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Traf­fick­ing in Publishing’s Commodities

• Old dri­vers are try­ing to find new routes but are too proud to admit they’re lost.
• New hot­shots are cut­ting in, try­ing to find ways to cap­i­tal­ize on the con­fu­sion and get ahead.
• Pun­dits keep jump­ing out in front to wave every­body through—“follow me!”—but can only hope nobody real­izes they don’t really know the cor­rect turns from their asses.
• All maps were out­dated before Bor­ders was forced off the road. Your GPS says noth­ing but “recalculating.”
• And then there are these cyclists between the com­pany cars, like Copen­hagen at 5 p.m., rid­den by fre­quently bel­li­cose self-publishers.

Watch care­fully. At times in our pub­lish­ing grid­lock, you can glimpse some­thing akin to “phas­ing,” a con­cept famil­iar to motorists stuck in traf­fic jams.

Think of cars stopped with their right or left turn indi­ca­tors on. Blink, blink, blink. Every now and then, those blinks will syn­chro­nize for a time.

If you’re will­ing to set aside some emo­tional invest­ment and look around, you’ll see sev­eral issues sync-ing up around us, and in a pretty roman­tic way.

Blink, blink, blink. Are you bat­ting your eye­lashes at me?

Here’s a new snoot­ful from the sainted John Sar­gent of Macmil­lan. Jeanne d’Arc to DoJ haters. David in the Val­ley of the Big­ger Five. We duly Ether­ized him just before Christ­mas, you may recall, in Macmillan’s Sar­gent: ‘In the Land of Giants.’

Now, Sar­gent is announc­ing he’ll be dis­trib­ut­ing English-language lovey-doveys from dig­i­tal romance pub­lisher Liz Pelletier’s Entan­gled–ment. Sar­gent has Entan­gled even St. Martin’s Press in a plan to bring some of those ebooks to print.

Blink, blink, blink.

Faith­ful Laura Haz­ard Owen writes it up, declar­ing Power of the indie: Macmil­lan strikes part­ner­ships with e-publisher Entan­gled in that World War III-size head­line font they love at paid­Con­tent. (Alas, no fault of Haz­ard, the site’s new mobile redesign ren­ders the Entan­gled Publishing’s logo “tan­gle ublishing.”)

She writes:

Entan­gled is one of a grow­ing num­ber of “bou­tique” pub­lish­ers that seek to strike a bal­ance between the free­dom of self-publishing and the struc­ture of work­ing with a tra­di­tional publisher…Entangled doesn’t offer advances and pays authors roy­al­ties higher than what they’d receive from a tra­di­tional pub­lisher but lower than they’d get if they self-published.

Have a look. Shirt­less men kiss­ing beau­ti­ful women. Blink, blink, blink.

Then here’s Michael Cader at Pub­lish­ers Lunch doing a fol­lowup to his excel­lent year-end look at the num­bers in James and Collins Drive 2012 Print Sales:

E.L.James’s Fifty Shades books sold over 14.4 mil­lion prints units, and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books sold over 9.6 mil­lion print books.  Together, these two authors accounted for over 4 per­cent of all print sales for the year.

So many boats float­ing on a tide of winkin’  and blinkin’. I’m not sure Cader wasn’t required to get shirt­less just to write his report. Bow and arrow nearby:

For addi­tional per­spec­tive, 2011’s top 15 non­fic­tion and fic­tion books com­bined sold about 18.3 mil­lion units; and Collins’ 2012 total is only slightly lower than all the top 15 children’s books in 2011 (which sold roughly 10.2 mil­lion books altogether).

Related read­ing: Deirdre Don­ahue at USA Today reports that Fifty Shades of Grey gets its hard­cover pub­li­ca­tion on Jan­u­ary 29—“just in time for Valentine’s Day,” as Don­ahue puts it. Somehow, one feels it’s bet­ter not to ask.

Don­ahue also notes “a dis­creet warn­ing on the back guar­an­teed to keep lit­tle eyes from pry­ing: ‘EROTIC ROMANCE: Mature Audience.’”

Donahue’s story is ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ will be pub­lished as hard­cov­ers. 

And at this writ­ing, Ama­zon is show­ing a pre-order price of $50.94, the list being $80.85. Enough to make you blink, blink, blink.

In some related read­ing to your related read­ing, Owen has an inter­est­ing take on the hard­back release:

With their avail­abil­ity in hard­cover, 50 Shades will com­plete an almost entirely reversed tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing cycle. The books started out as Twi­light fan fic­tion posted online. A tiny Aus­tralian pub­lisher then released them as ebooks and print-on-demand paper­backs, sell­ing about 250,000 copies. Ran­dom House snapped up the rights in a seven-figure deal, rere­leased the ebooks and made 50 Shades widely avail­able in paper­back for the first time — where it achieved stratos­pheric suc­cess. Finally, a lit­tle under a year later, the books will be released in their most expen­sive for­mat: The hard­cover list price is $26.95 per book, USA Today reports (though that will surely be slashed by retail­ers like Ama­zon and there will be a three-book bun­dle for $80.85.

 

Then here’s the dis­cern­ing agent Jason Allen Ashlock of Mov­able Type Man­age­ment at DBW’s Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog with a series of Q&As intended to reveal tra­di­tional insid­ers as “smart, indefatigable, book-loving peo­ple who are doing the very hard work of mak­ing the old new again.”

Cer­tainly, there are some who have for­got­ten, I’m sure, that the majors are peo­pled with intel­li­gent experts who have an ocean-deep insti­tu­tional mem­ory for some­thing you’ll now miss if you blink: literature. And yet, even this exer­cise goes right into our flash­ing red-light dis­trict: more romance.

In his first install­ment, The Change Agents: Amy Tan­nen­baum, Ashlock asks the highly regarded Simon & Schus­ter edi­tor to talk about self-publishing titles with which she has done “some excit­ing work,” books for which she has given demon­stra­bly suc­cess­ful self-publishing authors tra­di­tional contracts.

Tan­nen­baum lists:

• Beau­ti­ful Dis­as­ter by Jamie McGuire.
• Love Unre­hearsed by Tina Reber.
• The Sea of Tran­quil­ity by Katja Mil­lay.

Blink, blink, and blink. We’re sync-ed right up again with more romance. Note that the Atria divi­sion is hardly lim­ited to romance, far from it. But these recent selec­tions men­tioned by Tan­nen­baum hap­pen to trend that way.

At this rate, by my cal­cu­la­tion, we can expect to do away with men’s shirts in pub­lish­ing entirely by around May of 2014.

What I’d love to see Ashlock add for his upcom­ing Q&As with folks inside legacy pub­lish­ing is a ques­tion about whether they got into the busi­ness expect­ing to work in romance.

“Porter wants to know: Did you come into the busi­ness to pub­lish books about shirt­less men kiss­ing beau­ti­ful women?”

And by the way, the answer from some indus­try folks to that ques­tion would be yes, and that would be OK. It should go with­out say­ing that some peo­ple, indeed, are eager and happy to work in romance and its sub­gen­res, and this is fine. I’m not dis­parag­ing the choice. What I’m ques­tion­ing is the preva­lence of romance in the busi­ness right now.

UPDATE: Jason Ashlock tells us that he accepts our “Ether Chal­lenge” and will indeed be kind enough to ask his inter­view sub­jects whether they got into pub­lish­ing to work in the kind of mate­r­ial they find them­selves han­dling today. 

And, of course, this is not the whole story. Read on. And don’t blink.

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.