On Other Blogs

An End Run Around Public Domain

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Richard Wheeler reports that some literary heirs have found a way to undermine public domain — they trademark the name of the author, as Zane Grey’s estate has done with his name.

What the trademark accomplishes is to make it impossible for anyone to
publish a Grey novel that has fallen into the public domain unless the
publisher licenses the name of the author from the heirs. Oh, you can
print the public domain material, all right; just don’t put the
author’s name on it.

I wonder if this has ever been tested in court? If not, it probably will be soon.

Don’t Expect the “Truth” about Self-Publishing from Someone Who Runs a Vanity Press

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Earlier this month, I told you about a scam called "Beneaththecover.com," which purports to offer authors inside news and expert advice about the publishing industry when, in fact, it’s just a front for a bunch of vanity press and book promotion hucksters selling their wares.  This point was driven home the other day when one of their so-called "experts," vanity press publisher Yvonne DiVita, offered this outrageous lie in a post she had the chutzpah to title "POD Myths Dispelled – Get The Scoop Here":

In today’s
emerging digital world, if you truly want to attract that big name
publisher, use a professional POD firm to self-publish because the big
name publishers are watching.

The best way to attract a publisher is to write a good book, not blow thousands of dollars having it printed in POD form by a vanity press. If anything, printing your book in POD is more likely to prevent a publisher from taking you or the book seriously.

DiVita is one of a pack of POD vanity press hucksters who prey on the gullibility, desperation, and ignorance of aspiring authors. She argues that vanity presses aren’t merely printers but real publishers because they pay more attention to their authors than real publishers do.  What she neglects to mention is that vanity presses like hers make the vast majority of their money off their authors, not from booksales, and that all that attention they slather on their clients (not authors, ladies and gentlemen, clients)  is to convince them to spend even more on their worthless services.  She writes:

IF authors don’t sell enough books with their publisher, POD
or otherwise, the author isn’t trying hard enough. I’ve worked with
traditional publishers, and they require an extensive marketing plan
from authors before they will consider publication. And research shows
that books published by traditional publishers sell around 150-300, on
average.

That’s right, blame the author for the fact that their POD vanity press books aren’t sold in stores and are unlikely to sell to anyone but the client… and then back it up with pointless "facts."

I’ve had over two dozen books published by real publishers. No editor has ever asked me for an "extensive marketing plan" before considering my books.I’ve also asked a few published friends…and they have never been asked for marketing plans, either. But they are novelists, and perhaps they would be asked for one if they wrote non-fiction. So let’s give DiVita the benefit of the doubt and say publishers want marketing plans along with non-fiction book proposals. To which I say… So what?  How is that a persuasive argument for going to vanity-press instead of a real publisher? You’ll need a marketing plan either way. The key difference is that a real publisher will pay you and a vanity press will ask for your credit card number.

I’ve scoured the web and I can’t find any "research" that backs up her outrageous claim that most books published by genuine publishers sell only 150-300 copies.

The closet statistic I could find to her numbers was a 2004 Bookscan study that tracked sales of 1.2 million books sold that year. According to their figures, the average book of any kind published in 2004 sold 500 copies. The study noted that only 25,000 titles sold more than 5,000 copies each,
500 sold more than 100,000 copies and only ten sold more than a million
copies. But the figures are controversial, because the sales were not broken down by genre, like fiction or non-fiction, nor did they differentiate between titles from large
publishers or small ones, traditional publishers or vanity presses.

But lets pretend her figures are right. How is that an argument for going to a vanity press? Authors published by real publishers whose books only sold 500 copies in 2004 were still paid to be published.  They earned money, though not as much as they’d hoped.

By comparison, most vanity press authors will lose money because they paid to be published. But don’t take my word for it, let’s look at the 2004 sales figures from iUniverse, the biggest name in self-publishing:

18,108: Total number of titles
published

792,814: Number of copies
printed

14: Number of titles
sold through B&N’s bricks-and-mortar stores (nationally)

83: Number of titles that sold at least 500
copies

Out of 18,000 titles and nearly 800,000 copies printed, only 83 authors sold more than 500 copies. Good God. Think of all the money that authors lost …and how much iUniverse made. That’s the business that DiVita is in…and it’s a profitable one. For the printer, not the author. 

So what is the truth about POD self-publishing companies? It’s obvious. Vanity presses are in the "author services business", not the publishing business which, in a rare bit of candor, even DiVita concedes on her vanity press website:

Windsor Media Enterprises specializes in author services. We  offer idea development, manuscript critiquing, editing, proofreading, formatting and cover design, for new and existing authors.

And for that, they charge you a price and that’s how they make their money. That is their business. And if your book,  by some miracle, manages to sell a few copies, they make a little more. 

A vanity press will tell you any lie they can to convince you that they are real publishers (when they are merely selling editing and printing services), that self-publishing is the route most successful authors take (it’s not), and that you have as much of a chance to sell books with them as you do going with a traditional publisher (you don’t).

Is Yvonne DiVita really someone qualified to give writers sound advice? Or is she someone with a clear conflict-of-interest hoping to coerce naive authors into buying her product? The answer is obvious, and it came right from the founders of Beneaththecover.com  when they tried to solicit my brother Tod into being one of their experts:

Beneath the Cover is a cooperative venture for building marketing platforms of everyone involved.

That’s what should be written on the masthead of their home page, not "Where book industry professionals who know almost everything go to discuss news, insights, and evolving industry issues." And it should be stated in big print on each and every piece of "advice" that they give.

A Partnership that’s Plum Over

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The Smart Bitches are reporting what I already knew — the collaboration between my friends Janet Evanovich and Steve Cannell didn’t work out. The way I heard it from Steve, their writing styles just didn’t mesh but things ended amicably between them. I’m not surprised they have remained friends despite whatever creative tussles they may have had — they are two of the nicest,  and most talented, people I know.

Welcome to My Life

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Tess_photo
Tess Gerritsen perfectly captures my life in her blog today:

Night before last, I woke up in a sweat.  I couldn’t get back to
sleep because I was having an anxiety attack about my next book.  Oh,
it’s nothing new — I have these from time to time, and sometimes I’ll
lie awake for hours, mulling over what’s wrong with my plot, whether
I’ll be able to fix it, whether I’ll meet my deadline.  When I finally
do fall asleep, that anxiety follows me in the form of dreams.  Mine
usually involve showing up at school for a test and suddenly realizing:
I FORGOT TO ATTEND ANY CLASSES!  But I know what those dreams are
really all about: how the writing is going.

No matter where I am or what else I may be doing, this job is never far from my mind.

[…]I can be sitting on a beach on vacation, yet I’ll never really relax
because I know that there’s a half-written novel waiting on my desk and
I have only a few months to finish it.  I can’t remember the last time
I really, truly let go of the job.

She’s writing about herself, but she could just as easily be writing about me. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t feel the pressure of a book or script deadline or spent my "free time" thinking about a story I was working on or a plot I was supposed to come up with.  When I wake up at 3:30 am with jet-lag, the thoughts that keep me from getting back to sleep always involve a plot point or anxiety about meeting a deadline. I’m not complaining, far from it. It’s just nice to know that I’m not alone.

Who Says There’s Anything Wrong with a Network Affiliate Owning a City’s Only Newspaper?

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I liked Ken Levine’s observation about the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of the WGA Strike:

Good news! The LA TIMES has begun its Oscar coverage with a weekly
special section called THE ENVELOPE. Meanwhile, strike coverage has
been relegated to the Business Section. I somehow can’t see THE DETROIT
FREE-PRESS not running stories about an auto strike on page one. But
then again GM doesn’t own the DETROIT FREE-PRESS.

The Times is owned by Tribune, which also owns KTLA, one of the major affiliates of CW, one of the TV networks hit by the strike.

She-Wolf Memories

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The Retropolitan fondly remembers SHE-WOLF OF LONDON, a little-seen syndicated horror/comedy/romance that Bill Rabkin & I wrote and produced years ago…

The show’s biggest asset was the likability of the two leads. Going back and watching the show years later, after most of my memories had faded, I sort of expected to see a prototype “Buffy and Giles” relationship between Randi and Ian; I thought I was in for forty-odd minutes of a stuffy Brit getting dragged into adventures by his feisty American student. Perhaps that was the way that it was originally envisioned (it certainly has the set-up for it), but the show turned into something closer in spirit to a screwball comedy, with Randi and Ian flirting and grinning through their mysteries. Hodge and Dickson had great chemistry, and it was as much fun to watch them get into trouble and bicker with one another as it was to watch the ghoul-of-the-week come to life.

What Casting Directors Do

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THE MIDDLEMAN pilot is a go, and my friend Javi is chronicling the experience of producing it on his blog. Today he begins with an excellent explanation of how the casting process begins for the key roles in the project.

the concept meeting is that moment when the show’s team decides on a common language for the types of actors who will play the roles. the sky is the limit: if saying that the perfect actor for a role is “a young rod steiger” gets everyone on the same page, then so be it — if only because it provides a guideline, for the ensuing search for talent, and it ensures that there is consensus as to the kind of actors on which to focus (it also allows anyone at the studio and network who thinks — hey, “young rod steiger” is wrong, how about a “young raymond burr” — to voice their opinion, which, of course, leads to the inevitable consensus of “ok, how about a young william conrad?”).

the casting agents — trained professionals that they are — inform these conceptual discussions (and bring them down to earth) by offering their own lists of actors whom they believe are right, who are available, and who may be disposed to doing the project.

understanding and respecting the artistry of a good casting agent is crucial to producing a series — their job is to not only find the agreed-upon type, but also to identify actors who are up to the challenges of the project, and to open up the producers’ eyes to talent that may not necessarily fit the concept but who bring other things to a role that are equally interesting.

There’s a reason why they are called "Casting Directors," because they are actually bringing their taste, experience, and unique creative pov to the project, the same way a director does. You aren’t hiring someone just to sift through pictures and resumes (I have worked with casting director like that…and it was hell). It also helps if you can establish a creative partnership with a casting director who understands how you think, how you view story, the acting styles you like, and your approach to character.

I’ve been fortunate to have worked for years with two of the best casting directors in the business — Victoria Burrows & Scot Boland (LORD OF THE RINGS, 21 JUMP STREET, CAST AWAY, the new RESIDENT EVIL movie) — on two TV series, several pilots, and most recently on the U.S. casting for the FAST TRACK pilot. Having a creative short-hand together makes things a lot easier. I can always count on them to bring in just the right people…but they will also bring in some unexpected actors who offer a very different take on the character than I had in mind. Some times those actors are interesting misfires, but more often than not, it’s those unexpected choices we end up going with.  It was Victoria and Scot who found Johnny Depp for 21 JUMP STREET, Kevin Spacey for WISE GUY, and Viggio Mortenson for LORD OF THE RINGS, so that should tell you something about their creative instincts.

For the lead in FAST TRACK, they brought in Erin Cahill. She was exactly the face, the voice, the attitude and the look I imagined when I was writing. Erin was so close to the picture in my head that it was a bit startling for me. I’m not surprised at all that Victoria and Scot found her. That’s why they are so good at what they do.

But I also remember a time on DIAGNOSIS MURDER, when they brought in an actor for a spin-off pilot who’s performance wasn’t what Bill Rabkin and I had in mind at all…but he was so compelling, so interesting, so unique, that we had to cast him. It was Neil McDonough, and he was by far the best thing about the pilot. He later did a multi-episode arc for us on MARTIAL LAW, then immediately went on to BAND OF BROTHERS, MINORITY REPORT and BOOMTOWN.

Who you hire as a casting director is, next to the director himself, the most important choice you will make when you begin your production.  If you don’t have the right actors, you don’t have a show…