Twenty-six-year-old self-publishing sensation Amanda Hocking made headlines earlier this year when it was revealed that the then-unsigned author (she now has a contract with St. Martin’s Press) had managed to sell more than a million copies of her paranormal novels — once rejected by publishers — as e-books.
Now another self-published author reached a significant milestone: John Locke — not the 17th-century philosopher, but the thoroughly 21st-century thriller-writer — sold his millionth e-book on Amazon.
Locke sells most of his works for 99 cents each (although his “How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!” costs $4.99), and he can now boast membership in the same (very small) authors’ circle as Stieg Larsson and James Patterson — two more of the nine individuals who have sold more than a million Kindle volumes.
The product description for Locke’s “How I Sold 1 Million eBooks” certainly doesn’t sell the author short. Indeed, after a list of Locke’s accomplishments (“every seven seconds … a John Locke novel is downloaded somewhere in the world”) comes the proud statement: “All this was achieved PART TIME, without an agent, publicist, and at virtually no marketing expense!”
On the one hand, it’s very hard to argue with the numbers; it’s clear that, in some ways, both Locke and his readers have benefitted from the author’s lack of publishing or marketing costs. Another thriller writer, Barry Eisler, very publicly turned down a six-figure contract this March to light out into the world of e-books on his own — partly because the move allowed him to cut out an expensive middleman. (“I’m confident I can do better financially over the long term on my own,” he told The Daily Beast at the time.) And in addition to the financial benefits of self-publishing, Eisler and Locke both clearly relish the freedom they gain by working on their own: “I like the idea of being able to walk away from writing if it stops being fun,” Locke has told the AP.
On the other hand, publishers, editors and agents do not exist solely to sap money from writers; they also work to improve the manuscripts they receive. An interesting reaction to the self-publishing phenomenon in this vein comes from the English novelist Harriet Evans, who wrote the following in the Guardian last week, partly as a response to the online conversation between Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath in which Eisler initially revealed his intention to opt for self-publication:
[It's] noteworthy that not once in [Eisler and Konrath's] entire discussion does either of them mention who’s going to a) structurally edit or b) copyedit their books if they’re published online, except fleetingly as an outsourced resource they can pay for. And this is representative of a larger view across the spectrum of online publishing where the author, not a publisher, controls the process. That’s fine by me – as long as you’re not going for posterity or longevity, because though I am an avid consumer of all kinds of writing on the web, I firmly believe there’s a big difference between a book published online by the author and one prepared for publication by a publisher, and it goes to the very heart of what books and literature mean to us. …
Who knows whether Gone With the Wind would have been as successful had it been called, as it originally was, Pansy, after its eponymous heroine, Pansy O’Hara, before Margaret Mitchell’s editor at Macmillan persuaded her to change the name to Scarlett?
In light of Evans’s words, it’s more than worth revisiting the wonderful blog post Amanda Hocking wrote this March, when news of her self-publishing success began rocketing her to international attention. Here’s an excerpt:
Traditional publishing and indie publishing aren’t all that different, and I don’t think people realize that. Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren’t. It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it’s harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house.
I don’t think people really grasp how much work I do. I think there is this very big misconception that I was like, “Hey, paranormal is pretty hot right now,” and then I spent a weekend smashing out some words, threw it up online, and woke up the next day with a million dollars in my bank account.
This is literally years of work you’re seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. …
There is so much stress in doing it all yourself. The editing is never good enough. And finding an editor isn’t as easy everyone thinks. People thinking an editor is just having someone read through it a few times, checking for basic grammar and spelling, and while that is part of it, it’s also much larger than that. … Self-publishing is great, but it’s not easy.
The enhanced e-book — a digital text that comes garnished with multimedia material — is one of those ideas that sound terrific in theory but are rarely satisfying in execution. Economics is largely to blame: Video, audio and animated content can be expensive to produce at a time when many readers consider $15 an outrageous amount to pay for any e-book, no matter what bells and whistles come with it. As a result, a publisher has to charge less than the price of a hardcover for a book that costs more to create. That’s no incentive to devote limited resources to developing new kinds of digital books.
Video clips, the most common add-on, can obviously add value to cookbooks or to more substantive nonfiction, such as Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” or Sebastian Junger’s “War” — enhanced, respectively, with CBS news reports and clips from “Restrepo,” the companion film Junger made with the late documentarian Tim Hetherington. Literature, however, is another matter. Most of the stuff appended to the digital versions of new novels, for example, consists of author interviews and background material, most of which can already be easily found online in one form or another. That’s especially true if the author has been dutifully following the industry-wide directive to maintain a website, produce a book trailer, blog, engage with fans via social media and so on.
Given all these stumbling blocks, a $14 version of a famously enigmatic early 20th-century poem written by a decidedly unsexy dead guy — and in the public domain, no less! — would hardly seem the sort of thing to become a hit in the iTunes app store. Nevertheless, that’s just what “The Waste Land” has done. Created by Touch Press (the same company that made the benchmark apps “The Elements” and “Solar System”) and the British poetry publisher Faber and Faber, “The Waste Land” offers one of the best examples yet of how to make a successful literary app, often by contravening conventional wisdom.
First, “The Waste Land” is difficult; even T.S. Eliot acknowledged this in 1922, when he decided to publish notes along with the poem. Touch Press’ version comes with even more notes (by B.C. Southam), illuminating the complex web of literary allusions in those immortal 434 lines. The usual titles at the top of e-book bestseller lists don’t call for this sort of exegesis. There’s not much call to dig deeper unless the book in question has some depth. I don’t really need anyone to help me read a Stieg Larsson thriller, and I don’t plan to be ruminating on it much once I’m done.
“The Waste Land” is also old. Which is to say, it has stood the test of time and readers can feel fairly confident that the effort they put into comprehending it will be rewarded. There are undoubtedly adventurous writers exploring the possibilities of digital texts at this very moment, but they suffer a disadvantage shared by any contemporary experimentalist: Most readers don’t trust them not to waste their time. Apart from a valiant few, the majority would rather wait while someone else sifts through the dross.
Finally, “The Waste Land” is familiar. Publishers may tell themselves that students will buy the app because of its filmed performance by the great Irish actress Fiona Shaw and its audio recordings by Alec Guinness, Viggo Mortensen and the poet himself — not to mention video commentaries by such luminaries as Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. I don’t think so, not when you can get a used paperback copy for a buck or just download the thing for free off the Internet.
Instead, the people willing to shell out a premium for “The Waste Land” app are more likely to be older, the sort who feel they could have gotten a lot more out of the poem in college if they’d only been a little less distracted by the temptations that assail freshman English majors. Eliot’s poem is a bit daunting, but undeniably powerful, I told myself when a group of friends arranged a staged reading several years ago. I wish I knew it better, now that I’m more able to grasp its nuances. A new edition often provides the occasion for such revisits, which is one reason why publishers keep commissioning new translations of “Inferno” and “Madame Bovary.”
It sure doesn’t hurt that the app is so beautifully mounted. Shaw, who first toured her popular theatrical reading of the poem in the late ’90s, recites Eliot’s lines in a faded, crumbly Georgian interior that perfectly captures the prevailing tone of idle desiccation. The serenely austere page design conveys the flip side of the poem’s desert imagery, a feeling that in this place where everything extraneous has been burnt away, some titanic revelation is imminent.
You can watch Shaw read for a while, then switch back to the text to check a reference or translation, then go on reading the lines to the accompaniment of Ted Hughes’ very different vocal interpretation; the app keeps track of your place as you go. Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound played a crucial role in shaping “The Waste Land”; and the inclusion of the original manuscript with Pound’s handwritten edits offers a glimpse of that process. These various ways of approaching the text are enticements to the multiple readings that make a full appreciation of the poem possible.
Spending a day poring over “The Waste Land” app made me look at my old Norton critical editions with a new gleam in my eye. Instead of leafing through tissue-paper-thin pages of “Paradise Lost,” squinting at the tiny footnotes, it would be so pleasant to scroll through Milton’s epic (maybe with Gustave Dore’s engravings?), tapping on the lines that cry out for elucidation while listening to a professional narrator vault the poet’s enjambments far better than I ever could myself. How about “The Canterbury Tales,” with an audio track in Middle English to juxtapose against a modern English translation? I would indeed pay for these, and the enthusiastic reception for “The Waste Land” app suggests that I am not alone.
Further reading:
“The Waste Land” app in the iTunes app store
Touch Press page for “The Waste Land” with video demonstration
Why do women hate technology so much? This is the question never posed by the New York Times article today on the upswing in sales from the new Barnes & Noble Nook Color. Which, by the way, is turning out to be the “very promising younger daughter” to “the favorite son of the magazine business,” the iPad. According to a study quoted in the piece, the reason for the Nook’s popularity among women is the reader’s resemblance to static literature rather than interactive technology. Jeremy Peters reports:
“So what about the small fortune that publishers have poured into developing tablet editions that dazzle the senses with sleekly produced animation, live video and audio? They’re fine for the men, but a lot of women think there is nothing wrong with plain old words and pictures. “
I’d be offended if the subtext wasn’t that women actually just want to read, dammit, without checking Twitter or Facebook every five minutes.
Luckily the Nook Color has hit upon a solution: take away all the non-book features of an e-reader and market single-stand issues of magazines to women for downloading. This makes it much more of a “traditional” reading experience, since the Nook Color just has magazines take PDFs of their pages and sell them through their machines. The publishing houses are happy because they already have good standing with Barnes & Noble (as opposed to Apple’s iPad, which has a more tenuous and complicated relationship to publications), the magazines are happy because they are seeing sales growth, and women are happy because they are paying less per issue for their favorite titles (after the initial fee of buying the Nook).
So why even bother with a tech-heavy iPad? Because dudes like it, that’s why. Says Peters, “Some women, at least, seem to prefer their electronic reading devices to be simpler, something they can read on. Tablets with Rock Band, GT Racing and high-res cameras? That’s guy stuff.”
And, in fact, the Nook Color’s apps are more focused on learning tools, kids’ games and day planners than on FourSquare or Twitter. Though Barnes & Noble’s reader does offer Angry Birds, for “when you’re ready to unwind and take a reading break.”
Tyler Cowen, the prolific, articulate, libertarian-leaning economist who co-authors the hugely influential blog Marginal Revolution, asks how the “true economist” should react to the news that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and potential French presidential candidate, has been arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a maid in a New York hotel.
After all, DSK had a very strong incentive not to commit the crime, including his desire to run for further office in France, not to mention his high IMF salary and strong network of international connections. So much to lose.
Should the “real economist” conclude that DSK is less likely to be guilty than others will think? …. How many economists seriously use the concept of incentives — more than non-economists do — to understand everyday events? Is the notion that incentives predict individual behavior actually so central to economics? Should it be?
Cowen acknowledges that he “always wonders” about questions like these when he contemplates news accounts of “shocking” crimes. That’s no surprise: Cowen wrote an entire book about incentives and personal behavior, “Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.” (I was particularly taken with the section in which he evaluates the incentives involved in whether men should put the toilet seat down after urinating.)
Presumably, the fact that Strauss-Kahn is himself an economist makes his disregard for powerful incentives even more stupefying to a fellow dismal scientist. But for non-economists the notion that people do irrational things is utterly un-shocking and the premise that because Strauss-Kahn had “so much to lose” he is less likely to be guilty of the crime he is accused of is ridiculous. In this formulation “real” economists are better defined as economists who just don’t understand actual human nature. Without prejudging Strauss-Kahn, we know that powerful men do stupid, self-destructive things for sexual reasons every single day. If we’re looking for a science-based explanation, it probably has more to do with evolutionarily induced alpha-male reproductive mandates than any rational weighing of pros and cons.
But one suspects that for economists who are wedded to the idea that incentives are the arbiter of human destiny, being forced to contemplate the evidence that people can act at cross-purposes to their own interests is akin to staring into the abyss. What if this wasn’t just true on an individual level — what if people acted irrationally en masse? Think about the potential disasters we could face — voters might do something nutty like electing legislators who simultaneously pass deficit-busting budgets while refusing to allow the government to pay the ensuing bills!
I jest. I think the reasonable economist, if not the “real economist,” would be on safe ground to argue that incentives matter in the aggregate, but become less and less useful as you approach the individual level. In other words, it’s probably safe to generalize that most men appropriately appreciate the negative consequences of getting arrested for rape. (Or, to put it in less economic terms, most men aren’t pathological monsters.) But while Tyler Cowen may lean toward a worldview that evaluates every human action in terms of incentives more than the average economist, I think his reaction to this particular news event is indicative of the cognitive dissonance that defines economics as a social “science.” Economists often try to predict how people will behave as economic actors, and they’ll use an awful lot of math to try to get at the heart of it. But people are messy. We often act against their own interests, and we cannot, individually, be reduced to equations. We might be able to map our own genome and trace our evolutionary tree, but dang it, understanding why we run up our credit card debt or commit shocking crimes or want our Medicare and Social Security benefits to remain intact but keep electing politicians who promise to cut our taxes just doesn’t compute.
The truly real economist is the one who gets that.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of books are put out by independent presses that let you pay to publish your own story. And with the popularity of the iPad and Kindle, these would-be authors can bypass the cost of printing entirely, making your writing-to-publishing process a one-step deal. That may have been one step too few for British author Jacqueline Howett, whose book went out into the world before it was copyedited — and full of typos.
“The Greek Seaman” is the third of Howett’s self-published, straight-to-Kindle affairs, and it probably would not have drawn much attention had it not been for a blog called Big Al’s Books and Pals. On March 16, Big Al reviewed “Seaman” and gave it the most positive review the writer could muster:
“If you read ‘The Greek Seaman’ from the start until you click next page for the last time I think you’ll find the story compelling and interesting. The culture shock felt by the newlywed bride, Katy, who finds herself far from her native England, living on a cargo ship with her seaman husband Don is a good story in itself …
However, odds of making that final click are slim. One reason is the spelling and grammar errors, which come so quickly that, especially in the first several chapters, it’s difficult to get into the book without being jarred back to reality as you attempt unraveling what the author meant. At times, you’ll be engrossed in the story when you’ll run across a flowery description of the emotions Katy is feeling about her situation or her husband. These are numerous and sometimes very good. Chances are one of these sections originally pulled you so deeply into Katy’s world. Then you’ll run into one that doesn’t work and get derailed again. Reading shouldn’t be that hard.”
It’s not the worst review in the world: Big Al’s biggest problem with the story could be fixed with a good editor. (Think of how many novels need so much more than that to be engrossing.) The story could have just ended there, and if Jacqueline had stumbled across the review and taken those words to heart, maybe it could have. Instead, the book’s author went on to the comment thread for the post and did this:
This led to a 400-comment flame war that eventually spilled over to Jacqueline’s Amazon page. Now, 47 customer reviews later, “The Greek Seaman” has a total rating of one and a half stars. Commenters have taken to calling the book “vile,” “trash” and “not even a real book.” It’s doubtful any of these reviewers would have even found “Seaman” had it not been for the author’s public blow-up on Big Al’s blog.
Which makes me wonder if there isn’t some method to all of Jacqueline’s madness. After all, she got a bunch of people who would never have checked out her book to actually go ahead and buy a copy, just so they could crap all over it. (“Not only have I wasted my money, but I’ve wasted my time,” reads a typical comment.) Who really has the last laugh in that situation: the guys who spent $5 to write an angry Amazon review, or the author who took the money from a group of people who have nothing better to do all day than get into fights about grammar on the Internet?
A federal judge in New York City has rejected a deal between Google Inc. and lawyers for authors and publishers to let the gigantic search engine make money presiding over the world’s largest digital library.
U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin said the creation of a universal library would benefit many but would “simply go too far.”
He said the settlement of a class-action lawsuit that the company reached with U.S. authors and publishers would “grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners.”
Chin said the deal gives Google “a significant advantage over competitors.”
He said it would be “rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.”
Bestselling e-book author John Locke. 
A screenshot from "The Wasteland" 
The Nook Color: first e-reader actually aimed at reading. 
FILE - In this April 15, 2011, file photo International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn attends the IMF/World Bank spring meetings in Washington. Strauss-Kahn, 62, seen as the strongest potential challenger to French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 presidential elections, was pulled off a plane bound for Paris at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport Saturday May 14, 2011, and subsequently arrested in connection with the violent sexual assault of a New York hotel maid. Political rivals expressed shock at his arrest. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)(Credit: AP) 
The cover of the "The Greek Seaman" 
