Posts Tagged Publishing

As I sit editing my first (I hope!) sales-worthy novel, I am faced with a quandary. It’s something I have to decide before I start sending queries to publishers. To pseudonym or not to pseudonym?

You see, I have a ridiculously common name.  A quick Google search will give you plenty of people I share a name with. There is the Jennifer Davis who is a reporter for Faux News (BLECH). There is the Jennifer Davis who is a quite talented artist. Apparently there is also a Jennifer Davis who was recently arrested in Florida for marijuana possession.  And, there is the Jennifer Davis who writes children’s books.  The old guy at the local pet store also apparently went to the senior prom with a Jennifer Davis long before I was born.

Most of my published work before this has consisted of short stories in obscure genre magazines or academic papers in scholarly journals.  I used my real name, most of the time.  But much of being successful as a writer relies on treating your writing like a business, and part of that business is branding.

Can you really successfully create your own personal “brand” if there are already tons of people out there wearing identical generic logos? Especially if some of those people are in the same field in which you are attempting to succeed? This is a case when a name too common can be akin to anonymity, when the last thing you want is to be anonymous.

The obvious solution, of course, is to use a pseudonym. I even have one ready-made that is already heavily associated with me, the handle I have used on the internet for bordering on two decades.  It’s a name that I answer to as readily as I answer to Jennifer. It’s my twitter handle, my forum name, even the name of the character I play most often in video games.  It is as much my name as the name on my birth certificate at this point.  Googling that name, in fact, will turn up links that are almost exclusively me.

But part of the dream of being a writer is seeing your name on that cover. Right now, I haven’t decided whether I’d rather that name be the name I was given, or the name I have chosen for myself.  Perhaps some variation thereon would be better: J. L. Davis, or Jenny, or M. Dhommnail. I have heard that gender-neutral author names can help sell books in male-dominated genres.  J. K. Rowling, I have heard, decided to use only her initials so that she wouldn’t put boys off.

Perhaps this is something I should wait to discuss with an agent, once I secure one.  It is a puzzle, though, and one that will have to be solved.

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We have a black president. People like to talk about us living in a post-race society (of course we don’t…but some like to say so).  Generally, being overtly and obviously racist is Not A Done Thing. Not if you, you know, want to stay in business.

Except, apparently, in the publishing industry. Can you tell me why this keeps happening?

I’ve had this book Silver Phoenix by Cindy Pon on my to-read list for a while after seeing a lot of good reviews of it and all of the awards it’s won.  It is set in what is a historically accurate pre-China. The main character is Asian.

← This is the original cover.  It’s beautiful and accurate to the book and the character.

But apparently, some book buyers in charge of acquiring books for the major chain stores insist that this cover won’t sell. They insist this often before the book ever makes it to the bookstore. Before anyone who goes into the bookstore to buy books ever has a chance to buy the book with its original multicultural cover.

The bookcover gets redesigned so it will “sell better”. Here’s the new version →

Hmm. This is a book set in historical Asia, pre-China. Why does the character appear to be wearing modern clothes? And is she Asian? You can’t really tell. She rather looks like a modern goth girl ready to go clubbing. Is this Yet Another Vampire Novel? No? Then why?

They wanted to make her look more white. It’s even more obvious on the cover for the sequel to Silver Phoenix. The model is very clearly white. There is nothing to indicate that the story is set in Asia or that the character is Asian.

If there is anything whatsoever to indicate the plot or even the feel of these novels anywhere on these new covers, I can’t find it.

If there is a picture of a character on the front of a book, I want it to reflect the character that I am reading about within the pages of that book. I want it to reflect that character’s ethnicity and beauty, regardless of whether that beauty is white.

If the character is not white, I definitely don’t want to see a white girl on the cover. This has happened again and again, and is specifically rampant in YA novels.

Why does this keep happening? When will the publishers get a fucking clue and realize that people want their literature to be just as multicolored and diverse as the world is around them?

There’s only one way to combat this sort of thing. Let the publishers know that this is absolutely unacceptable.  In this case, the publisher is Harper Collins, but they are hardly the only ones guilty. Bloomsbury has had a particular habit of doing this sort of thing. Contact them and tell them to make their covers reflect the story inside, instead of turning every character everywhere white.

But don’t stop buying the books. To do so only punishes the author and reinforces the idea that diversity in books does not sell. It cheats the author out of the royalties for what may be a very good book, regardless of what the publishers decide to put on the cover.

It’s getting easier and easier to sell self-published books even through mainstream dealers like Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com, largely thanks to the e-book “revolution.”  However, I’d warn my fellow writers against doing such a thing unless they are already well-established and guaranteed good sales. (Wil Wheaton self-publishes through Lulu, and though he has a niche fanbase, it is well established and he already has reliable sales-numbers.)

It may be incredibly gratifying to finally see your name on the cover of a book, in a store, but for an unestablished author, this may be shooting yourself in the foot. Say you self-publish that first book and it sells a few copies, mostly to friends and family, of course, and a few others. Then, miracle of all miracles, your next book gets picked up by a Big Name Publisher. Big Name Publisher has more resources at its disposal and wants to make money from your book, so it will go out and promote it heavily.

However, the bookstores they try to market your book to pull up your name as the author and look at how many of your other books it has sold, and the number of books it buys is based on that. Big Name Publisher sees that the bookstores aren’t interested in selling your books, and that’s that.

There have been authors who have had to change their names just to get away from the low sales figures attached to their initial self-published books. This is not the path to a spot on the Bestseller lists, it is actually likely to work against you ever having that opportunity, no matter how good your writing is. If you choose to self-publish in spite of the problems with it, I’d recommend using a pseudonym. You can always come back and “reclaim” the book under your real name later if you do get the real big break, as Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman) and Anne Rice (A. N. Roquelaire) have done.

Offering writing for free over the internet to gain an audience is, however, a good way of promoting yourself, but even then you have to be careful. The same easy self-publishing platforms that authors are beginning to take advantage of are being used by unscrupulous publishers to steal content and offer it for sale.

Creative Commons offers an easy way to protect and license your content, but be careful that you do not accidentally sign away your rights to any money that is made from it.  If you choose to license your work with Creative Commons, make sure to choose a license that ensures that your work can only be used and shared non-commercially – that is, people are free to download, read, and share, but not sell, your work.  You can still offer your books for free over the internet with a full copyright rather than a CC license without giving up any rights to it at all.

Like I say, though you earn nothing from it, offering free samples or even complete books for free can be an excellent way to begin to gain an audience, as well as giving you a place to direct potential agents and publishers to so that they can easily see what you’ve done. The trick is to be careful and to keep a watch on the most popular self-publishing and e-book publishing websites to ensure that your work does not get stolen.

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It looks like Amazon has realized it’s mistake and reached an agreement with Macmillan over the prices of e-books for the Kindle, but the entire issue (and the strong-arm tactics Amazon chose to employ against Macmillan) only served to make me even more happy that I chose a nook.

You see, Macmillan wanted to charge a more dynamic range of prices (from about $6 to about $15) for its e-books, while releasing them at the same time as the hardcovers are released. Since a hardcover is typically priced at somewhere around $30, even the $15 e-book would be a bargain, but Amazon was insistent that all books for the Kindle be priced at $9.99 or below.

They call this “standing up for the consumer”, however they proved, with the de-listing of all Macmillan books, with the removal of purchased items from kindles, with DRM and ridiculously restrictive licensing, that the consumer is the last thing on their mind.

Because, you see, Macmillan was standing up for the people who produce those books, and Macmillan is one of the largest publishers of science fiction and fantasy literature in the country. When Amazon decided to de-list Macmillan entirely, they decided to wage war not just against a publishing giant, but against an entire genre, its fans, and the writers who write in that genre.

I’m glad that Macmillan held to its principles, here – if they are expected to offer e-books at paperback prices, it is perfectly reasonable to delay the e-book until the paperback release date, otherwise, it should be priced higher to ensure just compensation for the authors, editors, and other folks who work to produce that book. $15 is still a bargain to get a book on its hardcover release date, though if I want a book that badly, I’m likely to buy the hardcover anyway.

For my part, I’m so disgusted with Amazon’s approach to selling e-books that I’ve systematically changed all book links on this blog to Barnes and Noble. Because you see, as a writer, I expect to receive appropriate compensation for my work, and as a fan, I want to ensure that the people who produce the fiction I love don’t get shafted either.

On another, happier note, I’d like to encourage everyone to go visit the newly arrived blog of a friend of mine, Labyrinthine Library.  He’s a designer, a dad, a geek, all that lovely stuff, and can be expected to have some interesting commentary on art, as well as life, the universe, and everything.

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While I’ve written about why, at least for me, e-books will never replace real books, I am finding the  attitude of some publishers toward the format to be rather like hoping the problem will just go away if you ignore it or bluster at it enough.

Publishers should take a lesson from the mistakes of the music industry, and look at e-books not as an attack on the publishing industry, but as an evolution of it.  Instead of fighting the change, we should be looking at ways to embrace this new technology.

For the companies completely denying the e-book consumer by refusing to provide e-book versions, a significant portion of the market will be entirely lost, because there will be people who will simply not buy the book at all, unless they can get it electronically.  This would be the worst example of hiding in the sand, because it would mean those books that aren’t available as e-books would lose the potential sales that they would otherwise have had.

Several large publishing companies, such as Simon & Schuster and Random House, are setting delays between the release of hardcopy editions of books and the e-book versions, which could be a valid compromise, encouraging those who are truly excited to get the book to go out and buy it at their bookstore.  It would set up a delay rather similar to the delay between a theatrical release of a movie and the DVD release.

But here’s the thing: There will always be a group of sincere and devoted bibliophiles, like myself, willing to pay more for a beautifully crafted hardcover edition of their favorite books, but these will never be the “average reader.”

For the average reader, the ones already willing to wait for the cheaper paperback versions of books, waiting a few more months for the similarly cheaper and more convenient to purchase e-book won’t bother them one bit.  If a book they want is not yet available, well, they’re just more likely to go back and buy something else that is available instead.

It’s a difficult situation, and compromises will have to be made to make this new market work like it should, but the response to this new technology should not be one of fear or antagonism.  E-books are inevitable. They’re already here.  Publishers are going to have to learn ways to profit from them, or they’re going to be left in the dust.