Jackie Barbosa

Now that we’ve had a week to digest Dorchester’s decision to move to a digital first followed by trade paperbacks, there seem to be two basic reactions:

1. The Dorchester situation is unique because it was driven by serious financial problems that have been building for some time.

2. The sky is falling in traditional print publishing and this is merely the beginning of the end.

As I said in my post the other day about digital royalty rates, I don’t think the Dorchester situation is unique, but neither do I think that print publishing is on the verge of complete collapse. I do, however, think that the digital reading revolution is upon us, and it behooves both readers and writers to think now about what we’ll gain from the new landscape rather than cry crocodile tears over what we think we’re losing.

But first, what are we losing? In my humble opinion, the first thing we’re losing, clearly, is brick-and-mortar bookstores. This is not to say that there won’t be physical stores that sell print books; it’s just that they’re going to be the Walmarts, Targets, and CostCo’s of the world that stock a limited selection of the most popular/marketable books. We may continue to have a limited number of book “superstores” in big cities and a precious few indies may survive, but for the most part, sales of print copies of “rarer” book will migrate to Amazon and other online retailers. This is due to practical realities. As the number of print book sales decrease and digital book sales increase (the trend for the past several years in most sectors of the book market), the cost of shelving a wide variety of books in multiple retail spaces so that customers can pick them off the shelves and buy them is too high. It’s much cheaper to warehouse the same books in one or several locations and ship them to customers when they’re ordered online. If you think it’s not going to happen, all you have to do is remember is the gradual demise of record stores a decade or so ago. It’s exactly the same dynamic at play.

Those of us who love bookstores feel sad about this; I know I do. But when I look at my own book-buying behavior, I realize that I’m as responsible for this as anyone else. While I do still go to a bookstore about once a month, I often leave without buying anything and when I do, it’s usually books for my children; my own reading habit is largely sustained by digital books and Amazon/Book Depository/etc. This is because I’ve stopped being as much of an impulse buyer as I once was. I’m not buying books because I happen across them on the bookstore shelf and decide they sound good. I already know before I go to a bookseller’s site which books I want and why.

Now, this isn’t to say that the average reader has migrated to this method of bookbuying. But the “average” reader isn’t buying most of her books in a bookstore, anyway. She’s buying them at a discount at the aforementioned big box retailers. Oh, sure, there are vocacious readers whose tastes can’t be adequately met by the books that the chain retailers are offering, and they’re still going to bookstores. It’s just that there are fewer and fewer of them, and they are also the readers who are most likely to adopt ebooks, especially as the price of ereaders drops.

So, where does that leave the print book market? Well, my suspicion is that, within the next 5-10 years, we’re going to see the majority of publishers going to the Dorchester digital-then-trade model for their midlist and “niche” books, although they may choose to do simultaneous ebook and trade releases rather than staggered ones. They’re not going to do this because they have any great love for ebooks, but because there won’t be enough places for them to STOCK those midlist and niche books. They’re also going to do it this way because the profit margin on trade paperbacks is so much higher than for mass market paperbacks. (There’s already a noticeable shift toward trade paperbacks in the romance genre. The reasons are obvious–it doesn’t cost much more to print a trade paperback than a mass market paperback, but the cover price is nearly twice as much, and trades don’t get stripped and pulped. It’s pretty much a no-brainer for the publishers to prefer this format, provided, of course, they can get readers to buy them.)

The bestseller titles that are ordered and stocked by the large chains will still be printed for a long time to come. There will probably continue to be a mix of hardcover, trade paper, and mass market paperback formats for these books. But these books are likely to become the exception rather than the rule.

Okay, so, that’s my prediction. What does it mean to us as readers and writers? Well, ironically, I think in many ways, it’s probably a good thing for all of us.

For both readers and writers, I think it’s on balance a good thing because the model allows for a lot more innovation and variety in the types of books that are published. The rise of digital-only publishers over the last decade has already given those readers who were willing to read ebooks a much broader choice of reading material. Topics, genres, and styles that aren’t mainstream enough to appeal to publishers who are risking huge sums of money on printing and distribution are now getting published anyway. That trend should continue and expand to more publishing houses, because the large costs of printing and distribution will be eliminated for these books. Contrary to bringing about the death of the midlist, the digital revolution may well be the midlist’s savior, and provide writers with many more opportunities for publication (including going the indie route).

Of course, there are downsides. There are already, arguably, too many books published. The digital revolution will likely lead to more books, not fewer, and this means correspondingly fewer readers for each book published. (Garrison Keillor said we’re heading toward a publishing environment where every book published has eight buyers, all of whom are members of the writer’s family. I don’t think it’s THAT bad, but I do think there’s a grain of truth in there.) By the same token, the chain retailers, who already exert a huge degree of infuence when it comes to picking bestsellers, will become even more powerful. Get into the chains, and you’re pretty much assured of big sales numbers. Fail that, and you’re going to be more or less on your own when it comes to bringing readers to your books.

But these are all things we need to think about TODAY, whether we’re readers or writers. As readers, how will we find “our” books? As writers, how will we find “our” readers? As writers, how will we negotiate our contracts today with the knowledge that, in as little a few years (or overnight, if you were a Dorchester author), you might discover your book is coming out only in digital when you were expecting a print release? It’s going to take a lot of foresight, but at the end of the day, I feel we’ll all be better prepared to truly take advantage of the brave new world of publishing if we start now.

In other words, to quote REM, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

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I’m thrilled today to introduce you all to my dear friend, Sarah Barimen, who has recently joined the ranks of Cobblestone Press with her short story, Pirate’s Treasure. (Is that cover gorgeous or what? I swear, I’m still drooling…and envious!) Sarah’s story won’t be released for a couple of months, but in the meantime, I wanted to tell the story of how we became friends (more than a decade ago) and how excited I am to have had a hand (however small) in her road to publication.

Sarah and I “met” on Usenet in 1997. Does anyone else remember Usenet and newsgroups? Nowadays, all those newsgroups have pretty much moved to Google Groups and most people probably access them on the web, but back in the day, we used to set up our email clients to download newsgroup messages. Sarah and I were both new moms at the time, and so we frequented the newsgroups misc.kids, misc.kids.pregnancy, and misc.kids.breastfeeding. As time went on and we each went through two more pregnancies, we became very good friends both on and off the newsgroup.

When I left the parenting newsgroup world back in about 2006 to pursue writing seriously (I couldn’t spend all that time on newsgroups AND write, after all), Sarah and I kind of lost touch. Then, a few months ago, she contacted me and we connected on Twitter and Facebook. And lo and behold, I came to find out that Sarah was writing. At the time, she was working on an urban fantasy, but a couple of months ago, she sent me the short erotic story that ultimately became Pirate’s Treasure. I thought it was very, very good and worthy of publication, and suggested she submit it to Cobblestone Press, which I knew would take manuscripts of a shorter length than many epublishers. After a few weeks and some revisions, Sarah was offered a contract! Needless to say, I was delighted for her.

So, what’s Pirate’s Treasure about? Well, here’s the blurb to whet your appetite:

Miriam Van Vorce, traveling with her older sister to a new life on a Caribbean island, makes the trade of a lifetime when her ship is looted and burned by pirates: she gives her own virtue in exchange for her sister’s safe delivery to her betrothed for a wealthy arranged marriage.

She believes she has sacrificed any hope of happiness of her own, and she is resigned, but in reality she will gain far more than she ever dreamed: love, ecstacy, and a richly independent life of her own.

I hope you’ll all be looking for Sarah’s story when it’s released. I loved it, and I hope you will, too!

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago on Twitter, I am thrilled to have been invited to contribute a short story to the Mammoth Book of Scottish Romance, due out in January of 2011. Over the weekend, the editor sent out a preliminary copy of the cover art, and I wanted to share it with you all, along with a brief blurb for my story. Hope you like both!

The Reiver by Jackie Barbosa

Duncan Maxwell, laird of Lochmorton Castle, gets the shock of his life when he discovers the reiver captured in a raid on his lands is not a boy, but a young woman. Although she flatly refuses to tell him her name or how she came to be riding with a raiding party, Duncan cannot countenance imprisoning a woman in his dungeon but neither can her release her without compensation. Unable to ransom her back to her family, he treats her as an honored—though exceptionally well-supervised—guest. He takes to calling her Reva and determines to seduce the truth of her identity from her. There’s just one problem—the reiver may steal his heart before he can reveal her secrets.

Now I just have to write it .

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So was I! I still am, a little, but having received my first earnings statement (for sales of Behind the Red Door from release through December 31, 2009), I feel a little less in the dark. And since I don’t have any boundaries when it comes to sharing how much (or little) I’ve earned from the sale of that book, I’m going to share it all with you. Down to the last detail, including how much my advance was, how many units of the book are in circulation, and so on.

Ready? Here we go.

Okay, so, let’s deconstruct this a little bit.

First of all, it looks as through 6284 copies of the print book were either distributed to booksellers or sold directly to consumers. I don’t think it includes any copies that are still in the warehouse. That doesn’t give me an initial print run figure, which I’d hoped to be able to discern from this statement. However, my editor told me a few weeks ago there were 448 copies in the warehouse, which pushes the initial run up to at least seven thousand. In addition, this is only books distributed/sold as of December 31 of last year. The statement cycle is such that you get a statement in June that reports on July to December and another in December that reports on January to June. In addition, if your book comes out in the middle of a cycle, you have to wait until the NEXT cycle to see the first statement. For example, because my book came out in June of 2009, I didn’t get a statement in December of 2009.

Okay, so, I’m guessing my initial print run was in the neighborhood of 7,000-8,000 copies. Low, unfortunately, even for a niche line like Aphrodisia, but not a surprise to me.

Next, of the 6284 copies originally circulated, 2,132 were already returned, leaving net “sales” of 4,095 copies (e.g., books that are still in circulation and could theoretically be sold). A sale, as I understand it, doesn’t mean an actual consumer purchase (except in the case of Direct to Consumer and Special and Final Sales), but that it’s available for purchase. That’s why there’s an additional line item for return reserves, because the publisher is holding back some royalties in case more copies are returned by booksellers.

Okay, so what about those return reserves? I have to admit, I can’t figure out how they arrived at the 1,855. I thought it was calculated as 40% of the number of copies still in circulation, but that (4095 X 40%) doesn’t come out to 1,855. So, I have to throw my hands up in the air and assume there is some logic being applied that I can’t see.

Another thing that’s not quite right is my advance. The statement says I was paid $2,250 in advance. That’s incorrect. My advance was $2,500. If they had gotten that right, my net earnings would only have been $26.02. I notified my editor of the error and the royalty folks said they’d just catch it up/correct it in the next statement cycle, so I don’t have to send any money back (and I’m glad, not so much because I want to keep the money as that the agency already took its 15% off the top of the payment and the accounting hassle of refunding their portion and mine would have been quite a pain).

Last, the only reason I earned out is because of those wonderful ebook royalties. I get paid 25% of net on those, and even with the relatively low net, I still earn more per copy on ebooks than print. In recognition of that, I’ve decided to add some links to the website to point you to places where you can purchase Behind the Red Door in digital format, partly because I’d like to encourage you to buy digital if you can/want to and partly because, it turns out, my book isn’t all that easy to find in digital format. The only sites I’ve found it on so far, outside of Kensington’s direct site, are (in order of best pricing) Amazon Kindle, Sony, MobiPocket, and All Romance Ebooks.

Okay, so that’s it. Now I am naked before you all (at least in the figurative sense), and I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.

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My husband took this on Sunday afternoon of our cat, Oreo, snoozing amid the clean laundry.

Naturally, I think it demands a LOLCats caption, but I’m not coming up with anything especially clever. So, help me out here.

One lucky captioner (selected at random) will win a $10 gift certificate to the Harlequin ebook store (because, hey, I have to support my new publisher ).

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Since my recent sale to Spice Briefs (see post below), it occurred to me that a lot of writers out there might not be aware of the opportunities that are available in the short fiction, particularly romance and erotica. I’m thinking of writing an article (which I plan to submit to RWA’s trade publication, Romance Writer’s Report, for consideration). But since I don’t want to rely solely on my own experience, I’d love to find a few others who’ve made a career of writing short stories or novellas (40k or less) and who are willing to share their experiences in some detail in such an article.

If you’re interested, please reply in the comments or email me at jackie at jackiebarbosa.com.

Thanks .

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a proposal out on submission to a few New York houses. Or, I should say, had. Yesterday was the official close date for the project, and although I haven’t received a no from everyone yet, more than half the editors who had it have passed.

But the reason authors need Prozac isn’t because rejection is depressing, even though it certainly is a bummer. No, I think authors need Prozac because publishing professionals (be they agents or editors) can seem so oddly bipolar.

What I mean is that the aspect that one agent/editor loves about your manuscript is very often the element another one cites as the reason for passing. Now, of course, agents/editors are under no obligation to give you a reason for rejecting your work, so I’m always pleased when they go out of their way to try to explain their decisions. It’s just rattling because you hope for a rejection that can help you figure out how to do better next time, but when you have people passing for exactly the opposite reason (love premise/hate execution vs. hate premise/love execution), it definitely leaves you shaking your head.

And wishing for a nice dose of Prozac. Or barring that, a lot of alcohol.

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So, since the announcement of the new Apple ereader-plus-the-kitchen-sink device, Twitter has been awash with jokes about the name Apple chose for it. They chose not the much-anticipated iSlate or even the iTablet, but the iPad. Seriously?

Okay, so I kind of get it–it’s a riff on iPod, and Apple’s hoping this device does for ebooks what the iPod did for digital music. But honestly, what is it about devices for ebooks that makes manufacturers so determined to give them ridiculous names? Granted that Kindle is okay (although what starting a fire has to do with ebooks is beyond me) and Sony’s eInk name is a downright win, the two latest high-profile entries into the market, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and now Apple’s iPad, are just jokes waiting to happen.

Oh wait, the jokes didn’t wait. They were all over Twitter within minutes of the announcement. To the extent that iTampon became a trending topic and SBSarah from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books asked what happens if you have both a Nook and an IPad. (I suggested iFlow.) Jody Wallace wondered if a future, slimmed-down version would be the iMini, while a bigger, souped-up one (possibly for the large print reading public) might be called the iMaxi.

Whenever an unmistakably silly and riffable name like this comes down the pike from a large and respected company, the first thing we wonder is where the logical people were when the name was suggested. How could they have come up with a such a train wreck of a name, something so patently laughable?

The obvious answer is…they knew EXACTLY what they were doing. And in Apple’s case, I totally think they chose iPad with their eyes wide open. People are talking about it. They are getting a ton of free publicity from having given it a name that makes most of us wonder what the marketing people were smoking when they came up with it. There is method to their madness.

What I’m NOT sure there’s a method to is the pricing. The least expensive version of the iPad will set you back $499 for 16GB of storage space. Maybe I’m overly price sensitive, but I’ve got an iPod that has 30gb of space and a video screen that cost only a little more than half that. And while you could argue the iPad does the music function AND the music/video function in the same device, it’s a device that (judging from the photo of it in Steve Jobs’ hands) isn’t going to fit in my purse. Yes, it’s smaller than my laptop, but it doesn’t look a WHOLE lot smaller than a netbook, and I can get one of those for $250 according to today’s ads in the local paper.

I’m sure there are a lot of people who will buy the iPad and love it. But for me, the price entirely quelled my (initially very positive) response. At $200-$300, I very well might have bought one, but not outside the realm of possibility. $300-$350 would have made it harder to justify. But there’s nothing this device offers that I don’t already have elsewhere that I’m willing to shell out $499 plus 8.25% local sales tax.

In other words, I guess I’ll be reading mostly dead tree books for a while yet.

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I’ve gotten embroiled today in another Twitter conversation about piracy and one on Dear Author about authors airing their grievances with their publishers in a public forum. The two might seem totally unconnected, and in most ways, they are, but one thing that strikes me is this–when these discussions come up, the first party to get “thrown under the bus” is always the publisher. It’s always the big, bad publishers who irrationally want to be paid for their product. It’s the big, bad publishers who choose sucky covers for books and then force authors to accept them. Authors are at publishers’ mercy; readers are at publishers’ mercy. No one gets what they want EXCEPT the publishers.

Okay, so, I’m not here to be a cheerleader for the big publishing houses, because I don’t think they’re always in the right, but I’ll tell you what–I don’t think they’re always in the wrong, either.

For example, I know DRM is a touchy subject for the ebook readers out there and that they are unfairly being tarred with the brush of “pirate” because they just want to share their digital books the way they’d share print ones. I completely sympathize with that point of view. But by the same token, I understand why publishers feel they MUST use DRM and why they equate peer-to-peer sharing with piracy. For book publishers, the reality of digital formats means that a single copy of a book can be shared infinitely without any degradation in quality.

It’s as if we were living in world where Star Trek style replicators existed and any manufactured item could just be popped into it and reproduced ad infinitum at virtually no cost. If people could do that with print books (instead of having to copy them painstakingly page by page), you can believe that publishers would be trying to do something to paper books to prevent that, too. DRM may suck as a solution and do more to piss readers off than to protect digital books from being pirated, but publishers are over a barrel on this one. While it’s a poor solution at best (and doesn’t even really work), until the digital book market settles on a single file format a la mp3 and a model like iTumes comes into existence for books, they’re just trying to stick their fingers in the dyke.

And then there’s the issue of authors airing their grievances with the publishers. This particular round has to do with cover art. You can read the post on Dear Author if you’re interested in the specifics of the discussion.

Here’s the thing: when it comes to cover art (and by extension, titles), I’m inclined to believe publishers generally DO know what they’re doing. Even if the author hates the result, even if the models don’t look like the protagonists, even if the title makes the author cringe in mortification. All of the major publishing houses have been in the business of designing, marketing, and selling books for longer than any living author has been writing books. They haven’t succeeded in staying in business for 100+ years by being clueless. Authors are often surprised to discover that the title/cover that made them want to cover their faces in shame are actually beloved by readers and precisely what drew them to the book. This isn’t to say that every title/cover produced by a publisher is a winner, but on balance, I think it’s safe to assume the publisher has a better grasp of what sells than the average author.

Part of the reason I think authors don’t complain a lot in public about the publishers isn’t just that they’re afraid of the consequences (which is certainly an issue, especially for authors without a significant track record), but because in the final analysis, the publisher is taking the lion’s share of the risk (at least if it’s an advance-paying, traditional print publishing house) and therefore, you tend to err on the side of suspecting the publisher isn’t all wet. If you do think they’re all wet, then once your contract is up, it’s time to go looking for another publisher, and again, if you don’t have much of a track record, the last thing you want is to gain a reputation as someone who makes a big stink over things you really don’t know much about.

So, yes, there’s some fear there but also prudence and a sense of respect. You wouldn’t want your publisher complaining publicly about what a pain in the ass you were to work with and how you were completely clueless about how to write a book that could sell. That being the case, I think it’s just decent to return the favor and not trash talk¹ your publisher–even if you’re sure it’s all true and your publisher fatally sabotaged your career. There are just some places you’re wise not to go.
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¹I hope no one will construe this to mean I think the letter by Barry Eisler that was posted at Dear Author constituted “trash talking.” It was actually anything but. Which is precisely why I think writing and distributing it isn’t likely to cause Mr. Eisler any damage. That said, if I were to be moved to complain about something my publisher did, I doubt I could be so well-reasoned and insightful, which is one of the reasons I won’t go there.

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Last week, a series of huge storms blew through Southern California. And when I say blew, I do mean “blew.” On Tuesday, the rain was accompanied by particularly large gusts of wind. One of these tore through the neighborhood just as my mom was outside the school waiting to pick up my kids (I was teaching at my office). The result was downed trees and downed power lines and an area-wide power outage.

When they arrived at our house (after finding three of the four possible routes blocked by trees/tree limbs), they discovered the pecan tree in the southwest corner of our yard was one of the storm’s victims. It missed hitting the house (although if it had, it would only have harmed on corner of the garage), but it didn’t miss hitting the power line. It didn’t completely detach the service line from the pole, but it seriously stretched it.

As it turned out, the entire neighborhood was without power from 2 that afternoon until about 5 on Wednesday morning, but we had to wait until 10:30 Wednesday night for someone to finally come out, remove the old line, and attach a new one above the fallen tree.

And thus the topic of my post. As I was wandering around my candle-lit house, it dawned on me that I was seeing things in much the same way the characters of my 19th century historical novels would have done. Of course, living without electrical power in the modern world is a good deal more inconvenient that it would have been for our non-electrified brethen who were, after all, accustomed to cooking meals and doing other day-to-day tasks without the help of electrical appliances like stoves and ovens and whatnot. They didn’t expect to have TV or radio or (ye gods how did I go 30 hours without?) the Internet, so they didn’t miss any of those things.

Even so, however, I was struck by how PRETTY everything seemed those two nights without power. Candles actually throw a surprising amount of light, particularly when well-placed, and after a while, it stopped seeming dark to me and instead seemed warm and cozy (even though, to be honest, the house was REALLY cold!). I became very aware in those hours how much softer things looked, how much less I noticed dirt (a very good thing for someone with my aversion to housekeeping, lol), and how relaxed that candlelight made me feel (once I got over the horror of figuring out how I was going to feed my family dinner without a stove).

After it was all over and the lights came back on, I almost MISSED the flickering warmth of candelight. My husband felt the same way. So we’re considering having a “back to the 19th century” night every now and again (with or without the assistance of the power company) just to enjoy it.

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