Tag: writing

More fun with fake reviews

Dave O’Neill is just tired of all those “sorcerer in a monastery discussing theology” books that so permeate SF/F today:

Overwritten and felt derivative
To be fair, I was interested because of the Hugo nomination and was
curious about the general worlds involved. I made it about 5% into this
on my Kindle before grinding to a halt. Nothing was all that
interesting and didn’t drive me to read more. If you’re looking for
something to read while waiting for more George RR Martin, keep looking
would be my advice really.

I suggest that if you’re looking for something to read while waiting for more George RR Martin, perhaps it would make more sense to try the 854-page A THRONE OF BONES rather than a Hugo-nominated novelette. Good or bad, it’s just not going to take long, not even if you move your lips when you read. What I find amusing about all these hit reviews is that they know they need a few descriptors to justify the one-star rating, but they are seldom smart enough to choose any that actually sound relevant.

So far we’ve seen “incoherent and unconvincing non-story” as well as “adolescent theology”. And now “derivative”. Derivative of what? The Name of the Rose? A Canticle for Leibowitz? Monk literature isn’t what one would call a massive subgenre. What’s next, complaints about how lame the sex scenes are?

You can read better fake fake reviews right here on this blog. Consider Kyle’s: “Why can’t these critics at least be competent enough to complain about
this story in a manner that, while not necessarily hitting the mark, at
least lands in the same galaxy as the dartboard? If I was going to
criticize this (excellent) story then I’d whine about how it was maudlin
and sentimental, a fantasy Thomas Kincade painting, exposing the evil
crimethink purveyor Vox Day as actually being a sentimental wimp hiding
beneath his grandiose bravado projected on the blog.”

Thoughts on the Hugo nomination

  1. SF fandom has no grasp of how small it is. The repeated accusations of cheating by purchasing multiple memberships and ballot-stuffing demonstrate that the accusers haven’t even bothered to look at the Feedburner icon or click on the Sitemeter icon here. Last year it took only 38 votes to make it onto the Best Novelette ballot; the top vote-getting nominee had all of 89 votes. Meanwhile, the vast quantity of upset and offended goodthinkers visiting here via do-not-link to gawk at the evidence of my being “the antithesis of all that is good and decent” led to a gargantuan 6.9 percent increase in traffic here, which is to say, 758 additional Sitemeter visits out of nearly 12,000.
  2. It’s a lot harder to win a Hugo than to get nominated. To win, one needs about 400 votes under normal circumstances. But since the votes are ranked in order of preference and there is an active campaign to vote No Award above “Opera Vita Aeterna”, I’d need more than that. Translation: thanks very much for all the expressions of support, but don’t buy a membership to vote for me unless you’re also planning to get involved on the nomination end next year. If you want to express your support, I’d much rather you spend that money on Castalia House books by John, Tom, and Rolf. For $40 you can buy most of our English catalog… some of it directly from the store we are opening later today.
  3. Win or lose the awards, Sad Puppies has served its purpose. The purpose of Sad Puppies, as Larry repeatedly explained, was three-fold. First, to test if the award process was fraudulent or not. To the credit of the LonCon people, we have learned it was not. Second, to prove that the awards are a mere popularity contest, contra the insistence of those who have repeatedly asserted they are evidence of literary quality and the intrinsic superiority of the nominated works. We have shown that it is. And third, to prove that the SF/F Right is more popular in the genre than the gatekeepers have insisted. We have demonstrated that to be the case.
  4. People hate me a lot more than they hate Larry Correia. This is very troubling to the International Lord of Hate. I suspected as much, but I thought the ratio would be more like 65/35 than 90/10. That being said, I have little doubt that Larry will manage to level out that ratio somewhat by this time next year.
  5. SF progressives believe they are qualified to police race and ethnicity. Many of them can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that I am a Person of Color by every definition. It’s amusing that they think my labeling a lying African-American woman a “half-savage” proves my racism, but them calling a pair of Hispanic men all sorts of names, including “savage” and “uncivilized”, somehow proves they are not racist. 
  6. If they are unhappy now, they are really going to be unhappy in the future. I paid no attention to the nominations last year. The Dread Ilk barely paid any attention to the nominations this year. As we’ve previously seen to be the case, the progressives really don’t understand that their frantic attempts to belittle and disqualify us only makes us stronger, harder, and more numerous.
  7. Many Hugo voters have declared they will not read the novelette and it
    is already apparent that some of those who read “Opera Vita Aeterna”
    will not do so honestly. For example, one “reviewer” wrote: “I skip a little tedious adolescent Theology talk in Act Two, Plus a
    Silly Epilogue that I think VD thinks is Dramatic…. His point (I think) is that God Is Real. And So R Demons.
    The plot is pointless. The writing is dull and bad.”      But anyone
    who has read the story knows that the plot is far from pointless. And
    anyone who is sufficiently educated will recognize that the theology is
    not “adolescent”, it is paraphrased Thomas Aquinas from the Summa Theologica.
  8. I appreciate the nomination. It’s nice to receive the recognition and it is certainly useful in much the same way as my Mensa membership. But, having recently edited two books by a much superior writer who should, by any reasonable standard, already have several Hugo wins under his belt, it’s hard to view the process as anything but seriously flawed.
  9. The Wheel of Time is dreadful. It has always been dreadful, in sum and in part. I find it mildly amazing that people are more offended about my novelette being nominated than that gigantic insult to literature.
  10. The title of the novelette is no more Latin than “Vox Popoli”. It’s a blend of Italian and Latin.
  11. A man is defined by his enemies as well as by his friends. I feel extraordinarily fortunate indeed to have had this opportunity to observe the quality of both. It is not at all a bad thing to be personally disliked and viewed as “a contemptible piece of shit” by the likes of Mr. Scalzi and company. It is the approval of the wormtongues that a man should fear, not their hatred.

Hugo Awards: Best Novelette

Nominations for the 2014 Hugo Awards:

Best Novelette:

“Opera Vita Aeterna” by Vox Day
“The Exchange Officers” by Brad Torgersen
“The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal
“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang
“The Waiting Stars” by Aliette de Bodard

Congratulations to Larry Correia, who was nominated for Warbound, and to Brad Torgersen, who was not only nominated for “The Exchange Officers”, but also for “The Chaplain’s Legacy”. And, of course, to Toni Weisskopf.

The Baen Brigade fires back

Another Baen author responds to John Scalzi’s attack on Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf:

Recently, Toni Weisskopf the publisher at Baen Books wrote a guest post at Sarah A. Hoyt’s blog, a re-post of an essay she posted on Baen’s Bar, a forum that requires registration so Sarah’s repost is the public link. 

This post has had a lot of responses ranging from acclaim to hate. That means that in some sense, it’s important.  IMHO, the most interesting response was by John Scalzi in his blog. It’s that post I want to try to comment on.  I choose to do it here rather than in the comments there because there’s a zillion comments on it already, and I’m writing to my friends, not his readers.

Scalzi summarizes Toni’s post as follows:

 “Once upon a time all the fractious lands of science fiction fandom were joined together, and worshiped at the altar of Heinlein. But in these fallen times, lo do many refuse to worship Heinlein, preferring instead their false idols and evil ways.”

Let me make myself perfectly clear. Of all the styles of argument that you can engage in, this sort of straw man argument pisses me off.  It offends me. It makes me want to stand up and scream. The problem is, John’s failed both at the art of summary and at intellectual honesty.  He’s set up a target that he claims is Toni’s work, and then shoots at it, but if you’re going to try to tear apart a writer’s work, it’s important to actually tear apart what they wrote.  John didn’t do that.  He exclusively comments, at length on his summary, not on what Toni wrote, never citing her words or thoughts. This is unjust and unfair.

This is all very well and good, but I think Mr. Boatright is forgetting something VERY important. You see, Mr. Scalzi possesses a BACHELOR’S DEGREE in PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE from THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. You can’t front on that! In the meantime, another Baen author, Brad Torgersen, explains why he went with Baen instead of certain other publishers who have been in the news of late for not bothering to talk to their authors for periods exceeding one year and whose senior editors are chiefly known for sexually harassing women or describing themselves as racists on LiveJournal.

One of the things I found most unsettling about the novel publishing landscape were the numerous first-person accounts I was getting, from authors not too much further down the tracks from myself, about how it was a feast or famine business. You either hit home runs immediately, or you got dumped. It didn’t seem to matter who you published with, if you couldn’t show a substantial profit for the publisher, and do it very quickly, you were done. Likewise, if you were on the midlist and you weren’t showing bottom-line numbers indicating you were trending towards bestseller status, you were done. And not always explicitly either. Often people knew they were dumped simply because responsiveness from editors dropped to little or nothing, and contracts which had been previously promised, never showed up. There was no door being slammed, rather the dumping was done quietly. Sort of like having your utilities turned off at the street.

There was one publisher, however, who was getting consistently good marks: Baen. Authors — even new authors — were reporting that this publisher didn’t expect immediate grand slams. Instead, this publisher would work with new authors over time to grow and develop an audience. Not having landslide sales your first time out of the gate was not going to ruin you. Likewise, this publisher had a very respectable and healthy midlist, while also having very good brand label loyalty among readers. The latter being rare in an era when almost all readers are either loyal to a specific author, or loyal to a specific series and/or franchise. Thus it would be easier (for me as a new guy) to develop an audience, and I wouldn’t necessarily be doomed if I wasn’t cracking the top ten on the New York Times list with each subsequent book. There was the promise of breathing room!

I certainly hope that in the future Castalia’s authors will have similar cause to speak so well of us. I consider Baen to be a model for success in the new era of publishing. And, do you know, I’m beginning to suspect that the Baen Brigade is not fooled by Mr. Scalzi’s patented two-step where first he punches someone in the mouth, then steps back, smiles, and pretends to be best friends with them. He’s just joshing with his very good pal Miss Weisskopf, just like he and good buddy John Ringo were only kidding around with each other about his Participation Hugo.

Sorry, Johnny, but you picked your side and everyone knows it. Now everyone can see the very angry little lefty underneath the clown makeup.

UPDATE: Larry Correia piles on, which if you know anything about Larry, is saying something:

Basically, I love my publishing house. I know a lot of other writers, and I know somebody with just about
every publishing house out there. Hang out with a bunch of writers long
enough and you’ll get to hear them gripe about their publishers and
their editors. And if they’re not a star or a golden boy with their
publisher, then you’ll really get to hear them bitch and vent.  After
five years of this stuff I’ve heard all sorts of horror stories, yet I’m
unable to commiserate with them because luckily for me, my editors
don’t suck, and I haven’t ever felt like my publisher is trying to screw
me over.

Editing complaints are the best. I don’t know how many times I’ve
heard stories, especially from the mid listers at one of the big houses
about how they’ve turned in a book and waited 6 months, 9 months, or a
YEAR to get any editorial feedback. Hell, at that point I’ve already
written another novel and have forgotten the prior one. Then when the
feedback comes back it is “Hey, throw away this half of the book and
write something entirely different, oh, and I need that by Thursday.”
Sorry. Can’t commiserate with you, buddy….
Let me give you an example of what doing business with Baen is like. When I first started out I had absolutely no idea what I was doing as far as business, and like I said, no agent to guide me (got rejected by pretty much all of them, which is funny because I’m betting they’d love to be getting 15% of this action now!) so when I signed my first contract, I gave over things like dramatic rights (movies and TV), audiobooks, and foreign rights to Baen. At that point in my career, I was just happy that anybody was reading my stuff at all, and I couldn’t imagine that people would want to listen to it or read it in other languages.

So then I got approached by my first movie producer. Wow. Didn’t see that coming. Uh oh, my contract turned all that over to my publishing house… The contract doesn’t specify percentage details for that kind of thing. Now, at this point many publishers would have just screwed me over. Nope. One phone call to Toni, she sticks Baen’s Hollywood agent onto it, we talk, and boom, no problem. I’m then getting an extremely large percent of any of that sort of thing. For the last three years I’ve been collecting option money.

POLL: Who is the Greatest Living SF Writer?

  1. Larry Niven, 222 votes, 21 percent
  2. Neal Stephenson, 193 votes, 18 percent
  3. Jerry Pournelle, 172 votes, 16 percent
  4. Orson Scott Card, 167 votes, 16 percent
  5. Gene Wolfe, 92 votes, 9 percent
  6. John C. Wright, 63 votes, 6 percent
  7. Robert Silverberg, 61 votes, 6 percent
  8. Lois McMaster Bujold, 60 votes, 6 percent
  9. China Mieville, 32 votes, 3 percent
  10. Michael Flynn, 12 votes, 1 percent

1,075 votes total. Larry Niven is the winner.

Congratulations to Larry Niven, who was voted the Greatest Living SF Writer by more than half as many people who vote for the Hugo awards and more than vote for the Nebulas. I’m a little shocked that China Mieville garnered so few votes, as I thought he was a fairly serious candidate; in retrospect, William Gibson should have been on the list rather than Michael Flynn.

I was somewhat bewildered by some of the writers suggested by people who missed out on the original discussion. David Weber? He is certainly a best-selling author and his books are indubitably entertaining but greatness is not measured in Mary Sues. Connie Willis? Well, she’s won a lot of awards, but literally zero people even brought her up in the nominations. Kim Stanley Robinson? A one-trick pony and the trick grew old several books ago, to say nothing of the fact that no one even mentioned him.

It was a surprising credible showing by Lois McMaster Bujold and somewhat disappointing by Robert Silverberg. I think Silverberg and Wolfe are probably not read as much by my generation and the following one. Card and Wright were about where I expected them to be; I wouldn’t be surprised if they switched places in another ten years. And it showed that Neal Stephenson is the best of the coming generation of SF elders.

The Greatest Living SF Author

Philip K. Dick is dead, alas. As are Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov. (And, apparently, Arthur C. Clarke.) So, who would you nominate for a poll on this subject? Here are my nominees, in no particular order:

Neal Stephenson
China Mieville
John C. Wright

Orson Scott Card looked like a contender early on, but he did his best work first, in my opinion. Good, to be sure, but not great. Charles Stross has declined from his breathtaking Accelerando days; I enjoy his Laundry novels but while they are fun, they are not the stuff from which greatness is made. Lois Bujold is very good, but not on the level of the three men listed above. Once the Fourth of the original Big Three, Arthur C. Clarke is overrated and hasn’t written anything worth reading in years, presumably because he is still dead. William Gibson isn’t so much in the limelight these days, but he continues to write interesting books. Tanith Lee is a fabulous stylist, but she has faded from the Secret Books of Paradys days and she wrote fantasy, not science fiction, anyhow.

Perhaps the New Heinlein, Mr. John Scalzi? A mere jest, in more ways than one. Anyhow, if we can narrow the list to 10, then I will post a poll tomorrow and we can sort out everyone’s opinion on the matter. If you have a potential nominee, please make the case here.

Three possible nominees from three recognizable authors who shall remain nameless unless they wish to identify themselves: Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle. A fourth author seconds the nominations for Niven and Pournelle, and, (rather dubiously in my opinion), throws David Weber’s name into the hat. I say this as one who has recently revisited the Honorverse.

A model comparison

A few weeks ago, I pointed out how the former president of the SFWA declared that no-advance deals were “wrong”, “a Shitty Deal”, and possibly “worse than no deal at all”. Other traditionally published writers have even described them as “unethical”.  The former president also asserted: “Advances are typically all authors make from a book.” This is important to keep in mind when one considers what SFWA presently considers to be a professional payment as per its membership requirements.

  1. Word rate: $0.05 per word, increasing to $0.06 later this year
  2. One Paid Sale of a prose fiction book for which the author has been paid $2000 or more.

As it happens, Castalia House had just released two books, one by Mr. Kratman and one by me, which allows us to compare the real world results of the traditional professional model and the no-advance model which various authors have criticized so vociferously. Mr. Kratman has generously permitted us to use his book as a general example. Let’s look at the word rate model first.

1) At 20,000 words, Big Boys Don’t Cry would have commanded a flat-fee payment of $1,000.00.  Depending upon the publisher and the publication, Mr. Kratman would have received the payment between two and eight weeks from the time he delivered the manuscript. He delivered the manuscript on February 21st, so he would have received $1,000 sometime between 1 March and 12 April. He would not have received anything more than that.

2) If he received an advance of $2,500, that would have been against a royalty of 25 percent. He would have received $1,250 about a month after signing, then another $1,250 sometime between 21 March and 21 November 21. (Having been signed to Pocket Books, I am well aware that the check is seldom delivered promptly upon delivery and approval of the manuscript.) This is actually a conservative estimate, as increasingly payments are being divided into three parts, signing, delivery, and publication.

The performance of Mr. Kratman’s book is spelled out in comparison to the traditional model on the Castalia House blog. Due to the speed with which Castalia publishes and pays royalties, Mr. Kratman can expect to receive his first payment by 18 March, 23 days after publication. And he can also reasonably expect to receive more than $2,500 in royalties several weeks BEFORE he would have been likely to receive the second part of a theoretical “advance payment”. Moreover, once the $2,500 figure has been surpassed, he will continue receiving TWICE the royalties he would have under the traditional model.

Now, publishers are not stupid. They will not continue to publish authors who regularly underperform their advances. So, logic dictates that the only advantage of advance payments is to provide a small measure of very short-term security to authors who are unsure of their ability to sell their books and are willing to give away half their future earnings in exchange for that security. Nor have book advances been the historical norm, as the New York Times noted in 2009.

“In the old days,” the novelist Henry Bech, John Updike’s fictional alter ego, once said, “a respectable author never asked for an advance; that was strictly for the no-talents starving down in the Village.”

Both math and history make it obvious. Advances are for no-talents and the no-advance model is materially beneficial to the author. So, if you are an talented author who is confident in his ability to sell books and therefore interested in working with Castalia, have a look at our Concepts page, as there are certain books we would like to publish that none of our current authors are writing.

UPDATE: Since we have had a few inquiries, please note the following submission requirements for Concept-based submissions: “While we normally require completed drafts for submissions, in the case
of Castalia Concept-based submissions, we are willing to review
five-chapter novel submissions so long as they are accompanied by a
complete and detailed outline of the book or series. Novella submissions should still consist
of complete drafts.”

A theory of mediocrity

Sarah Hoyt ties the ongoing series of SF/F debacles to the coddling of the Millennials:

Anyway – the most important influx of these writers, who got doors thrown open for them because they were the right age/gender/upbringing – most of whom were very young and female – was about ten years ago.  Young women just out of college were getting huge offers for books that were what young women just out of college and with no life experience would write (and no, I’m not committing the error above.  This wave of what I call “red carpet acceptances” was targeted at young, just out of college and parroting the right “truths” – no life experience or rational thought wanted, or, in fact, accepted.) – very derivative, with a lot of sex and, in mystery, a lot of shoe and fashion shopping.  (I read Manolo shoe blogger, but look, there are limits to how much I care about shoes.)

Which brings us to now.  These young people, often very protected, were taken in and told they were the next best thing.  Not because of what they did, but because of what they WERE.  Success was their right and inevitable.  Like the poor kid who wrote the essay I linked, they were told they were so smart and brave and stuff for exactly parroting what they’d been taught.  And by and large – with a couple of exceptions – their stuff didn’t sell all that well, though they’ve won awards and been fetted and told how wonderfulglittery they are.

And even the ones who were successful are now shaky, because all they ever did was enter into traditional publishing and be massively supported and do fairly well within that framework.

I don’t even know if the smartest ones know all the breaks they got.  I doubt it.  First of all, because in publishing this stuff is all hidden and it’s hard to realize how much support you had, or even that other people didn’t get it.  (Unless you don’t get it, in which case you start wondering how the process broke down, then find out this is standard.)   Second because it’s human to take credit for our own success, no matter how helped.

So, you see, in their eyes, they think everyone else got this sort of magic carpet ride.

I think this may be a factor, but I think a more important one is the ideological element. As Tom Kratman and others have observed, leftist infiltrators always make a priority of bringing more of their own kind into an organization with the aim of taking it over. Talent and performance are tertiary at best, as both ideological correctness and “diversity” are deemed more important.

Add onto this the intense discomfort that the mediocre have when forced to compare themselves with their superiors and it is only a matter of time before an infiltrated organization is filled with soft, nasty, small-minded and petty mediocrities.

For illustrative purposes, compare John Campbell with Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Or contrast Louis L’Amour with John Scalzi. One doesn’t even need to read a single word, simply looking at pictures of the two individuals being compared is enough to tell you what sort of fiction they are going to publish and write.

The mediocrities brought in the clueless young women because they were the only sort of writers around whom they felt comfortable. Men writing masculine tales of technological competence and bravery? That not only made them feel uncomfortable and inferior, it wasn’t something to which they could even understand, let alone relate.

Of orcs and orc talk

John C. Wright points out that the orcs, aka the Insect Army, really mean what they say:

Upon hearing the orcs talking in their orc-talk about ruining the writing field, making the writing field worse, driving good books away and shoving bad books into their shelf space in the name of fair play, and, in short, talking about heaping the writing field high with warm filth and stinking ordure, flies and rivulets and urine,  the sane people react with a blankness of mind akin to shutting one’s eyes at too great a shock. We cannot believe the orcs are serious. We assume they cannot mean that.

You want J.K. Rowlings, the most celebrated writer of our age, to write LESS? The mind reels, we think the orcs do not mean it, we do nothing to shut them down or shut them up, and then the orcs carry out their program, while we scratch our heads, puzzled that no one told us that this was exactly what they meant all alone.

But it is what they mean.

Yes, dear reader, the orcs mean exactly that. They want less talent, less books you like, and more dross and spit and entrails.

It’s hard for those who aren’t pigs to understand that pigs really do enjoy rolling around in the fetid muck. And it’s hard for those who aren’t orcs to understand that orcs really want to destroy human literature and replace it with their own obscene, subhuman schlock. But it’s true. They see themselves in a fundamentally different way than those of us who consider ourselves to be creatures of God, blessed with souls and created for a higher purpose than the momentary gratification of our animal instincts. They are the self-appointed wicked, the haters of God and the good, and the enemies of every noble virtue. They revile the beautiful, they elevate the ugly, they glory in desecration, and they constantly seek to drag others down to their level.

It is illustrative to compare the protagonist Machine in Tom Kratman’s work to the protagonist Man in John Scalzi’s best-known work. Which character better demonstrates the concepts of conscience and honor and sacrifice? Which character speaks more truly of the realities of the human condition?  And which is the human literature and which is the mere grunting of orcs?

Publisher’s Weekly on the indie revolt

It’s not looking good for the traditional publishing industry:

For decades, aspiring authors were taught to bow before the altar of Big Publishing. Writers were taught that publishers alone possessed the wisdom to determine if a writer deserved passage through the pearly gates of author heaven. Writers were taught that publishers had an inalienable right to this power, and that this power was for the common good of readers. They were taught rejection made them stronger. They were taught that without a publisher’s blessing, they were a failed writer.

And it was true. Without a publisher, the writer was doomed to failure, because without a publisher the writer couldn’t reach readers. Six years ago publishers controlled the three essential legs of the professional publishing stool: the printing press, the access to retail distribution, and the knowledge of professional publishing best practices. It was a print-centric world where e-books were but an inconsequential glimmer in the eyes of a few delusional hippies, me included. A writer could self-publish in print, but without retail distribution these writers were destined to fill their garages with unsold printed books, all the while lining the pockets of vanity presses who exploited their dreams of authorship….

Today, the myth of traditional publishing is unraveling. The stigma of traditional publishing is on the rise.

The author community is growing increasingly disenchanted by Big Publishing’s hard line on 25% net e-book royalties, high e-book prices, slow payouts, and insistence on DRM copy protection. The recent news of major publishers touting record e-book-powered earnings only adds insult to authors’ perceived injury.

Authors are also disappointed by Big Publishing’s misguided foray into vanity publishing with Pearson/Penguin’s 2012 acquisition of Author Solutions, a company known for selling over-priced publishing packages to unsuspecting writers. Multiple publishers have formed sock puppet imprints powered by ASI: Simon & Schuster’s Archway, Penguin Random House’s Partridge Publishing in India, HarperCollins’ Westbow, Hay House’s Balboa Press, Writer’s Digests’ Abbott Press, and Harlequin’s Dellarte Press. These deals with the devil confirmed the worst fears held by indie authors who already questioned if publishers viewed writers as partners or as chattel.

Now, one could try to dismiss this because it is written by Mark Coker, who is betting big time on the indie publishing revolution with Smashwords. (Full disclosure, five of my books are available there.) But aside from the fact that he is in an ideal position to see what is taking place and sharp enough to have anticipated events, the significant fact is that Publisher’s Weekly obviously sees the writing on the wall.

The publication of this piece indicates that they have no intention of going down with the traditional publishing ship. Now, there is still a need for publishers; having been through all the headaches of getting set up for distribution, finding the right people with whom to work, and so forth, I would estimate that at least two-thirds of the traditionally published will have zero desire to become self-publishers if they can get a fair deal from independent publishers.

But publishers can’t continue to grab up to 93 percent of the revenue any longer. Publishers can’t live on the fat overhead they have traditionally demanded at the expense of the writers who were never presented with the choice between much smaller advances and significantly larger royalties. As Coker writes: “The solution is for publishers to realize that they are service providers to authors.”

That’s exactly what we’re doing at CH. We provide editing, superior covers, multiple foreign language editions within weeks of first publication, a boosted signal, reasonable rights-reversion terms, and the author receives an equal share of the royalties at worst. We know what authors want and need because we share their concerns and our business model is built on partnering with them, not systematically exploiting them.