Quacking Alone

(Upset Hubby Alert – I can’t remember where I read it!)

Read somewhere (hence the hubby alert above) that some of the editors at the big publishing houses are now looking for contemporary romances.  Actually, I think I read in a couple of different places over the last week or two, news that contemporaries may be the next hot thing.  What do I say to that?

THANK GOD, THE GREAT GREEN TOAD FROG AND ALL THE RE-FRIED CLAMS IN THE UNIVERSE!!!

I like historicals and I write historicals, but there are times, many times, when only a contemporary will do.  Some of my favs from that genre are folks like Diana Palmer, Linda Howard, Susan Elizabeth Phillips and Jayne Anne Krentz.  I can curl up in a chair and watch hours pass like minutes while I read one of theirs in paperback form,  or – as I add more to my Sony Reader – in ebook form.  I’m eyeballing a purchase of a Diana Palmer and a Brenda Jackson Westmoreland anthology for my e-reader as we speak. 

I also love contemporaries.  I also WRITE contemporaries.  I previously published Email Enticement, a contemporary set in my home town of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  I just published Griffin’s Law, a contemporary set at the University of South Carolina’s Law School in Columbia, SC.  Both books take place at that interesting mental spot where love and the law intersect. So, does my gratitude about the return of the contemporary contain some amount of self-interest?  You bet’cha.

But, keep in mind, that I write contemporaries because I read contemporaries.  I write contemporaries because I love contemporaries.  I don’t agree that you have to write what you know.   I do agree that you have to write what you love.   Enthusiasm and joy and a page turning experience will never happen for a reader if they didn’t first happen for the writer.  Fun is contagious. 

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Amazon announced that it is capitulating to Macmillan’s demands. The e-tailer essentially says it has to capitulate but that its customers will make the ultimate decision at the cash register.

Maybe I’ve been a lawyer too long, but this looks a lot like a marketing ploy cooked up at the end of a negotiation. Kindle users get upset at e-books priced over $9.99 because they feel that’s their bargain with Amazon. So how could Amazon give in and still come across as being on the Kindle owners’ side? They could play a giant shell game but not run it for long enough to do any serious damage to Macmillan or Amazon.

Was this a real dispute or a giant pacifer to Kindle owners? Either way, it opens the door and all the other publishers can now walk through. It’s the beginning of the end of that $9.99 ceiling.

I’m an indie publisher so the publishers big prices can only help my bottom line. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for Amazon’s customers.

I doubt that Kindle owners will feel terribly pacified.

E-books have arrived.  There’s no longer any doubt about that because in the wake of the plethora of e-readers, Apple’s iPad is about to enter the market.  The bigs have stopped throwing down over whether e-books should exist.  Now they’re throwing down over how much they should cost.  The journey from whether to how much marks the milestone of an industry change.

This week Amazon and Macmillan locked horns over price point.  At the iPad announcement, Steve Jobs indicated that Apple would only take a 30% commission off the sale of each e-book.  Under the Apple scheme, publishers would set the price.  Boy, howdy, that would suit the publishers just fine but the public – not so much.  After the iPad was out and about and had established itself with a sales history, the pricing structure would have given publishers leverage over Amazon.  Note that I said AFTER. 

One publisher didn’t want to wait.  Before the stories from Job’s launch announcement had gone to print, John Sergent, CEO of Macmillan, decided to go all Godfather on Amazon.  Sergent told the e-tailer giant to adopt Apple’s price structure and abandon its pricing insanity ($9.99 as the max for an e-book) OR Macmillan would do “extensive and deep windowing of titles”.  In other words, Macmillan said, give us control of pricing or lose the right to sell our newest and most popular books. 

Sergent made the worst of all negotiating errors – he made a threat he couldn’t or shouldn’t back up.  And Amazon took him at his word.  The e-tailer didn’t just give a verbal response, it gave a real world response.  Amazon removed the buy button from all of Macmillan’s titles, e-books and print.  Now Amazon sells a lot of e-books, but it doesn’t out and out dominate the market because that market is too new, it’s evolving daily.  However, no bookstore on the planet sells the number of print copies that Amazon does.

Now Macmilian is in a corner without a fallback position.  It overlooked the fact that even after the Apple launch, it will still need Amazon.  Macmillan reacted by issuing a “letter” to its authors/illustrators and the literary agent community.  As the blog Dear Author noted, the letter missed its most important audience — the readers. Macmillan wants to make money on its product, Amazon wants to sell a lot of its product, and the readers want to buy books and e-books at a fair price. 

The delicate balancing act of marketing/price structure can’t work if total control is given to the publisher.  Amazon talks about anti-trust and in response, Macmillan cites a US Supreme Court decision legalizing retail price maintenance for luxury goods.  Common sense and the free market can imagine more practical reasons for not giving a producer control of the price of its goods.  What would Wal Mart or Dollar General have to charge for goods if the manufacturer set the price? 

If Amazon wants to make money on volume instead of price margin, that helps the consumer.  If Macmillan weren’t so short sighted, it would realize that it helps the publisher and its authors too.  People all over America (like me) are caught like rats in the trap of the economic crunch and we can’t afford to pay big prices for books.  But the crunch won’t last forever (please God) and when it passes, readers will be able to pay more for books. 

Macmillan forgot the most important lesson of the Godfather – if you’re making the other party an offer it can’t refuse, first you better be sure it can’t refuse.  Amazon could and it did.  Be careful what you ask for publishers, because you might get it. 

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Okay, America, I can now reveal a closely guarded secret. Santa’s name is John.

No? You disagree? Well, maybe John is just MY SANTA. Come to think about it, he is my Santa. And he rocks it big style. So ladies (especially you redheads out there – you know who you are) hands off. In addition to my hubby’s myriad and too numerous to list other amazing qualities (in addition to putting up with me), he’s a smart and generous man who got me an e-reader for Christmas.

On Christmas morning, my hubby handed me my gifts in a very specific order. First up, I unwrapped an organizer for all those knives, forks and spoons that have been wadded up and tossed randomly in a drawer for years. Then he handed me a box containing a Hamilton Beach Brewstation Coffeemaker to replace ours that died a few months ago.  (As a rambling aside, I’ll note that the Brewstation is a temperamental machine with a shorter lifespan than other models. But I forgive it and will replace each Brewstation with another because nobody in the price range comes close for quality and convenience).

When John handed me the first box, with the drawer organizer, he said it would make me smile. It did, because after over 20 years of marriage, he knows full well my rule that Christmas gifts should cater to wishes and wants rather than needs and necessities. I’ve ranted often enough to him about my ire for men who present their wives something like a vacuum cleaner as a Christmas gift. I’d hope that wives who receive something like that got their hubbys a set of pots and pans because they’d get the same hurt, lost expression when the gift got open. Men of America, your wife may clean and manage your household but listen to me very closely – your wife is not your house.

So the first gift, the organizer, was a “gag” gift of a sort. My hubby is a smart man with a sharp sense of humor and he could be a comic for a living if he didn’t have a family dragging him down and grounding him. The coffeemaker was a better gift, although it still catered to need rather than want — I consider coffee to be necessary for survival. Both the first two packages were very big. The third package was smaller, much, much smaller. And ladies, don’t we know that the best holiday gifts come in the small packages?

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THREE CHEERS FOR AMAZON!!!

I’ve given the company a hard time for its failure to clean out its Mobi closet, but people aren’t perfect so I can hardly expect a company to achieve perfection.  Lord knows, I’m the poster child for flaws.  So I’m not saying that Amazon is perfect, but this week it took huge strides in becoming close enough to perfect for me.  Amazon just proved once again that it is the indie writer’s best friend. 

This week, Amazon’s indie writer’s subsidiary, CreateSpace, entered the publishing biz.  CS has signed distribution deals with Ingram’s Lightning Source and Baker & Taylor which will make books widely available to retailers and bookstores as well as to schools and libraries.  It’s a big, big deal done quietly, almost under the radar. 

This quiet deal promises to change the face of publishing.   

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It looks like the Kindle will win the Christmas, 2009 E-War amongst the readers.  

From all reports, B&N’s Nook has been selling well, but it looks like the company rushed the device to market before it had a good supply of the devices.  Nooks ordered now for Christmas gifts will arrive long after Santa’s sleigh has returned to the North Pole.   Holiday sales do account for a large percentage of a retailer’s sales.  Additionally, B&N likely felt that not getting its device out for the Yule season would mean the company surrendered the battle without fielding an army.  B&N didn’t want to give Amazon more of an advantage than the company already had.

I haven’t held a Nook, but I’ve held a Kindle.  The device is amazing.  It’s like the keys to the kingdom for a life-long bookworm (like me).  The 3G wireless connection means a reader can order a new book anytime, anywhere.  No bookstore required.  And Amazon has had the device out for a couple of generations so it has had some time to work out those kinks.  My computer programmer hubby would, I think, always hesitate a couple of years before buying a Nook.  Hubby says that the first generation of a program is bound to have bugs that will get worked out later, and he doesn’t like to play guinea pig.  (He also feels that if he writes a computer program that compiles on the first try that disaster looms ahead, but that’s another story.) 

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This week one of the bigs broke ranks and insiders have gone postal. 

Harlequin, one of the biggest category romance publishers on the planet, announced a new publishing arm.  For a fee that varies by package, a writer can publish a book that Harlequin will distribute. The pay-to-play arm of the company was originally named “Harlequin Horizons.”  All over the blogosphere, writer’s associations went ballistic.  RWA, Romance Writers of America, issued a special announcement which basically tossed Harlequin out of the club, decreeing that Harlequin had become a non-eligible publisher and was no longer eligible for RWA-provided conference resources.

Harlequin responded by noting the extent to which its company has supported the RWA and has provided resources to the RWA.  However, because of the furor over the whole business, Harlequin took the unfortunate (and rather cowardly) step of saying it would change the name of its pay-to-play arm and that “Harlequin” would not appear in the name of the new division.

Harlequin didn’t cancel the new venture and so far as I have been able to determine, RWA hasn’t responded to the name change or welcomed Harlequin back into the fold. 

The whole debacle shows how terrified traditional bastions of publishing are over the future.  Many websites criticized Harlequin by calling it a “vanity press.”  Vanity press is a prejudicial and demeaning term that carries a boatload of implied criticism.  The term basically means – or it used to mean – a place an author pays to be published. It was different from a subsidy press, which is one where the author participates in the costs of publication in any manner. The terms were created or endorsed by associations like RWA to differentiate “real authors” from “fake authors.”   You’re only a real author if you’ve played their game their way – you queried until you found a “worthy citizen” or agent to sell your work to the Royals in the big publishing castles.  Fake authors are allowed to be members of RWA, and fake publishers can associate with the real authors, but they don’t get all the benefits. RWA hopes that because it deigns to allow them to belong to the group, the fake authors and fake publishers will see the error of their ways. 

RWA endorses or advocates only one path to publication – the sacred path.

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I held a Kindle.

Yes, I actually had a real, live, working Kindle in my very own hands. My hands shook, my palms sweated, my fingers gripped it tight, so very, very tight. My brown eyes glistened with lust that turned to love at first grasp. But then came the time of horror, of desolation, of pain. My hubby, my own ever-loving hubby looked at me and said, “You have to give it back now.”

My fingers held it tighter and I shook my head no, no, NO. And John said, “It’s not yours. You have to give it back.” He held out his hands, very carefully, like a cop trying to talk a deranged psycho holding a gun into giving it up. I could have made him fight me for it. I could have forced him to pry it out of my clinging hands. But then, the Kindle might have been hurt. I couldn’t hurt the precious little device. So I untangled my fingers, and handed it back.

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They say that even a broken clock is right twice a day.  My percentage may not be quite as good as that broken timepiece, but by The Great Green Toad Frog, once in a great while – I’m right too. 

A while back, I started blogging about my dissatisfaction with Mobipocket.  As you may know, Mobi is the ebookbase distributor that used to be THE place for indie publishers to sell ebooks.  The little French company was going gangbusters until 2005 arrived and the American giant, Amazon, gobbled up little Mobi.  Many thought that the purchase meant that Amazon’s already immense assets and web presence would advance the brand, provide a killer venue to the indie publishers, and make the Mobi format the industry standard for ebooks.  But, of course, it didn’t work out that way.

It was a strategic takeover for the Giant which was apparently already eyeballing plans for an ebook distribution service of its own.  The purchase meant that Amazon could cannibalize the company by siphoning off pieces and parts of the Mobi technology. I’m no gadget guru (my hubby wears that hat), but I suspect that computer folk would be able to examine the Kindle app’s code and see the fingerprints of its Mobi forerunner.  Once the Giant licked all the red off the Mobi sucker, it could toss the sucker in the garbage. 

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Our new project this week - the book trailer for Faerie (see post from hubby below, YouTube, Yahoo Video, & Coming Soon Everywhere We Can Think Of)  turns my thoughts to marketing and the state of the industry generally. 

Of course, it also turns my thoughts to Faerie which is my “rest of the story” spin on the famous legend of the Clan McLeod of the Isle of Skye in Scotland.  After Ian’s handfast marriage to a faerie princess ended after a year and a day, per his agreement with her da, the Faerie King, the princess returned to the land of faerie.  Her braw, strong hubby watched her go, holding their infant son, without making a single protest.  Later, the babe cried and the princess returned to comfort him, leaving him wrapped in a faerie flag that could be used to protect the Clan.  Interesting story, but what laird worth his highland blood would let a beloved go without fighting to keep her?  And after she left, we have a fine laird with a castle and no lady wife.  When he marries, how will the princess feel?  Surely, the many tears she’d shed would anger her powerful father into appearing at the wedding reception and pronouncing a curse. 

Check out the trailer for A Faerie Fated Forever, and you’ll get a glimpse of that handfast marriage that ended in a curse that the current laird must meet or risk living his father’s tormented, unfulfilled life.  You’ll also get a glimpse of the gorgeous terrain of the highlands and hints of the rest of the plot.  So watch the trailer and buy the book or the e-book. 

After watching markets recently, I’m betting you’d buy the e-book. 

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