‘Legacy’ and ‘indie’ .. the weasel words of a phoney revolution
You can use words in two ways: to hide the truth and to reveal it. When I was a journalist it was always the latter because the first was wrong, and got you fired. Now I write fiction things are the same but different. I write lies in order to reveal a murkier truth beneath them.
But what I don’t do is try to disguise the truth beyond my work. That’s bad. It’s deceptive and dodgy. It’s also very current at the moment. Let’s look at two of the weasel words of the current phoney revolution in the ever-more-bizarre world of ebooks. First…
Legacy publishing
Joe Konrath, who seems to be setting himself up as the L. Ron Hubbard of the self-publishing scene, may well have a good claim to this one, not that it’s original of course. Back in the 1990s when the web was starting to come alive business was buzzing with talk of ‘disintermediation’ and how a new breed of etailer would come along and sweep away the staid ‘legacy corporations’ who then ruled the world of commerce. Remember those great innovative dotcoms Webvan, Pets.com, Kozmo.com. Boo.com…? Well probably not, since they all went bust.
Did the web change retailing? Of course it did, but mainly through consolidation in the shape of a couple of dominant outlier efforts that got in early and commandeered the market. Take a bow Apple for iTunes, the world’s biggest music retailer. Take a bow Amazon who sell, well, pretty much anything you can imagine. The good legacy retailers of the 1990s are still around, refreshed for the digital age, sometimes struggling like most of us, sometimes, like John Lewis in the UK, doing pretty well, thank you.
The web came late to publishing distribution. It didn’t really get started until Smashwords and Kindle Direct Publishing came along. Now we have an astonishing number of people pinning their authorial hopes on self-published titles through these channels. And an awful lot of them seem to follow Konrath’s lead in damning the ‘legacy publishers’, most of whom have rejected the works they’re now putting out themselves.
Let’s look beyond the bluster and examine some numbers.
In May in the UK the Publishers Association reported that all digital formats — ebooks, audio and subscriptions — accounted for just eight per cent of the total invoiced value of book sales in 2011. Yes consumer ebook sales grew by a staggering 366% on the previous year while print sales were down by seven per cent. But… those ebook sales came in at £92 million while the print sales were £1.579 billion.
In the US? The latest figures I can find are these for the first quarter of 2012 from Galleycat.
The US figures are impressive, showing ebooks surpassing hardback sales and closing on paperback. But even in the US combined print sales are still more than double ebook revenues. No one doubts the gaps are closing. But print is still the bigger business and there’s a feeling in some quarters that ebook growth is slowing from exponential to incremental. In money terms they’re still a long away apart. And get this from the UK stats…
41% of revenues earned through export – with East & South Asia and Central & South America, notably Brazil, showing the strongest growth performance
There’s the second clue why ‘legacy publishing’ is a term without meaning. Yes, digital is big in the US and getting bigger in the UK. But in the rest of the world it’s either in its infancy or hasn’t even started. Some of that may be due to slow acceptance of the technology. But at least a part of it is cultural: some countries still prefer paper books for now.
Is this going to change? Yes. Will ebooks sweep the planet and become the dominant international publishing medium over the next few years? Not a chance.
So here’s what ‘legacy publishing’ actually means…
The form of publishing by which most of the world gets its books, and will do for some considerable time to come (however much Joe Konrath shouts)
Indie author
Someone was mulling on Twitter the other day…
Why the animosity between indie and traditional authors? Do indie and traditional MUSICIANS fight, too? Indie and Trad FILMMAKERS? Come on.—
Rob Gregory Browne (@Robert_Browne) August 29, 2012
I get asked this from time to time too. It baffles me. I guess I’m a ‘traditional’ author, in that I predate Kindle Direct Publishing. But I don’t sit around thinking, ‘Damn those self publishers stealing the bread from my mouth.’ Nor does any other traditional author I know. We’re too busy and it would be both pointless and hypocritical, since lots of us, myself included, have self-published backlist ourselves. I even have one produced specifically for Kindle, Writing A Novel With Scrivener and I’m very pleased indeed with the way that’s gone.
But let’s focus on that word ‘indie’. What does it mean? Independent? I’m independent. I write the books I want for the publishers I choose. I was even independent when it came to writing The Killing, in the sense that it was agreed from the start this would be based on the TV series, but I could still change what I want, and I’d keep copyright of the finished book. I can’t think of a single ‘traditional’ author I know who isn’t ‘independent’ in that sense too.
So what’s this term about? Oh yes, I see. It’s about saying the new breed of writers who throw this moniker around are somehow cooler, hipper, more adventurous than the rest of us. And hiding that term ‘self published’ too, of course, since that’s seen as a touch pejorative, not that I understand why.
Does any of this make sense? Not much. As I’ve written here before, one of the worrying aspects of the current ebook scene is the way it is honing in on specific genres, not broadening the range of literature out there. Indie, in terms of cinema and music, means stuff that sits outside the mainstream and tries to push the envelope.
In self publishing, the work that seems to be getting the attention and, yes, the sales is usually derivative, predictable and firmly set in the latest genre to sell. Which currently is soft porn — sorry ‘erotica’, to use one more current euphemism.
Only the other day Konrath was holding up a couple of his latest adoring pinup ‘indie’ authors as exemplars for the rest of us to follow. Here they are…
Alice in Wonderland rewritten as porn. And a porn book about a woman having sex with a rich man written as… porn.
Look. I’ve got nothing against this kind of thing. If people want to write it and others want to read it, fine. But it’s not exactly Sundance or Lollapalooza is it?
‘Indie’ surely means adventurous, different, pushing at boundaries, ignoring commercial constraints to challenge conventions regardless of the financial consequences. Not hacking out unoriginal, derivative me-too copies of an out-of-copyright classic rejigged as soft porn, or trying to cash in on the latest brief I-had-weird-sex-with-a-guy-who-owns-a-Merc mayfly hit to race to the top of the bestseller charts.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with doing either of those things. But please… don’t try and wear a trendy tag round your neck while churning out this stuff. It’s insulting and ridiculous. We all know what you’re after and it’s not writing a great book or trying to extend the reach and richness of storytelling.
Konrath spells it out in a paragraph like this in virtually every one one of his messages to the faithful…
If she wrote 20 ebooks (15 titles and 5 collections) and each one earns only $150 a day, that’s a million dollars a year. That’s just 75 ebook sales and loans a day per title, and I’ve hit that number many times and for extended periods.
I rest my case, m’lud.
12 Responses to “‘Legacy’ and ‘indie’ .. the weasel words of a phoney revolution”
My understanding of the various terms associated with this zany new publishing world…
The term ‘indie,’ when applied to an author, refers to an author published by an independent publishing house. An independent publishing house is a number of things, some only publish digital and are really ‘imprints’ more than ‘houses.’ Either way, an independent publisher tends to embrace the changes in the industry by publishing ebooks at reasonable/competitive prices, encouraging genre-bending and experimentation, and offering their writers the lion’s share of ebook profits. The profit percentages of print books tends to be in line with a traditional publishing house. The independent publishing house handles edits, covers, etc.
A self-published author does everything from editing, marketing, blurb-writing, book design, etc on their own. Or pays to have things done.
The term ‘legacy’ is applied primarily to the ‘Big 6′ (or eight or ten) New York houses. Think Random House. A legacy publisher does not embrace technological changes in the industry. In fact, they tend to fight it by charging the same (or more) for an ebook as a paperback and pushing back the release date of the ebook version of a title until the paperback has been out for as long as a year. The legacy publisher, as I understand it, tends to keep the lion’s share of profits from all book formats.
That’s my understanding from months of reading articles, books, and blogs about the state of the publishing industry. I am not a published author and have no experience dealing with publishers.
That’s quite a prejudiced case you’ve presented, sir. You protest that you are baffled by the animosity between traditionally published authors and indie authors and then you proceed to bash indie authors and to claim we all write porn and only do it for the money. C’mon, David. You can do better than that.
When I was published by Random House, I was not entirely independent. If I wanted to do a book signing at a Barnes & Noble, my corporate had to talk to their corporate and most of the time, the answer was no. I even had CRMs from several stores request me, and I was not allowed to sign in those stores because they did not want to spend their coop money on me. I could not choose the price for my ebooks. And in the end, I could not choose what to write – because they chose not to publish what I chose to write. I think I am considerably more independent as a self-published author, and for the first time I am independent of a day job and able to write full-time. The backlist titles I wrote for them are now selling very well with my choice of cover art, my ability to market them, my chosen prices.
You said, “‘Indie’ surely means adventurous, different, pushing at boundaries, ignoring commercial constraints to challenge conventions regardless of the financial consequences.” And there is plenty of that out there. For example, self-publishing has proven that there is a much larger market for science fiction and fantasy novels than traditional publishing believed existed. Many of the novels on this list http://bit.ly/O8Fxlq are just the adventurous, pushing-at-boundries sort that your post would lead one to believe do not exist out amongst the money grubbing, porn-producing indie writers.
I self-published my last novel which is, as far as I know, the first submarine book written by a woman. It’s a big, 500+ page adventure thriller, and I can’t find any other women authors treading the same ground. Traditional publishing wouldn’t even look at it, but I self-published and have found readers – men and women – want to read this sort of book.
For the first time, authors have the independence to present their work directly to readers and let them decide what they want to buy. It turns out “readers” is a much more diverse group than New York thought. For me, and many other midlist authors who have been treated so poorly by traditional publishing, this is absolutely revolutionary.
Where do I say ‘all indie authors’ write porn?
When you are addressing indie authors and you say, “don’t try and wear a trendy tag round your neck while churning out this stuff. It’s insulting and ridiculous. We all know what you’re after and it’s not writing a great book or trying to extend the reach and richness of storytelling,” you are speaking to indie authors with the plural form of you, and clearly when you say “this stuff” you are referring to the erotica novels you’ve just been discussing and referring to as “porn.”
In your blog, you object to the “weasel words of a phoney revolution.” You didn’t say you were only talking about SOME of the people who claim to be indie. When you are speaking to all who adopt that label, you are speaking to me. I wear that “trendy” tag around my neck, and I will argue that I am after writing the best damn book I can.
Ah – so no answer to the previous question which means, I presume, you accept I didn’t say what you claimed I said. You also have seemed to have missed the part in which I say I’m a self-publisher too.
Great shame no one can discuss anything in this area without this kind of overblown response.
It’s the thing I hate about the e-book debate in general. People are so, so partisan about it that the whole discussion becomes “I like eBooks”, “well I don’t” and that’s the whole conversation.
I thought we were having a reasonable discussion. How did you miss my answer to your question? When you speak to indie writers with the collective “you,” and say we all know what you’re after, I read that you are speaking to all indie writers as the title of your blog suggests. When you write about the “stuff” they write that only seeks money and has no aspirations to great storytelling (which you previously referred to as porn), then you have said all indie writers write porn.
Of course I know you are a self-publisher. I own your excellent self-published book on Scrivener (as well as several of your novels), and I recommend your work to others all the time. I have great respect for you as a writer and intellect. It doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with everything you write. In this blog, I think you dragged out a lot of old dusty entitled thinking, and in getting off on an overblown rant of your own, you dumped all indie authors in Konrath and some erotica writers. I was simply calling you on it.
Case in point….
Christine: why would you address someone in that way and expect a reasoned reply? it’s just rude.
Just picking up on one point here. David, you said “Which currently is soft porn — sorry ‘erotica’, to use one more current euphemism.” I have only read 50 Shades 1 (and only 48% of it) and it certainly doesn’t qualify for the description ‘erotica’. If the copies are at the same level, then neither do they. In some ways I feel applying ‘soft porn’ is not appropriate given the definition of porn and in that vein, ‘mommy porn’ is simply a term of abuse.
That 48% led me to the term ‘smutty love story’ personally.
I stand corrected!
Not meant as a correction actually, but simply my attempt to apply the Trades Description Act worldwide.
Luckily I have no time right now to step up on my soapbox and issue my diatribe on why it’s not erotica.
All reads of these comments should consider themselves very lucky in that respect.
“Indie, in terms of cinema and music, means stuff that sits outside the mainstream and tries to push the envelope.”
Would that it were the same in literature – a few years ago many of us who self-published did so for exactly these reasons. Sadly the high profile successes of a few self-published genre writers have fuelled a hype machine that the media is doing its best to stoke which focuses more and more on how “indie” writers can be more and more like those who are traditionally published, while the wonderful artistic diversity – which is still there – gets lost
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