What Writers Say To Agents After The Party
The May 27 piece, “The Overselling Of Self-Publishing”: New Perspective continues to draw response. It referred to one of my friend and colleague Jane Friedman’s best pieces this year, How to Secure a Traditional Book Deal by Self-Publishing at Writer Unboxed (where we both are contributors).
By luck, I was sitting beside Friedman when she read the piece here at Thought Catalog. The 27th of last month was the first of two days in the International Digital Publishing Forum’s (IDPF) Digital Book Conference 2015. I had served as program director and Friedman was kind enough to expertly moderate a panel at my request. Is Online Social Community Likelier To Develop A New Generation Of Readers? Or Writers? Our panelists were Wattpad’s Ashleigh Gardner, Biztegra’s Murray Izzenwasser, and iShook’s Beni Rachmanov. They did a fine job.
As things have played out in the ensuing month, self-publishing authors have found themselves confronted with a change announced in how Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select will pay its writers: on a per-page plan instead of for each borrow of a book. If you need more on that topic, there’s this story here at Thought Catalog, Amazon’s New KDP Select Per-Page Payments: Everybody Has To Swim For It Now, and this at The Bookseller’s The FutureBook, Gaming The System: Amazon At Home And Abroad. We’ve had a good #FutureChat on the topic, too.
Some of the most thoughtful commentary about what the per-page payout might mean has to do with how critical it becomes for KDP Select authors to focus on quality. Rather than offering quick, short writes for borrows on the Kindle Unlimited (KU) andKindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) plans, many are now thinking more about capturing and holding readers all the way through their books — which is hard in any case, and especially hard in a world of electronic enticements and endless interruptions.
A new idea of patience, of careful craft, of renewed dedication to quality has appeared on the table of our debates.
And of everything that Friedman had written, her comments on the impatience she finds in many authors seemed to hit the rawest nerve. “The Overselling Of Self-Publishing” has had quite a lot of response to that observation, sometimes heated.
The Water’s Fine, Isn’t It?
Friedman’s main point was that she is being contacted as a consultant by self-publishing authors who want to know how to get traditional contracts. Her remark:
By far, the No. 1 consulting request I receive is the author who has self-published and wants to switch to traditional publishing. Usually it’s because they’re disappointed with their sales or exposure; other times, that was their plan all along.
That may not sit well, of course, with folks in self-publishing who feel themselves to be on a kind of mission to proselytize for self-publishing. Going beyond a recommendation (“I self-published and it went well, would you like to know more?”), these folks seem to feel that they must persuade others to take the same path.
Kindle Direct Publishing was introduced in 2007 and has come into its own as the terrifically viable option it is today, intensely valuable in so many cases, an honorable and now maturing option in publishing. But it is still that: an option. So is the effort to get into traditional publishing. There is no pledge of allegiance to the flag of self-publishing, nor to the traditional establishment. Neither pathway is a cause. The work is what’s important. And each creative person has the right and the obligation to make his or her best decision.
‘Most Of You Are The Rules, Not The Exceptions’
In a comment on the “Overselling” story, one of our good Thought Catalogreaders lays out a deftly written response, in part:
I think throwing out the “impatience” accusation is both immensely arrogant and a slap in the face to the countless writers who’ve tried for years and years on end to secure traditional representation/publishing to no avail. Sure, it’s easy for agents and editors to look down their noses atop their thrones and sigh “so impatient,” as they continue rejecting 97% of manuscripts. I also think views like the ones pushed in this article are, frankly, the very skewed, biased result of editors and agents (I found this article via a smug retweet from a big-name agent) who are scared you-know-what-less that their livelihood is going to go up in flames in a decade or less, as more and more authors start to realize the advantages of self-publishing.
It’s perfectly appropriate for our reader to express his or her opinion, glad to have it. And I’m glad to have another viewpoint, this time from a literary agent.
San Diego’s Jennifer Azantian was with the Paul Levine Literary Agency and Sandra Dijkstra’s agency before opening her own shop in February 2014. And her commentary seems to take that reader’s input as her starting point.
I just wanted to say that most agents and editors (and I say this as one of them) are not coming from a place of malice or concern over livelihood when they bring up issues with self-publishing. Most of us are in this industry because we love good books, and we love working with authors. It’s true that there are some successful authors who self-publish, but for every break-out success story, there are thousands of disappointed writers who had no idea what they were getting into.
There’s more: Read the full story at Thought Catalog
By Porter Anderson
Follow @Porter_Anderson
Writing on the Ether: When Authors Yell ‘Everybody Into The Pool!’: Another Viewpoint
Originally published by Thought Catalog at www.ThoughtCatalog.com
