About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

Dover Beach goes live on BookBub!

Posted on June 28, 2014 by Richard Bowker

My novel Dover Beach is now featured on the BookBub website, and it’s in the email BookBub sent out to 400,000 science fiction readers. The book is on sale for the ridiculously low price of $0.99. Here’s where I discuss the economics of a BookBub promotion. (If you want to buy the book, click the link on the BookBub page — they’ll get some revenue, and if they get enough click-through sales, this may help convince them to feature another one of my books.)

My publisher came up with this blurb for the book–there is presumably a word limit:

A Philip K. Dick Award finalist set in a harrowing world devastated by war: Believing himself a clone, Dr. Charles Winfield enlists the help of Wally Sands to expose a top-secret government project. But in his pursuit of answers, Wally uncovers truths about himself — and crosses paths with a killer…

This manages to get two or three things wrong, but whatever; I probably couldn’t have done any better. Here’s a customer review, titled “A Different but Wonderful Private Eye Story”, that does a better job of capturing what the book is about:

Walter is a quirky private eye like none you’ve ever experienced! The poor fellow stumbles into one disaster after another, making you laugh, cringe, and pity the lovable, determined character. By the way, Walter is a survivor of the downfall of America so he’s familiar with overcoming challenges. As the story unfolds, tidbits are revealed toward understanding what happened. To assist Walter is an eclectic and interesting collection of friends who assist him along the way. They will become like friends to you also. This book has twists and turns, great wit and humor, and very colorful characters. I loved book so much that I ordered the next novel in the series (A Distance Beacon) right away. Great job!

This reviewer gets everything right, except the name of the sequel. But it’s close!

By the way, there has never been a better time to get one of my books. Senator is also available for $0.99, and The Portal continues to be free. Here’s a recent five-star review of The Portal, titled “A Lot of Heart”:

I thought at first this was going to be another YA gimmicky novel with kids complaining about their lives and using the device of dimension travel just to come up with random quirky things, but this book is much more than that. You really get to know and care about the characters, and things move along quite well and not predictably. The really surprising part is the life lessons learned by the characters – they really leave you with something more than just a fun little read. Glad I read it!

Amazon vs. Hachette: The competition starts taking advantage

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Richard Bowker

For all the articles I’ve read about Amazon’s hardball tactics in their battle with Hachette, I have seen little discussion of the risk it’s taking. They are obviously leaving an opening for the competition. The Times finally ran an article about what’s happening on that front. An independent Seattle bookstore hand delivered copies of J. K. Rowling’s new book along with a “Hachette swag bag.” And the big vendors were also taking advantage:

On Walmart.com on Thursday, “The Silkworm” was one of three books featured on the books’ home page at 40 percent off, or $16.80. Walmart has also promoted the book with ads on Facebook and through mass emails to its customers promoting Hachette books. On Barnes & Noble’s site, “The Silkworm” was one of four of “the week’s biggest books.” A digital edition for the Nook was $11.99. It was Barnes & Noble’s No. 2 best-seller on Thursday. On Bookish, the website that the major publishers started last year to combat Amazon, it was the first “new and notable” release featured, and was selling for $19.60.

This doesn’t mean Amazon will back down, or that it won’t win. But it surely is taking a risk.

“Who’s going to blink first?” mused Mr. Sindelar, the independent bookseller. “That’s what everyone wants to know. I have no idea. But a lot of our customers told us they were buying from us explicitly as a protest against Amazon. We live in Seattle, where people go to farmers’ markets. They don’t want to limit the diversity of where they shop. I think this has helped people realize that if Amazon is the only option, that’s putting way too much power in one company.”

Another author complains about the new digital world order

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Richard Bowker

This one is Tony Horwitz, who wrote the wonderful Confederates in the Attic. He recounts his tale of woe in a New York Times op-ed. He got an offer from a new digital media outfit to write an e-book about the Keystone pipeline. They in turn contracted with an ebook publisher to produce and market the book. But the digital media outfit collapsed before he got his advanced, and the ebook publisher collapsed after the book was published. He now has little prospect of getting sufficient revenue from the ebook to make the months of research and writing worth while (although the publicity of a Times op-ed is going to help).

But now that I’ve escorted two e-partners to the edge of the grave, I’m wary of this brave new world of digital publishers and readers. As recently as the 1980s and ’90s, writers like me could reasonably aspire to a career and a living wage. I was dispatched to costly and difficult places like Iraq, to work for months on a single story. Later, as a full-time book author, I received advances large enough to fund years of research.

How many young writers can realistically dream of that now? Online journalism pays little or nothing and demands round-the-clock feeds. Very few writers or outlets can chase long investigative stories. I also question whether there’s an audience large enough to sustain long-form digital nonfiction, in a world where we’re drowning in bite-size content that’s mostly free and easy to consume. One reason “Boom” sank, I suspect, is that there aren’t many people willing to pay even $2.99 to read at length about a trek through the oil patch, no matter how much I sexed it up with cowboys and strippers.

It’s a sad story, but Horwitz’s main problems seem to have been shaky publishers and the lack of demand for long-form journalism, not the ebook model itself (which let him publish his story within days of its completion, while it was still in the news).

And you don’t have to deal with shaky publishers to have a tale of woe. I sold my novel Senator to an enthusiastic editor at William Morrow, a well-established publisher. But my editor subsequently left the company amid rumors that Morrow was going to be acquired. The book was therefore an orphan, assigned to a foster-editor who had no stake in its success. Without any publicity or editorial push, it sank without a trace — until I resurrected it as an ebook. These things happen.

Parents, don’t let your children become authors. Teach them Java and C++, and let them write code, not books.

Happy Bloomsday!

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Richard Bowker

To celebrate, let’s take a look at Joyce’s drawing of Leopold Bloom:

And here is 1955 photograph of Marilyn Monroe in a bathing suit reading Ulysses:

Does it get any better than that? I think not. Here’s some background on the photo.

Anyone here subscribe to BookBub?

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Richard Bowker

We’re going to run a promo for Dover Beach on BookBub June 28th. BookBub appears to be the 800-pound gorilla of online ebook advertising. And it has raised a bunch of venture capital to get even bigger.

The startup is nearing 3 million members, drives more than 1 million e-book sales every month and generates revenue in the “seven figures” from commissions on sales and fees paid by publishers and authors to be included in the newsletter. What makes all that even more impressive is BookBub has been bootstrapped — until now.

BookBub announced Thursday that it has raised a $3.8 million Series A round of funding from NextView Ventures, Founder Collective and others. Much of the funding is intended to help the startup ramp up its staff of 20, build out the web experience and develop for mobile and eventually expand internationally. But part of the funding is also intended to help BookBub expand from ebook deals to ebook discovery.

The economics of this for an author or publisher are pretty interesting, and a bit scary. Bookbub charges based on genre and sale price. Dover Beach will be priced at $0.99 and slotted as science fiction. The cost for the placement is $240, which is about an order of magnitude more than other ebook discovery sites such as eReader News Today (where will also be running a Dover Beach promotion at about the same time). The 35% ebook royalty on $0.99 books means that we’ll have to sell around a thousand copies to break even. (Of course, the calculations are a bit different for a series book like Dover Beach, since the hope is that some percentage of Dover Beach readers will go on to read its very fine sequel, The Distance Beacons.)

BookBub claims their SF mailing list contains 400,000 names, so if just half a percent of those folks buy the book, I’ll be doing fine. My publisher says some promos they’ve done with BookBub haven paid off, although my friends Jeff Carver and Craig Shaw Gardner did really well with their BookBub promotions. So we’ll see.

My publisher is actually a bit worried that BookBub will become so successful that they’ll crowd out the competition a la Amazon. What’s so special about it? I’m not entirely sure. It has a very clean interface compared to eReader News Today — no ads for JetBlue or Audible Com. That counts for something. They seem to have a smattering of mainstream books (today they’re offering Katherine Hepburn’s autobiography), but mainly they offer high-end indie books of the sort you see at other ebook sites, and the deals are pretty much the same. So I’m a bit baffled.

I let you know how we do.

Slate weighs in on Amazon vs. Hachette

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Richard Bowker

This article makes a couple of interesting points.

First, mainstream publishers are screwing authors on e-book royalties:

“Look at Harper’s own numbers,” DeFiore wrote. “$27.99 hardcover generates $5.67 profit to publisher and $4.20 royalty to author. $14.99 agency priced e-book generates $7.87 profit to publisher and $2.62 royalty to author.”

Looks fishy, doesn’t it? And the same basic math holds throughout the industry, including at Hachette.

The 15% royalty on hardcovers has always been justified by the costs of manufacturing, storing, and shipping the physical object. Those costs disappear with an e-book. But apparently the publishers are not passing much of that savings to the author. And Amazon knows this.

By leaving royalty rates where they are, publishers have left their nice digital margins hanging out there for everyone to see. And when Amazon sees someone else’s healthy profits, it’s like a dog smelling a steak. As Jeff Bezos has said, “Your margin is my opportunity.”

The other point the author makes is that reduced profits for publishers means a brain drain as fewer people decide to write books:

If publishers make less money on every book, they are going to pay people less to write and edit them, and talented people will decide to do something else with their time. Consider that it takes at least five years, and usually more, to write a definitive presidential biography. If an advance of $100,000 exceeds the budget that an Amazon-dominated world will allow, then the only author who can write such a biography must be either independently wealthy or subsidized by a full-time job, probably teaching at a university.

Do you buy this argument? I suppose it could be true for mainstream non-fiction. It certainly seems untrue for fiction — or, at least, it would be balanced off by an influx of talented writers who are simply bypassing the barriers put up by mainstream publishers. If I earned more from my writing I could quit my day job and write more, but that’s fundamentally a function of success in the marketplace, not advances from a publisher.

Publishers as gatekeepers

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Richard Bowker

One of the arguments made on behalf of mainstream publishers in the Amazon-Hachette war is that publishers act as gatekeepers — keeping the junk out of the market and using their editorial skills to improve the books they do let into the market. Here’s a writer offering up a paean to these gatekeepers in the the pages of Publishers Weekly:

In a market of unlimited book options, how does an audience make choices? At the moment, most of that burden is carried by the book business. The publicity and marketing campaigns and cover designs and flap copy—the things that publishers do—are not just methods of selling books; they’re also readers’ main tools for discovering books. The same is true of the curating and merchandising in stores, and book coverage in the media. Without reviews, staff recommendations, and endcap displays, unlimited choices aren’t narrowed down—they’re overwhelming.

Second, if all books become cheap or free to readers, then writers are unlikely to earn much (if anything). Who will want to write if writing doesn’t pay?

Third, without the gatekeepers, those who do write will create books that are worse—and not just authors whose dormant genius must be drawn out by patient editors, but all authors. Every book that doesn’t first have to get past a gatekeeper or two, or 10, before being put in front of the public will be worse.

He then goes on to describe how much his manuscript was improved in the process of being submitted to agents and publishers. Well, your mileage may vary; mine certainly did. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the editorial support and advice I got while I was part of the mainstream publishing world ranged from trivial to nonexistent. Editors didn’t have the time or the interest or the talent to make my novels better.

Two further points. First, the main idea behind being a gatekeeper is to keep out the bad stuff. But of course fallible human beings are making judgments that could well be wrong. The most poignant case of this was John Kennedy Toole’s amazing A Confederacy of Dunces, shunned by mainstream publishers and only published by an obscure university press years after his suicide at the age of 31.

Less poignant, but of more immediate interest to me, is my novel The Portal, which my agent several years ago declined to market, deeming it unpublishable. So now it’s out there in the self-published universe, and the rave customer reviews are starting to pile up. Here’s one of many:

A Terrific Read! I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading this. Would the promising story idea deflate once it got past the initial set-up, as so many other books do? It definitely did not, and stayed entertaining all the way through – I could not put it down. I have kids around the same age and I really felt for these boys – they’re lost and are doing whatever they can to stay alive, stay together and hopefully get home. Glad the book was complete in itself, but it would be great to see them have more adventures like this. Overall, two very enthusiastic thumbs up!

(The semi-poignant part of this saga is that in the years after my agent rejected it I managed to lose the final draft — no hard copy, no soft copy. Luckily, my friend Jeff managed to hang on to the final Word file. Apparently he had more faith in it than I did!)

The second point is that gatekeepers are going to let stuff through that they shouldn’t. Not all books that come out from major publishers are worth reading, or are as good as they could possibly be. The two most recent Jack Reacher books could certainly have been improved — one by going through another draft, the other by being tossed into the wastebasket. But apparently the publisher doesn’t care — they just want a Jack Reacher book every year.

I don’t know anything about Emma Donoghue, but her latest novel, Frog Music, is a historical mystery and apparently very different from her previous “worldwide bestseller,” Room. The Boston Globe hated it, the New York Times hated it, and lots of Amazon and (especially) Barnes & Noble customers also hate it. My guess is that her publisher, Little Brown (part of Hachette), was hoping for another Room, but this is what the author delivered to them. So they were stuck publishing something they didn’t much like. (Also, the Kindle version costs $12.99, which suggests that the e-book pricing wars haven’t quite started yet — it’s actually a buck cheaper at B&N. So I’d just like to mention that you can buy pretty much all of my e-books for the price of one Frog Music.)

Thoughts on Amazon vs. Hachette

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Amazon is apparently playing hardball in negotiations with the publishing conglomerate Hachette, and as usual people are outraged. As usual, I find it hard to understand what the problem is. Certainly some Hachette authors will be hurt in the short run, but that’s not really Amazon’s concern. Authors are always buffeted by changes in the marketplace. There is certainly a possibility that Amazon will become something of a monopsony — the only place to which publishers can sell their books. But the remedy here is legal, not calling Jeff Bezos an extortionist.

Joe Nocera of the New York Times sums things up like this:

No matter what you think of Amazon’s tactics, they surely don’t violate any laws. It is acting the way hardheaded companies usually act — inflicting some pain on the party in a dispute to move it toward resolution. On some level, the book industry has never fit comfortably in the contours of big business. But over the years, as one house after another was bought by conglomerates, as they merged with each other, as they tried to increase profits with the kind of regularity that pleases Wall Street, they began the process of commoditizing books.

Jeff Bezos? He’s only taking that process to its logical extreme.

One other thing: Nocera mentions Walmart and cable companies as examples of big companies that squeeze its suppliers. But books are not fungible, the way air conditioners and other things you buy at Walmart are; if you want J.K. Rowling’s latest book, you’re not going to accept a substitute. And there are way more suppliers for books than there are cable providers for your home. If Amazon makes it hard for you to buy a Hachette book, Barnes & Noble will happily take your order — and, if they have any brains, they’ll give you a special discount.

The only issue here is that Kindle users are more or less tied to Amazon for their e-books. But if they find that they can’t get a lot of their favorite titles on the Kindle, maybe they’ll buy a different e-reader. This is no different from Netflix, which has a large but incomplete selection of movies and TV shows to stream. If their selection doesn’t satisfy you, you have to go to Hulu or some other vendor. Not having their books available from every conceivable bookseller is not great for authors and their readers, but it’s also not the end of the world.

Use your talent before life decides to take it away

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Richard Bowker

The other day I heard a story about a brilliant young novelist who had a brain aneurysm that left her unable to write. The next morning I listened to a podcast about Jacqueline Du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who came down with multiple sclerosis at the age of 27, subsequently had to give up performing, and died from the disease at the age of 42.

It’s good to be reminded every once in a while that life sucks; so create beauty while you can. Here is Du Pre playing the first movement of the Elgar Cello Concerto; you could just watch her emote for eight minutes without bothering to listen to the music. The orchestra is conducted by her husband, Daniel Barenboim. She was 22 at the time; he was 25. They were on top of the world then; she’s been dead for 30 years now, and he is still going strong. (The movie Hillary and Jackie recounts the story of Du Pre, her sister, and their husbands. It’s a harrowing story, although apparently its accuracy is in dispute.)