Inverarity is not a Scottish village

A couple of weeks ago, I posted Beware of Vanity Press Scams, in which I singled out the Strategic Publishing Group, affiliated with the hydra-headed AEG Publishing Group.

I received this response from an anonymouse:

Your research.
You're comments are way off base and at best, amateur. There are numerous authors published by Strategic that are doing quite well with book sales and book signing events. You should really do more research before making such "preachy" and uninformed opinions yourself. These kinds of comments only question your own morals and your value to the literary community.

Dear anonymouse:

Are you a butthurt author victimized by Strategic and trying to convince yourself you're a real author? (You're not, not in the eyes of the publishing industry, no more than if you listed a self-published book as a publishing credit.)

Or are you, perhaps, Robert M. Fletcher, the person behind AEG?

Here is some more of my research:

Robert Fletcher of Writers' Literary Agency Labelled Fraudulent And Frivolous In Legal Ruling

Robert M. Fletcher, literary scammer

AEG (Writer's Beware)

Writers Literary Agency/AEG Publishing Group/Strategic Book Publishing/Eloquent Books (Absolute Write)

Strategic Book Publishing AEG Publishing Group Complaints - Fraud

So, anonymouse, do tell, name me some of these "numerous authors" published by Strategic who are enjoying such literary success? Name me one book published by Strategic that I can walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble and purchase? (No, ordering off of B&N or Amazon's website doesn't count -- anyone with an internet connection can put their book on Amazon or barnesandnoble.com now.)

(P.S. It's "your comments," not "you're comments.")

Deleted in comments to another post:

Subject: The Lord of the Rings
Tolkien's masterpiece turned out to be the most read work of literature in the 20th century in English. It's a unique accomplishment which really cannot be put into any category. That's what great literature is.

Please visit my blog at www (dot) a n g e l a f o u r n i e r (dot) blogspot.com and leave a comment. Thanks!

The above blog (remove spaces and such that I added in the quote) appears to be a platform to pimp a book (which I won't link to but it's linked on every post in his blog): something called "Angela 1" which appears to be the sort of preachy moralistic YA book that would gather dust on the shelves of Christian bookstores if it was even good enough to be published by small Christian presses.

This book, however, is vanity published by Strategic Publishing Group, which is affiliated with the AEG Publishing Group.

AEG is similar to several other enterprises such as Publish America, which pretend to be legitimate publishers and "accept" submissions from prospective authors. They go to great lengths pretending that they are not vanity presses and that they can actually put your book in bookstores, that you will be paid in royalties just like a real author, etc. The reality is that their entire business model depends on getting the author to buy copies of his or her own books from them (because nobody else is going to).

See Writer Beware or the SFWA's ALERTS FOR WRITERS for more. Or Google "Strategic Publishing Group" or "PublishAmerica" + "scam."

These companies (and many similar ones) operate under a number of different names. And you'll find all their books available on Amazon. So this is one downside to the new ease with which would-be authors can bypass traditional gatekeepers, as I have mentioned before: not all publishers are created equal. Some are just fronts for vanity presses.

Note that vanity presses are not automatically fraudulent or disreputable. One that is up-front about its business model is just offering a legitimate service. But those like Strategic Publishing Group and Publish America are notorious for tricking naive would-be authors into believing they are being published by a "real" publisher and that their books will appear on the shelves at Borders, etc. In reality, the chances of a regular bookstore carrying anything from one of these "publishers" are approximately zero, and no one else in the publishing industry will consider a book published by them to be a publishing credit; if you query an agent and say you've been previously published by PublishAmerica or AEG, you will almost certainly be laughed at (and rejected).

ETA: Originally I was quite a bit more inflammatory and made specific references to the author, because I fucking hate spammers like you wouldn't believe, and his post struck me as pure spam. After thinking about it and rereading his blog and cooling off a bit, I suppose it is possible that he really did think he was making a legitimate contribution to the discussion, though I think it was still mostly just linkspamming. So I've toned down my response somewhat. But the general comments about vanity presses remain.

So, I'm just feeling cranky but I'm afraid this could turn into the kind of rant where people point and laugh and say "UR totally old dude and WTF are you talking about?" because I haven't done an in-depth study of today's YA genre, I just know what kind of books I'm seeing reviewed all the damn time and what aspiring YA writers say on writers' forums.

So, with as much self-awareness and appreciation for irony and my own hypocrisy as I can muster, let me just say: most YA fiction sucks.

( In which Inverarity waves a cranky fist at those damn young adults on his lawn )

We all know the ancient wisdom of the internet: "Do not feed the troll." I.e., don't respond to trolls, don't let them bait you, don't give them the attention they so desperately want. If everyone just ignored a troll, it would eventually get bored and go away disappointed.

And this never, ever works.

In all my years on the internet, I've never seen a dedicated and persistent troll actually fade away by being ignored. Why? Because there will always be someone who just can't ignore it. It's just not realistic to think that on a newsgroup or email list or forum with dozens if not hundreds of people, every single one of them will be able to refrain from responding.

I withdraw increasingly from online interactions because the urge to want to punch people through the internet is too strong.

In today's WSJ article Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books, the booming ebook business is cast as dire news for authors. They break the numbers down as follows:

The new economics of the e-book make the author's quandary painfully clear: A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15%, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70%, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25% of that, or $2.27, to the author.

The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.

Okay, what's wrong with this? Answer: the assumption that hardcover sales and ebook sales are zero-sum.

Authors (and publishers) always prefer hardcover sales, because they get a bigger cut from each. But the reason popular books usually wind up being reprinted as paperbacks is because most people will only buy their favorite authors or a really hyped book in hardcover. The number of paperbacks sold usually far exceeds the number of hardcovers. And notice that the author's royalty for ebooks is higher than for hardcovers (whereas the paperback royalty rate is usually lower).

So, ebooks are only bad for authors if they cannibalize hardcover sales, and do not increase overall sales. Since ebooks are still relatively new, there aren't a lot of long-term numbers to argue this one way or the other, but I think that the ease of buying an ebook is only likely to increase total sales.

E-books sales are exploding. Currently, e-books account for an estimated 8% of total book revenue, up from 3% to 5% a year ago. Mike Shatzkin, a publishing consultant, estimates e-books could be 20% to 25% of total unit sales by the end of 2012. "Eventually, digital books will overtake physical books," Mr. Greco predicts.

Another thing to note (which the article doesn't): with ebooks, there need never again be any such thing as "out of print." Even now, authors with long out-of-print titles whose rights have reverted to them are beginning to realize that there exist epublishers such as ereader.com and Fictionwise who can take those old books and reissue them digitally. Nobody is going to be making big money off of electronic sales of their older titles, but for an author with a substantial backlist, that's another revenue stream from books that are currently earning them nothing.

More doomsaying from the article:

The lower revenue from e-books comes amidst a decline in book sales that was already under way. The seemingly endless entertainment choices created by the Web have eaten into the time people spend reading books. The weak economy also is contributing to the slide.

It is certainly true that people are reading (and buying) books less. I can only offer an anecdotal counterargument, however: since acquiring an ereader, I have read (and purchased) far more books than I did before. Including, ironically enough, paper versions, since by reading and reviewing more frequently, I've been hanging out at more book and writing forums and blogs and getting more recommendations for books to read, including some that aren't yet available as ebooks (boo! hiss!). And my impression is that this is true for most people with ereaders. There's something about click-and-download that makes an ebook purchase easier to get over the should-I-buy-this-or-not? obstacle than actually taking a physical book off the shelf and walking to the counter with it to hand over your credit card. Yes, digitally speaking, you're doing exactly the same thing, but Amazon knows what they're doing. (And I don't even have a Kindle; if I were book browsing with 3G wireless and one-click purchasing, my to-be-read shelf would be even bigger!)

So far, ebooks are seen as a secondary market that doesn't require the same attention or marketing as hardcovers. This is changing and will change more, and when ebooks are pushed more aggressively on the web, ebooks will come to be seen more as a driving force in a book's success.

Another example of Not Getting It:

John Pipkin's 2009's debut novel, "Woodsburner," won several literary prizes, including the 2009 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Despite the acclaim and print sales of more than 10,000, "Woodsburner" has only sold 359 digital copies.

Mr. Pipkin says the business model of e-books worries him. "I embrace anything that makes it possible for people to read what I've written, especially if it's somebody who might not have read the physical book," Mr. Pipkin says. "But the sales price of e-books is lower than the price of physical books, so writers stand to earn less. It's a concern moving forward, especially as e-books make up a larger percentage of sales."

Mr. Pipkin then goes on to whine about how hard it is for him to support his family on a writer's income:

"Unless you're a best-selling author, I don't see how it's possible for an author to get together enough income to pay for health insurance, retirement and other things," he says.

Umm, newsflash, Mr. Pipin: this has always been true. Advice for would-be writers from time immemorial has always been: "Don't quit your day job." The WSJ article seems to back up Pipin's concerns by referencing several authors "only a few years back" who received six- and seven-figure advances for their debut novels, as if this is remotely typical. The number of writers who can make a full-time living off their writing has always been small, the percentage of fiction writers who can make a living off of writing novels even smaller. Only the big names are full-time novelists; only the biggest of big names actually make more than a decent middle-class income. (Also, the majority of big name authors did not get big advances for their first few books. Stephen King, who received a $400,000 advance for Carrie -- that was for the paperback rights, btw -- is very much atypical.)

And none of this has anything to do with ebooks. Does Mr. Pipin imagine that all 359 of those ebook sales of his book would have been hardcover sales if the ebook had not been available? He contradicts himself by worrying what ebooks will do to book sales. Anything that makes it possible for people to read what he's written, especially if they wouldn't otherwise, represents an additional sale that otherwise wouldn't have happened.

SF author Cory Doctorow (who is also quoted in the WSJ article) has an even more radical take on this, since he advocates the abolishment of copyright and argues that every author should make their works available for free online, as he has done. He makes this case in a series of essays in his book Content. Now, I am not actually convinced that his model will work for every author, but reading his arguments will certainly get you thinking about our current assumptions about intellectual property and the viability of charging for content in a new way.

As e-book sales accelerate, their impact on physical book sales will grow. Publishers worry that $12.99 digital books that typically go on sale the same date as physical books will cut into their hardcover sales and their $14.99 paperback sales down the line, a key revenue producer for literary titles.

No doubt this is true. I increasingly prefer to buy books electronically and will certainly choose the digital version over the hardcover *. But looking at the model above, the author makes $4.20 off of a hardcover sale, vs. $2.27 off of a digital sale. So how much better does the electronic version have to sell than the hardcover for the author to make more money? I'll do the eighth grade algebra for you: at just over 1.85 × hardcover sales, electronic sales net more money for the author. If electronic royalties rise to closer to 50% (as some are suggesting), ebooks becomes even more lucrative for the author. (Keep in mind also that paperback print runs are usually much greater than the hardcover printing, and increasingly, genre books don't get hardcover editions at all.)

This discounts the economic impact on publishers, and how the entire industry will shudder and rearrange itself with the continued closing of brick-and-mortar stores, but my point is that the WSJ's conclusion that the increasing popularity of ebooks spells doom for authors is, at the very least, premature.

* Though I did buy Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings in hardcover, because maps and pictures don't display well in my tiny ereader. But I'm gonna give that big-ass doorstopper away as soon as I finish reading it. Incidentally, what I actually paid off the $28 cover price after getting my Borders Club discount was $16.87. So if $14 went back to the publisher, and $4.20 of that back to Brandon Sanderson himself, then the bookstore only cleared $2.87. No wonder Borders is struggling? But without the club discount, I would have bought the digital version and just squinted at the tiny maps, rather than paying 28 bucks.

I used to be incredibly argumentative. (I know, big shock, right?) I spent more time than I want to think about arguing on message boards, getting into flamewars with people who were just so unspeakably jaw-droppingly blood-boilingly unbearably fucking stupid that surely the entire universe would collapse into a singularity if I did not disabuse of them of their utter and complete wrongbadness.



I just skimmed a certain HP message board for the first time in months, and.... yeah, I'm glad I've outgrown that. (Okay, I'll still get into it sometimes with people, but for the most part, I've learned to walk away from poo-flinging chimps, or better yet, not engage at all.)

This, btw, is why I don't post a lot about my politics here. 'Cause I can easily go off on a tear about my godless heathen liberal politics, but then it becomes unfun when people who share a common love of fandom are suddenly ripping into each other over abortion or God or whether Obama wants to make you gay marry a Muslim anchor baby. (Yes, I totally ripped that last line off from John Scalzi, who I want to be when I grow up.)

So, now and then I feel like doing the "blogging" thing where I actually talk about, you know, real stuff, and then I think better of it, because that way lies self-immolation.

Anyway, here is a revised Thorn Family Tree (with some noteworthy additions) as a reward for suffering through the above rambling. Note that it is still subject to future revisions...

So, I'm reading Mockingjay now because I got hooked on the trilogy. I even succumbed to Amazon's pre-order offer, and I hate Amazon.

This is technically not a spoiler, because I haven't actually finished the book yet, so I'm only making a prediction, but...


I'm gonna go ahead and call it -- Katniss winds up with Gale, and I think it was blatantly obvious that this is how the "love triangle" would be resolved since book one. And if I'm totally wrong here, then wait until I've finished the book before you "Ha!Ha!Ha!" me in the comments. :P


Anyway, I'm not posting this to talk about Mockingjay, but to talk about how totally fucking appalled I was to read this thread.

I am completely opposed to Digital Rights Management schemes. They don't work, they annoy customers, they encourage piracy. That's why the music industry is slowly coming around and iTunes has finally gone DRM-free.

That said, I can understand why people who make a living off of intellectual property are reluctant to relinquish the illusory protection that DRM offers. You can now take it for granted that anything that can be digitally reproduced (movies, music, books, software) is available on a torrent, and it's essentially your customers' good will (or ignorance) that keeps them from going there to get your work for free instead of paying for it.

Technologically, it is all but impossible to prevent this. Every form of encryption and copy-protection scheme will be cracked, so they are at most an inconvenience to pirates. You can go on a crusade against those who run the file servers or upload the files, but as the RIAA has found, there are just too many for it to have any real deterrent effect when you try to make an example out of a few individuals.

It's still worthwhile to send the C&D orders and take legal action against those you catch, because while keeping piracy underground doesn't stop it, at least it makes it a little less likely that Joe Consumer will become accustomed to routinely browsing for the latest book or album at Pirate Bay.

But here's the thing: a lot of people nowadays, especially younger people (shakes cane at those damn kids traipsing across his lawn) have grown up with filesharing and BitTorrent and just take it for granted that this is something you do and it's perfectly okay and normal.

Look, FOADIAF if you think that. The vast online slushpile created by allowing anyone to upload their unedited crap will not kill professional writing, but everybody feeling entitled to read someone's work without paying for it will. If a writer offers work for free (and an increasing number of them do), that's great. But if they're selling it, then you cannot simultaneously claim to be a fan of someone's work and want to see more of it while refusing to pay for it.

Libraries and used books are, of course, a slightly different kettle of fish. But I will say that, as I am privileged enough to be able to afford to buy a new book when I want one, I generally do.