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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
I had a great couple of weeks away from my novel. Real life is great! But now what? What are these characters supposed to be doing? Wasn’t there some plot point I wanted to add right around here? Didn’t I note that down somewhere? I have this other note, but what does it mean?
I came across a good piece of writing advice once from Graham Greene (I think). Don’t stop writing when you reach a difficult part; stop when you reach an easy part. That makes it easier for you get rolling the next time you sit down to write. Why don’t I pay more attention to Graham Greene?
Actually, even the easy stuff seems difficult after a couple of weeks. Surfing the Internet certainly seems like a more attractive option than rewriting that sentence. And I really ought to recheck my email — it’s possible someone has written me in the past five minutes.
OK, let’s try again. Blogging is just one more excuse.
Last Sunday’s Book Review had a pair of essays on the topic “Why is it so hard to capture the writer’s life on film?” This a question that seems easy enough to answer. Thomas Mallon captures it like this:
Because no one wants to watch somebody typing, Hollywood often makes movies about writers who stop writing. It’s easier, and more entertaining, to show them being Technicolorfully destroyed by fame or drink or premature success.
And he brings up one of my favorite writer’s movies, Wonder Boys:
The hard part is always trying to show writers doing what they actually do. The Michael Douglas character occasionally sits at his Selectric wearing a woman’s bathrobe, like a pitcher’s lucky underwear, trying to summon more phrases for his already overlong, inert manuscript.
It seems a bit odd that there are so many movies about people whose lives are so fundamentally boring. My guess — and it’s only a guess, mind you — is that this is because many movies are written by writers. Anyway, these essays are pretty good, and they provide me with several additions to my list of writerly movies to watch (or re-watch):
Barton Fink
Deconstructing Harry
Julia
The Hours
Beloved Infidel
Capote
And, in particular, Bright Star, which I’ll blog about next.
The Portal continues to be free on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The main idea here is to generate customer reviews, because reviews are what stimulate e-book sales. As my publisher says:
The more reviews, the more sales. In other words, “people are interested in buying what other people are interested in reviewing”. This is the basic definition of Social Engagement.
Reviews are hard to come by, actually. I don’t know what percentage of readers leave reviews, but it can’t be very high. Giving the book away for a while increases the pool of readers, which increases your odds of getting reviews.
My publisher is more interested in the number of reviews than how positive the reviews are, but obviously that matters to the author! It also matters to some potential advertisers, who aren’t interested in promoting books unless they have received a certain number of reviews at a certain quality level (e.g., at least 10 reviews, average higher than 4.0).
Here are the first couple of (five-star) reviews that have come in as a result of this promotion. Both readers have a similar reaction — which is exactly the reaction I was hoping for, actually. This one is 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!
And this one is titled “Very Enjoyable”:
Really enjoyed this book. At first I thought it was going to be kind of silly but it didn’t take long till I could hardly put the book down. I found myself identifying with the curiosities of Larry.
Really hope there is a second in the series coming!
So, thanks to these readers, and everyone else who takes the time to leave a review.
My friend John Klobucher has created an interesting fantasy universe in his episodic series Lore of the Underlings. He has now collected the first set of episodes in old-fashioned book form:
Print books are great! You can read them in the bathtub, and I’m pretty sure they don’t require batteries. So pick up a few.
Note that John did the cover art. He also creates podcasts of the episodes, where he does the narration and all the voices. Plus he composes original music for them.
He’s a bit of a show-off.
Another in an occasional series.
Like Young Cassidy, The Invisible Woman is a biopic about a famous writer. Unlike Young Cassidy, it is really really good.
It’s the story of Charles Dickens and his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. Ralph Fiennes directed the movie and plays Dickens; Felicity Jones plays Ternan. I like the
way the film captures the complexities of the relationship: this wasn’t a love story. Ternan admired Dickens, but above all she needed money and security; Dickens was fond of Ternan, but above all he needed a young, pretty woman to admire him.
Beyond that, I like that they got Dickens right. Dickens was a creep in his personal life: he was awful to his wife, dismissive of his children . . . but he was also haunted by a dreadful childhood that goes a long way toward explaining the mess he made of things. And there was his art and his public, both of which were more important to him than his wife and children. The film captures that: he is constantly writing, and when he isn’t writing, he is performing.
Finally, the emotional climax of the movie is Ternan’s explication of the alternative endings of Great Expectations. How cool is that?
The movie seems to have been kind of a flop, which is too bad. There are plenty of reasons why, I suppose. It’s not especially romantic; there’s no musical soundtrack (which worked for me); Dickens is probably considered old-fashioned and sentimental. But I found it more satisfying than almost every other movie I’ve seen lately.
(By the way, someday I might start an occasional series of Shakespeare on film. The previous movie that Fiennes directed was a modern-day version of Corialanus, with Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain. That, too, was pretty good. And also kind of a flop. Maybe Fiennes needs to sign on to direct Iron Man 4.)
Richard Bowker 