazon because of their commission rates. The publisher didn't want to bump the book price by $3 just to account for Amazon.com's cut. Selling on the web is selling on the web, right? But it's not. Amazon.com goes around the world and offers a bunch of discounts and incentives that a Mom-and-Pop distributor can't match. Amazon.com offers rewards credit cards, for instance, and was able to negotiate cheaper shipping costs for itself with the US Postal Service because they do such a high volume. Furthermore, LibraryThing and Bookcrossing and a host of other sites pull their data directly from Amazon's data, and if you're not in there, it's like your book simply doesn't exist for a certain number of potential readers. Amazon.com is the 15,000-pound gorilla in publishing. People look at you funny if you tell them that, no, you can't get the book on Amazon, even more than when you tell them they can't find your book down at the local Barnes and Noble, either.

And when you come down to it, Amazon.com's cut is not necessarily unbridled greed. They have warehouses to maintain and staff to pay. The free shipping you get with every $25-or-more order gets paid for out of their commission. I know one online bookstore, Shocklines, that only charged a 40% commission; the owner is having to close down the shop because he ended up doing too much business to keep up with on his own, but he could never quite make enough to hire an assistant. It's an expensive business.

Labels: bookstores, publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

If you look at a book, usually on the dustcover, paperback cover or somewhere in the first couple of pages you will see something like "'(This author's) writing is a dazzling bravura of wild imagery and nail-biting suspense.' – Reed McReaderson" or "'A wonderful book! I couldn't put it down!' – Gush Auteur".

These little cover raves are known as "blurbs".

I am a firm believer that a handful of strong blurbs can be just as effective as the same number of positive reviews; they're shorter, they're direct, and they reveal nothing spoiler-like about the work in question. This, to my mind, makes them a good alternative for potential readers who don't want to chance having a review give away too much of the story.

Some -- but not all -- blurbs are culled from reviews. Probably half the time (or more) a writer will contact other writers and ask them if they would be willing to read something with an eye toward providing a blurb. I have gotten several wonderful quotes this way, and have also provided them for other writers. (I don't always do this; in the past 4 years I have been asked to read several novels for which, in the end, I couldn't in good conscience provide a blurb because, well...I didn't like them.)

Let me quickly address a few misconceptions about writers providing blurbs for other writers:

1. Yes, a lot of the time these writers know or are at least acquainted with one another -- but that in no way means that a good blurb will be guaranteed. A writer worth any blurb value has his or her reputation to uphold, and publicly praising a bad book won't help that cause one bit.
   
   
2. I can't speak for others, but I myself do read, from first page to last, each and every book I am asked to blurb. (There seems to be a rather cynical belief that writers don't bother reading their buddies' books before giving them a blurb -- while I don't doubt that this happens every so often, it is most assuredly not the norm.)
   
   
3. Yes, any writer providing a blurb is aware that it's going to be used to entice a reader to buy this particular book, and will slant their blurb to that end -- but bear in mind that is because they like and believe in the book to begin with, so its integrity needn't be called into question.
   
   

This is not to say that things can't go wrong here, as well. If a book is saturated with too many blurbs, one gets the feeling that the publisher is overcompensating and perhaps trying to sell you a bill of goods. The first book in Dean Koontz's Frankenstein series has ten pages of blurbs inside.

That's overkill, because the sheer amount of them robs each individual blurb of its effectiveness. You're so numbed by the time you reach the end of the damned things you almost don't feel like reading the book -- which turns out to be quite a lot of good, old-fashioned fun. But because it starts off by pummeling you with page after page of rave blurbs (almost none of which refer to the book itself), you go in with the creeping feeling that someone is trying to convince you a sow's ear is actually a silk purse.

My own personal cutoff point is two pages or a dozen blurbs (whichever comes first); after that, I ignore them. With blurbs, less is definitely more. (The ideal for me, by the way, is a single page containing somewhere between five and ten concise, tantalizing quotes.)

I am very careful to make certain that none of the blurbs used for my books are taken out of context -- I don't want readers to feel that these quotes have been employed to mislead them, and I don't want reviewers to feel that I've misrepresented their theses by "doctoring" their comments.

What it boils down to is that strong blurbs can serve as the middle ground for readers who want some sense of what to expect from a book but don't want to chance having anything "spoiled" for them ... and reviewers can write whatever they damned well please without fear of being accused of "spoiling" anything.

I still think the best solution is to read the first few pages of a book to figure out if you're going to like it or not. But if that's not possible for whatever reason, then seek out a review; read the first two paragraphs and the last two paragraphs if you want to avoid encountering spoilers. If that doesn't appeal or work for you, then turn to the blurbs.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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Have you ever seen or purchased a limited-edition book that came already signed by the author or contributors? Yeah, it's pretty neat getting a book like that, and collectors are willing to pay quite a bit extra for a book signed by a famous writer.

Some people think that the publisher rounds up all the authors for a wine and cheese party at which everybody signs the books, but that's not usually what happens. Trying to get a bunch of writers together in the same room at the same time is like herding cats, and mailing boxes of books around the world is terribly costly.

So, what publishers do is mail around stacks of pages -- signature sheets -- that the authors then sign and ship to the next people on the list. After the sheets are filled with signatures, they're added to the rest of the book's pages and bound into (or simply tipped into) the finished book.

If you aspire to be an anthology editor, be aware that signature sheets -- while they are indeed a cool thing to do for a limited edition -- are often a big huge expensive pain. This is particularly true if there are more than 10 authors involved and they're not local (if they are local, you can attempt to host the aforementioned sheet-signing party and get it done fairly painlessly).

If there are more than 20 authors from all over the country involved in your project and you've got to get everyone's signatures on the sheets, it's just like Disneyworld, if Disneyworld involved sitting in a hardbacked chair for 10 or 12 hours only to have circus midgets rush out of a closet and pelt you with dead fish at the end of your wait.

Things that will likely happen to signature sheets:

1. The post office will go "OMG! Big box = teh bomb!" and haphazardly slash it open with a boxcutter and consequently slice or otherwise munge up the top and bottom sheets in the process. *
   
   


2. At least one author will have carpal tunnel syndrome and not be able to sign the sheets for months and months.
   
   
3. While the author is recovering, one of the author's cats will climb to the top shelf where the signature sheet box has been put for safekeeping, and thoughtfully hork a big wet hairball therein.
   
   
4. While the author was recovering, postal rates went up, thus rendering the postage you included in the box insufficient. Author is dead broke due to having to pay the doctor for carpal tunnel surgery. You will have to overnight a money order to the author to enable her to send the box along to the next author.
   
   
5. Next author in line finally receives the box, then proceeds to pitch a fit because "there are way too many signature sheets" (you included 20% more in a futile attempt to compensate for boxcutters, hairballs, and coffee spills) and thus the publisher is trying to cheat him. So you have to call author up in an attempt to explain the presence of additional sheets to cover for loss, but he's not hearing any of it. Author holds entire box hostage until his wife counts up the sheets and tells him that you were right all along. He signs the sheets and sends them along without apology.



6. Somewhere between Bloomington and Boise, the post office will lose the box entirely. *
   
   Alternate Scenario: the box arrives safely in Boise, but the author's angry drunk spouse believes the box is from a lover, and throws it in the dumpster.
   
   Alternate Alternate Scenario: the box arrives, but is stolen off the front porch by a creepy stalker who's been going through the author's mail; signatures of some authors will later show up on Ebay.
   
   Son of the Return of the Alternate Scenario: After the box arrives, the author's town is hit by a flood, hurricane, tornado, volcano, alien invasion, or plague of paper-devouring locusts.
   
   Regardless: you'll have to print up a whole new set, and reobtain the first bunch of signatures.
   
   

* Both of which can happen to book shipments, too. We recently got a box of chapbooks which had been obviously opened by/broke open at the Post Office, spilled onto the floor, possibly stepped on, and hastily dumped back in the box and resealed. Moral: use strong packing tape and plenty of bubble wrap.

Labels: publishing, signature sheets, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Preface: This essay was written by Tim Waggoner and is reprinted with his permission. I, too, have had a novel deal go bad under slightly different circumstances. My situation was that I sold a short novel on proposal to a seemingly well-funded specialty publisher, got a contract that everyone signed ... and the publisher abruptly went under three months later when their .com parent company started cutting off less-profitable subsidiaries. I had a lot of the same thoughts that Tim expresses here, so I hope that those of you who aspire to become published novelists will find this piece useful.

---

"They decided to withdraw the offer on your novel."

I hesitated, not quite believing what my agent had just told me. "What? Why?"

"The editor said she was no longer 'comfortable' with the book. Whatever that means."

The publisher in question had made an offer on my novel The Harmony Society over a month before. Not for a large advance, but they had seemed enthusiastic about the book. After years of trying to sell a novel, I thought I'd finally done it -- finally was a Writer with a capital W. And now this.

My agent commiserated with me a bit before promising to keep sending the book around. I thanked him and hung up. I knew publishing was a volatile business and that this particular house had a reputation for somewhat eccentric business decisions. But no longer comfortable with my book?

I felt awful. I'd come so close to achieving my dream of being a published novelist, only to have it yanked away from me -- two hours before I was due to attend a local science fiction convention as an author panelist.

Needless to say, I didn't feel like going. Even with dozens of short story sales to my credit, I felt like a failure and a fraud. I didn't want to have to sit on panels and pretend that I knew what the hell I was talking about. Didn't want to have to face friends and acquaintances and have them ask how things were going with my writing.

I was angry at my agent for pushing the editor too hard for more money and better contract terms, perhaps scaring her off; angry at myself for having been dumb enough to believe that the offer had been a firm one in the first place. Angry that I had no clue exactly what had happened to screw up the deal and that I probably never would. But most of all, I was angry that I had wasted so much time pursuing my dream. A dream which had turned around and bit me hard on the ass.

In the end, I went to the con, if only so I'd have some friends to complain to. They were all perfectly sympathetic, of course, but several of them said with a wistful tone, "At least you had an offer."

I felt like telling them the grass was definitely not greener on this side of the fence, but I didn't. I knew they wouldn't understand. I wouldn't have either, not before.

I moped around all weekend, felt miserable, talked about quitting writing, and stuck more than a few mental pins in an imaginary voodoo doll labeled EDITOR.

Then the con was over, my friends returned home, and I was left with only my wife to complain to. But I didn't feel much like talking anymore. I realized that I'd actually been fortunate to have a con to go to. While it hadn't exactly kept my mind off my stillborn book deal, it had, if nothing else, kept me busy and provided some measure of catharsis.

But now it was Sunday night and stretching before me was my first full week as a failure. The question was, what was I going to do with it?

The next day I sat down and started to write another book.

I wanted to get back on the horse, was afraid that I might never write a novel again unless I did. I used an outline which I had completed some months back so that I wouldn't have to worry about developing a plot and characters. I could just write.

And write I did, well over ten pages a day in between teaching college composition courses and caring for my then one-year-old daughter. I took all the emotional energy churning inside me and channeled it into my book, writing like a man possessed. I finished the novel, titled Necropolis, in twenty-nine days.

I tinkered with the manuscript, editing and revising over the next several weeks, then blasted it off to my agent. But now doubts began to set in. What if I'd written Necropolis too fast, hadn't revised enough; what if it was absolute crap?

Sure, my writers' group liked it, but how could I trust them? They were my friends; they knew how emotionally fragile I was just then. I could have probably scribbled out a grocery list and they'd have praised it as a surefire Nebula contender.

The con had taught me that I needed to keep busy, but I couldn't bring myself to write any more fiction, not then. Nearly a decade earlier, I had worked as a reporter for a small weekly newspaper, but I had written very little nonfiction since. Still, I occasionally thought about getting back to it, and now seemed the perfect time.

I threw myself into reading about nonfiction writing techniques and researching markets. I tossed around different article ideas, finally deciding to write a personal essay about my experience with testicular cancer. I developed a query letter, sent it out to fifty magazines, and sat back to wait. A few days later I received an e-mail from an editor at Penthouse. He was interested in seeing the article.

A couple weeks more, and the article was finished and in the editor's hands. The check was welcome, of course, but I had gained something far more important than money: I felt like my words were valued again -- not by my wife or my writers' group, not even by an editor of a national magazine. But by me. And I needed to feel that way, needed it like a man lost in the desert needs a drink of cool, clean water.

I toyed with the idea of saying to hell with fiction altogether and writing nonfiction exclusively, but I couldn't do it. Despite the instability (and occasional insanity) of a fiction writer's life, I loved it too much to quit. I returned to working on short stories and noodling around with novel ideas. My agent called to let me know he liked Necropolis and would start submitting it to editors.

I'm not the only one who's had a book deal go sour on him, of course. SF novelist J.R. Dunn (This Side of Judgment, Days of Cain, Full Tide of Night) once had an editor send him a two-page letter of revision for a novel. Dunn made the revisions, turned the novel in, and it was rejected.

"Naturally you're going to be furious when your book's rejected," Dunn says, "but you want it to be rejected for good grounds, not a minor technical point." It turned out the editor "basically didn't understand what a radio was. I told my agent to drop the publisher and go on to another, and that's what we did." The novel, This Side of Judgment, came out two years later in hardback to good reviews. Dunn says the moral is "not all editors are idiots" and advises writers to "keep banging your head against a wall" until your book finds a home.

Editor Gordon Van Gelder says that having a book deal fall through is "definitely not common at all." He advises authors to research a publisher to determine size, longevity and stability before submitting. Smaller houses are especially precarious financially.

Van Gelder assures that there is "no stigma" for authors who've had book deals collapse on them, and that actually the book's more attractive to other editors because it had a deal before. For instance, Van Gelder once bought a book by Tanith Lee that had been abandoned after the Abyss line of horror novels folded. Not only did Van Gelder think it a fine book, but it was a sequel and he felt Lee's fans should have a chance to read it.

"It was the right thing to do," Van Gelder says, "plus I made some money for St. Martin's in the process."

Happy ending time. My first daughter is now seven, and my second is two. I've long since gotten over my anger at my agent and continue to have a great working relationship with him. The editor who rejected my book because she was "no longer comfortable with it" was fired years ago. I have a full-time, tenure-track job teaching creative writing at a community college, and I've published over sixty stories in various anthologies and magazines.

Given the mergers and downsizing in publishing over the last few years, and the fact that The Harmony Society was a slipstream novel not easily pigeonholed, my agent and I decided to investigate the possibility of placing the novel with small-press publishers. A recent start-up, DarkTales Publishing, seemed a likely prospect. They publish offbeat horror/dark fantasy novels and have brought out work by such authors as J. Michael Straczynski, Yvonne Navarro and Mort Castle, among others. We decided to give them a try.

And they took my novel, with every intention of publishing it. But after a couple of years, the publisher realized their business had grown too big, too fast, and they needed to slow things down. DarkTales would still be bring out my novel, but they couldn't say when. So, after letting out a long sigh, I decided it was off to market once more.

The Harmony Society finally found a home with Prime Books. The advance was less than that offered by the original publisher, but the overall terms are much better. More important, my book is with people who are enthusiastic about it and who intend to do their best to promote it. If the original publisher had brought out the book, while I would've made more money on the initial advance, there would've been little to no promotion, and most likely The Harmony Society would've come and gone without much notice. I'm confident that Prime will do my book justice. Who knows? We might even sell a few copies, too.

Since placing The Harmony Society, I've also published an erotic mystery novel and a short story collection. As for Necropolis ... well, it's still making the rounds. I'm hopeful that one day it'll be published too, but if it isn't, it won't be the end of the world -- or my career, for that matter.

I've learned the most important lesson an author needs to learn: I don't need publication to feel like a writer. The only thing I truly need is to keep writing.

Final note: all the novels Tim mentions in this essay have found happy homes, as well as several others he hadn't even started at the time he wrote this essay.

Labels: novel, publishing, Tim Waggoner, writing

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by Tim Waggoner

Want to write horror? A lot of folks do. The mainstream publishing industry may have momentarily turned its collective back on the genre, but the small press scene is thriving, not to mention the burgeoning number of horror sites on the Web. Unfortunately, a great many stories published in these markets are uninspired (to put it kindly) and just plain bad (to put it honestly). Want your work to stand out from the rest of the lycanthropic pack? Want to start selling to larger and more prestigious markets? Want your horror stories to be so good that people breathlessly race through your prose, barely able to whisper an exhausted, "Goddamn, that was something," when they've finished reading?

It ain't easy. But I've got three tips to offer that will increase your chances of joining the dark pantheon of horror writers who kick major ass.

1. Beware of clichés.

Read widely, both inside and outside of the horror genre, so you can recognize plots that have been done to (living) death. Then you'll know better than to write a story which ends, "And it was all a dream" or "And then he realized as his lover sank her fangs into his neck that she... was... a... VAMPIRE!"

When I was in my teens, I wrote a horror story with the embarrassing title of "Scary Christmas." In it, a young punk torments and kills an elderly man whose ghost comes seeking Yuletide revenge. At least I had the good sense never to send this piece of crap out. Revenge stories are one of the biggest clichés in horror fiction, and beside that, there's no tension in them. Readers know exactly how they're going to turn out every time.

Still, you can make clichés work for you. In my story, "Blackwater Dreams," published in Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares 2, I tried my hand at another ghostly revenge story. Only this time I took the cliché and gave it a twist. The man character, a young boy who blames himself for the drowning death of a friend, is visited in his dreams by his friend's ghost. He fears the spirit has come seeking revenge, but the friend isn't angry -- he's lonely. At the end of the story, my protagonist has to make a terrible choice: leave his friend to his loneliness, or join him in his watery afterlife.

In my story "Alacrity's Spectatorium," I twisted another cliché around. I took the notion that vampires don't cast reflections and created a dark mirror which displays only the reflections of vampires. What price would vampires pay for a glimpse of themselves in such a unique mirror? More, what would such a glimpse mean to them?

Instead of ending with a cliché, why not begin with one? Start with "It was all a dream" and build your story from there. Why not begin with a man discovering his lover's a vampire and see what happens after that? Or flip the cliché around. What if a vampire discovered his lover wasn't another nosferatu but was instead (shudder) a human?

And try to avoid the most overworked plot in horror fiction, which author Gary A. Braunbeck describes as a story in which the main character exists only to get "slurped by the glop." Stories in which characters are merely props to be eaten, drained, eviscerated, sliced, diced and turned into julienne fries by your monstrous "glop," whether it's a vampire, werewolf or the ubiquitous serial killer. These stories aren't just boring; they're insulting to readers who deserve better.

Probably the best way to avoid clichés is to adhere to one of the hoariest: write what you know. Draw on your own experience for your story ideas, write about the things that excite and disturb you, the people, places and events that form the unique fabric of your existence, which make your life different than any other that's ever been lived before. If you do this, you can't help but be original.

2. There's a difference between disturbing readers and simply grossing them out.

Too many beginners think that writing horror is all about detailed descriptions of disembowelments and gushing bodily fluids. They mistake the use of such elements for artistic audacity and cutting-edge (pun intended) writing. The truth is, though, that such writers are the literary equivalent of the kid who jams his finger up his nose and pulls forth a big old nasty booger so he can wave it in his friends' faces.

Good horror -- like all fiction that truly matters -- is about affecting readers emotionally. True, revulsion is an emotional reaction, but it's a simplistic one with a limited effect on readers. They finish your story about a penis-munching condom, think, Man, that's sick, and immediately forget all about it. You've failed to touch them save on the most shallow of levels.

I'm not saying you should avoid writing about the dark and disturbing. That's what horror's all about, from the quiet subtlety of a half-glimpsed shadow on an otherwise sunny day to the in-your-face nastiness of blood dripping from the glinting metal of a straight razor. But if you are, as Stephen King puts it, going to go for the gross-out, it has to arise naturally from the story itself, to be so integral to the tale you're telling that it can't be removed without making the story suffer.

In Gary A. Braunbeck's novella, "Some Touch of Pity" (also an excellent example of a writer taking a cliché -- the werewolf story -- and putting an original spin on it), there's a flashback detailing a character's rape. Not just the physical aspect of it, but what the character experiences emotionally as the rape occurs. The scene is absolutely brutal, but it's also completely necessary to the story. If the scene were toned down, or worse, removed, the story would be far less emotionally wrenching.

In my story, "Keeping It Together," forthcoming in the SFF-Net anthology Between the Darkness and the Fire, I write about a gay man living a heterosexual lifestyle in a home and with a family that he has created from his own desperate desire to be what he perceives as "normal." But it's an illusion which can't be sustained, and as the story progresses, the house, his wife and young daughter all begin to decay around him. In one scene he has sex with his wife out of a sense of husbandly duty, and since she is well along in her dissolution by this point, their lovemaking . . . damages her. I created this scene not merely to make readers go "Ooooh, yuck!" but to further dramatize the impact of such deep-seated denial on both my main character and those around him.

Remember that extreme elements, like anything else in fiction, are only tools to help you tell your stories in the best way you can. But like any powerful tool, they should be used sparingly, cautiously and always with good reason.

3. Give us characters we care about.

Let me say right up front that this bit of advice doesn't mean that we have to like your characters. It means your characters should be so well developed and interesting that we want to read your story to find out what happens to them. There are characters -- Captain Ahab, Sherlock Holmes, Hannibal Lector -- who aren't always likable (and are sometimes downright despicable) but who are so unique, so fully realized, that they can't fail to fascinate. Compelling characters is what memorable fiction is all about, whether you're writing for The New Yorker or Cemetery Dance.

In my story, "Seeker," which appeared in the White Wolf anthology, Dark Tyrants, I write about a disillusioned crusader who has lost his faith in God and has gone searching for a nest of vampires in order to prove to himself that there is some sort of spiritual aspect to existence, even if that aspect is evil. The plot runs on two tracks. First is a narrative of the crusader penetrating the forest where the vampires live, being attacked by them, and finally dealing with their leader (who I made not merely a vampire but one who has merged with the Wood itself). The second track details, through various flashbacks, the events that caused the crusader to lose his faith and make him so desperate to find a sign -- any sign -- that there's Something More to life.

If I did my job right, readers will be interested not only in the action in the story, but also in the crusader himself, so that when the story reaches its climax and the character's quest is fulfilled in a way he -- and hopefully readers -- never imagined (no, he doesn't become a vampire himself; remember what I said earlier about avoiding clichés? I try to practice what I preach), there's not only an emotional pay-off, but hopefully readers will leave the story thinking a little bit about their own spirituality.

There's a lot more to writing good horror, but if you take the three morsels of advice I've given you to heart, you'll create stories which will not only rise above the generic tales of flesh-munching zombies and blood-lusting serial killers that are out there, you'll create fiction worth reading -- and worth remembering.

---

This article was originally published in EWG Presents, July 1998 and was translated into Portuguese by Ricardo Madeira and reprinted on Terravista in July 2000.

Labels: horror, publishing, Tim Waggoner

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by Tim Waggoner

"It's not what you know, it's who you know."

That bit of conventional "wisdom" is often cited by writers to explain everything from rejection letters to the lousy state of publishing. It's not my fault, they think. It's the publishing good-old-boy network keeping me out.

There's no denying that networking is important -- perhaps even vital these days -- in creating a writing career. But too many people hold a narrow view of what networking is. They imagine standing around at a publisher's party at a conference, free drink in hand, schmoozing with editors and agents, regaling them with wit and wowing them with a verbal description of their latest (planned) 300 thousand word opus. But in its purest sense, networking is simply about making connections, and you don't have to be a mainstay of the New York publishing scene to do it effectively.

One of the first ways that writers can start making connections is by taking classes. Creative writing classes are offered through colleges and universities, of course, but they are also sponsored by adult continuing education programs, libraries and local arts organizations. Taking a creative writing class can provide an excellent opportunity for feedback from a (hopefully) skilled instructor, and from other student writers. But it can also provide the beginnings of a writer's network. Your instructor will be able to point you toward resources -- reference books, writing programs and conferences in your area -- which can, if nothing else, decrease you writing career learning curve.

Your instructor should be able to give you advice on publishing, perhaps even provide you with some contacts. But the truth is that many creative writing courses are staffed by instructors who've published little, if at all. Always try to learn something about an instructor's credentials if you can before signing up for a class. Ask to see a bibliography of the instructor's published works, and try to track down and read some of them. Caveat emptor.

But even if the instructor is far from a best-selling author, that doesn't matter much. Because the most important networking opportunity is the chance to connect with your fellow students. From creative writing classes, writers' groups are born. Groups which can continue providing feedback on your work long after the class ends; groups which also can pool their knowledge of marketing and submission strategies.

But what if there aren't any creative writing classes offered in your area? How can you establish a writers' group then? By advertising, naturally. Put up notices in libraries and bookstores. WANTED: ONE WRITERS' GROUP.

Author readings and signings are other excellent networking opportunities. You might be able to chat with the author for a bit and ask questions. (Maybe even more than a bit since signings and readings are notorious for being poorly attended. You may well have the author all to yourself.) You can also meet other beginning writers. Take a notebook with you and, at an appropriate time, announce you'd like to form a writers' group and pass the notebook around for interested parties to write down their addresses and phone numbers. You can also pass out business cards if you have some (and you should).

The Internet has been a boon to writers. You can take classes online and connect with other writers via newsgroups and chat rooms. You can exchange stories for critique through e-mail and of course share those all-important marketing tips.

Author web pages are also wonderful resources. Not only do authors sometimes post articles on how they got started or offering advice to newcomers, often authors' e-mail addresses are also provided. Got a question or two? Go ahead and e-mail an author, though don't be surprised if he or she's too busy to respond. And don't bombard them with "where's my reply" follow-ups. Annoying people is not an effective networking strategy.

Writers' organizations are also great networking resources. Often, you need to have only one pro story sale under your belt to join as an affiliate member. You won't be able to vote in officer elections or for awards, but you'll be entitled to receive the organization's publications, such as handbooks, newsletters, even directories of members (with those handy e-mail addresses). Even if you haven't made a pro sale yet and don't qualify for membership, you can still often purchase and subscribe to an organization's publications.

Conferences and conventions are prime networking opportunities. Not only can you attend workshops and informative panels on writing, but you can often speak with program participants -- authors, editors and agents -- in the hall after a panel or at other slow times during a conference. Come prepared with questions and always bring along a manuscript or two. Never thrust your work upon someone, though. Always wait to be asked.

You can also become a program participant yourself with only a few sales to your credit. I began sitting in on panels at Science Fiction conventions after only having sold a handful of stories. All I did was write the conference's director of programming, introduce myself as a local writer, list my credits, and relate my desire to be on a few panels.

My first convention as a program participant made all the difference in my career. Not only did the other writers see me more as a peer, I was able to find a writers' group which counted several published novelists among its members. I can't begin to tell you how much I've learned from them, and far more important, I made some great friends.

And that's what networking is all about, really. Not cold-bloodedly using other human beings to advance your career. It's about making connections, making friends. I began this article with a bit of writing wisdom. Let me close with another: Good writing happens when good people get together.

Good careers can happen, too.

Labels: networking, publishing, Tim Waggoner, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

After a while, regardless of how well-focused, disciplined, and determined you are when writing a book, you just don't, well... see it any more. It happens to all of us at some point on every project. You spend so much time writing, cutting, revising, and polishing, that you risk either not seeing the forest for the trees or become so over-focused on one particular tree that you don't notice the forest fire until it's too late.

Okay, carried that metaphor just a little too far, sorry, but hopefully you've already discerned the point: that there comes a time during a book-length project when you've spent so much time working on it that you lose perspective.

Here's the thing: by the time you, as a reader, pick up a copy of an author's book, the author him- or herself has read it over at least three times -- and this is after the countless hours spent writing, re-writing, and polishing. If you want to include all that, as well, then I think it's safe to say that by the time a book goes to print, its author has read it through, from beginning to end, a minimum of seven times, probably more.

This is a necessary evil. Editorial suggestions and changes must be considered and/or made, the manuscript must then be read through to make certain that these changes mesh with the overall story (tone, narrative arc, continuity, etc.), and if a problem is then discovered, it must be fixed, and the whole process starts over again.

I'm oversimplifying this because to describe the process in painstaking detail would not only rob the reading experience of some of its magic, but bore you to tears.

But when the book is finally out there, and everything looks good, the author and the editor can sit back and smile at having done their job to the best of their abilities. Authors often cite their editors as having been "instrumental" in helping to shape a book that may have encountered some rough spots along the pot-holed road to publication. Editors deserve all the credit that an author cares to cast their way, no arguments here.

But there is a group of unsung heroes in the publishing process, people whose names often don't appear anywhere in the book, but without whose effort, insight, and input, a lot of us would look like illiterate fools.

I am talking about proofreaders, those folks whose thankless job it is to go through your manuscript once you've ceased being able to see it anymore and look for the signs of a possible forest fire (see over-extended metaphor at the beginning). Many people think a proofreader's sole responsibility is to check spelling and punctuation.
While that is definitely right up there on their list of duties, many of them go the extra mile -- hell, many of them go several hundred extra miles -- to ensure that the book they're working on is the best it can possibly be.

And they do this by deliberately searching out those elements that you, the writer, ceased to be able to see somewhere around Draft #3.

Two personal examples: a few weeks ago, right before my second Cedar Hill collection, Home Before Dark was being prepped for the printer, one of Earthling's marvelous proofreaders noticed that in my story, "Palimpsest Day", the age of the mother did not add up if one stopped to consider her dates of birth and death. Now, I know that a lot of people tend to read such details with a quick eye and don't stop to do the exact math ... but that's no excuse for sloppiness, and that is exactly what this mistake was -- sloppiness on my part. I had become so over-focused on fine-tuning the story so that it fit into the overall arc of the Cedar Hill cycle that I overlooked a small but significant detail -- making sure the mother's age added up. While a mistake of this sort probably wouldn't have ruined the story, its mere presence would have lessened the story's value. I had read through the manuscript so many times that I simply didn't see this problem any more, and thanks to a sharp proofreader, neither will you.

Second example: up until its fourth round of proofreads, my novella In the Midnight Museum contained a glaring continuity error that, while in and of itself quite small, would have damned near pulled the rug out from underneath the entire story had it not been caught by the proofreader. It was a quick, minor detail that very well might have been overlooked by most readers, but those readers who would not have missed it would have had the entire second half of the story ruined by this nagging inconsistency. (You've noticed, haven't you, that I'm not telling you the exact nature of this mistake? That's because I am so embarrassed by it that I dare not share the specifics, lest you think me, well ... simple. "My God," you'd say. "A sponge would have seen that." And I'd prefer you leave this essay thinking I have an IQ higher than my shoe size.)

But, again, this potentially destructive detail was overlooked by me because I had stopped seeing the whole of the moon and focused only on the crescent (I figured it was time to switch metaphors).

So consider all of the above to be a preamble to this: a song of gratitude to all proofreaders, those unsung heroes who labor over our manuscripts almost as long and intensely as we do, whose unblinking eye often catch the flaws that we can no longer see, and whose objectivity gives us a fresh perspective just as we need it the most.

I'm going to end this by getting even more specific: Paul Miller, Don Koish, Deena Warner, John Everson, Ron Clinton, Robert Mingee, Jack Haringa, and -- my own personal major domo, Mark Lancaster ... thank you. A thousand times, thank you. Thank you for caring about my work enough to go those extra hundred miles and always pointing out even the smallest problem, no matter how testy I get about your nitpicking. You are why I look like a good writer.

My gratitude and admiration knows no bounds.

Now see how many mistakes you can find in this blog entry. Just don't tell me about them or I might throw a hissy fit.

---

Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of 14 books and over 150 short stories. If you enjoyed this article, take a look at his book Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror as a Way of Life.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, publishing, writing

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Ad compositors put together the advertisements you see in the newspaper. Sometimes they design the ads themselves based on a client's needs (which can change at the drop of a hat), but often they replicate or scan in a client's existing design. They will also do a lot of typesetting, proofreading, and correction. Ad compositors generally don't need to know how to draw or do illustrations, but if they do have artistic talents, they may find themselves called upon to do more interesting stuff if they work in a good shop (or, alternately, they may find themselves frustrated that they're never called upon to use the full range of their skills).

These days, most ad compositors do their work on computers (often Macs) using programs such as Multi-Ad Creator, Photoshop and Pagemaker. However, some compositors may do physical paste-up with waxed bits of printed stock art, text segments and design elements cut up with an X-acto knife and assembled on galley paper over a light box.

My year working part-time as an advertising compositor was the most stressful job I've ever had, and at minimum wage, no less. Our ad room had deadlines three times a day; the workload and pressure were incredible. A friend of mine worked professionally as an ad compositor for a small daily paper -- she was unbelievably burnt out after a year, and I think she maybe got $18K a year in exchange for elevated blood pressure and perpetual sleep deprivation.

If you seek out a job as an entry-level ad compositor, you can expect to learn a lot about graphic design and computers in a short period of time. Most newspapers, if they don't actually require a portfolio of advertising design work, will require at least some journalism or graphic design coursework and evidence of computer proficiency before they'll hire you. You may also have to pass a typing test or test on keyboard shortcut commands (I had to take the latter; I don't know how common that is, though).

Labels: publishing

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To get a job as a copy editor, you must have a rock-solid sense of grammar, spelling and punctuation and a keen eye for errors and typos. You must be able to read quickly and accurately. You must be able to write well and speak well. You must be able to work alone with very little direction, but you must also be able to work as a team member under a micromanaging senior editor; either work scenario is possible, as is anything in between.

Copy editors at magazines and book publishing companies check materials for grammar, punctuation, readability, style, etc. They also generally do fact-checking and suggest minor revisions. They may do research for writers, and they may be called upon to produce materials for websites.

People seeking entry-level copy editing positions at magazine/book publishers generally need a bachelor's degree in English or journalism. However, publishers that produce scientific, technical, or highly academic works will often accept (or might even require) degrees in relevant academic fields along with evidence of being able to do the particulars of the editing work.

Editing for technical publications often pays better than similar jobs at mainstream publications. So, if you want a job as an editor and are majoring in something besides English or journalism, you can do well provided you get some decent experience on a student paper or magazine while you're in school. Conversely, English and j-school majors will do well to supplement their degrees and student editing experience with a good grounding in other disciplines, particularly the sciences.

Copy editors on newspapers are usually called upon to create the headlines for stories in addition to editing copy; they will also often lay out the stories.

I worked as a copy editor for a small daily paper many moons ago when I was in grad school. It was a tedious, stressful, utterly thankless job. The paper had to be laid out and delivered to the printer a little before midnight, and often reporters and desk editors didn't get copy delivered until well into the evening. I remember several instances in which there were two of us who had less than an hour to check the entire paper before it had to be sent to press.

Newspapers often have a hard time retaining copy editors, which doesn't surprise me given my own experience. The pay was practically nil, you got little appreciation from the other staff when you did your job properly, but if you messed up and overlooked something, you got your butt chewed out.

The only advantage to working as a newspaper copy editor is that it gives you invaluable experience so that you can get better, saner work later in your career. If an employer sees that you could cope with daily newspaper work, he or she will know you can handle an enormous amount of deadline stress and chaos.

Labels: editing, employment, publishing

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Many of us remember the ultra-plainly-labeled, über-cheap generic foods sold in bulk at grocery stores a few decades back. Stuff like bulk beer, which came in plain white cans with just the word "BEER" in stark black letters, plus minimal nutrition information and a bar code.

Fewer people remember that, for a very brief period of time in the white-label heyday of the early 1980s, someone attempted to market generic genre books.

Yes, completely generic paperback books. They had a plain white cover with just the title in black block lettering: ROMANCE or SCIENCE FICTION or HORROR or WESTERN.

They released one book in each genre; an older friend of mine collected the whole set. The books had no back-panel blurb, no author information, no publisher information, not even a copyright page.

My friend said the novels were uniformly awful, but entertainingly so. Apparently the writer or writers went out of their way to incorporate every possible genre cliché into the paper-thin storylines.

I'm guessing the white-label SCIENCE FICTION novel had a bad case of white room syndrome.

The books, of course, failed miserably except as a collector's oddity for bibliophiles. It's hard to get authors to do good work when they're not even given a pseudonym, and it's even harder to get readers to pick up a book without the benefit of snazzy cover art, a catchy title, or author name recognition. And, of course, without publisher information attached to the product, there's not much possible motive or method to marketing.

Labels: bookstores, publishing

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U.S. copyright law is intended to foster artistic and intellectual endeavors by protecting creators' rights and thus their livelihoods. However, copyright law can easily turn into a stifling intellectual monopoly (some MP3 fans would argue that this has already happened). Thus, the law contains a lot of compromises to try to keep it fair to other creators and to works' users.

The "merger doctrine" is one such compromise aimed at keeping creators from claiming unfair rights.

One of the basic tenets of copyright law is that you can't copyright ideas (industrially-useful ideas can be protected by patents, but that's a whole different subject), just the original expression of those ideas. This is codified in Section 102(b) of The Copyright Act:

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

But it seems like someone could get around this by copyrighting, say, a dozen different little ways of expressing the same simple idea so that nobody else could feasibly use that idea, doesn't it? That's where the merger doctrine comes in: if there are a limited number of ways that somebody can express an idea, then you can't copyright expressions of that idea at all. This is to keep the idea itself free for everyone to use.

For instance, you can't copyright the sentence "Fred spoke." Sure, you could write it "Fred made an announcement" or "Fred shouted" or the all-time favorite "Fred ejaculated", but when you come down to it, it's expressing the simple idea of a man speaking. There are only so many ways to express that. (Whatever Fred says can of course be copyrighted if it otherwise meets the not-too-difficult criteria of original expression, of course)

The merger doctrine was upheld in a case called Toro Co. v. R&R Products Co. in 1986. The 8th Circuit Court ruled agreed that the doctrine is important in keeping a creator from monopolizing an idea. Most courts since then have ruled that the doctrine prevents an author from copyrighting a passage in the first place. However, some have ruled that the creator can copyright the passage, but that others will only be guilty of infringement if they use the exact same expression (many people don't realize that they can normally be found in violation of copyright even if they change the wording of a passage somewhat).

Labels: copyright, publishing

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Vanity publishers will publish anything if the author has the money, be it a family history to distribute to relatives, a guide for classes, or a volume of badly-written poetry. With a vanity press, there's no editor making an informed decision as to whether or not the manuscript in question is good, bad, or indifferent. The lack of a "gatekeeper" makes all works published by vanity presses suspect in the eyes of the publishing world.

Thus, the lack of editorial process is the first reason that writers, reviewers and editors scorn books put out by vanity presses.

The second reason is that many vanity publishers are crooks, plain and simple.

Many vanity presses -- and bogus literary agents who work with or own vanity presses -- advertize in the backs of literary magazines and appeal to a frustrated writer's, well, vanity in assuring them that their opus will see print.

What's not mentioned is that the costs will be high, the quality of the product low, and its chances of being taken seriously lower still. They also don't mention that they'll push the services of a "book doctor", who will charge you high fees to "improve" your manuscript. Some vanity presses will take an author's money, but never actually print the books. Vanity presses engage in a lot of borderline or outright scamming; they ensure their own profits, and the clauses in their contracts often create a situation where the author becomes their best customer.

The bottom line is this: the money should flow from the publisher to the writer, not the other way around.

If you submit a manuscript someplace and the "publisher" writes back praising the work to the heavens -- but then says you need to pay an "editing fee" because your manuscript has a few weensy problems and they know someone who can fix it right up -- run fast and don't look back. Likewise, if your inclusion in an anthology is contingent upon your buying the anthology, you're dealing with a vanity publisher who is trying to take advantage of you.

The same goes for many publishing contests (frequently poetry contests) that require a fee. Typically, these scams want you to pay $25-$50 as an entry fee, and the work of all the "winners" (read: everyone who shelled out the entry fee) goes into a large anthology that the "winners" are pressured to buy. These things sometimes get announced in the "community" section of smaller local newspapers, falsely lending legitimacy to the scams.

A few of the vanity publishers out there include:

• 1st Books Library
• American Book Publishers Group (to be avoided because they've scammed authors)
• The Amherst Society
• Commonwealth Publications
• The International Library of Poetry
• Iliad Press
• JMW Publishing
• Lee Shore literary agency -- works closely with vanity publishers to help disguise their nature
• Northwest Publishing
• Minerva Press
• poetry.com
• The Poets' Guild
• Poetry Press
• Poetry Unlimited
• The National Archives
• Gardenia Press
• GMA publishing
• Sparrowgrass Poetry Forum
• Trident Publishing / Washington House (an arm of American Literary Agents of Washington, a fee-charging agency that makes its money by charging authors rather than from selling books) (also, not to be confused with Trident Media Group, which is a legitimate and respected publisher)
• Vantage Press

Self-publishing is not synonymous with vanity publishing. You aren't paying a publisher to run your work -- you become a publisher. If you have a track record with or knowledge of traditional publishing, either as a writer or editor, you can successfully self-publish a work that was deemed unpublishable due to commercial or genre concerns.

For instance, Kelly Link's critically-acclaimed story collection Stranger Things Happen was published by editor Gavin Grant (then her boyfriend, now her husband), after she'd collected a stack of positive rejections and a couple of conditional offers from established publishers (most genre publishers thought her stories too literary and most literary publishers turned their noses up at the genre elements). Link and Grant were both experienced publishing professionals who, after research and discussion, decided they could do her book best themselves. Their production of Stranger Things Happen was definitely self-publishing, but a very far cry from vanity publishing.

The key thing is that successful self-publishers have gotten enough objective external feedback to be confident that their manuscript is indeed worthy of publication and will be of interest to readers. They have done the market research to identify a legitimate printing company (such as Thompson-Shore) or are prepared to go the DIY route of using their own printing equipment (many chapbook publishers go this last route). They are prepared to competently edit, design, distribute and market the book themselves.

Print on demand (POD) is also not synonymous with vanity publishing. While some vanity publishers do run POD operations, there are also POD printers such as Lightning Press that will not do business with you unless you're an established editor (and can prove it). POD is a technology that is being embraced by the mainstream publishing world for its convenience.

POD has not improved the reputation of vanity publishing in any way. Vanity publishing, because it lacks standards and is rife with scams that prey on writers, will always have a well-deserved bad reputation. What POD has done has put small press publishing and self-publishing within the financial reach of many do-it-yourself writer/editors. Some of the results have been amateurish, of course, but some have been of very high quality. But before POD technology became available, they might not have been feasible at all.

A reputable publisher isn't just a middleman, but that's a topic for another article.

Labels: publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

As a college student, I really came to love used record and book stores. Sometimes I'd find the most amazing books and albums that had been out of print for years. And sometimes, I'd be able to find brand spankin' new stuff that I just couldn't afford at Borders or Tower Records.

Later on, I was still broke but in grad school studying journalism. I started to learn about copyright law. More important, I started to get to know authors who were just as broke as I was but who didn't have a light at the end of their financial tunnel in the form of earning a commercially viable degree. Copyright was more than an abstract concept to them -- article sales and royalties paid their rent and kept food on their table.

Armed with just enough copyright knowledge to keep me out of court for libel and my new insights into the working author's life, I saw used bookstores and CD shops in a whole new light. All these books and albums for sale -- and no money to the publisher! No royalties to the authors! Holy shit!

Was the FBI gonna come busting down the doors of Half Price Books for copyright infringement someday? Because it all certainly seemed like a violation of the spirit of copyright -- the stores were doing a pretty brisk business, and every used copy sold was money that never reached the creator. But still, my author friends visited the used shops just like everybody else did, and for the same reasons: they wanted stuff that was not available elsewhere, or they just couldn't afford to pay for new.

While some big-name musicians like Garth Brooks periodically raised a stink about used CD sales, it seemed that everyone turned a blind eye to the whole thing because cracking down on used bookstores would create far more problems than they'd solve.

As it turns out, selling used books, CDs, movies and software is perfectly legal due to what's known as the "first sale doctrine".

Section 109 of the U.S. Copyright Act codifies this doctrine. Anyone who is a lawful owner of a physical copy of a copyrighted work can do as they please with that physical copy.

They can destroy the copy, paint it pink, put blinkenleits all over it, rent it to somebody, or transfer ownership by giving it away or selling it. They can't, of course, duplicate the copyrighted content or reuse it or sell it in some way -- the first sale doctrine deals with the physical object, not the intellectual expression it contains.

However, when cassette tape players and recorders came along, the U.S. recording industry started to fear for their profits. (Sound familiar? You bet!) So, they put their vast financial resources to work influencing legislators. In 1984 the Record Rental Amendment was passed on the logic that renting out albums made it too easy for people to copy music without paying for it, thus dreadfully harming the RIAA's copyrights.

As a result of that amendment to Section 109, you can't rent an audio CD or tape or phonograph. Due to legal extrapolations of the Record Rental Amendment combined with the fact that software is often set up for licensing rather than sale, you can't rent a piece of software, either ... unless you're talking about a video game, which is not seen by the courts as being software. At any rate, that's why you can't rent the latest Britney Spears opus at Blockbuster along with Fatal Frame for your Playstation.

Fortunately, the RIAA didn't take the step of preventing libraries from lending out music albums, nor have they seriously attempted to stop the sale of used CDs. However, all that could change if they decide that these activities are excessively limiting their profit margins.

The book publishing industry, by contrast, has neither the lobbying power nor the motivation to try to change the laws as they exist.

It's perfectly legal to rent a novel, for instance, but sadly reading just isn't popular enough to support the development of a Bookbusters chain.

Labels: copyright, music, publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Asking "Is file sharing theft?" is a bit like asking "Is driving a car murder?" (If during the course of a drive you intentionally run somebody down with your car in an effort to kill them and they die, yes, of course it's murder ... but otherwise, no.)

File sharing is, as a general concept, not a problem. It's a perfectly legal thing to do if you either own the materials you're sharing or have the right to share them because they're in the public domain or the owner has granted permission for them to be shared.

The real question is ....

Is file sharing other peoples' intellectual property theft?

Now we're getting down to business!

What is theft?

Theft, all by itself, is a general term that is not given a technical legal definition at the federal level in the U.S. (some states do define it; others don't). It's often used synonymously with larceny (which is defined technically, which we'll get to in a minute).

The 'Lectric Law Library Lexicon defines theft as commonly meaning to secretly and dishonestly take someone else's property (in other words, steal it) for the sake of money (either to sell the property or to simply avoid paying for it). It further defines theft-bote as being the crime of knowingly receiving stolen property from a thief.

Thus, both stealing an item and receiving stolen items can be considered forms of theft under those definitions.

The Oxford Dictionary of Law (which covers British law, which is similar but by no means identical to U.S. law) defines "theft" as "The dishonest appropriation of property belonging to someone else with the intention of keeping it permanently."

Criminologist Thomas O'Connor states that "all modern theft laws have their origins in the ancient law of larceny."

He further says that:

Larceny is the wrongful taking and carrying away of personal property which is in the possession of another with the intent to convert it or permanently deprive the owner thereof.

Okay, so what's larceny? And what has it got to do with filesharing?

According to O'Connor and other sources, classic criminal larceny involves:

1. Wrongfully taking something from someone else (stealing) To do this you have to have control over the object -- but it doesn't have to be actual physical control. You can claim that a book on a shelf is yours and sell it to someone else. When the person walks off with the book they think they've legitimately purchased, they have not committed larceny, but you have. When an item has been taken for personal use, a common defense is to claim that the person was only "borrowing" the item and intended to return it. In that case, it's up to the court to decide whether the evidence surrounding the incident indicates an intent to steal or a real, honest intent to return the item.
   • The act of ripping and making a copyrighted MP3 available for upload has been seen by the courts as wrongfully taking control of an intellectual property. Once other anonymous users have downloaded copies, there's no feasible way to "give it back" to the rightful owner. On the downloading side, however, a user who downloads an illegal copy, tries it out, and then deletes that copy could arguably be seen as just having "borrowed" it.
     
     
2. Taking the item away from the place it was stolen (asportation) There's a lot of variance in how this is interpreted. For instance, in some states, a person can be convicted of shoplifting if they are observed taking and sequestering an item but abandon it in the store before they are apprehended. Theft laws also cover people who can't really asportate anything in a legal sense, such as a parking lot attendant who is given a customer's keys and then goes for an extended joyride in the car.
   • Transferring a file to a fileshare server certainly seems to fulfill the broad asportation criteria, as does downloading it.
     
     
3. The stolen item being personal property. According to modern laws, personal property can be real property (land, houses, etc.), tangible property (moveable things like cars), services, information, intellectual property, and even contraband. Under the vast majority of legal systems, the value of the item determines whether the act of stealing it is considered a misdemeanor, felony, or civil matter.
   • Courts have well and thoroughly upheld that reproduction rights to things like songs and stories and art are valid intellectual properties. Thus, the extent of the financial damage to the holder of the copyright determines whether or not the case would be pursued as a felony, misdemeanor, or civil action.
     
     
4. The item being in the posession of the thief. Most laws require the owner of the item to prove that it was taken without their consent, that they can identify the object as being theirs, and that they did not abandon the item (thus creating a situation in which a reasonable person might think the property was free to whomever wanted to take it).
   • If you've made an illegal copy of an intellectual property and make it available for upload, you are quite obviously in possession of it. However, you might be excused if you legitimately thought the intellectual property was abandoned (for instance, because it was out of print) or in the public domain due to a lack of a copyright statement.
     
     
5. Taking the item with the intent to sell it, gain a reward for its return, or to permanently deprive the owner of it. The "permanent deprivation" part is a little complicated. Courts have ruled that cases like taking a car temporarily for joyriding constitute larceny. Why? The item has been taken recklessly without permission, and the owner stands a strong chance of suffering some kind of financial loss due to the item being damaged while in the thief's control. So, even if the thief always intended to return the item, the risk of permanent loss to the owner makes it larceny.
   
   In other words, larceny (theft) either permanently deprives or has a strong risk of permanently depriving the rightful owner of money.

As I mentioned previously, some U.S. state laws explicitly define theft. For instance, the Ohio Revised Code defines theft thusly:

2913.02. Theft.

(A) No person, with purpose to deprive the owner of property or services, shall knowingly obtain or exert control over either the property or services in any of the following ways:

(1) Without the consent of the owner or person authorized to give consent;

(2) Beyond the scope of the express or implied consent of the owner or person authorized to give consent;

(3) By deception;

(4) By threat;

(5) By intimidation.

(B) (1) Whoever violates this section is guilty of theft.

Ohio law further classes the following larcenous crimes as being forms of theft, several of which apply to file sharing:

• 2913.03. Unauthorized use of a vehicle.
• 2913.04. Unauthorized use of property; computer, cable, or telecommunication property or service.
• 2913.041. Possession or sale of unauthorized cable television device.
• 2913.06. Unlawful use of telecommunications device.
• 2913.07. Motion picture piracy.

But wait! My filesharing isn't depriving the owner of anything! They can still do what they want with it!

Or, as a pro-filesharing user wrote in an online journal: "Steal an idea, they still have their idea, but now you have it too."

Not so fast, pilgrim.

First of all, we're not talking about ideas -- ideas can't be copyrighted. Art and stories and songs contain ideas, convey ideas, but they are not in and of themselves ideas.

Arguing that it's okay to trade a song because it's just an idea is like saying it's okay to sell a human being because we're just nitrogen (hey, humans contain nitrogen, and they give off nitrogen, so they're nitrogen, right?).

Second, refer to the part in #5 above about the larcenous nature of taking a car for joyriding. Now, think about identity theft, a well-recognized but very new form of theft.

If someone commits identity theft against me, I still have my actual identity. My face and fingerprints are still on my person. My friends and employer still recognize me.

I still have my identity, and now somebody else has it too ... and they're racking up credit card bills in my name. It's going to cost me a lot of time and money (because, after all, time is money) to get it all stopped.

Even if the identity thief figures her actions are harmless because the credit card companies will surely forgive my debt once they figure out I couldn't have made the purchases -- it's still theft because it's depriving me of money.

So, yeah, in the end it's all about money. And most writers, musicians, and artists stand to make money in royalties off sales of individual copies of their work, so every copy that gets downloaded off a filesharing server represents a potentially lost sale. Furthermore, a work's resale value may be diminished; publishers release work they expect to profit from, and if they see that the work is rampantly available via filesharing and people are getting it for free, they may question the profit in re-releasing the work.

The actual ramifications of lost sales from filesharing are hard to determine, of course. Some quantity of people who download a PDF or MP3 or EXE probably never would have purchased a legitimate copy of the property in a store; either they really were too damn broke, or they just weren't interested enough to buy but were curious enough to download. But many people fileshare because it's free and convenient, and presumably they do represent lost royalties to the creator.

However, just because the financial loss from a theft is miniscule doesn't mean it's not a theft. If I pocket a 5-cent piece of bubblegum in a candy store, the store owner may never even realize the gum is gone. But I still stole it, and I can't argue otherwise. Even though my theft is trivial, I am still a thief.

Making unauthorized copies of a protected intellectual property such as a song, book, or game available on a filesharing server is arguably a form of theft theft because it conforms to the U.S. legal requirements of larceny. No breaking and entering or forcible boarding need be involved to become a thief.

(Congress could of course pass a law at any time explicitly excluding filesharing copyright violations from being considered larceny in any way, and in that case illegal filesharing might be a form of theft in a moral sense but not in a commonlaw sense. Laws are set in paper rather than stone and are constantly being renegotiated and changed. That's why the world has so many lawyers.)

The Morality of Filesharing (or, Legal, schmegal, filesharing isn't wrong, and you can't make me believe otherwise!)

We are all ultimately responsible for the ethical decisions we make. Hundreds of teeny-tiny little events that are technically crimes go on all the time, unnoticed amongst the great raw screaming chunks of misery that represent larger crimes like armed robbery, rape and murder.

Circumstances can make almost any crime an unfortunate necessity or even a moral good. If I have no money, and my child is starving, I will steal milk for her if I have to, because the needs of my child outweigh my need to be a law-abiding citizen and not harm the store owner.

If I must learn Filemaker Pro to get a job I desperately need and simply haven't the money for a legitimate copy, I will download it and feel bad later when I've got the job.

There's a moral allowance for genuine human need.

There's also a moral legitimacy for filesharing in the name of civil disobedience in some cases. Copyright laws are supposed to balance the public good of being able to freely access and obtain artistic and intellectual materials with the creator's right to control those materials. A strong argument can be made that current laws have gone well past protecting creators -- and in some instances completely fail to protect creators -- and instead offer an unreasonably long corporate monopoly on intellectual property.

For instance, current laws have created a situation in which many musicians end up signing all their rights over to a music company in exchange for releasing their work. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act is widely seen as a move pandering to Disney and other corporations that violates the spirit of the original laws. And many feel that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is bad lawmaking on several counts.

There are quite a lot of materials out there that, while technically copyrighted, have been functionally abandoned. The creators are dead or no longer have rights to their own work, the work is out of print, and the copyright is owned by a corporation that is indifferent to making the work available for sale at a reasonable price.

In such cases, file sharing functionally abandoned materials arguably does provide a benefit to the public and also is defendable under the 4th clause of the larceny rules above.

There's also a moral allowance for using filesharing to obtain digital copies of work you already purchased in a hardcopy or analog format. There's even a borderline slippery-slope argument with some ethical (but no legal) grounding that it's okay to download copies of cable channel TV shows if you subscribed to those channels when the episodes aired. In both those instances, you could have made copies of the materials for personal "backup" use (which is a legitimate thing to do) but the person who has helpfully uploaded the materials is still violating the law. It's an imperfect world.

But there isn't really any moral allowance for simply wanting to have something without paying for it.

Songs and art and books don't grow on trees ... although seeing them everywhere might lead you to believe that they do.

Most people see the glitz and glamorous lifestyles of the latest vapid pop sensation, or hear about the millions of dollars Stephen King just donated to a charity, and they blithely think that all artists, musicians, and writers make plenty of money and a little filesharing surely isn't going to hurt. Besides, hey, they're getting exposure to new people, and they should feel flattered that people think their stuff is worth stealing.

The reality is that most writers, artists, and musicians work hard and don't get a lot of money for what they do. The flattery of seeing one's work on a filesharing server rubs off very quickly if one doesn't have enough money to pay the electric bill that month.

The reality is that artists, writers, and musicians have to pay their bills just like everyone else. They need money to survive -- it's a rare landlord or utility company that will take books and CDs in trade.

Most people create art, music, or stories because they need to express themselves. And for most creators, the whole point of being able to make a living off their creative endeavors is to enable them to keep creating. If they have to take another job to make their bills, the time spent at their day job is time and energy that can't be put to creating new songs or stories or pictures.

Thus, if professional artists, writers, and musicians are unable to make enough money off their work to live on -- they will produce less and less creative work. If Stephen King hadn't been able to make a living with his writing, he'd have had to keep being a low-paid, overworked teacher. We'd have gotten Carrie, certainly, and probably The Shining and maybe even The Stand. But what about later, more sophisticated work like The Green Mile and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon? Those very well might not exist.

In the end, the deprivation caused by mass filesharing might really end up being manifested as less and less quality entertainment available to consumers.

If you think books and songs and movies are overpriced, visit your local library (they might even buy new items they don't carry you if you and your friends request the materials), or buy used copies. And remember, you and like-minded friends can always try making your own for each other.

Hey! What about libraries? How come they get to exist?

Public libraries are run on a combination of tax-derived funding and donations. Their mission is to make books (and to a lesser extent audio and video works) available to everyone in their community.

Every book you find in a library has been legitimately purchased or donated by someone else who bought the book. In short, every copy represents a sale and thus money to the copyright holder. The First Sale Doctrine makes it perfectly legal to lend out a legitimate physical copy of a book, movie, or CD. When a book circulates, it goes out to one person who borrows it for individual or family reading, keeps it for a few weeks, and returns it. The book keeps circulating on this kind of individual basis until it is too worn to lend; then it is replaced with another paid-for book or sold in a booksale fundraiser. A popular library book might be read by 25 people in a year.

Contrast this with illegal fileshared copies of the book. I have seen books posted on IRC that haven't yet gone to press -- in short, somebody with access to the publishing company uploaded an illegal copy. Thus, the shared file doesn't represent a sale at all. And in the case of a person uploading a copy of a legitimately-purchased electronic book, the First Sale Doctrine does not apply because the intellectual content has been duplicated without permission.

A popular prerelease book might be downloaded by 25 people in just a few hours. And once those hundreds of people have downloaded the PDF -- what incentive do they have to actually buy the book, even if they enjoyed it and would have otherwise bought it? Very little, unless they understand the hard work the writer and publisher put into making the book. The sheer numbers make permanent financial losses a very real possibility.

But, as Voltaire said, "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."

Do as your conscience guides you. Just don't be confused or in denial about what you're doing.

---

References

• A conversation with OSU law professor Sheldon W. Halpern
• The Oxford Dictionary of Law
• 'Lectric Law Library Lexicon entry at http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/t085.htm
• Anderson's Online Revised Code at http://onlinedocs.andersonpublishing.com/
• Theft Law: crimes Against Property & Hybrid Crimes by Thomas R. O'Connor at http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/293/293lect11.htm

Labels: copyright, music, publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

"The publisher is just the middleman!"

I've heard many an aspiring writer make a statement to this effect. And, really, who can blame them? We live in an era where print-on-demand has made hardcopy publication something that regular people can afford, and anyone can put up a web site or burn content onto a CD.

The faltering economy has made the big publishers more conservative. They've cut back, been less willing to take risks on new writers. Publishing houses have been sucked up by international megaconglomerates whose core interest is the Almighty Dollar, Pound, or Euro; art is of little concern if it doesn't sell to the increasingly text-jaded masses who turn to TV and video games for their pasttime pleasures.

So electronic publishing and POD technology and Amazon.com have been a godsend to the small press and the savvy self-publisher. Almost all of us have heard of a success story of The Little Author Who Could.

"Yeah!" many writers think. "The only thing standing in between me and my audience is those darned publishers! Who needs 'em anymore? I can do this myself!"

And I know people who have done it themselves.

Heck, if your needs are simple and you just want to have your work read and appreciated by others, you're in the right place: many places on the Web provide an instant gratification to writers that you can't find anywhere else.

But if you want to carve out a career as a writer, make no mistake: becoming a commercially successful self-publisher is several metric tons of hard, hard work. And, as promising as electronic publishing is, readers haven't flocked to it. Readers want to buy a book with real pages they can dogear and read out in their hammocks. It's very rare for anyone to make much money off an electronic book. You have to go hardcopy.

Here are some things to consider before you try your hand at self-publishing:

• Can you get your manuscript in professional shape? Many of us make poor self-editors. It's only natural; you spend hours upon hours staring at a manuscript and mistakes start to look like they belong there. Do you have access to people who are competent, eagle-eyed proofreaders who will be willing to give you the hard news if your manuscript needs more work than just a grammar cleanup? If you don't have acquaintances willing to do this for you, can you pay a freelancer to look over your manuscript?
  
  
• Can you properly design your book? You'll need desktop publishing and typography skills to do your book right. And what about the cover? Do you have graphic design skills and access to pro-level software? What about photography or artwork? Once again, if you want your book to compete with the books produced by the publishing houses, you have to produce a professional-looking product. If you don't have design/layout skills, you'll need to find someone who does.
  
  
• Can you pay for a printer? POD is much less expensive than traditional printing ... but it's not cheap. You're still looking at a few thousand dollars for a print run of any size. And POD has its limitations -- you often don't get to use decent paper, and some color schemes will look muddy on the covers. If you decide to go with a regular printer, perhaps a local print shop, you're looking at more money -- and more decisions. Do you know how to choose paper? What about preparing camera-ready copy? Do you know about computer file formats if the print shop can work from a disk?
  
  
• Can you promote your book? Have you done your research to figure out who your audience is and where they're most likely to see your ads? Sure, printing out some bookmarks to distribute at local bookstores is a good start ... but only a start. Do you have the money to take out some ads in relevant magazines? Can you design a compelling ad? Can you set up a website to promote your book? Do you have the time and money to schmooze at conventions? Can you write promotional copy and news releases to send out to newspapers? Can you set up and coordinate readings/signings at regional bookstores? Do you have the time and money to get promotional copies into the hands of reviewers? Can you promote yourself without coming off as too pushy?
  
  
• Can you properly distribute your book? It's relatively easy to get a listing for a POD on Amazon.com or BN.com, but getting your books into brick-and-mortar stores -- where people will be able thumb through your work and buy it on impulse -- is another matter. You can get local stores to carry copies on consignment, but what about stores in other cities? Do you know how to secure a deal with a national distributor? And what about international publishing? Do you know how to reach foreign-language audiences overseas?
  
  
• Can you handle sales? Some POD printers will offer an online shopping cart and they will process and mail orders for you. If you go with a regular printer, though, you'll have to do all this yourself. If you want to sell online, you'll have to get a shopping cart on a secure server or work through PayPal (which is pretty simple, but I've heard many trouble reports). Otherwise, you'll have to process checks or money orders. Are you organized enough to keep track in case your book does do well and the orders pour in? Do you have the space to keep the many boxes of books clean and dry and ready to be shipped? Do you have the money and time to promptly ship individual copies of your books hither and yon? Do you know how to handle the new tax issues your little enterprise will bring?
  
  
• Do you have legal expertise? Most authors don't have to worry about charges of libel from an angry acquaintance who sees him- or herself cast in a despicable light. Nor do most writers have to worry about lawsuits from the parents of children who hurt themselves trying some dangerous stunt they read about in your book. But what would you do if you were one of the unlucky few? And what if you discover another writer has plagiarized parts of your work? Or if a foreign press translates and publishes your work without permission or payment? Do you have money for a lawyer to go to bat for you?
  
  
• Can you negotiate for the sale of your book's rights? There's money to be made in the sale of film, audio, and foreign-language rights. Do you know how to negotiate this kind of thing?
  
  
• If, after having done all that hard work, can you deal with scorn and disrespect? Because unless your book pulls in some serious critical accolades or sales, you'll be dismissed by many as a hack amateur who couldn't find a "real" publisher. And you'll have to resist the overwhelming urge to beat these people into a pulp.

Publishers are seeming a little less middling now, aren't they?

Big publishers and even established small presses have access to tremendous resources that you as a self-publisher will not. Yes, you will inevitably have to do some promotion on your own even with a deal from a major publishing house. But there's so much more that goes into making a book than just the selling.

Don't sell yourself (and your book) short. Take the jump into self-publishing if you feel confident in your skills; heck, you might find you have a real taste for it and discover a new career for yourself as a small press publisher. But it really might behoove you to try the traditional routes first.

Labels: publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Most of us first encounter the notion of plagiarism while we're in school. Countless schoolkids unwittingly become plagiarists when they write their first few research papers: they copy verbiage verbatim from an encyclopedia or Web article. Even elementary school teachers are quick to tell kids that's a no-no if they realize their students have done it. Often, though, the students are instructed to "put the material in their own words", and they dutifully do some rewording. The student (and, often, his or her teacher) thinks this is fine, when really even a reworded passage still technically counts as plagiarism in academia if it's not cited properly.

Teachers (usually) crack down on plagiarism harder in high school, and most of us who had decent English instructors got citation and footnoting pounded into our heads. In my high school, unwitting plagiarism would get you marked down, but being caught willfully copying a paper would get you a zero for the whole project, potentially causing you to fail the entire class.

The stakes get higher in college; many professors have a zero-tolerance policy, and if they catch you plagiarizing a paper, they will flunk you without a second thought.

But you can always re-take a class. It's expensive, and being flunked is embarrassing, but you can chalk the whole thing up as a learning experience and move on.

Once you leave school and enter a profession in which your livelihood is tied to your publications, a plagiarism charge is a deadly serious prospect. If you are a reporter, novelist, scientist, or academic, being outed as a plagiarist can simultaneously wreck your professional reputation and put you at risk of an expensive lawsuit. In short, it can break you.

The trouble is, it's actually pretty easy for a working writer to unintentionally commit plagiarism. I've known of two good authors who unwittingly committed plagiarism. I've changed their names, even though one involved a public court case:

Case #1: John Doe and the Plagiarized Novel

John Doe is an up-and-coming writer, not a big name, but he's made some story sales and sold a first novel. His younger brother Sam is really excited about John's publishing success, and Sam says he had a great idea for a book. John agrees to write his next novel based on his brother's ideas. Trouble is, Sam had gotten all his ideas from an older, not-well-known horror novel written by a very prolific well-known writer we'll call Mr. Big. John doesn't know this.

So, Sam outlines the plot and characters -- taken almost verbatim from Mr. Big's book -- and gives his notes to John, not realizing that what he's doing is wrong and dangerous. John thinks his brother's ideas are awesome, and starts writing the novel. The novel is in John's style and his own words, but the characters and plot are almost identical to the other book. Sections of dialog, courtesy of Sam, are identical. When it's finished, he gives it to his agent (who hasn't read Mr. Big's book) who thinks it's great. The agent sells it to a publisher who also hasn't read Mr. Big's book.

When the novel comes out the next year, other people read it who have read Mr. Big's book. Someone sends Mr. Big a copy of the novel -- and he's furious he's been ripped off by some punk upstart.

John, still not realizing what his brother's done, insists he's innocent. Mr. Big takes the case to court. John is found guilty of plagiarism and is ordered to pay Mr. Big a fairly large settlement. John suffers a great deal of public embarassment, loss of professional reputation just as he is actually starting to have one, and has to pay Mr. Big the equivalent of a small house mortgage for many years. He suffers tremendously because his brother was copyright-stupid and John didn't think to ask where his great ideas were coming from (and also because neither he, his agent, nor the publisher were well-read enough to catch the novel's problems, but that's another issue).

Case #2: Sally Smith and the Plagiarized Story

Sally is a published story author and academic. Like many writers, she keeps a notebook of ideas she jots things in as they come to her. She also jots down particularly cool, quotable passages she finds in the many books she reads. She is always careful to note where she found the passages -- except once, she slipped up. She wrote down a paragraph from another writer's short story, but got distracted before she cited it.

Ten years later, Sally's published a metric ton of her own fiction in books and story collections. She's asked to write a story for an upcoming anthology, and so she starts thumbing through her old notebook for an idea. She spies a nifty paragraph -- the one from the other writer's story -- and inspiration strikes.

She sits down and writes a story that flows effortlessly from her fingers; it feels familiar to her, but by now she's written hundreds of stories and she dismisses the feeling. The finished story is very similar to the other writer's story. Not identical, not even similar enough for many people to call foul over ... but she's got that one paragraph in there, and it's word-for-word the same.

Her story's published in an anthology, and then she sells it as a reprint to another anthology. Nobody notices anything's amiss. Then, one day, one of her readers sends her an email: "I really enjoyed your new story, but wasn't it a lot like Richard Roe's story in New York Tales?"

Her memory pings. She digs out her old issues of New York Tales and finds Roe's tale. Sick horror overwhelms her as she reads his story and realizes why writing her recent story felt so familiar to her -- she read it ten years before, and used it in her notebook!

She realizes that something like this could ruin her reputation, and on top of that she feels horrible for inadvertently ripping off another writer. So, she sends Roe an apologetic letter explaining what happened, and asks Roe what he wants her to do.

Roe's met Sally before, enjoys her work, and respects her as a writer. He accepts her explanation, and says that he'll be satisfied if Sally sends him the money she got for the story with the understanding she will never try to sell it again. And finally, he has her copyright the story under both their names. He doesn't take her to court, and the matter remains private among him, her, and their agents. Sally's cost is a few hundred dollars and some personal embarrassment. Her reputation remains intact, and everybody goes on with their lives and the incident is pretty much forgotten.

There's always a price to pay for committing plagiarism, even unintentionally. But by coming clean and being upfront and contrite about your mistakes, you can potentially avoid the worst. If you gamble that nobody will notice, you run the risk of having the charge taken to you by an angry author who won't be much inclined to believe your explanations (especially if you cop a bad attitude with him or her). If you try to cover up, you make yourself look guilty, and you're not likely to do well in court.

If somebody accuses you of plagiarism and you genuinely think the charges are unfounded, by all means, fight them -- but first, make sure they are unfounded. Don't cave to a crackpot who thinks that just because you also named your main character William Ballinger that you owe him a chunk of money. But if you know you screwed up, just 'fess up and try to do damage control.

Labels: copyright, publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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The Traditional Path To Being Agented

When you're trying to sell your first novel, you're stuck in a terrible Catch-22: many publishers won't look at your work unless it's represented by an agent, but it's very hard to get a legitimate agent without a published novel under your belt or a publishing offer in hand.

Joe Haldeman once told me that the single best way to get a decent agent is through a combination of shopping your own novel around and networking with other writers. The best way of getting noticed in the slush pile is to have a track record of short story sales -- even a few credits look a whole lot better than none. Novel writing is very different from short story writing; some folks do the one well and the other poorly. However, having short fiction credits shows that you have marketable skill writing fiction. Heck, in some instances the editor might actually recognize your name. Whatever you can do to get your manuscript out of the slush pile and into an editor's hands is a very good thing.

If you're starting to get short work published, joining professional writers' organizations like the National Writer's Union, SFWA or HWA can be a huge help; these organizations will help you develop professional relationships with established authors who've already been around the block a time or two when it comes to agents and who can recommend someone when you've finally got a bite from a publisher. They'll also help steer you clear of known scam artists.

In some instances, these professional organizations offer you other opportunities to get in touch with publishers. For instance, the Horror Writers' Association has set up pitch meetings with book editors at this year's World Horror Convention. While pitch meetings can be a terror some writers don't want to deal with, they can yield very good results for those who present themselves and their work well in person.

When you get an offer back from a publisher, that's the time to call up your author aquaintances and see if they know of decent agents who'll be willing to look over the contract. The 10%-15% agent commission is well worth having someone knowledgeable check the contract to make sure you're getting what you should and, possibly more important, aren't selling away important rights.

Evaluating An Agent

Sometimes, though, you don't have contacts, and you're not a story writer. What then? How do you separate the hordes of scam artists and bogus amateurs posing as legitimate literary agents from the real McCoys?

You should probably look elsewhere if an agent:

• isn't located within easy driving distance of the New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, or London areas. These are major publishing centers, and if an agent works elsewhere, he or she will not be as efficient at working with editors and getting your work out there.
  
  
• isn't a member of the Association of Authors Representatives (AAR). There's no reason for a legitimate agent to not be a member of this professional group. Ideally, an agent should also be a signatory to the Writers Guild of America.
  
  
• isn't listed in the Literary Marketplace.
  
  

You should definitely look elsewhere if an agent:

• Runs advertisements in writing magazines seeking clients or runs a promotional website to drum up business.
  
  
• Charges a reading or other up-front fee.
  
  
• Won't reveal who his or her clients are.
  
  
• Can't demonstrate that he or she has sold anything to a legitimate commercial publisher.
  
  
• Charges marketing, contract, representation, handling, processing, retainer, or circulation fees -- all this should be covered by their commission.
  
  
• Is eager to offer you editing services for a fee (see below).
  
  
• Refers you to a book doctor if he or she rejects a manuscript.
  
  
• Owns or works with a vanity press.
  
  

There are other factors to consider, of course. Getting data on agents can be hard, which is why it helps to network with experienced authors. A good agent should make most of his or her money off commissions paid after your work finds a home -- if they don't sell your work, they don't get paid. An agent who charges reading fees etc. doesn't have much of an incentive to get your work out there and sold.

For a good free evaluated database of literary agents, visit http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/pubagent.htm.

Agents as Editors

A lot of scam artists posing as agents work as "book doctors" or covertly run vanity publishing companies; they pretend to be an agent so as to procure business for their press or marketing/editing sidelines. However, a few agents legitimately work as freelance editors for commercial publishers.

How can you tell the one from the other? Check for legitimate credits as an editor and an agent -- the person should be happy to provide them. A legitimate editor/agent should always agent on commission and should never solicit editing business from clients. Professionals know where the lines are drawn, and they keep their businesses separate.

Legitimate Agents Who Just Don't Work Out

An agent who does well for one writer might not do well for another. Sometimes, there's a personality conflict. Or an agent might mishandle a book in a genre that he or she is not familiar with. An agent might work very hard for his or her top-selling writers and almost totally ignore the others. An author I know experienced the latter situation; his manuscripts languished for the three years he was with a particular agent, but after he severed the relationship, he sold six novels on his own.

The key thing is that a good agent will keep the lines of communication open and will provide evidence that he or she is doing what he or she is expected to do. Agents are usually murderously busy, yes, and it doesn't do to be a pest when asking for updates. But you should see progress, and you should feel that an agent is listening to your concerns and taking them seriously.

A good agent is worth his or her weight in gold. In addition to invaluable aid on contract negotiations, he or she will save you a lot of headaches in dealing with troublesome publishers and will generally run interference so that you don't get into a fight with people and generate ill will.

But always remember, with the exception of getting your work seen by editors at houses that don't take unagented manuscripts, there's really nothing an agent can do that you can't manage on your own with some study and work.

Labels: publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Okay. You've written your story or poem. You think it's good. Your friends say it rocks. Your creative writing instructor gave it an "A" and wrote in the margin, "Excellent work. You should try to get this published."

Yeah! Get it published! Uh, but you've never sent your work out before. What do you do?

Step One: Find a Market

Most beginning writers will find that magazines and webzines are their best options for getting their first works published. Writers can often resell their better works (sometimes many times) to anthologies after the initial sale (and, of course, after the exclusivity clause has passed).

How are web publications different than hard-copy magazines?

Webzines have certain advantages. They are often easier (and less expensive) to submit to because you can email your work to the editors instead of having to print and mail your submission. Web publications often have a faster response time and are more receptive to work from beginning writers. It's also easier to find out about web-based publications because you don't have to track down a physical copy to review as you would a regular magazine -- the sites are free and quickly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

On the other hand, hardcopy publications have a different set of advantages. Regular magazines often pay more for work, and a sale to a hardcopy pub has a certain cachet that webzines can't match. Your Aunt Wilma will be ever so much more impressed when you hand her a slick, shiny magazine than if you send her a URL. Also, hardcopy magazines that have been around for more than a year tend to be more stable.

How do I find out about a publication?

Ideally, if you're a writer, you should already be reading magazines and websites that publish the kind of work you want to sell.

But, since there are hundreds of publications out there, you obviously can't read them all, or even find a fraction of them in your local bookstore. Every year, Writer's Digest publishes a big, thick book called The Writers' Market; they also publish similar books like the Novel & Short Story Writer's Market and Poet's Market. The Writer, Inc. publishes a similar annual volume called The Writer's Handbook. All these books contain the listings for many, many markets, and you can find one to many of these books at your local library or bookstore.

However, the information in annually-published books can be stale. You can find more current market information on the Web. Do a search for magazines or market listings at places like Yahoo! Also, the following sites may be helpful:

• Duotrope's Digest
  (http://www.duotrope.com/)
• The Market List -- A resource for writers of SF, fantasy and horror (http://www.marketlist.com/)
• Ralan.com
  (http://www.ralan.com/)

Gee, I'm really busy, and it looks like I found all the info I need in this market listing ... do I really have to read the site before I submit?

Yes. Absolutely. You need to visit and read through the site. Any information you find on a market list may be incomplete, out-of-date, or just plain inaccurate. There's no excuse to not check out the site before you submit.

97% of all publications with a Web presence also have guidelines posted or offer them through email. Read them and follow them; editors all have different preferences as to how to prepare/deliver submissions. Most print markets do not accept electronic submissions unless they've worked with you before (this is changing). Many web-only publications don't accept hardcopy at all.

And, ultimately, the best way to know what an editor likes is to read what he or she has already published.

Once I'm at the site, how do I evaluate the publication?

Focus on the fundamentals. Do you like the stories and poems presented on the site? Are the stories and poems presented in an attractive, easy-to-read, error-free manner? Is the site aesthetically pleasing and regularly updated? If you like the site and think you'd like to see your work there, by all means submit.

A note on paying vs. nonpaying publications: My feeling is that you should always shop your work around to publications that pay professional rates first -- this means at least 3 cents a word. Some people feel that any pay is better than no pay and won't submit to nonpaying publications. Others feel that making $10 for a story you worked on for 20 hours is such a trivial compensation that the overall quality of the publication in terms of how the site or magazine looks and what kind of exposure it gives to authors is far more important. Ultimately, it's up to you. There are high-quality nonpaying web publications and paying-in-copies magazines out there that publish professional-quality fiction and which do provide important exposure to new and rising writers.

A note on contest/reading fees: If a publication requests a reading or editing fee, run away and don't look back. You should never have to pay to be published. Although some legitimate contests require a fee, I suggest avoiding those, too.

Step Two: Prepare Your Submission Properly and Send it Out

(Most of my comments here relate to preparing work for electronic submission)

Preparing your submission properly means adhering to the publication's guidelines. Editors don't just make up rules capriciously; they have good reasons for them. One editor may have been burned by Word macro viruses, and doesn't want to receive Word documents from unknown people. Another editor may be using a text-only email package that doesn't handle attachments well, and therefore he or she wants plain text in the body of an e-mail message.

If you do something that lets the editor know you didn't bother to read the guidelines, he/she will not look favorably upon your submission. Put yourself in the editor's shoes: "If a writer clearly didn't bother to take 5 minutes to check out my freely-available site and read the guidelines, why should I spend the 15-30 minutes to read and evaluate his/her work?"

If the editor wants snail-mail submissions in hardcopy only, don't send a disk. If an editor wants to see submissions sent in RTF, don't send an attachment as a Word document. Don't send attachments if they say they only want to see plain text. If you frustrate the editor by sending him/her something he/she can't read, you're not helping your chances.

If the editor wants to see a cover letter, write a good one. Use the same language in an e-mail cover letter that you would in a hardcopy cover letter. Make sure you've checked for grammar and spelling errors before you send -- the ease of submission makes some people sloppy in this matter. Be formal and businesslike, unless you know the editor well and have an established rapport. Don't wax eloquent about your five cats, or try to summarize your story. And don't ever, ever try to be funny unless you're very sure of the editor's sense of humor.

If you come off as a difficult person or a crank in your cover letter, the weary and overworked editor may think, "Gee, this person's stuff is pretty good, but I get the feeling he/she is going to hassle me endlessly if I engage him in any sort of conversation, so I'm better off just sending the standard rejection and not encouraging him."

If the editor accepts attachments, make sure the text of the files is in standard manuscript format, unless the editor tells you he/she wants something different.

Take a little time to learn about file formats and how to make your word processor save files correctly. It's not hard, but you will need to know the difference between an RTF and a PDF.

If you are sending out electronic submissions, be sure you understand your e-mail program, and make sure you know how to format a plain-text submission properly. Make sure your e-mail program is sending plain text and not HTML, because HTML is pretty unreadable to people using text-only email software. Special non-ASCII characters like em-dashes and typographer's quotes will need to be converted to plain text characters, or they'll mess up your manuscript with nontext symbols. Most word processing programs have a "Find/Replace" feature, so this is pretty easy to do. Italic text will need to be indicated with underscores (or whatever the editor prefers).

Make very sure your spacing and line width is set properly so that submissions don't wrap badly (72 characters is a safe line width). Some word processing programs won't give you this info, but many text editing programs will. Set the margins, then when you export the file, have it change soft returns to hard returns, then open the file in a text editor like BBEdit or Notepad (or TextPad, which is a better program) and cut and paste it into your e-mail program.

If the editor can't read your submission easily, you've got a 90% chance it'll be automatically rejected.

Make sure your system is virus-free; sending an editor a virus is not a good move.

Step 3: Be as honest as you can in your dealings with editors and publications

Simultaneous submissions are iffy. Editors don't want them because they don't want to go through the trouble of reading/evaluating something if it's already taken. Writers have a strong urge to send a single story or poem to to several markets simultaneously because of the long waits and the low chances that an editor will take something. It's frustrating. If you do this, and a story/poem gets taken while it's under consideration at other markets, be fair to the other editors and promptly send them a courteous letter notifying them that you must withdraw the submission from consideration.

Speaking from experience, it's really, really awkward when you get two acceptances at the same time for the same piece from different publications. You have your pick of where you'd like the story to appear (which is good) but if you mis-handle declining the offer from the editor of the less-preferred publication, you risk creating hard feelings that can haunt you in the future.

Don't try to resell published stories unless the market accepts reprints. If an editor buys a work and then finds out he/she's gotten a retread, he/she is gonna be pissed. This is a good way to burn a bridge and develop a bad reputation.

Editors do talk and compare notes, particularly if they're actively annoyed with a specific writer. And editors have a way of moving up in the world and turning up where you least expect at conventions and such. Today's bush-league zine editor might be tomorrow's acquiring editor at the major book publisher you try to sell your first novel to.

Don't plagiarize. I probably don't need to say this, but if you plagiarize someone else's work, you're gonna get found out, and once you're found out, you are done.

Don't resend rejected stories unless you've rewritten them significantly. Generally don't resend rewritten stories unless the editor has asked to see a rewrite or if it's been a while between submissions (I'd say at least two years, unless there's a new editor or 1st reader). Some editors have long memories, and if they recognize the same submission under a different title, they'll almost certainly reject it and they might view future submissions from you with suspicion.

Step 4: Be patient ... and be professional

Once you've sent a submission, wait at least two months before querying unless the editor has indicated shorter response times are normal. If you get no response, query again after another two months. If you still get no response, send a third query indicating that the editor should consider the story withdrawn if you receive no reply.

Dammit! They rejected my submission!

If an editor rejects your work via email, don't hit the "reply" button unless you're going to thank them for their time and offer them a new submission.

Don't ever send a publisher a nasty letter, unless you're sure you'll never have to deal with the editor again (and in most cases, you can't be sure). Particularly don't send them something like "Neener, neener X Magazine already bought my story, idiot!" So what if your story sells to another publication? Magazines aren't interchangeable -- what is publishable one place is not necessarily publishable elsewhere. And you've just demostrated a lack of good grace and sense. Likewise, don't demand an explanation if none was given, unless you really want the editor to really give you a piece of his/her mind.

Yay! They bought it, they bought it!

By all means, celebrate. No sale will ever be quite so cool as your first one.

If there's money involved, make sure you've got a signed contract, and make sure you understand the terms of the contract. Know what rights you've sold and retained. Be sure you understand exclusivity clauses, etc.

However, don't constantly send queries as to when your work will be published or posted. And, once a story is posted, don't deluge an editor with requests for corrections/changes unless the errors were introduced by the publications' staff.

Don't ever, ever start shopping an accepted story around just because you feel it's taking too long to be published. In the print world, it is not uncommon for a backlogged publisher to take two years to publish a story or poem. In the Web world, six to eight months lag time between acceptance and publication is not uncommon, nor is it unreasonable. If you think a publication has gone down, query the editor. If a message bounces, wait a week and send again. If you have a signed contract or otherwise have made an agreement with an editor, then resell the story out from under him or her, you've burned a bridge.

Step 5: What to Do If Things Go Wrong

As Neil Gaiman said, there's many a slip 'twix cup and lip in the publishing world, particularly if you're dealing with the small press or semiprofessional publications.

Sometimes, you can have a signed contract and never get published because the magazine runs into financial problems and ceases publication. In some cases, you should get a kill fee for your orphaned story. If you think a publication is going or has gone under, follow the querying advice I gave above. If after the third query you get no satisfactory reply, you can safely consider your story to be freed of the contract and ready to submit elsewhere.

Sometimes, your story gets published ... and you don't get paid. This will happen to you, sooner or later. If polite communication with the publisher does not remedy the situation to your satisfaction, you may need to see legal counsel.

I don't recommend calling a private lawyer over a $30 or $50 sale -- it's the better part of valor just to write small unpaid sales off your taxes (if you live in the U.S.) and chalk it up to experience.

Instead, what you should always do is to contact relevant writers' organizations to lodge a complaint -- organizations like Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Horror Writers Association can be very helpful to authors who run into trouble with publishers. Sites like the Rumor Mill at http://www.speculations.com/ and Preditors and Editors at http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/ are also useful.

If you think you've been screwed by an unscrupulous publisher, don't go around on web boards and newsgroups badmouthing the publisher in public. Namecalling and vicious language can easily backfire and make you look like a troublemaker that other editors don't want to deal with. Speak the truth, but do so as politely and professionally as you can.

Labels: publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

First, ask yourself why you want to start a webzine. There are lots of good reasons, but if you can't give yourself a cogent answer, you might need to do some re-thinking. Webzines are easier to produce and maintain than print publications -- but they do take work. A lot of work, and a lot of time. I've seen a lot of webzines get started on the basis of the publisher's nebulous idea of simply wanting to do one; they seldom make it past the first issue or two.

Next, ask yourself what unoccupied niche your publication will fill. There are a lot of publications, both online and off. How will yours be better or different than what's already out there? These are important questions, because new webzines are very hard to promote, and you won't get readers if you don't offer something worthwhile and different.

Study your favorite webzines. Figure out how they work, and what you like best about them. Then use that information when you design your site. And, once your site is running, check your competition regularly to see what they're doing.

In design, a clean, simpler look is often better; the site should be about the text, right? Don't make more work for yourself than you have to; if you don't have a knack for site design, enlist the help of an acquaintance who does. When you're making a prototype page design, check it on as many different platforms and browsers as you can to make sure it looks good. If your Java-ridden site crashes someone's browser or is unreadable on a Macintosh -- you've just lost a reader. Get the best graphics and artwork you can. While the writing makes the magazine, people make their initial judgments on the aesthetics of the site -- they won't bother to read it if the art looks bad or if it's hard to navigate or the text is hard to read.

Figure out if you're going to pay writers and artists or simply "pay in exposure". You'll get better material and your publication will have better status in the eyes of readers and writers alike if you pay professional rates. But if you offer pay, even a modest amount, you're going to be inundated with materials, the vast majority of which will be unpublishable. I've seen publications die when their editors burned out from trying to read the tons of submissions they got when they started offering writers payment. If you get a listing in any of the Writers' Digest books ... brace yourself.

Figure out whether your webzine will run as a commercial or noncommercial publication. If you decide to go with the commercial option, your best bet is to find a corporate sponsor, as Chiaroscuro (www.chizine.com) found in Leisure Books. I've never seen a fiction/poetry webzine run successfully on banner ad revenues and subscriptions; other webzines that offer compelling nonfiction information (like stock market advice) or porn have managed this feat, though. If you go the noncommercial route, it may be worth your time to try to get set up as a nonprofit organization (this is what we're in the process of doing at Strange Horizons). As a nonprofit, you'll be able to get grants and donations. Strange Horizons has already done well enough in obtaining donations that we can pay professional rates to contributors, although all of us on staff are strictly volunteers.

The quality of the writing in your magazine will make or break it ... look for the best you can get, and treat your writers well. If you pay, pay them on time (preferably on acceptance rather than on publication), and respond to their concerns promptly.

If you're not personally overseeing the finances, make damned sure you know where the money's coming from and where it's going. Keep the best records you can, because if you're operating your webzine at a loss, you can potentially write it off as a business expense.

Your staff is crucial to your success. You can run a simple site essentially by yourself, but for anything the least bit complex, you need the help of at least a few other competent, committed people to help you. In dealing with a staff, especially a staff of volunteers, frequent communication is critical (weekly progress reports are good); try to keep people feeling involved and enthusiastic.

Make sure your stories and articles are cleanly laid-out and free of typos and code-os. Even if you are an amateur, you don't want to look like one, do you?

And finally ... trust your instincts, and follow them. Make good on your promises to your contributors, your readers, and yourself.

For more advice on starting a webzine, visit:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20010101/start_a_magazine.shtml

Labels: publishing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Pesticide contamination. Poverty. Global warming. Illiteracy. Deforestation. Cancer. Advertising.

Advertising?

Yes, advertising ranks right up there with the major evils of the world in the minds of many political activists and environmentalists, particularly those who subscribe to Dependency Theory.

Dependency Theory is the new kid on the block in the field of international economics, and it is embraced by many educated Latin Americans (dependistas). Subscribers to this theory argue that developing nations are dependent on an international capitalist system, and that the rich, developed Northern nations (Japan, the U.S., members of the European Community) who control the system take unfair advantage of the developing countries at every turn, thus keeping them economically anemic and shackled in class conflict, poverty, and environmental degradation.

Take the case of Brazil, for instance. Like most other Latin American countries, Brazil has a host of severe social, political and environmental problems: rain forest destruction, illiteracy, widespread hunger, rampant human rights abuses, severe urban air pollution, political corruption, water pollution, ad nauseam.

A dependista would argue that all these problems can be traced directly to Brazil's past as a Portuguese colony, a land whose people and natural resources were ruthlessly exploited by European "discoverers." This exploitation is carried on today, both by the chronically corrupt political system that sprouted in the footprints of the old Portuguese robber barons and by the corporations of the North, who see the country as a source of cheap labor and cheap materials and as a market for second-rate goods.

The dependista view holds that Brazil gets the short end of the stick in any economic deal with the North. They argue that Northern countries conspire to keep down the market prices of raw materials such as timber and sugarcane, thus forcing Brazil to sell off its precious natural resources at unfairly low prices. The North gets the benefit of cheap raw materials while Brazil is left with a dwindling rain forest and the pollution left over from activities such as strip mining.

In return for all this, the dependistas say, the Northern corporations buy up bargain-priced air time on Brazil's TV networks and bombard the impoverished, illiterate, advertising-naive populace with exhortations to buy Northern products. And the Brazilian people believe what they see in the ads, believe that these Northern goods will lead to modernity and happiness. Well-to-do Brazilians discard their cultural values in favor of the glamorous lifestyles they see advertised on TV, and they start to conspicuously consume high-priced, foreign-made goods like automobiles and champagne. The poor strive to emulate the rich and use their meager wages to purchase products like Coca-Cola and Lucky Strikes instead of healthy, low-cost foods like beans and rice or other necessities such as medicine. As Brazilians at all income levels buy foreign consumer goods (and buy into foreign advertising), more money is siphoned out of the country into the pockets of Northern corporate executives. And so more trees are chopped down, more land torn up and poisoned in a hunt for gold to pay for more unhealthy Northern goodies, and the vicious cycle continues.

But is this really what's going on in Brazil? Are TV ads really helping to destroy Brazil's environment, stunt its economy, ruin the health of its people and drown its local cultures? And, if the ads do cause damage, can the blame be laid squarely at the feet of Northern corporations, as the dependistas claim?

Well, the first element of the problem is television, and the Brazilians do watch quite a lot of it. Brazil's preeminent network, TV Globo, is one of the largest networks in the world; virtually everyone in the cities has a TV; in fact, some who have televisions do not have more necessary appliances such as refrigerators. Nightly Brazilian-made soap operas, telenovelas, have been hugely popular, and writers such as Alma Guillermoprieto have noted that the these shows have influenced Brazilians' social and political behavior. Furthermore, as Guillermoprieto also observed, the line between reality and TV fiction is blurry in the minds of many Brazilians, and so it is even more likely that Northern commercials, which (unlike the telenovelas) are specifically designed to influence consumer behavior, are even more likely to have an impact.

And the Brazilians are exposed to a huge number of advertisements during their favorite telenovelas, far more than would be allowed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission; as advertising researchers Richard Tansey and Michael Hyman have noted, commercials take up about 25 percent of TV Globo's air time. So for every three minutes of soap opera, Brazilians see at least two thirty-second advertisements.

But, contrary to the dependista argument, these commercials aren't exactly a bargain for advertisers. In an article in the August 16, 1993 edition of The New Yorker, Jorge Adib, the managing director of TV Globo's international division, stated that the network charged advertisers the equivalent of $53,000 U.S. dollars for a 30-second spot during popular prime-time telenovelas. While advertisers have to shell out far more money to U.S. networks for ads shown during special programs such as the Super Bowl, $53,000 per commercial is hardly small change.

And since U.S. advertisers are willing to spend that kind of money to attract Brazilian consumers, obviously Northern goods are selling quite well down there.

So what are Brazilians buying? And are the products in question as damaging to the nation's economy, environment, and public health as the dependistas claim?

For one thing, Brazilians seem to love automobiles as much as Americans and Italians do. And while the social and economic effects of car buying and driving are hard to gauge (more on that later), automobiles definitely have negative environmental consequences.

The most obvious problem with cars is air pollution. According to annual monitoring reports from the United Nations Environment Programme, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo already have some of the worst air pollution problems in the world. Much of this pollution comes from coal-burning factories, but a significant portion comes from cars. Gasoline combustion produces a host of noxious chemical by-products, mainly hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, ozone, and peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN).

All these chemicals are components of photochemical smog, although as far as direct harm to human health is concerned, ozone and PAN do the worst damage; both chemicals are toxic at very low levels, causing lung irritation that can be fatal for people with asthma or emphysema. Plants are even more sensitive to ozone and PAN, and the chemicals can cause serious crop losses to farmers who have fields near urban areas.

Hydrocarbons such as methane and nitrogen oxides do more than contribute to smog, however. Methane is a known "greenhouse gas" that can contribute to global warming. Nitrogen oxides mix with atmospheric water to create fish- and tree-killing acid rain.

The particular composition of Brazilian gasoline creates other problems. Lead, a heavy metal that causes mental retardation in children and neurological problems in adults, is still used as an additive to prevent "knocking." Brazil uses a 20% alcohol/80% gasoline mixture in an effort to reduce oil imports, but unfortunately the annual production of the sugarcane-derived alcohol creates about 100 to 120 billion liters of vinhoto, a pollutant that interferes with water's ability to carry oxygen, thereby killing fish and other aquatic animals. Furthermore, many social activists and environmentalists worry that the fields used to grow sugarcane for alcohol production would be better used to grow food crops for Brazil's hungry populace.

The disposal of certain automobile parts causes other pollution problems. The main problem comes from cars' lead-acid batteries, which are difficult to recycle properly and are more likely to be carelessly dumped in fields or roadsides where they disintegrate and contaminate the ground with lead. Tire disposal presents another problem, not only in the landfill space they take up but because tire piles are notorious for catching fire. Such fires are long-burning, hard to put out (fire fighters usually have to use chemicals that are themselves potentially dangerous pollutants) and produce plenty of thick, black smoke and noxious fumes.

Automobiles are beyond the financial reach of many Brazilians; environmental researcher Roberto Guimaraes estimated that only 8% of the people own cars. However, Brazil has a big population, and the wealthy and middle class are buying autos at a great rate. In fact, an article in the May 16, 1994 edition of Advertising Age dealt with an unusual problem for General Motors: the Brazilians loved GM's Corsa, a sleek $7,000 subcompact, so much that people were buying them faster than GM could make them. In response to this overwhelming demand for and subsequent shortage of the little cars, GM launched a $1.5 million TV ad campaign that featured General Motors do Brasil Vice President Andre Beers urging consumers to wait a few months before they went out to buy a Corsa.

A big Northern-owned corporation telling customers to not buy its product? This seems to fly in the face of the dependista assertion that corporations are interested solely in economic rape and pillage. On the other hand, one could argue that GM was simply exercising good business sense, trying to keep the price of the Corsa down so they could sell more cars and make more money in the long run.

At any rate, Brazilians buy a lot of cars, all of them from foreign owned companies. According to the aforementioned Advertising Age article, Brazilians purchased 869,170 cars in 1993: 325,629 came from Autolatina's Volkswagen division, 217,714 from General Motors do Brasil and 209,071 from Fiat, and the remaining 116,756 car sales were to other Northern companies such as Chrysler and Volvo. Economy-priced cars like the GM Corsa comprised 40% of all the car sales. Brazil has no nationally-owned car companies, although they have a few companies that make auto accessories, such as Companhia Siderurgica Belgo Mineira, which produces steel auto parts, and Pirelli Pneus, the world-renowned tire manufacturer.

This situation seems to follow with the dependista argument that the North is dominating the Brazilian market and siphoning money out of the country. However, one also has to consider the fact that General Motors do Brasil and Autolatina Volkswagen have manufacturing plants within the country. Thus, the major portion of the cars Brazilians buy are made by Brazilians, and so a portion of the proceeds of the car sales are cycled back into the country in the form of worker wages and local executive salaries. By the same token, a Brazilian auto assembly line worker makes far less money than his or her U.S. counterpart, so no doubt GM and Volkswagen pocket a tidy profit, but it is not the wholesale thievery that many dependistas depict.

And, going back to the advertising element of the situation, it turns out that many of the people who make the ads that sell the cars are in fact Brazilians. Multinational corporations are becoming more and more culturally savvy; they know that nobody knows a market like the people in that market. According to Advertising Age, GM's price-control Corsa ads were created by Colucci & Associados Propaganda, and Fiat also uses local advertising talent to produce their Brazilian commercials. So, when you come down to it, Brazilians are equally if not more responsible for the images and ideas projected in the commercials than are the Northern corporate executives who run the companies from afar.

In fact, the state of Brazilian advertising as a whole contradicts the dependista argument that Latin American governments are helpless to counteract the effects of Northern advertising. The largest single advertiser on Brazil's airwaves is not one of the multinational corporations -- it's the Brazilian government. In 1984, media researcher Sergio Mattos found that Brazil spent over a billion dollars in media advertising every year, and most of that went to purchasing TV air time. The Brazilian government has never hesitated to use TV to promote its agendas, and so one would think that if it objected to the content or message of the ads Northern companies broadcast over TV Globo, the government would not hesitate to do something about it.

After all, up until 1985 TV Globo was a puppet of the Brazilian government (this contradicts the dependista claim that Latin American media outlets are controlled by the North), and researchers such as Sergio Mattos and Joseph Straubhaar believe that the government consistently shielded the network from unwanted Northern influence.

Brazilian television got started in 1950 and was based directly on U.S. models. And, as in the U.S., at first only rich Brazilians could afford TVs, and because there were so few viewers most programs were made in Brazil. But in the late 50s, the cost of television sets started to go down, and by that time TV had become a status symbol, a way to show one was modern, even if one was illiterate.

With the increasing viewership and increasing potential for profit, Brazilian media mogul Roberto Marinho decided to found a new network, TV Globo, in 1962. Though Marinho ran other successful media enterprises such as the newspaper O Globo, he decided that TV was too new to risk running it alone. So he signed a deal with Time-Life Corporation in which Time-Life agreed to provide financial backing and technical assistance in exchange for a share of TV Globo's future profits. However, in 1964 the military took control of the government, and although the regime was nominally U.S.-friendly, it decided the deal between Time-Life and TV Globo was of questionable legality. In 1968, the deal was called off, and although TV Globo paid back Time-Life's loans (essentially interest-free) by 1971, the Brazilian network gained far more from the deal than did the U.S. conglomerate. In fact, Time-Life's financial advisor Joseph Wallach, who helped set up TV Globo's financial and corporate organization, defected to Globo, obtained Brazilian citizenship, and became a Globo executive.

The whole episode between TV Globo and Time-Life turns the standard dependista depiction of North-South economic deals inside out. Because of TV Globo's maneuvering in the Time-Life deal, by 1968 the network was clearly the dominant force in Brazilian television.

The Brazilian government continued to dominate TV Globo, however. The military use the network to present a peaceful, homogenized picture of Brazil to the people. TV was used as an electronic sedative; the dictatorship censored anything that might prove to be the least bit inflammatory.

Because the U.S. was on friendly terms with the regime, canned American shows dominated the airwaves for a time. But in the 1970s the military, apparently gripped with a new nationalistic ideology, encouraged TV Globo to develop local programming, and the U.S. imports began to be phased out. Soon, Brazil was exporting its home-grown shows, and by 1984, 90 other countries were buying TV Globo programming.

In 1985, Brazil went through a period of political upheaval, and the military dictatorship crumbled, but TV Globo skillfully avoided being pulled down with it. In fact, the network was instrumental in the election of the new president, who, unfortunately, proved to be almost as corrupt as the military who preceded him.

And that essentially captures the true nature of Brazil's problems: the worst threats to her environment, economy and public health come from within the country. As writers such as Alma Guillermoprieto and Roberto Guimaraes have documented, even now that Brazil has a democratically elected government, politicians still lead the country into environmentally disastrous projects such as the Trans-Amazon Highway Project (which hugely increased the rate of rainforest destruction), refuse to deal with social problems constructively (witness the government's decision to "clean up" Rio for the 1992 UN environmental conference by rounding up and shooting street children) and steal public monies with impunity. Whatever negative impact Northern TV commercials have, it is a bit like a bad case of ringworm in comparison to the metastasizing lung cancer that is Brazilian government.

Of course, ringworm is ringworm, and Northern corporations try to make money as they can in the Brazilian marketplace. But dependistas cannot claim that this is a sign of a Northern conspiracy to keep the country economically subservient. After all, those corporations try to take any advantage they can within their own countries' markets, with the same potential for damage. U.S. communications researchers regularly debate the ethics of advertising practices in this country. While people have called for increased regulation of commercials (again, a power that the Brazilian government has mostly chosen not to exercise), nobody has seemed willing to hold advertising designers and marketers to any kind of professional moral code, as are other communicators such as newspaper reporters (but this is a subject best explored in another writeup).

So, there is no evidence to indicate that Brazil has been singled out for Northern oppression via TV commercials. But even if the country was subject to some kind corporate conspiracy, it is still Brazilians who design and produce a significant portion of the commercials, and so the Brazilian people must share a portion of the blame for whatever harm befalls them and their country as a result of those ads.

And on a more basic level, Brazilians must take responsibility for their consumer choices. Businesses sell what they think people want to buy. If the Brazilians decide they want to buy into a wasteful consumer culture they will indeed suffer negative consequences. Their forests will continue to burn, their urban air will get worse, their children will suffer from malnutrition and environmental diseases. By the same token, though, if the Brazilians refuse to buy Pampers and Marlboros Corsas and demand healthier, more environmentally-sustainable products, then that is what corporations will sell them.

And if the Brazilians are too advertising-naive, too enamored of Northern lifestyles to choose the road to sustainable development, it is not the job of General Motors or Volkswagen to give them the right map.

That duty belongs to the dependistas and other concerned Brazilians; they are the ones who must work to see that their people get the education they need to make the right social, environmental and political choices. They are the ones who must help the Brazilians take ownership of their country's problems and learn to master their own government. It will be extremely difficult to do all this, of course, and enlisting the help of TV Globo's executives is vital, but if Brazil is to develop properly, it must be done.

Of course, it's a lot easier for Brazilian dependistas to stay in their universities and non-profit organizations writing angry essays about Northern advertisers. It's easy, and it won't help their country very much at all.

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References

Besas, Peter. "Globo Grabs the TV Jackpot in Brazil." Variety, Vol. 346 No. 10, March 23, 1992, p. 82.

Bunce, Nigel. Environmental Chemistry. Wuerz Publishing Ltd., 1991.

Guillermoprieto, Alma. "Obsessed in Rio: Letter from Brazil." The New Yorker, Vol. 69 No. 26, August 16, 1993, pp. 44-56.

Guimaraes, Cesar, and Roberto Amaral. "Brazilian Television: a Rapid Conversion to the New Order" in Media and Politics in Latin America: The Struggle for Democracy, Elizabeth Fox, ed. Sage Publications, 1988, pp. 125-137.

Guimaraes, Roberto P. The Ecopolitics of Development in the Third World: Politics and Environment in Brazil. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1991.

Mattos, Sergio. "Advertising and Government Influences: The Case of Brazilian Television." Communications Research, Vol. 11 No. 2, April 1984, pp. 203-220.

Straubhaar, Joseph D. "Brazilian Television: The Decline of American Influence." Communications Research, Vol. 11 No. 2, April 1984, pp. 221-240.

Tansey, Richard, Michael R. Hyman and George M. Zinkhan. "Cultural Themes in Brazilian and U.S. Auto Ads: A Cross-Cultural Comparison." Journal of Advertising, Vol. 19 No. 2, 1990, pp. 30-39.

Tansey, Richard and Michael R. Hyman. "Dependency Theory and the Effects of Advertising by Foreign-Based Multinational Corporations in Latin America." Journal of Advertising, Vol. 23 No. 1, March 1994, pp. 27-42.

Turner, Rik. "GM Tries to Put Brakes to Corsa Success in Brazil." Advertising Age, May 16, 1994, pp. I-1, I-21.

Zandpour, Fred. "Global Reach and Local Touch: Achieving Cultural Fitness in TV Advertising." Journal of Advertising Research, September/October 1994, pp. 35-63.

Labels: media theory, publishing

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Ever since the case of Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, advertising has been the unpopular stepchild of the First Amendment. In that 1976 case, commercial speech, typified by ads that promote a product or service, was nudged under the umbrella of protection afforded by the First Amendment. But the Supreme Court did not give commercial speech full constitutional protection. As a result, advertisers can get soaked in trademark and copyright infringement cases.

Such cases get particularly muddy when parody is involved. Commercials based on parody, such as the Energizer Bunny ads, can be hugely successful. But the legal stakes are high. A parody, by its nature, has to remind the audience of the original; otherwise, the spoof falls flat. In the process of "conjuring up" the original to the audience, an advertisement can violate copyright and trademark laws.

And by their nature, parodies can carry a devastating sting. In 1987's L.L. Bean v. Drake Publishers, Judge Bownes wrote:

Since parody seeks to ridicule sacred verities and prevailing mores, it inevitably offends others, as evinced by the shock which Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Voltaire's Candide provoked among their contemporaries.

Companies that make ads spoofing other companies' products and commercials are walking into a legal mine field. Consumers may love a good parody, but the companies whose products are the butt of the joke get mad. The angered companies then try to get even in court, suing for copyright and trademark infringement, injurious falsehood, trademark dilution, misappropriation, and even defamation. Even when the offending advertiser wins in court, the legal battle can cost huge sums of money.

So, legally speaking, what can advertising parodists get away with? Right now, there is no firm answer to this question; the legal status of an advertising parody is often in the eye of the beholding judge. A good way to understand the current legal thought in this area is to look at some of the more important advertising parody cases of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The first case from this period is L.L. Bean v. Drake Publishers (1987). High Society, a pornographic magazine, published a two-page parody entitled "L.L. Beam's Back-To-School-Sex-Catalog" in its October, 1984 issue. The sexually graphic article, which was clearly labelled as being a fictitious parody, depicted a facsimile of L.L. Bean's trademark.

L.L. Bean sought a restraining order to take the offending issue out of circulation. Bean's suit accused Drake Publishers of a variety of trademark related violations, including trademark dilution. The district court ruled for Drake on many of Bean's complaints, but the court did grant Bean a summary judgment in regard to its claim of trademark dilution. The district court ruled that the crude and sexually offensive nature of the parody had "tarnished Bean's trademark by undermining the goodwill and reputation associated with the mark." The court then issued an injunction barring further publication of the parody to prevent additional damage to Bean's trademark.

Drake appealed on the grounds that the injunction violated its First Amendment rights. The appeals court ruled that the district court had dismissed Drake's First Amendment rights too easily. First, the court stated that the use of Bean's trademark in the parody was an editorial and artistic use, since the parodied trademark wasn't used to promote any goods or services. Second, the court stated that while the parody was vulgar and offensive, it was still entitled to First Amendment protection. Chief Judge Bownes wrote,

Trademark parodies, even when offensive, do convey a message. The message may be simply that the business and product images need not always be taken too seriously; a trademark parody reminds us that we are free to laugh at the images and associations linked with the mark.

In sharp contrast with this case is Mutual of Omaha v. Novak (1987). The Novak ruling came close on L.L. Beans's legal heels, but the Novak majority almost completely ignored the precedent.

In 1983, Franklyn Novak began selling T-shirts and other items emblazoned with a parody of the Mutual of Omaha "Indian Head" logo. Novak's parody depicted the head of a wasted human in an Indian war bonnet and had the phrases "Mutant of Omaha" and "Nuclear Holocaust Insurance" incorporated into the parody logo. Mutual of Omaha sued on the grounds that Novak had disparaged and infringed on its trademark. The district court rejected the disparagement claim but found for the insurance company on the trademark infringement claim and issued an injunction barring Novak from selling his parody merchandise.

Novak appealed the decision. In a majority decision, the court of appeals affirmed the lower court's ruling. The court ruled that Novak's parody would create confusion among consumers as to whether or not Mutual of Omaha was sponsoring Novak's merchandise and therefore violated both federal and state laws. The majority stated that although the parody had political content, Novak could have expressed his views in many other ways besides parodying the Mutual of Omaha logo. Thus, the court did not consider the injunction to be a violation of Novak's First Amendment rights. The majority ruling only mentioned L.L. Bean in a single footnote, stating that Novak did not violate Bean's precedent, since the Bean ruling was based on the "editorial or artistic" use of a trademark and the Novak case was based on the confusion issue.

Circuit Judge Heaney vigorously dissented with the majority:

The majority's holding sanctions a violation of Novak's first amendment rights. The T-shirts simply expressed a political message which irritated the officers of Mutual, who decided to swat this pesky fly buzzing around their backyard with a sledge hammer. ... We should not be party to this effort.

Heaney expressed serious doubts that anyone would confuse Novak's "Mutant of Omaha" parody with the real Mutual of Omaha. Furthermore, the insurance company had not given any evidence to prove that the parody had hurt its sales or reputation in any way. Heaney stated that nobody could doubt that Novak was using the parody to point out the folly of nuclear war, and he pointed out that scholars have rejected the idea that parodists must use "adequate alternative means of communication." And finally, Heaney argued that a trademark is "a form of intangible property that itself conveys or symbolizes ideas." Therefore, an attempt to enjoin a trademark parody censors the content of the expression more than the manner of the expression and so violates the First Amendment.

In comparing L.L. Bean and Novak, it is worth noting that the rulings in the cases run counter to intuitive logic. An offensive, sexually-oriented parody that could conceivably "tarnish" a company's image was found to be protected, whereas a milder, fairly non-offensive parody was enjoined.

In 1988, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell reaffirmed part of the L.L. Bean decision and put offensive parody firmly under the protection of the First Amendment. In 1983, Hustler ran a parody of a liquor ad that featured a fictitious interview with preacher Jerry Falwell. In the parody interview, Falwell was portrayed as having had a "drunken, incestuous rendezvous with his mother in an outhouse." Falwell sued the magazine for libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

After several years of litigation, the case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court noted that the main legal knot of the case was whether a public figure (such as Falwell) could recover damages for emotional harm caused by a parody that most people would consider to be gross and repugnant. The court concluded that, based on the history of the political cartoon, a parody or caricature of a public figure, even when it is deeply offensive, is protected under the First Amendment.

In the early 1990s, a pair of cases involving beer companies set forth new standards concerning parody in advertising.

The first case, Tin Pan Apple Inc. v. Miller Brewing Co. (1990) dealt with both copyright and trademark infringement issues. Miller Brewing ran a humorous TV ad that featured three black rappers and comedian Joe Piscopo. The rappers in the ad dressed and performed like the Fat Boys, a rap group that encouraged its underage audience to abstain from alcohol and other drugs. The Fat Boys sued, accusing Miller Brewing of copyright, trademark, and privacy violations.

The case went before the district court. In the matter of the copyright violation, the Fat Boys claimed that the ad had copied parts of their rap songs. Miller claimed that the ad was a parody, and as such constituted "a fair use which prevents a claim of copyright infringement." The court agreed that parody usually qualifies as a fair use, but it also stated that using copyrighted material for solely commercial purposes was illegal. Judge Haight wrote:

This commercial's use is entirely for profit: to sell beer. Even if the concept of parody is impermissibly stretched to include this commercial, it does not qualify as fair use . . . the commercial in no manner "builds upon the original," nor does it contain elements "contributing something new for humorous effect or commentary."

The court then turned to the issue of the alleged trademark infringement. The Fat Boys had stated in their complaint that their group name had been registered as a trademark. The Fat Boys and Tin Pan Apple had entered into licensing arrangements with merchandise companies to use the group's name and image in making clothing and toys. In essence, the group had the trademark status of a company.

The Fat Boys argued that the beer commercial misled consumers into believing that they endorsed Miller's beer and encouraged drinking. Miller Brewing again used parody as a defense. And, again, the court used the logic it had used with the copyright infringement issue to decide that Miller had violated the Fat Boys' trademark.

While Tin Pan Apple was an important ruling, the most important case of the period was Eveready v. Adolph Coors Co. (1991). This case provides an new perspective on several advertising parody issues, since it pits advertiser against advertiser, parodist against parodist.

Eveready is well known for its ad-within-an-ad "Energizer Bunny" TV commercials. But some people may have forgotten that these ads began as a parody of Duracell TV ads. The original Duracell battery ads displayed a room full of toy rabbits playing snare drums. As a voice-over talked about Duracell's batteries outlasting those of its competitors', all the rabbits but the one run by Duracell batteries stop playing.

In the first Eveready spoof, the ad displays a similar group of toy rabbits playing snare drums. A voice-over says, "Don't be fooled by commercials where one battery company's toy outlasts the others." At that, one of the rabbits turns its head, and its eyes widen as the Energizer Bunny strolls out in front of the other toys, beating its bass drum. At the end of the ad, the voice states Eveready's now-familiar pitch, "Nothing outlasts the Energizer. They keep going and going and going .... voice-over fades out as ad ends" The Energizer Bunny pauses in the middle of the screen, leans back, and exits the screen during the fade-out.

This ad started a very successful ad campaign for Eveready. The series of ads involved the Bunny intruding on fake commercials for fictitious products such as "Sitagin" (a hemorrhoid ointment that spoofs "Preparation H") and a wine called "Chateau Marmoset." The Bunny also became more boisterous, typically knocking over props, and spinning around once and twirling his drum mallets before exiting the screen.

In late 1990, Coors Light's marketing department decided to give Eveready a taste of its own parodic medicine. Coors' advertising agents had been told to design a set of ads involving Leslie Nielsen, a popular actor who has starred in slapstick movie parodies such as Airplane! and The Naked Gun. The agents designed an ad in which Nielsen would parody the Energizer Bunny. Coors accepted the design, produced the ad, and scheduled it to air in the six weeks immediately before Nielsen's new movie, Naked Gun 2 1/2, was released.

The parody commercial starts with a visual of a beer pouring into a glass with a voice-over accompanied by classical music. The voice and music grind to a halt and Nielsen walks onto the scene, beating a bass drum and wearing white rabbit ears, a fuzzy tail, and pink rabbit feet with a dark business suit. The Coors Light logo is emblazoned on the drum head. After a few beats on the drum, Nielsen spins around several times. And after recovering from an apparent dizzy spell, he says "thank you" and leaves the screen.

Eveready caught wind of the ad before it was sent to the networks and wrote letters to Coors demanding that the commercial not be aired. The two companies met and were unable to resolve their dispute, so Eveready filed suit in an attempt to keep the commercial off the air. The complaint argued that the Coors commercial violated Eveready's copyrights and diluted and infringed on its trademark.

The district court stated that it was obvious that Coors had "copied" something from the Energizer commercials, but pointed out that Eveready had to prove "substantial similarity" between the two ads to win its copyright infringement claim. The court then examined the nature of the Coors commercial. The court cited Tin Pan Alley's precedent that appropriating copyrighted material for a solely commercial use could not constitute protected parody.

The court then refused to follow this precedent on the grounds that although TV ads are designed to sell a product, this does not mean that they are "devoid of any artistic merit or entertainment value." Furthermore, the court pointed out that since the original copyrighted material and the parody were both advertisements, Eveready couldn't argue that its creation deserved especially strong protection. And finally, the court ruled that the Coors ad only used as much of the Energizer commercial as was necessary to make a decent parody of it. District Judge Norgle wrote,

Mr. Nielsen is not a toy (mechanical or otherwise), does not run on batteries, is not fifteen inches tall, is not predominantly pink, . . . . He by no means copies the majority of the Energizer Bunny's "look."

The court consequently ruled that Eveready had not established that Coors had violated its copyright, and then turned to the trademark infringement issue. The court stated that Eveready had to prove that Coors' ad would create confusion among viewers as to which company sponsored the ad. The court pointed out that Eveready's strength in this issue was also its weakness: Eveready had a strong trademark in the Energizer Bunny, so strong in fact that viewers would be unlikely to think the Coors ad was anything but a parody. And, given the commercial power of that trademark, the court did not see how the Coors ad could dilute or erode the mark's strength or distinctiveness.

Given the Energizer ruling, it would seem that advertising parodies would get slightly more First Amendment respect in the courts. But Vanna White v. Samsung Electronics America Inc. (1992) proves that things are not as they seem.

Samsung ran a series of humorous magazine ads set in the near future. These ads poked fun at current pop culture while implying that Samsung's VCRs would be around in the next century.

Samsung's problematic ad was a spoof of the "Wheel of Fortune" game show. The ad portrayed a robot that had been dressed and posed to resemble Vanna White, the show's hostess. White had not been consulted about the ad. She felt that her image had been unfairly used, so she sued Samsung on the grounds that the ad gave a false impression that she endorsed Samsung's VCRs and that the company had unlawfully appropriated her likeness and had violated her common law right to publicity.

One of the defenses that Samsung used was that its "Vanna White" ad was a parody, and as such was expression protected by the First Amendment. The majority of the court agreed that the ad was intended as a spoof, but it felt that the ad might mislead consumers into thinking that White endorsed Samsung's VCRs. Because of this, the fact that the ad was a parody was no defense. "The difference between a 'parody' and a 'knock-off' is the difference between fun and profit," wrote Judge Goodwin.

Judge Alarcon disagreed with this view, however. In his dissent, he stated:

The majority gives Samsung's First Amendment defense short shrift.... The majority's attempt to distinguish this case from Hustler Magazine v. Falwell ... and L.L. Bean v. Drake Publications is unpersuasive. The majority notes that the parodies in those cases were made for the purpose of poking fun ... But they fail to consider that the defendants in those cases were making fun ... for the purely commercial purpose of selling soft core pornographic magazines.

Alarcon also stated that "no reasonable consumer could confuse the robot with Vanna White or believe that ... she endorsed Samsung's product."

In First Amendment protection terms, the White ruling seems to be a throwback to Novak. White shows that advertising parody's status in the courts is still at least partially at the mercy of individual judges' legal interpretations (not unlike many other areas of current communications law). Will advertising parodies ever be given more First Amendment protection? Only future cases will tell.

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References

Eveready Battery Co. v. Adolph Coors Co., 765 F.Supp. 440 (1991).

Hustler Magazine Inc. v. Falwell, 14 Med. L. Rep. (BNA) 2281 (1988).

Langvardt, Arlen W., "Protected Marks and Protected Speech: Establishing the First Amendment Boundaries in Trademark Parody Cases," The Trademark Reporter 82 (September-October 1992): 671-764.

L.L. Bean Inc. v. Drake Publishers Inc., 13 Med. L. Rep. (BNA) 2009 (1987).

Mutual of Omaha Insurance Co. v. Novak, 836 F.2d 397 (1987).

Rodin, Rita A., "Parody Protection Under The Fair Use Doctrine-- The Eveready Standard: It Keeps Going, And Going, And Going..." St. John's Law Review 66 (Fall-Winter 1993): 1169- 1192.

Tin Pan Apple Inc. v. Miller Brewing Co. Inc., 17 Med. L. Rep. (BNA) 2273 (1990).

Vanna White v. Samsung Electronics America Inc., 20 Med. L. Rep. (BNA) 1457 (1992).

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