The Runes of Odin
The Legacy of Odin
The Iron Throne
Sunday, September 18, 2011 at 8:36PM Currently finishing the first draft of The Decay Chain and with the help of a friend from Germany, have found a number of music albums that are really providing the perfect paradoxical mix of angst, chill, atmosphere, energy and darkness for the book.
Sunday, April 17, 2011 at 6:37PM Steph Moriarty (Clarion South attendee and long-time industry employee) gives her thoughts on self-publishing, particularly with regards to print publishing.
A boy I used to date once asked me, “What do you think of South African accents?”
To which my response was, “What kind of question is that?”
“It’s not a rascist thing. It’s just personal experience. Every South African person I’ve encountered at work has treated me like crap. Now whenever I hear the accent, I cringe. It’s like a Pavlovian response.”
As a bookseller, my Pavlovian response to self-publishing is somewhat analogous. I don’t hate self-published writers on principle, but in my experience, most of them have been awful to deal with.
The thing is – and this may sound obvious, but bear with me – when you self-publish, you’re taking on the role and duties and responsibilities that would traditionally belong to your publisher. The impression I get is that too many writers, not just the ones who self-publish, don’t understand and don’t take the time to try to understand, what exactly publishers do. Publishing companies are not hungry monsters who eat Word documents and spit out bound and finished books. They’re not just there to make sure all the words are in the right order and slap a pretty cover on the front. They also do complex and mundane things like sales research and find markets and organise publicity and marketing campaigns and, perhaps most difficult and mundane of all, fatten up (metaphorically speaking) the sales team with reasons your book is great but, more importantly, reasons people might by your book, and then send them off to clash with the retail buyers. These are the parts that self-published writers don’t tend to do as well, partly because they don’t know they have to do them, or don’t know how to do them, or are not qualified to do them, and partly because it’s hard to do a company’s work when you’re just one person. Which is not to say it can’t be done. But it is not easy to do well.
When publishers take on a book, they do so because they think it will sell. They may also think it’s a work of literary and creative genius, but the tipping point will always be if it has selling potential. When writers self-publish, the motivation should be the same: they should believe that they can sell it – and by “believe” I mean, have years’ worth of business and industry knowledge, preferably with the figures to back it up, to be able to make a rational, unbiased and qualified assertion that this venture is going to turn profit. Or, at least, you need to be able to talk convincingly about why people might want to buy the book. One writer I encountered in the bookselling trenches of not that long ago came to the shop unsolicited to hawk his expose on freemasons because, in his words, “Father’s Day is coming up”. Presumably his book contained new insights into contemporary freemason society, but not only were we not that kind of bookstore (we specialised in cooking, lifestyle and kids books), I remained doubtful as to whether I could imagine myself giving that book away to someone, let alone buying it myself. It also had an awful (though thankfully minimalist) amateur cover, which did not help. This is another aspect of self-publishing that people tend to think is easy to get right. Good book design is expensive, because good designers who know what they’re doing and who know their genres, and who have the time and good will to read books and come up with ideas, and absorb other people’s ideas, are in demand. Mainstream publishing does not always get covers right by any means, and they may very well not give your book the cover that you had in mind, but they will give you something that many people have looked at and worked on and thought hard about. It is, after all, not in any publisher’s interest to see your book not sell (unless you have been rude to them). Obviously. They want it to do well as much, if not more, than you do, because they are as invested – if not more – as you.
I’m going to try to keep the sales and marketing rant short because it’s pretty common knowledge that every writer these days should be doing at least some self-promotion if they want to see success. Marketing is hard, but fun. Sales is harder. Retail buyers are the gatekeepers of bookshop inventory, and they can be mean, lean and, more relevantly, on an annual budget that is both. Understand that no bookshop can stock every book or every kind of book. Understand that the buyers love books as much as you (hopefully) do, but that the first rule of poker is “leave emotion at the door”. Be prepared to leave a reading copy, at the very least, and don’t expect to get it back. Ever. This does not mean that the longer you leave it with them, the likelier it is you’ll get it back. The inverse is true. The longer you leave a thing in a bookshop – whether on the shop floor or in the back room – the less likely it will ever be found again.
Don’t try to guilt buyers or booksellers into taking your book. It’s this kind of behaviour that makes them hard-hearted. Don’t ring every few days to see how sales are doing and to offer to replenish stock. It’s annoying, and booksellers are busy, and they’ll think you’re desperate. If they need more copies, they’ll contact you. And DON’T rearrange shelves to put your book in a more prominent position. If you think it’s a reasonable request – ie. the bookseller has taken a significant number of copies – ask an assistant. Always be courteous. Whether you get the outcome you want or not, be professional and thank them for your time. This goes for all authors, not just self-published ones. And even if you do get your book on shelves, don’t expect them to miraculously fly off on your own.
Thought your job was done when you wrote the damn thing? You wish.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011 at 7:36PM Myth number 3: Book prices are expensive in Australia because publishers are evil money-grabbing, faceless conglomerates who want to take over the world.
This is a complicated one to unpack. Firstly, there’s the issue that a lot of book prices are left over from a twenty year-old economy where the Australian dollar was 40 or 50 cents to the American greenback. The book industry is also one of those rare, strange beasts where the identical product that was released twenty years ago is still being made and put out into the market, and the truth which everyone knows but few people have been willing to articulate is, well, things never really ever get cheaper. Which leads me to my second point: things have never really been cheap in Australia. We’re isolated, so we have to factor freight costs onto everything we import, and our population is tiny, which means we can’t produce in bulk and get the same wholesale discounts as the other bigger consumers. Our food, rent, and wages are all three times, if not more, than the dollar-equivalent in the US, another as a relic of that 1990s economy, though I’ve heard time and again the comment that the quality of things here is better, which could all be placebo effect, but the quality – the physical quality – of books certainly is. So many of my imported books are either printed on clumsy, public toilet paper-esque pages, or the thinnest Bible paper. I understand this may not factor in for a lot of people – they’re not buying a book for the paper stock, after all, but for the words and ideas contained therein – but it’s definitely a factor as to why locally produced and printed books cost more.
Thirdly, we are one of the only countries in the world to tax our books. The GST, that deceptaively doe-eyed 10%, knocked the wind out of the bookselling industry for years. Yeah, I know, anticlimax, but people never seem to factor this in either.
Remember when there was this whole movement about buying Australian products because even though they might be a more expensive, you were supporting local industry and jobs and your own economy, yadda yadda yadda? I must be getting old …
Myth number 4: The music industry went digital, survived piracy and hasn’t completely died, so what the fuck are you guys afraid of?
Monday, March 7, 2011 at 8:37PM Steph Moriarty was a flat-mate and fellow Clarion South attendee in 2009. With a razor-sharp critiquing knife and a look that can freeze you in place in terror, she's also worked for years at the coal-face in the book-selling business. She knows her stuff.
In two parts, below is her response to the many opinion pieces and speculation about the Borders / Angus&Robertson debacle in Australia.
I’m pretty deeply vested in every facet of the book industries, so it’s particularly frustrating to see so many people hypothesising about why things are the way they are, and how Borders and Angus & Robertson had it coming, etc. with only a speculative understanding and no insight into how things actually are.
I have worked as a bookseller for seven years, with experience in chain stores as well as independents. I am a professional writer who reads not nearly as much as some people I know, but I would venture a reasonable amount. Which means I buy a reasonable amount of books from wherever I can get them: big bookstores, franchises, indies, second-hand bookstores, and yes, because I’m frequently poor, online. This is my explanation (and occasional angry digression) on a few popular misconceptions on recent book industry events.
Myth number 1: REDgroup went bankrupt because of rising ebook sales/internet book sales.
