publishers shooting themselves in the foot

I liked this article by Simon Owens describing how publishers are driving away writers and into the waiting arms of Amazon. This quote, especially:

Amazon, with its ecommerce system and now its Kindle publishing platform, has figured out how to scale midlist authors, and is therefore willing to gobble up those writers the big publishers turn away, offering them a bigger cut of their sales in the process.

But this, I believe, is to the long-term detriment of the publishers. Because now a new generation of writers is growing up on the Amazon platform, using social media and email lists to market its books, and several of these writers will advance from selling merely thousands of books to selling millions. And once they’re selling millions of books and collecting 70 percent of each copy sold, it’ll be extremely difficult for those conglomerates to lure the authors back under their umbrella with the promise of a puny 10 percent of cover price royalty. By abandoning the midlist to Amazon, publishers are hastening their own demise.

There was another consistent trend I found when interviewing zombie novelists for my article: fervent distaste for the New York publishing industry. And maybe that’s the real reason why publishers and agents never bothered reaching out to them; it’s not that they don’t recognize the sales and money potential for these authors, it’s that they’ve spent the last decade sowing so much bad blood within the writer community that they know approaching them for a book deal is a lost cause. Midlist authors have been burned once, and now with Amazon and their own marketing abilities they can ensure they’ll never be burned again. So that leaves the remaining book publishers engaged in bidding wars for a shrinking pool of first-time writers still uninitiated to the cold, soulless world of modern New York publishing.

“The last decade sowing so much bad blood within the writer community.”

Man! Isn’t that the truth? Back in the last decade I sent the book that would become THE THIRD SOUL OMNIBUS TWO to a publisher,  and after about a year and a half, the rejection latter came back with a single line that said “Sometimes I wish Dungeons and Dragons had never been invented.”

Meanwhile, since I self-published THE THIRD SOUL OMNIBUS TWO, it has sold 1200 copies, and the vast majority of traditionally published books fail to sell less than a thousand copies.

A better example – GHOST IN THE FLAMES was rejected about thirty different times before I self-published it in 2011. Since then it has sold just under 17,000 copies.

“Fervent distaste for the New York publishing industry.” That sounds about right. 🙂

I’ve written over thirty books in the last five years, and I haven’t approached a publisher with a single one.

That said, I did make some deals with some publishers for some stuff to come out in 2017 (we’ll see if it actually happens), but the publishers came to me with a good deal, rather than the other way around.

That’s the difference. Before ebooks, publishers were the only game in town and it was their way or the highway. Now you don’t have to work with publishers at all.

-JM