52 Projects
About | Jeffrey Yamaguchi | 52projects.com | @52projects | 52projects Facebook | Instagram
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<3 you weirdos.
LOL
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A thrilling look into the fast-paced world of New York publishing. Wait for it ... Wait for it ...
A behind the scenes look at the edgy, fast-paced world of New York publishing.
Wait for it …
Wait for it …
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LifeNPublishing: The 1000th Post
This snuck up on me! It’s been about 5 months and this blog has taken off like I never expected.
I’ve had a great time doing the posts and interacting with people who, seemingly, agree with a lot of the things I have to say. To everyone who follows, submits, and regularly reads:
and seriously:
So have a lovely day, lovelies, and I will see you on the other side (of 1000).
CONGRATS!
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Here’s @abramsbooks crew celebrating @origamiyoda’s awesome #art2d2 book release #latergram #publishing
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John Scalzi examines a Random House "Alibi" Contract, which is of their e-pub only imprints
I’m all for trade publishing. I’m all for self-publishing. I’m also happy to e-publish shorter works through smaller e-publishers. All are good options and there are good reasons to go with any of the three. A lot of it depends on a thousand different factors unique to each writer and even to each project.
However, it’s disheartening to see one of the Big Publishers create these e-imprints that basically act like vanity presses. As Scalzi points out in his original piece about their SF/F e-imprint Hydra (yes, like the villains in Captain America), Random House is not wholly evil, and in fact they have been a great publisher for countless authors, including Scalzi himself.
But these four imprints they’ve created are certainly really bad choices designed to attract desperate writers who want Big 6 Publishing validation without any of the actual benefits of being trade published, let alone by the Big 6 (never mind what many legitimate small presses may offer) So really, if it’s this or self-publishing, you’re a million times better off doing it yourself. Financially and otherwise.
I recommend writers read both pieces, and even if you’re not a writer, it’s always fun read John Scalzi taking down stupidity.
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Let’s talk about me for a moment. Anyone who knows me knows I feel pretty positively about the traditional publishing model; I work with Tor (part of Macmillan, one of publishing’s “Big Six”) because I get excellent service from it, including brilliant editing, fantastic art and design and top-flight marketing and publicity. Tor and its people earn every penny they make from my books, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m happy to partner with them and hope to do so far into the future; I am happy to defend Tor whenever someone blithely and stupidly suggests that my publisher is “just a middleman” sucking money from me. They aren’t and they don’t.
But make no mistake that my admiration for Tor — or any of my publishers, large or small — is grounded in the fact that ours is an equitable relationship. The minute the relationship stops being equitable is the moment when the relationship is done. Because the fact of the matter is that, if it came to it, I could put out my own work; pay for the editing and art and everything else and then put all the profit into my pocket. Because this is the world we live in now. I don’t usually want to, for all sorts of reasons. But I could. And at this point, so can anyone.Jon Scalzi, delightfully foaming at the mouth, on Hydra, Random House’s new ebook-only, science fiction imprint. (via amiwithani) -
Bookavore: Goofy publishing conference thought
There’s a lot of thought-provoking discussion I’ve heard today in which smart people theorized that books of the future will never be finished; we will be able to change them, and chunk them, and slice them and dice them, and read them upside-down, in space. They will sing to you in your sleep. It…
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Yesterday was my first Book^2 Camp and my first “unconference” of any kind, so I had no idea what to expect. I imagined people sitting around in conference rooms, selling each other their respective agendas and spouting lots of jargon. But none of that happened and by the end of the day I felt re-energized and thrilled to be a part of the sprawling, idiosyncratic, weirdo-genius-filled world of book publishing. Also slightly drunk.
The first session I attended was Ami Greko’s session about what she learned from making her (wonderful) zine about her recent four month travel sabbatical from her job at Kobo. We talked about the idea of creating media that’s intended for a specific audience, who are then the only people who can have access to it, rather than setting the default mode of every interaction to “public.” This seems like a super specific theme, but the conversation went from there to everything to comment trolls to high-profile failed Kickstarter campaigns.
The next session I went to was about what publishers can (and can’t) do for authors — basically, the person who initiated the session wanted us to tell her why she shouldn’t just self-publish her book. This one pushed me up against my biases. For a long time, I have been singing the gospel of “publishers still offer value to new authors that self-publishing can never match, except if you have shitloads of money to spend custom-recreating what happens at a publishing house via freelance labor or if you are the one in a million author whose self-published book is republished — well — by a major publisher.” It was hard to maintain this belief, though, as I watched a room full of editors, designers and authors explain the less-than-logical aspects of the publishing process as though explaining the odd, vestigial tribal rites of a dying civilization. As depressing as it was, it was also thrilling to hear editors being honest about this stuff. I hope the authors in the room could pull the figurative cotton wool of self-delusion out of their ears long enough to hear them.
Throughout the day, various people said various renditions of “publishers should publish fewer, better books” and everyone was consistently like “YES! EXACTLY!” I found myself thinking, though I know there are lots of contractual and practical reasons why this could never happen, about what would happen if it was possible for publishers to gently euthanize projects that weren’t working out. One of the many things that’s hard to explain to authors is that there really are very few “sleeper hits” in publishing — if your book is going to completely tank, your publisher knows long before that first copy hits the shelves, based on presales. Unless you’re very savvy about knowing which questions to ask, or have worked in publishing, or you have an agent who knows you can handle the truth, you’re going to keep holding out hope for way longer than is necessary. It would be sad but probably psychologically healthier for everyone involved, not to mention a much better use of resources, not to go through the motions of promoting the publication of — wow, I’ve been trying to dodge this metaphor but it’s really the only one that will do — a stillborn book. If publishing were like any other business and books were like any other product, that sales-conference “nope” would be the moment in the process when the problematic item could be sent back to the lab for testing and rejiggering. But books aren’t products, they’re art — except when they’re mostly just products, which is often. Or when they’re to some extent both, which is always.
One huge problem, almost too huge to approach directly, is that we whisper in euphemisms about the distinction between book-shaped products — celebrity memoirs, cat calendars, point of purchase novelty books, packager-conceptualized YA series — and books that are, you know, real books. Big publishers need to sell book-products to subsidize literature, or so the conventional wisdom runs, but what if we acknowledged more openly that publishing Snooki’s novel involves a totally different process than publishing Alan Hollinghurst’s novel? What if we just stopped even calling the former thing a “book”?
Obviously that’s exactly the kind of utopian/delusional thing that is never going to happen, but I liked that this was the kind of thought that Book^2 Camp made me think. I also liked hanging out in Workman’s offices all day and doing exercises like going around the room and saying what the last book we bought with actual money was and why we bought it. Lucinella, a Terry Pratchett novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and Code Name: Verity were some of the books people mentioned. Publishing people!! I love you!
(photo via Guy LeCharles Gonzalez’s post about how discoverability is a problem for publishers, not readers, ding ding ding)
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