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Foam and Froth and Mighty (Upside-down) Pyramids

Written by Eric Flint

Beginning with this essay, I want to start looking at the question of DRM and modern copyright laws from a different standpoint than I’ve taken so far. I want to examine the new digital era in terms of how authors and publishers can take advantage of it. Had the music recording and movie industries done this years ago, instead of panicking themselves over the dangers of the digital era, we’d all be in a lot better shape—and we’d have a lot fewer bad laws on the books.

I need to start, however, by debunking some myths. Myths which, no matter how wrong-headed and patently foolish, are widely held.

How widely? Widely enough that Time magazine, in its recent commemorative issue on the inauguration of the new U.S. President, Barack Obama—the issue was dated February 2, 2009—ran a major article on the subject of publishing in the electronic era. The author of the article was Lev Grossman, and the title was “Books Unbound.”

It’s a long article, and quite fascinating. It’s been years since I can recall reading anything that managed to combine as much in the way of error and misinformation, and then present it wrapped with such illogical reasoning.

So let’s go through it, step by step. Polemics can often be the best way to make some points.

Grossman begins by recounting the story of a health-care industry consultant named Lisa Genova who’d written a novel but couldn’t find an agent and couldn’t find an editor interested in the book. So, finally, she self-published in 2007 by paying a company to produce the book. This, of course, is the familiar route whereby would-be authors use a so-called “vanity press” to get themselves in print.

Nowadays, it’s claimed by some that “self-publishing”—even when you pay a company to do the printing and much of the actual publishing work—is not the same thing as a vanity press. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I’m not honestly interested in the distinction because it doesn’t matter. As it happens, I don’t myself have any particular bias against self-publishing. I considered it once myself, in the years before I’d gotten anything published, and while I decided against it my reasons were entirely practical. It’s a very ineffective way to get published, that’s all—with some exceptions, which I’ll discuss below.

But Grossman claims it worked for the novelist, Lisa Genova, in this instance. According to the article:

“That was in 2007. By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all—and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5.”

The logic involved is mind-boggling—an example of the error of post hoc ergo propter hoc that is cruder than most.

For those of you who’ve forgotten my earlier column on the subject, the Latin phrase post hoc ergo propter hoc means “after which, therefore because of which.” It’s the logical fallacy of presuming that because Event B occurred after Event A, then Event B must have been caused by Event A.

In this instance, the logical gap is obvious, and it falls between the sentence than ends “. . . and those few were liking it” and the next sentence, which starts “Genova wound up getting an agent after all . . .”

I don’t know how Genova wound up getting an agent, nor how that agent manage to persuade a major publishing house to pony up a half million dollar advance for a first novel. If you’re wondering, by the way: no, that isn’t common. It’s about as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth. The average advance for a new novel is between $3000 and $7000—and few of them earn enough to repay the advance.

Here’s what I do know. However this all happened, the fact that Genova self-published the book had absolutely nothing to do with her later success. In fact, it would have been an obstacle for her agent and something that the editor who got enthused about the book would have had to explain away to her or his boss in the publishing house. Self-publishing—whether or not it’s considered the same as a vanity press—is not an asset for an author.

The reasons should be obvious. First, because it always carries at least the implication that the author couldn’t find a commercial publisher—presumably because the author isn’t very good. And, secondly, because no publisher likes to pay a lot of money to publish a book which is at least technically a reissue, rather than a new title.

What I suspect happened was simply that Genova got somehow hooked up with this agent, and the agent took it from there. Mind you, it’s quite possible that she handed the agent a copy of the self-published novel, since it existed, and that’s how the agent first read it. But she could just as easily have handed her agent a manuscript and gotten the same result.

The point is that there is no connection between those two events—and Grossman could have easily determined that by a simple reversal of the question. To wit:

Lots of books get published every year through self-publishing and vanity presses. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s lots and lots.

How many of them wind up #5 on the New York Times bestseller?

Uh . . . Maybe one every five years, if that often. Yet meantime, week after week after week—the list is run on a weekly basis—other titles that were not self-published make it to #5 on that list. Not to mention Numbers One, Two, Three and Four.

For that matter, how many self-published or vanity press titles ever get picked up later by a commercial publisher, regardless of the size of the advance and regardless of whether the title makes the NYT list? That does happen, but it happens very rarely. At least 99.9% of all self-published and vanity press titles never go anywhere beyond the tiny circulation that is typical of such titles.

Grossman’s argument, logically speaking, is no different from someone writing a gushy article that relates the story of how Person A won the state lottery—which, by the by, happens more often than an unpublished author gets an advance of $500,000 from a publishing house—and giving the reader the impression that . . .

Winning the state lottery is the new way everyone will make a living!

To be blunt about it, Grossman is being dishonest by opening his essay with this anecdote. Clearly, the purpose of the anecdote is to lay the basis for the rest of his long article, which is devoting to arguing that publishing is on the verge of a profound sea change and that authors will no longer earn their living by making royalties. But how can a lively anecdote about a tiny fraction of human experience in publishing possibly provide a basis for that argument?

Answer: it can’t. But, gee, isn’t it a nifty anecdote? So let’s just charge ahead as if we’d established anything.

Basically, his article repeats all the fallacies of pro-DRM advocates, but from the opposite standpoint. Grossman agrees with the most extreme pro-DRM advocates that the digital era poses a mortal threat to copyright. The difference is simply that it’s implied that he thinks that’s to the best, and he states explicitly that it is inevitable and that the publishing industry might as well get used to it.

Let us now proceed through his reasoning, such as it is, step by step. But remember that he begins it all with a patent piece of duplicity: That because Author X made it big by self-publishing, that represents the wave of the future.

Following the Genova anecdote, Grossman gives a capsule history of the novel. His main point here is that the existence of the novel in its modern form is relatively recent in human history, dating back no earlier than the early 18^th century. He’s wrong about that, too, by the way. The modern novel began in the 17^th century with such titles as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and you can find plenty of examples of similarly long tales still earlier than that. Rabelais’ famous stories Gargantua and Pantagruel were published in the 16^th century.

For that matter, the human race has always doted on long and complicated stories. That’s been true for millennia, and is exemplified in such things as the Bible—which, in literary terms, is a complex and multi-authored work far longer than any commercial novel—and the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, which is probably the longest single story ever told and makes Tolstoy’s War and Peace look like a short afternoon’s tale.

Still, there’s a kernel of truth in Grossman’s claim. It is true that the advent of the modern novel “happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technical circumstances.” Specifically:

The invention of the printing press—which happened two and a half centuries earlier, remember—made it possible to produce a lot of relatively cheap copies of a single work.

The rise of capitalism and modern commodity production meant that you had a well-developed marketing network.

The same profound economic and social forces were beginning to produce a large so-called “middle class” which was generally both urban and literate.

Finally, the adoption of modern copyright laws—the first of which in the English-speaking world was the Statute of Anne in 1709—gave authors an established legal framework within which they could make a living plying their trade.

All this is true enough. It’s what comes next that causes the problem, because—once again—Grossman is about to take one of his flying leaps in logic.

Here’s the next sentence in the essay:

“Fast forward to the early 21^st century: the publishing industry is in distress.”

He then proceeds with a long paragraph listing various and sundry problems besetting the industry. This publisher laying off editors and other staff, that publisher undergoing a drastic reorganization, salaries frozen in many publishing houses, and so on and so forth.

Once again, we see the Grossman Method of Logic. Relate an anecdote or collection of anecdotes and then sally forward, breezily assuming that you’ve proven or demonstrated anything by the anecdote.

But, again, this is all balderdash.

It is indeed true that, right now, the publishing industry is having more than its usual share of woes. And . . .

This proves or demonstrates what, exactly?

Absolutely nothing.

Let’s start with the plight of the hapless editors, who find themselves out of a job. For Pete’s sake, the publishing industry has always been notorious for firing editors. If you don’t believe me, ask any editor. Publishing is one of those few industries which has the great advantage of being somewhat glamorous. It therefore attracts a lot of would-be editors mostly because they really like literature and think (often correctly, by the way) that they would enjoy a career in publishing for that reason. And they’re willing to put up with a lot in order to get that benefit—a lot more than they’d put up with, if they were employed as washing machine salesmen.

Trust me on this one, I know a lot of editors. If you get any editor to talk to you over a few beers, they will all tell you that the industry pays lousy and that the stability of employment is usually just as bad as the salaries. And honest publishers—many of whom began as editors themselves—will tell you exactly the same thing.

And it’s always been that way. It was that way a hundred years ago, and it was that way two hundred years ago. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, nobody but a blockhead ever undertook to make a lot of money in publishing. It is and always has been a relatively low-profit and chancy industry.

Nor is there anything new about publishing houses being “in the midst of a drastic reorganization.” From the standpoint of the news—or any relevance to Grossman’s argument—he might as well have stated that there was fog in London and sunny weather in San Diego. Gee, no kidding.

But there’s a method to Grossman’s madness. Having, once again, established an irrelevant fact, he charges on. He proceeds to recount the basic features of the publishing industry, and—this is perhaps the only useful part of his article—dismisses along the way several other myths.

He notes, in particular, that the hoary chestnut that publishing is in trouble because people today don’t read due to electronic distractions is blithering nonsense. He points out, for instance, that literary reading by adults has actually increased over the past few years. (And although he doesn’t mention it, reading by teenagers had also increased.)

But we can smell trouble coming by the time he spends dwelling on what he considers the very peculiar features of the industry. He singles out two in particular:

First, he spends time explaining the system whereby authors get mostly paid by advances against royalties—which (he somewhat breathlessly reports) don’t have to get paid back by the authors if the book doesn’t sell well.

Is he right about this? Yup, he sure is. Most authors never see any royalty payments because most books never “earn out”—to use the industry expression—the advance that was originally paid for them. And although you can look at advances as loans advanced against eventual royalties, they have the peculiar features that the loans have no interest and don’t have to be paid back if the royalties don’t cover them.

Yes, yes, yes, it’s all true—and it’s all completely irrelevant to Grossman’s argument.

Why? Two reasons:

First, it’s been true for decades, probably centuries. So what difference does it make now?

Secondly, there’s a big fudge involved, and it goes back to the distinctions between authors which I made very early in this series of essays. (You can find the discussion in my columns for the third essay, published in the October 2006 issue of this magazine.)

Yes, it is true that “most” authors never earn royalties. But there is a big difference between “most authors” and “most books sold.” The great majority of books sold are written by a relatively small number of writers—usually called “lead writers” in the industry—and those writers typically do earn royalties.

I will use myself as an example, since I know my situation the best. I am today a very well-established lead writer in the large genre called “science fiction and fantasy.” I just recently published my thirtieth novel.

Thirty novels, all of them still in print—and well over ninety percent of which have earned out their advance and are paying me royalties. And the few which haven’t earned out still have a good chance of doing so, by the way. They’ll certainly come very close to earning out.

Is that unusual for lead writers? No, not particularly, except for the fact that all my books are still in print. That is a bit unusual, and is explained by the fact that almost all of my books are published through Baen Books, which is an independent publishing house and keeps its titles in print longer than a big corporate house typically will.

In short, once again, Grossman has advanced an observation which, while true enough in its own terms, has no relevance to his argument. Yes, advances are an unusual way for an industry to pay for its most critical labor. But, first, there are good reasons for doing so, that are relevant to the specific nature of the industry. It’s worth noting that the entertainment industries in general very often have unusual ways of paying for their most critical labor. Boxers, for instance, work for prize money. No one proposes to substitute prize money for regular wages in the steel industry, however—and the boxing industry has somehow managed to stay afloat for several centuries nevertheless.

Secondly, the advances system creates no great burden for the industry since the big majority of the really critical labor does earn out the advances.

As is demonstrated, third, by the simple fact that things have been chugging along this way for a very long time now.

Grossman then goes on to examine the peculiar and complicated way in which the industry sells its product. Publishing is one of the few major industries that works primarily on a consignment basis. If books go unsold, the retailers can return the books to the publisher, and it is the publisher and not the retailer who absorbs the loss.

I could easily spend an essay (or two or three) on the stupidities of the consignment system which has dominated publishing since the publishing industry was foolish enough to institute the system back in the Great Depression.

It’s an asinine system, in my opinion, sure enough. I have no quarrel with Grossman on that subject.

But . . . but . . .

The operative clause in terms of this argument is “back in the Great Depression.” For Pete’s sake, whether right or wrong or somewhere in between, the consignment system as the basic model for book distribution has now been in existence for three-quarters of a century. Most of you reading this essay hadn’t been born yet, and those few of you who had been born were probably too young to remember it anyway.

So what does any of this have to do with the supposed transformation in the publishing industry that Grossman claims is caused by the digital era? The consignment system had been in existence for at least a decade before ENIAC fired up its 17,468 vacuum tubes to become the world’s first Turing-complete digital computer. Whatever its problems may be, if they were really that big a deal they would presumably have torpedoed the industry long ago.

An aside here. The reason I detest the consignment system has little do with the overall economics of the publishing industry. From the standpoint of publishing as a whole, it’s really no big deal. It simply means that they have to build into their price structure the fact that they have to print about twice as many books as they will actually sell. (What happens, in effect, is that when you pay eight dollars for a paperback in a bookstore, you’re actually buying two books—the one you’re taking home with you, and the extra copy of the same book that is going to get pulped to keep the whole circulation stream going.)

Well, they did that a long time ago, and things have been chugging along well enough since.

No, the real problem with the consignment system from my standpoint is that, combined with the major changes in the distribution industry over the past two decades or so, it tends to make bookstores stupid. “Stupid” in the functioning sense that since they don’t take most of the risks of bad decisions they make but can pass them onto the publishers, they make a lot of bad mistakes. What’s probably more important, to me at least, is that they are also incredibly careless.

What I mean by that is this: Because of the sloppiness of the consignment system, major chain bookstores typically spend little time and effort (much less money) keeping careful track of all their titles. Instead, they concentrate almost entirely on the few big blockbuster titles—which is where they make most of their profits—and tend to ignore everything else.

But “everything else” means well over 99% of their titles. If any other retailer was as careless with most of their inventory as bookstores are, they’d go out of business pretty quickly. But bookstores don’t care that much, because most of the burden for their screw-ups winds up getting borne by the publishers thanks to the consignment system.

For all authors except the tiny number of top-selling ones, that means the system is a burden on them also. For those authors—and I’m one of them—it means that not only is their livelihood completely dependent on the market but, in this instance, it’s a market that has the brains of a moron.

Again, trust me on this one. I don’t know any successful author who hasn’t gritted his or her teeth when they see the way that bookstores so often are obviously paying no attention to sales. There will be one or even no copies of a book of theirs which is actually selling quite well, right next to multiple copies of a title by some other author that they know isn’t selling well at all.

What’s far worse is the plight of new and midlist authors, whose novels can have excellent sell-through but will never earn out their advances because the bookstores don’t order enough copies. They presumably would order more copies if they started paying attention to their whole inventory, and began noticing that some titles by new authors have a sell-through of 70% or 80%, which is well above average. But . . . they just don’t bother. If those lost sales were costing the bookstores money, they’d start paying attention to the problem. But they don’t, so they just shrug it off.

And that, in a (very abbreviated) nutshell, is why I dislike the consignment system. But please note that this has absolutely nothing to do with what Grossman is prattling on about.

The purpose of all this prattle—we’re about to see another Grossman Leap of Logic—is to give the impression that (somehow or other) he has laid the basis for the next stage in his argument. Which begins as follows:

“If you think about it, shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty 20^th century.”

Well . . . yeah, I suppose. But why stop there? Centuries do not succeed one another like so many discrete and separate stones. Actually, they don’t really even exist except by arbitrary human custom. One year passes into another, that’s all. The difference between 1999 and 2000 (or 2000 and 2001 if you’re a purist about these things) was really no greater than it was between 1998 and 1999, or 2001 and 2002.

For Pete’s sake, lots of things—most things, in fact—are still “pretty 20th century.”

The way we build roads . . . yup, still pretty 20^th century. But the roads work, don’t they?

The way we make steel . . . yup, still pretty 20^th century. But the alloy still serves its functions, doesn’t it?

Should I go on? Should I slaughter untold innocent electrons with an endless list of all the things still being done and produced today that are “pretty 20^th century”? But that still work just fine and are causing no problems at all.

Once again, Grossman’s method of argumentation is to establish an irrelevant truth (or sometimes, semi-truth) and then press on as if he’d demonstrated or established anything significant.

Sure enough, the very next sentence is:

“Novels are getting restless, shrugging off their expensive papery husks and transmigrating digitally into other forms.”

Aha! Finally! After all this blather, we get to the real nitty-gritty. Just like all the extreme pro-DRM advocates, Grossman thinks we’ve really entered into a completely new world of publishing.

But it’s all baloney. As I’ve established in earlier columns, it is simply prattle to claim that publishing is rapidly moving from a paper to an electronic format.

No, sorry, it ain’t. The overwhelming majority of books written, sold and read are still produced on paper—and while electronic reading is growing, it is growing slowly. (Outside of a few specialty areas, like encyclopedia publishing.)

Just as—to go back to the first Grossman myth—the overwhelming majority of authors still get started the old-fashioned way, by submitting a manuscript to a commercial publisher. The number of successful authors who got started by self-publishing or using a vanity press is miniscule.

Another aside here. I said early in this essay that there were some exceptions to the general rule that self-publishing is impractical. So I should probably explain them now.

The exception comes with certain types of non-fiction books. The big problem with self-publishing isn’t actually the publishing part of it. Nowadays, with modern computers and printing methods, that’s pretty easy and not even very expensive.

No, the real problem comes with distribution. The standard story for self-publishers—which happens at least a thousand times for every Lisa Genova story—is that they wind up with a garage or basement full of their (unsold) books. Major distributors will not take them, because such titles generally sell like crap. And without the resources of a major publisher, the author is reduced to physically hauling the books around personally and trying to sell them or get a bookstore to take them on consignment. This gets counter-productive very quickly, it should be obvious.

The problem is that, with most books and almost all fiction, it’s simply very difficult to target the audience. But that’s not necessarily true with non-fiction titles, especially ones that have a tight focus. To give an example I know about personally, many years ago a friend of my mother self-published a book on a specific aspect of psychiatric care. She distributed the book herself and sold several thousand copies of it—which matches the level of sales of most commercially-produced books, even in numbers, and was far more successful for her financially since she got to keep all the money instead of only the small portion (somewhere between eight and fifteen percent) that authors get from commercial publishers.

The reason she could do so, however, was because:

First, the book focused on a very specific subject.

Second, she was a well-established and well-known expert on the subject among psychiatric social workers and nurses in psychiatric institutions.

Third, she sold the book at conventions frequented by other such professionals in her field, which provided her with an already assembled perfect target audience.

So, in this instance, self-publishing worked. But none of those conditions, much less all three of them, is likely to exist when it comes to a novel.

Like any “rule of publishing,” you can find occasional exceptions to these nostrums. But that’s what they—rare exceptions. They are certainly not the rule, and they cannot be used the way Grossman tries to use them, as props to support the most rickety logical structure imaginable.

But he keeps doing it. Having established, to his satisfaction if not the satisfaction of reality, that paper books are “pretty 20^th century,” he charges on yet again. Now he claims that the wave of the future is electronic books read on cell phones and—

—wait for it—

Fan fiction!

Yup, fan fiction. With logical methods unsurpassed since Alice fell into the rabbit hole, Grossman has gone from the anecdote about Lisa Genova and her self-published success to the notion that the future of publishing will be . . .

Oh, I just can’t summarize his prose. It really needs to speak for itself. I’m trimming some of the text to keep it from keeping too long-winded. It’s impossible to keep it from being windy, of course, since it’s all hot air:

“So if the economic and technological changes of the 18^th century gave rise to the modern novel, what’s the 21^st century giving us?. . . From a modern capitalist marketplace, we’ve moved to a postmodern, postcapitalist bazaar where money is increasingly optional . . . Put these pieces together, and the picture begins to resolve itself: more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild variety of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City’s entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste . . . [Old Publishing] will live on in a radically altered, symbiotic form as the small, pointy peak of a mighty pyramid . . . The wide bottom of the pyramid will consist of a vast foamy layer of free, unedited, Web-only fiction, rated and ranked YouTube style by the anonymous reading masses.

“And what will fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point.”

Oh, my. What you see above is just another version of the Great Nightmare of all pro-DRM advocates—but in the form of a wet dream.

And that’s what it is. A wet dream. Pure, unadulterated balderdash. Reality turned on its head—and quite literally. A so-called “mighty pyramid” in which not only all the money but almost all the readers will reside in the “small, pointy peak,” while the supposedly “wide bottom” will indeed be foamy. That is to say, mostly froth and looking way, way bigger than it actually is.

Has common sense been outlawed? Ask yourself how much of your reading consists of wading through unedited and self-selected fan fiction that you read on a cell phone? (Or read anywhere else, for that matter.)

One percent? Most likely, no percent. Ask anyone you know who reads a lot. The answer will be the same.

Nobody with any experience in real world publishing, whether as an author or an editor or a publisher—or a reader—will recognize the picture that Grossman is painting. It’s completely surreal. It has literally no connection to the real world.

I don’t think Grossman realizes it, but the logic of his argument is that traditional commercial publishing has survived—even prospered—for at least three centuries by perpetrating an enormous fraud on the world. Because, it turns out—such is the wisdom of Grossman, anyway—that the following things are true:

First, there is no distinction between good authors, mediocre authors and bad authors except blind luck in the market.

Second, the vast reading public is made up almost entirely of imbeciles who will cheerfully spend many hours—but no money!—reading drivel.

Third, “Old Publishing” is a pack of swindlers who have stayed afloat for three hundred years by convincing the reading public that there really is a difference between good writing (or even just competent writing) and bad writing, and that they perform a valuable function in separating the wheat from the chaff.

But now we learn the truth. There is no wheat and there is no chaff. There is only the foam.

Where to start? Readers who’ve been following this column from its inception will of course recognize that I’ve already demolished most of these notions. True, the notions were advanced in the form of alarmist fears, not Grossman’s triumphalism. But they’re the same notions.

But enough’s enough. I spent this essay examining Grossman’s article in Time magazine simply to establish that the mythology concerning the “modern digital era” is very widely spread. What I want to do now, starting in the next essay, is approach the problem from the standpoint of a commercial author who has—in the real world, and not Grossman’s world of foam and froth—used the techniques of the digital era very successfully. And, perhaps ironically, done many of the same things in practice that Grossman fantasizes about, but did them successfully because I do not share any of his misperceptions.

To give an example, so far as I know I am the only fiction author today—in any genre—who has successfully incorporated so-called “fan fiction” into a series whose novels regularly appear on the New York Times bestseller list. What Grossman prattles about, I have done.

But I certainly didn’t do it his way, which is nonsensical. I did it by recognizing that publishing is still and will continue to be dominated by what he calls “Old Publishing,” but that the digital era does provide authors (as well as publishers) with a number of valuable new methods and avenues for practicing their ancient craft.

We’ll get into that in my essay for the next issue of the magazine.