Brian Niemeier is more than a little amused by John Scalzi cracking under the combined pressure of his big, beautiful book contract and the God-Emperor’s presidency:
Scalzi’s “the dog ate my homework” post is yet another indication that #1-selling indie author Nick Cole is about to be vindicated once more. To quote Nick:
Okay. As I’ve talked about before this before… this is what happens next:
- Big Pub reduces its Author List down to servicing Cadillac Clients. Many authors who think they’re something are about to be shown the door in the form of un-returned emails, unanswered calls, and not talk of future projects. Already happening.
- Amazon Opens Book Stores.
- Trad Pub Authors attempt to seamlessly bring themselves, and their mojo, into Amazon and fail badly because they’re not used to the volume of work. Marketing, Formatting, Editing, Social Media, and most importantly now: a tight release schedule of every 30-90 days. Also Amazon picks the winners and its more interested in New Talent.
A cataclysmic paradigm shift is underway that will soon overturn the publishing landscape as we know it. Indie has been overtaking tradpub for years, and now the Big Five New York publishers’ sole advantage–their paper distribution monopoly–is about to collapse.
When B&N goes, it will take the tradpub midlist with it. You’ll know the old era is over when current tradpub authors start trying to go indie. But as Nick forecasts and Scalzi confirms, former tradpub darlings are woefully unprepared to handle the increased workload.
And that’s just on the writing front. Factor in the additional responsibilities of being your own publisher and marketing department, and consider how a guy who can’t finish a novel in ten months with the backing of sci-fi’s biggest publisher will fare in the new order.
Here’s the truth: Scalzi’s ongoing nosedive has nothing to do with who’s president or the current weather. It has everything to do with the fact that Patrick Nielsen Hayden handed him a golden ticket. Scalzi has never had to work in this business without Tor propping up his career. Now he’s losing favor to N.K. Jemisin, his last book underperformed, and he’s falling behind on his contract–all in the looming shadow of B&N’s failure.
I prefer to characterize my friend Nick Cole as a bestselling Castalia House author, but otherwise, Brian has described the situation rather well.
I’m sure you will understand that I found this comment to be particularly entertaining.
“The worst part of all this is that Vox called it when he was given the deal in the first place. And Scalzi, in his arrogance, set about to prove him right.”
The thing is, I wasn’t making the prediction out of any malice or SJW-style magical thinking. It was entirely obvious to me that an author whose primary skill was marketing himself to editors was not going to be successful once they stopped devoting excessive resources to propping him up and maintaining a false narrative about his skill and his success. Scalzi is, and has always been, a mediocre mid-list author with a penchant for juvenile vulgarity. If he submitted a manuscript to us under a different name, there is virtually no chance we would accept it for publication.
That being said, John Scalzi is very highly skilled and he is extraordinarily successful, just not at what he wants you to believe he is. The challenge facing him is that while those particular skills were integral to his success in a traditional publishing model that required currying favor with SJW editors and the pseudo-media of SF fandom, they are considerably less useful in the brave new world of publishing today.