Neopatronage is not for everybody

In a Substack post, Brian Niemeier accurately describes the way the publishing industry has changed in recent decades. He argues that the way forward now for the writer (and other artists, if one may so term writers) is to seek what he calls ‘Neopatronage’ – neo in the sense that it differs from the sort of patronage bestowed on artists all the way from antiquity until the emergence of commercial publishing.

Neopatronage seeks financial support directly from the audience rather than through the medium of intermediaries such as publishers, bookshops, record labels, etc., all of which tend to extract more money from the audience than the artists themselves. That is all very fine until you consider the fact that most people are unwilling to pay anything at all because they regard what is on the internet as free. Writers in English must also take into account the steep and accelerating decline in literacy in Britain and north America, our two principal markets.

I am not arguing for a return to the humiliating grind of (a) trying to find an agent who will even look at your book and then (b) hoping some august being will actually stoop to publish it. What’s more, in London and probably New York too, publishers now employ ‘sensitivity readers’, typically young women fresh from indoctrination in a university, whose job it is to comb through the text searching for anything liable to offend anyone, anywhere, particularly the pets of the central banks and, below them, the giant corporations who these days run the largest and most powerful publishing companies.

So even if an author gets to first base in the legacy publishing process, he, or these days, more likely, she, will immediately come up against one of these censorettes and her felt-tip pen. This is after, of course, the text has been deemed generally acceptable by the publishing director.

In my case I would last no more than fifteen minutes of sensitivity reading and the business relationship would be over before it had barely started.

Censorship of what is published online is in its infancy but is due to get worse. Much worse. Amazon already bans political books it considers us too delicate to see. It and most other online marketplaces (e.g. Apple Books, Kobo, Smashwords) have strict rules about publishing the worst filth, which I quite understand and indeed approve of. The world is knee-deep in that as it is.

I am afraid the prospects for authors grow grimmer by the year. I foresee a time when new work is distributed as samizdat and the author receives nothing except social invitations – with luck.

In my own circumstances, this does not bother me. There are far more efficient ways to make money than writing; the vast majority of published writers have waged or salaried employment anyway. They write in the evenings or at weekends or whenever they can. The more enterprising ones get hold of a sinecure in the public sector where nobody much cares what they are doing, and write at ‘work’.

My own exposure to mainstream publishing ended in the early nineties, the last book being first published in 1987; my further dealings with HarperCollins related only to subsidiary rights. In fact, after what Hollywood did to that story I gave up writing altogether in disgust and co-founded a business.

But writing is a disease and I could not keep away. By 2000 I had finished another novel. My agent received generally favourable reports from publishers’ readers but nobody was buying. I hadn’t realised that in the years I had been away the landscape had changed.

Like its predecessor, that novel is a thriller: a commercial decision on my part. I hadn’t much enjoyed some sections of the narrative but felt that I needed to capitalise on the success of the previous book. Indeed, I would rather have written something else. When my agent, expressing puzzlement and regret, eventually abandoned her search, I decided to write what I wanted to write.

That book couldn’t find a publisher either. I continued writing anyway, and as I did so it dawned on me that things had changed. I gradually gave up thinking about legacy publishing and was writing merely as a hobby. This gave me complete artistic freedom, which I love.

Then in 2010 or so, Smashwords, Amazon’s KDP and whatnot started up and I found I could make some pocket-money from my efforts. That is where I am today. I can write whatever I want. Writing, for me, has become largely an exercise in self-realisation. It helps with exploring who I am and my place among my fellows. If other people like reading what I turn out, I am of course very pleased, because part of my motive remains to entertain and perhaps inform others. But it is only a part, and if nobody likes my books that is OK too.

I will not seek Neopatronage. It takes too much effort for too little reward.

Besides, I have inherited the unbecoming and groundless pride of the Irish, overcoming which is proving intractably difficult, even with the help of my keyboard.

Bookbinding then and now

 

This is how books were made when the contents were seen as precious and worthy of handing down to succeeding generations. The process is obviously expensive, and is now mostly the domain of restorers and hobbyists rather than publishers.

Until about 1960, sewn binding was the norm for textbooks and those novels falling outside the category of pulp fiction, which was and is issued with ‘perfect binding’, using glue to hold the spine of the book together. Pulp books, typically with paper covers, were regarded as disposable, and if they fell to pieces after a while (which they do, when the glue dries out) nobody would very much care.

A sewn book, especially in hard covers, remains open and can be read hands-free. It has a much longer life than a perfect-bound book; I have handled an original copy of the first volume of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, published in 1590 and still perfectly intact.

In 1935 the founders of Penguin Books decided to adopt perfect binding in order to make books of a better quality affordable. Perfect binding has gradually become more and more widespread, to the detriment of reading, because it is difficult to keep a perfect-bound book open. Various reading-stands and other devices are available, but these are at best a bodge. Perfect binding for a textbook is something of a disaster.

Traditional publishers are in business to make a profit. Perfect binding becomes the norm; typefaces get smaller; the paper is of lower and lower quality; and the books become more expensive. The majority of titles published in paper are failures, financially speaking, so it behoves the publisher to cut corners wherever he can: he depends on a few best-sellers to keep the money rolling in.

One of the reasons I do not issue my novels in paper is that the quality of print-on-demand books is appallingly low. They are produced as cheaply as possible and deliver a horrible reading experience. An ebook is much nicer (and even cheaper), will not fall to pieces, and can be read hands-free. What’s more, the publisher, if he knows his business, can format the content to make it as least as attractive as that of a printed book, the bonus for the reader being that he can alter the typeface, margins and leading to his liking.

If moreover he owns an ereader with a leather cover, all his reading on that device will be of leather-bound books …

A nice new word

Quote of the week, with the bonus of a new word for me!

"Obviously Amazon has a very definitive point of view on what should be done in the publishing business. Those in the publishing world are not totally copacetic with it," Moonves said.

The perfect book-trailer

H/T: No Water River

What Every Creative Person Should Know About Writing for Money

The Famous Writers School was co-founded by Bennett Cerf, who also co-founded Random House, the publishing company. The Wikipedia entry for FWS is here; the exposé by Jessica Mitford is here.

It was fronted by various (at the time) well known names from the world of publishing, such as Rod Serling.

Talent is innate. No one can teach it to you. You can be taught how to use tools and how to operate within the market where the fruits of your talent can be sold. Otherwise, you’re on your own.

I am suspicious of any course purporting to teach “creative writing”. The student’s time and money would be better spent in (a) living life and thereby furnishing his subconscious with the stuff of which stories are made; and (b) reading, reading, and reading some more, thereby furnishing his mind and sensibility with the stuff from which his own technique can be wrought.

A former neighbour of mine once approached me as I was washing my car. She said that a friend of hers had fallen on hard times and needed some quick cash. This friend had had the idea of writing a novel. Did I have any tips; could I recommend any shortcuts?

Another acquaintance, approaching retirement from his job with the Forestry Commission, told me he was thinking of taking up freelance writing and asked me my opinion of the idea. I replied: “If you have any soul left to destroy, writing is a good way to go about it.”

No one with an ounce of sense sets out to write for money. In fact, no one with an ounce of sense sets out to write at all. One writes because one is compelled to do so; because failure to write, to get the words out, results in a malaise that cannot be relieved in any other way.

Writing is a form of addiction. The writer craves the opioids that his own brain generates during composition. The habit often begins early, at school, with praise from a teacher for an essay or poem. The confounded teacher notices a spark of talent in the wretched child and with unthinking words at once sprays butane on the embers and condemns the pupil to a lifetime of addiction.

Of course, the dopamine habit also grips the untalented, as a glance at any slush-pile, paper or electronic, will confirm.

If you write “creatively” at all, the only valid motive is self-realization. You should not expect, and certainly not demand, that other people should read your output, still less pay you for it. If they do either, you’re well ahead of the game – especially if they pay.

The desire for payment will expose you to rejection on an industrial scale. It will compromise your output. You will have to stifle innovation by tailoring your prose to a presumed “market” (i.e. the work already on sale). You will also have to collaborate and accept criticism, not only from editors but reviewers.

But, in the first instance, the desire for payment will leave you vulnerable. The world’s greatest con-artist, “Count” Victor Lustig, once declared that it was impossible to swindle an honest man.

My advice to my neighbour’s friend? “Don’t do it!”

Authorship in the Information Age

I have just ended a two-year experiment. Readers were invited to download six of my novels and send me a fee if they enjoyed any of them. You can see the original proposition here.

The experience bears out much of what I have read about online content. Of more interest, it also got me thinking about the practice of authorship in the Information Age.

Downloads and payments

At least 36,568 ebooks were downloaded from external, authorized sites, and well over 100,000 from my own. Some titles were posted on torrents. Originally the requested payment varied with the title (85p and up), but PayPal took too big a slice of that so in 2009 I increased the rate to a flat £1.50 per book.

The gross income (after PayPal) was £522.28, net £258.38 pre-tax, or about 0.19 pence per download. 144 payments were made. The smallest was 85p; the largest a remarkable £50, which followed £10 from the same donor. Some other people paid more than the requested amount, a few less. A British reader sent me a £10 Amazon gift certificate on finishing The Tide Mill, while some members of the MobileRead Book Club (which made one of the titles its monthly choice) paid even though I gave them a waiver.

By far the greatest number of payments came from the U.S. and Canada, followed by Britain and then the rest of Europe. There was a handful from Australia, and a very generous one from a reader in Singapore. Despite the fact that Chinese visitors were almost as numerous as Americans, no other payment was received from Asia.

I am most grateful to all those who paid, many of whom wrote supportive or even flattering emails, blog comments, or messages in the PayPal dialog; and all of whom gave me great heart and confirmed my belief that there are plenty of thoroughly nice people out there.

Non-payment

Failure to pay can be ascribed to six motives:

1. Didn’t read
2. Didn’t like (at all or enough)
3. Liked but decided not to pay
4. Liked but forgot to pay
5. Liked but had trouble with the site (it was down for a while)
6. Liked but didn’t want to deal with PayPal (I had a couple of messages about this)

Of course, you never know how many downloaded ebooks are even looked at, never mind read. Of those that are read, you don’t know how many are enjoyed. Conversely you don’t know how many are duplicated and sent to friends. It is no use trying to guess how many readers enjoyed the books but didn’t pay. However, given that some people did pay, it is safe to conclude that a number of the others chose option 3.

For an analysis of this behaviour, take a look at a 2008 blog post by Stephen Poole, who conducted a similar experiment. The comments are especially illuminating; there’s no need to rehearse them here.

Attitudes to books

A common theme seems to emerge. Internet content is widely, but not universally, regarded as free: if it isn’t, then it should be “liberated” and shared via torrents. Of more concern to authors, what is printed in books is also widely, but not universally, regarded as free, an attitude fostered by (a) the free-at-point-of-service provision of books during education or by public libraries, (b) the existence of the public domain, and (c) the nature of paper books.

This attitude is consistent with a flourishing culture. It is reinforced early, by (a); (b) provides a vast and growing body of literature out of copyright; and with (c), once you have bought a paper book you own it and can transfer ownership to someone else.

Few readers, I should imagine, are much exercised about copyright. They might know it to be a limited contract society makes with creators in order to encourage creation, and that depriving an author of a royalty should piously be deplored. Into the mix, however, despite the perennial background bleating of authors, goes also a vague notion that every writer is a millionaire.

Authors and their agents and publishers depend on copyright for their living. We hear a lot these days about digital duplication of copyright works: this I believe is one of the main impacts on authorship, since readers appear reluctant to reward the producers of freely distributed books. There are other impacts too, nearly all related to computers.

A buyers’ market

The number of people who can write is dwarfed by the number who think they can but can’t. Press stories of huge advances paid to unknowns heap the slush piles even higher. The mountain of manuscripts is so big that few mainstream publishers will even look at an unsolicited submission: everything now has to go through agents.

The attitude of publishers to authors is a product of this buyers’ market, and has probably got worse in recent years. I won’t detail the Kafkaesque tribulations of my own dealings with publishers in the twenty years to 1997, but let me say that London publishing at that period was regarded as a socially desirable occupation. Perhaps it still is. Many staff were recruited by class and connection rather than ability. If an author’s sales shot into the stratosphere he was treated with shameless sycophancy; otherwise he was never allowed to forget his place.

I cannot imagine that some of this attitude doesn’t seep down to readers. When a reader enters a bookshop or library he is reminded of just how many books are begging to be noticed. The Romans had a proverb: quae rara, cara – what is scarce is valued – and the converse surely holds true.

The effect of computers

Word processors have made the physical composition of text much easier than it was in 1971, when I started out. The slush-pile is becoming not just a mountain, but a lofty and majestic range. As ebook displays and the internet loosen the publishers’ stranglehold on the means of production and distribution, so is a lot of that slush-pile finding its way onto the Web.

The availability of professional works is increasing too, as authors and publishers convert their backlists into ebooks: and, thanks to Project Gutenberg, more and more public domain material is coming online. And then there is Google Books.

All this is bad news for aspiring writers, but both good and bad for readers. Good because they have more choice and prices will tumble; bad because it will be harder and more time-consuming to find new books of quality. Not only will these be outnumbered by rubbish, but I predict that the means whereby they arise – the craft of authorship itself – will become a niche activity.

A dying craft

In his essay, Why I Write, George Orwell says:

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in – at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. – Using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.

Writers, then, are born with sundry traits and defects which come together in a pathological urge to tell stories. This is even true of non-fiction, but since my experiment involved fiction I will concentrate on that type of writing here.

Inventing a story is a creative act, needing talent. The storyteller’s rhythm and taste will develop as he grows, informing and refining his talent, but if he lacks the techniques to tell his stories effectively he will never fulfil his potential. The craft of fiction requires thousands of hours of preparation based in extensive reading, besides the acquisition of a large writing vocabulary and expertise in grammar, usage, and the structure and exposition of plots. A skilled editor needs only a few hundred words to tell if a writer knows his stuff.

If would-be writers are unable to acquire these tools of the trade, the standard of work must plainly fall. A writer needs time to learn and experiment, to find his voice, and he needs some sort of encouragement to sustain his efforts. For many of us time is in ever shorter supply. As for encouragement, that can be as nugatory as the hope of success. In the past, new writing had far less competition. Recognition of talent was more likely. The printed word was more precious than a fleeting collection of pixels on a screen, and in order to produce a script for submission you had to type the thing yourself – or pay plenty to have it done.

Hyperlinked reading

There could be even worse in store. I read the other day that the internet is supposed to be altering the way young people think.

Documentary presenter and social psychologist Dr Aleks Krotoski said: “It seems pretty clear that, for good or ill, the younger generation is being remoulded by the web. Facebook’s feedback loops are revolutionising how they relate. There is empirical evidence now that information overload and associative thinking may be reshaping how they think.” ...

Dr David Runciman, political scientist at Cambridge University, added: “What I notice about students from the first day they arrive at university is that they ask nervously, ‘What do we have to read?’ When they are told the first thing they have to read is a book, they all now groan, which they didn’t use to do five or ten years ago. You say, ‘Why are you groaning?’ and they say, ‘It’s a book. How long is it?’”

People brought up on hyperlinks will not be receptive to the linear experience of a novel or short story. Still less will many of them wish to tell tales in that way or have the patience to learn the craft.

The word according to Jobs

Steve Jobs was vilified for his observations on the Kindle, “which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading”. Unfortunately, he has been right about such things more often than he has been wrong, and anyone who thinks that iBooks will amount to anything but a minor aspect of the iPad is mistaken.

It’s all a bit glum if you love books.

As long as there are old fogeys like me around, there will be a market for them, but (if  Mr Jobs and Dr Krotoski are right) as we die off the audience will become smaller and smaller, with ever less incentive for storytellers to choose linear writing as a medium. Linear fiction will never die out, but will become a backwater served by authors who have independent means and write purely to be read.

At the age of eleven, 20% of British children are functionally illiterate. I’ll say nothing more about educational trends, both here and in the United States, except that judgment on these is probably implicit in Jobs’s remarks.

Back to the experiment

The willingness of MobileRead Book Club members to pay, even though they were not obliged to, is especially interesting. As member of that forum myself, I had engaged in the discussion and the others knew they were dealing with a real person.

The number of downloaders who enjoyed the books and did not pay could be smaller than I suppose. The site at first allowed simultaneous download of all six books, two clicks away from the home page. Many visitors simply downloaded the files and took a glance, if that, at the rest of the site. They did not engage with me at all: they just wanted the “free books”. Those who downloaded from other sites had even less of a connection. How many copies were read all the way through, with the attention and pleasure that establish a relationship with an author?

When I first made my offer I tried to make my site as informative and engaging as possible. My subsequent disappointment at the low rate of return did not take into account the typical behaviour of people – of all primates, indeed, perhaps even all animals – in situations where they are anonymous and have no relationship with the provider. Add in our conditioning to the value of books (especially those we “borrow”); add in also the amount of reading material freely available on the net, and I think I did quite well to gross £500.

I am still offering my ebooks, but this time through Smashwords. Five are for sale; one is offered free, as a loss-leader, and you are very welcome to grab a copy. You needn’t read it, buy the others, or engage with me if you don’t want to. Keep it somewhere safe, though: fifty years from now it may turn out to be a curious antique.