From July 5, 2012

Part of my series of columns on pub­lish­ing, Writ­ing on the Ether, appear­ing Thurs­days at the invi­ta­tion of Jane Fried­man at JaneFriedman.com

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Six weeks after escap­ing the 9/11 attacks in New York City, Chance Sowin moves back home, hop­ing for famil­iar­ity and secu­rity. Instead, he inter­rupts a bur­glary and his father is killed.

“Auda­cious, genre-bending … a thrilling head-rush of a book.” —Eliz­a­beth Eslami

Find out more on Ama­zon and down­load a sam­ple to your Kindle.

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Inde­pen­dence

Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ties cheer the Rus­sians’ defeat of Napoleon’s Grande Armée each year in out­door pops extrav­a­gan­zas on the Fourth. That’s Tchaikovsky’s cannon-and-chimes 1812 Over­ture (Op. 49) still rival­ing Sousa in our ears.

So it’s not that sur­pris­ing that We, the Cre­atives, can bring a cer­tain mer­cu­r­ial — none dares call us self-centered — charm to our obser­va­tions of Inde­pen­dence Day, is it?

Thus, you’ll find that sev­eral com­men­ta­tors in the field this week have men­tioned our authors’ “free­dom” and “inde­pen­dence” as being wor­thy of a good Roman can­dle and a match.

 

One strong exam­ple of this comes from the Kill Zone. Sorry about that group-blog name, it’s the genre-gnawing noir-dark-alley-blog-home of sev­eral accom­plished sus­pense and thriller writ­ers. As far as I know, they’ve had not one homi­cide there. Yet.

One Kill Zone mem­ber we know well here on the Ether is our good friend James Scott Bell.

Another is Nancy J. Cohen. It falls to her to light the fuse for the gang this year in the Death Region. And what I like about her mini–Grucci show is her effort to get some bal­ance into it:

Today we have more free­dom to choose where to pub­lish our work. We used to be con­fined to the mega New York pub­lish­ing houses.

Bal­anced with:

Here’s what it means to choose the self-publishing path: Besides writ­ing and mar­ket­ing our own works, we have to out­source to edi­tors, cover design­ers, and for­mat­ters. We have to col­lect the income from var­i­ous dis­trib­u­tors and for­mu­late our own spread­sheets. And don’t for­get buy­ing ISBNs, deter­min­ing a name for our pub­lish­ing “com­pany”, and reg­is­ter­ing for copyright.

In fact, maybe I like Cohen’s view­point so much because she gets just plain Sartrean at one point:

With free­dom comes greater respon­si­bil­ity, and we’re feel­ing that as indie authors.

If not quite our own pri­vate Huis Clos, Cohen brings us to…shall we say, the ties that bind us.

These are tough choices, but at least we have them. It’s more than we could do sev­eral years ago. Now there’s always the pos­si­bil­ity that our work will make it into the hands of read­ers one way or another. Isn’t that a rea­son to celebrate?

Well, hm, some­how, I don’t find myself jump­ing into the conga line on the strength of that “possibility…one way or another,” no. But I salute Cohen for just that — for pos­ing it as a ques­tion instead of as a truth we all feel ready to hold self-evident.

Let’s explore an author’s free­dom in the next sec­tion, also, as we look at a call to arms from a good col­league in the Colonies’ libraries.

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Libraries and liveli­hoods: Brant­ley, Coker, Gardner

If libraries could mount a cam­paign directly at authors and agents, it could help broaden access to (e)books. Librar­i­ans could raise aware­ness that an author should “Say yes to your library!” and write into their con­tracts the require­ment that their (e)book be avail­able in the library mar­ket with­out oner­ous limitations.

I’m not recall­ing many times I’ve heard an author sug­gest that any­one “Say no to your library.”

Here on the holy Ether, this is preach­ing to the perverted.

But Peter Brant­ley, in his post at Pub­lish­ers Weekly’s PWxyz blog — Authors: say yes to libraries! – is work­ing, in part, in response to the news of the Smash­words deal with California’s Cal­ifa libraries. As we cov­ered in the last Ether, that arrange­ment has a clause that will allow library patrons to pub­lish their own books and offer them up as library ebooks.

While there seem to be glim­mers of hope in a cou­ple of lim­ited pilot pro­grams, the major pub­lish­ing houses are still hold­ing out from allow­ing their front list ebooks to be bor­rowed by library patrons.

In putting together his post, the faith­ful Brant­ley (he’s based at the Inter­net Archive in San Fran­cisco) quotes Smash­words’ Mark Coker, always good for a sound­bite, saying:

“The big New York pub­lish­ers are treat­ing libraries like second-class cit­i­zens, so I see this as a real excit­ing oppor­tu­nity for indie authors to move in and serve the needs of libraries.”

You get the spirit of the idea right away, of course. A big heart is at work here.

And on the face of it? Well sure, a lot of authors might love to sit down with a fire-breathing Big Sixer and say, “No, buddy, I’m not sign­ing my name to this lunch tab or your lit­tle con­tract until you grant me the right to put this ebook into libraries.”

But when I asked agents about this?

Well, first they ran out of the room. One issue I’m run­ning into from time to time is that mem­bers of the com­mu­nity don’t feel they can speak hon­estly on the record. This is espe­cially true of agents, who worry that if they honk off any pub­lish­ers with a com­ment, they could end up being less able to get what their author-clients need.

While I under­stand the fear — and regret the para­noia — I think it’s a mis­take to speak off the record. Nor­mally I wouldn’t carry such com­ments, but in this case, I went to the peo­ple I asked, and I can vouch for their authenticity.

(Even more frus­trat­ing are pun­dits who won’t reveal even to media peo­ple who they are, and yet expect us to carry their quotes. In those cases, the ones in which some­one hides com­pletely behind a pseu­do­nym or other dis­guise, I refuse to quote. If I can’t vouch for who my source is, that per­son is no source of mine.)

One agent told me:

While this might be a viable and inter­est­ing option for authors when re-selling back-list or self pub­lish­ing, tra­di­tional front list pub­lish­ing con­tracts for authors with­out mas­sive lever­age would not be viable in my opinion.

One agent who is always gen­er­ous and up-front with authors — no stranger to Eth­er­nauts here — is Rachelle Gard­ner.

When I put the ques­tion to her, she pointed out that going into con­tract nego­ti­a­tions with the hard restric­tions of some rights already tied up is never smart:

And is it worth giv­ing up a pub­lish­ing con­tract? No.

One pub­lisher weighed in, too, again on con­di­tion of anonymity, but echo­ing what these and other agents told me: only a “very attrac­tive, proven” author could be expected to pre­vail on this in a con­tract negotiation.

So while the idea of Smash­words’ arrange­ment with the Cal­ifa libraries might have inspired Brantley’s post, the folks I spoke to kept going back to the fact that Smash­words is a self-publishing ser­vice, not a tra­di­tional publisher.

The idea of facil­i­tat­ing library avail­abil­ity can make us feel all warm and fuzzy, sure. But do we know that librar­i­ans are ready for, as Coker puts it, “indie authors to move in and serve the needs of libraries.” Would a lot of DIY work from debut authors serve those libraries’ needs?

Even if writ­ing things into con­tracts made sense for tra­di­tion­ally pub­lished authors, it might be worth find­ing out first whether libraries are ready to “say yes to self-publishing authors” they’ve never heard of before.

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