In Defense of Indie Authors II

In my original post In Defense of Indie Authors http://theslowvine.blogspot.com/2013/08/in-defense-of-indie-authors.html I wrote an angry, off the cuff blog in response to an anonymous "gate keeper" who used foul language to denigrate the Indie Author movement. And I used some strong words in response. This past week, (on my birthday in fact),the be all and end all in literary agents, Donald Mass released an article on indie vs traditional publishing http://writerunboxed.com/2014/02/05/the-new-class-system/ and served up the next volley in the war.

Go ahead and read it. There are a lot of valid points from traditional gate keepers about quality that indies ignore at their own peril. Maass is right (to a certain extent) about writing, fiction writing, being a meritocracy. Good work will always find an audience, eventually.

But as an analyst of the industry? Maass is well...he should stick to his day job. I hear he's very good at it.

We discussed last time about how large presses advertise the likes of JK Rowling, point to her sales and then congratulate themselves that their money was well spent. When in actuality it just isn't. Now Maass figures, the indie author boom has "gratefully relieved (publishers) of the money-losing burden of mid list."

OK, mid list authors are now able to quit the day job and work full time, but this isn't the "glorious revolution true believers would like it to be." Really? Really? Really?

Look, Mr. Maass wants to have it both way, but as usual he is in the middle of the forest so he can't really see what's going on.

Is traditional publishing in trouble? YES!

I can even use Mr. Maass's own points to prove my case. It is very clear Mr. Maass has almost no business theory in his background, so I think that mean he fundamentally misunderstands what the facts are telling him. First he posits that traditional publishing is fine because "seventy percent of all trade book sales of print editions". OK, down from how much? Before Kindle and I-Pad the percentage of ebooks to print books sold was negligible. (And most ebooks were scams, I know, I know I'm OLD). But this has taken place in the last seven years, ebooks have taken out about thirty percent of the markets. And with a good, professional cover and a professional editor, it can be difficult for the casual consumer to tell the difference between an indie author and a traditionally published one. A savvy indie can in fact, produce something better.

Secondly, Mr. Maass wants to say there are few indie author "who have mastered the demanding business of online marketing." But he also says, writing is a meritocracy. It's either one, or the other. It cannot be both.

What is happening now is indie authors who are ready to break out of mid list status will get deals. Agents, publishers will come to them to find their readers. People are getting signed from Amazon and Wattpad every month.

Mr. Maass says most people are still knocking on the traditional door, and that may be true, for now. It's hard to be independently published and get your work into the mega big box stores. But those same stores are all pyramiding authors. Walmart and Target only carry a small fraction of the books in a bookstore. It makes Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and whatever comes next more successful as the thing that had been genre turns mainstream. Sure there's more risk and more money for the publisher there, but it crowds out valuable, lesser known experiments.

True, Maass gives indies props for their ability to innovate and to go out and get their own audience, but he uses the unfortunate term "cull" to speak of the process by which trad pubs are signing successful indie authors. But going forward this is going to be the de facto way anyone gets a publishing gig. Why?

Well Amazon is not just the lion in ebook, it's the lion in all of publishing. They have their own imprints which they thought would go into store, but retail has rebelled mostly because Amazon is so busy putting the rest of retail out of business. But think of this, someone, right now, in a struggling imprint is sitting around thinking "what can I do to save this business?" They will be going through the ranks, following authors and trying to crack Amazon's break out algorithms. The job of the literary agent will change too. Though never for the elite Donald Maass's of the world. Literary agents will be more like sports agents, whereby you pretty much have to already be a professional athlete to get representation. Agents will be there forge links between publishing and other creative industries. Publishing is becoming more like it was in Jane Austen's day than JRR Tolkien's.

As for his assertion that the Big Five are not "staggering, falling to their knees and heading for extinction". He may believe time will tell. Smart companies change with the times. But, profits hit their greatest as an industry is on the way down. In fact, profits are usually only readily attainable in industries who are ascending or declining. In mature industries, profits are hard fought and hard to come by. Consolidation is a sign of industry weakness not strength. That's what the Wall Street traders see. I don't think very much traditional publishing can survive without the bookstore and Amazon and Walmart are rapidly putting them out of business. Moreover books are quickly becoming a luxury item. Which is great news for bibliophiles where editions will be rare, leather bound and jammed full of extras and bad news for publishers who will become divisions of some other larger companies and not the free entities they are today.

As always, I stand publicly behind my views.

Melanie