#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
I got this email today:
Greetings – I am looking to purchase 5 text link ads on neilgaiman.com/journal/
Each ad is two to three words in length and can be placed anywhere on your page as long as the ads are visible on the majority of pages on your website. I would be willing to pay for 3 months of advertising up front. Would you be interested?
I haven’t been feeling like myself lately…but I’m pretty sure that I’m not Neil Gaiman.
I got this "personal" email today from Matt Burke at Vendorpro:
I’ve been to your Lee Goldberg website and I think your books are perfect for our stores. I especially like "Diagnosis Murder Series". We work hand in hand with the largest stores in the country, plus thousands of small to medium sized specialty businesses stretched across the U.S. If you want the opportunity to sell your books through major retailers like Barnes and Noble, Borders, Amazon.com, Waldens, Target, QVC, HSN, etc …plus the other 51005 gift stores, 16826 bookstores, and over 24000 mail-order catalogs…check us out.
Here’s what I told Matt. I thanked him for the personal email. It gave me a good indication of his honesty, attention to detail and professionalism… because if he’d really been to my site, he’d know my DIAGNOSIS MURDER books are published by Penguin/Putnam, one of the largest publishers in the world, and are already available at major retailers. Matt needs to work on his pitch (or at least do his homework) before sending out his junk mail — or, at the very least, give up the pretense that he knows anything about me or my books.
I got this email the other day. Here it is, in its entirety:
For anyone interested.
Does he really think an agent will stumble on his blog and offer to represent him? Or that a publisher will be so enthralled by his prose that they’ll offer him a book contract? Or that a development exec at some studio will read it and beg to buy the movie rights? Sure, some blogs and websites have led to book and movies deals. But it’s exceedingly rare.
My advice to Steve is to take the chapters down. The book clearly needs lots of work before it’s going to be ready to submit to an agent or publisher. And he isn’t doing himself any favors by posting the rough chapters publicly and — cringe — posting a cheesy, home-made "cover" and — big cringe — linking to a "review" of the pages from some blogger.
Where do people get these really, really bad ideas?
UPDATE 5-26-06: For reactions and discussions prompted by this post, look here, here, here, here, here and here. The consensus, with a couple of exceptions, seems to be that I’m a bully who reacted too harshly (one blogger, David Thayer, likened this dust-up to "Godzilla vs. Bambi"). Perhaps that’s true… I was certainly in a sour mood last week.
I got this email the other day:
I recently wrote a heady sci-fi thriller that has gotten good response
from people, but my manager calls "unmarketable". You see, apparently,
if Hollywood wants a Phillip K. Dick type of story, they go buy a real
Phillip K. Dick story. But, unless the budget is under 10mil, they
won’t touch it without his name on it. So, I was thinking, since book publishers don’t have "shootable"
constraints, would they ever read scripts with an eye on the author
building them out into novel form? I’d love to make it a novel, if I
thought others would love it to be one. Would Del Rey read a script? Would they even consider, let alone pay for, a property not in novel form?
I’m not sure your manager is right about your script. If it’s good, people will buy it. If it’s not, they won’t. My guess is that either he’s lazy or he thinks your script is unmarketable because it isn’t very good. That aside, the answer to your question is no, a publisher/editor won’t read the script. They buy books, not scripts. They don’t know how
to read a script. And most important of all, they can’t tell from a script if you can write a
book. You might be able to get way with writing a 100 sample manuscript pages and
an outline of the rest if you have a good literary agent that editors trust.
This is a long post… so feel free to scroll past if you don’t have time to kill. This week, I ran smack into an ethical dilemma and it was all thanks to this short email from a complete stranger:
Charles Willeford’s GRIMHAVEN. Looks like you expressed interest in it in a blog a couple of years ago. Still interested?
Yes, I replied, of course I was interested. GRIMHAVEN is Willeford’s unpublished Hoke Mosely novel, his dark and self-destructive follow-up to MIAMI BLUES, his break-out hit. GRIMHAVEN reportedly turned Hoke into a sociopath who murders his children. Willeford’s agent wisely counseled him that it would be career suicide to submit that book to his publisher and that, instead, he should bury it and write something that would capitalize on the success of MIAMI BLUES, rather than piss all over it. Willeford took the advice and wrote three more great Hoke novels before his death. But like all Willeford fans, I’ve been intensely curious about the book. The few people I know who’ve read it say it’s Willeford at his best and worst.
So hell yes, I want to read it.
A day or two later, I got another email from the stranger. This time the note was longer, chatty, friendly, and full of tantalizing comments about the book ("it’s a viscerally sickening read, alright (I’ve got two girls), even if it has a certain internal consistency and simplicity").
He went on to talk about how he bought a xeroxed copy of the manuscript some years ago from a "bootlegger" for a mere $20 and that he came across "some asshole" selling the same photocopy for $200 on the Internet.
But I figure that it’s something the world should have, so I scanned and OCRed it, and after being distracted from it for about six months I’m finishing up the proofreading. Right now I’ve got 200 tiffs and 200 individual-page text files, and once the proofing is done I’ll concatenate it into a single text file. So the question is this: What’s the best way to get it out to the people who want to find it? Is there a torrent tracker favoured by traffickers of bootleg manuscripts?
Yes, I wanted to read GRIMHAVEN…but the idea that someone would take an unpublished manuscript that didn’t belong to him and distribute it all over the planet made me queasy…as did the idea that he thought that I would help him do it.
But why shouldn’t he think so? After all, didn’t I jump out of my seat when he offered me the book? Didn’t that make me just the kind of guy he thought I was? While I was wrestling with these uncomfortable questions, another email showed up from him:
I got this email from a very successful and critically acclaimed mystery novelist I know (who gave me permission to post this as long as I removed his or her name):
How can you be friends with Joe Konrath? He’s the anti-Christ. In his own way, he is as bad or worse than Lori Prokop. The advice he gives to aspiring writers is just terrible and, worse, he’s doing everything he can to undermine his fellow professionals. How, you ask? He’s perpetuating the myth that you should devote all or part of your advance to promotion, that you should devote yourself to making sure that the publisher makes money (even if it costs you). What he’s doing is legitimizing the damaging corporate mindset that authors should pay for their own promotion without any investment or reimbursement from the publisher. We’re supposed to live off our advances, not kick them back to the publisher for advertising and promotion. Joe’s latest moronic blog post was so infuriating I almost put my fist into my laptop screen. Of course his publisher loves him. But professional writers should fear him. He’s cancer.
After getting this email, I had to scoot right over to Joe’s blog to see what had pissed off my usually low-key buddy so much. I think this is it:
My writing philosophy is simple: Make money for your publisher.
I do this by not only doing a lot of self-promotion, but by also
considering my audience even before I sit down to write a single word.This means compromises. This means understanding the system writing
exists in (the publishing business) and weighing it against the many
reasons I wanted to become a writer.Successful writers seem to understand this balance, and the
trade-offs required. They realize that their books are products as well
as art.By ‘successful’ I mean that they are making money for their
publisher. You don’t have to be an NYT bestseller to do this. All you
have to do is earn out your advance.You can earn out your advance by doing a lot of self-promotion, by
working closely with your publisher, by spending a lot of your advance
money on marketing, and by writing good books.
Let me start by saying I really like Joe. I think he’s funny, gracious, multi-talented, and genuinely interested in helping his fellow writers. We don’t always agree, but that’s okay by me — I don’t always agree with my wife, either, but we still love each other. Sure, I disagree with Joe from time to time, but that doesn’t diminish my respect for him or how much I enjoy his company.
I’ve always been awed by the incredible time and energy Joe puts into promoting his books. He visited something like 200 booksstores for "drop in" signings during a promotional tour which, I believe, was paid for by his publisher. He does an amazing job getting his work noticed and I applaud him for it.
That said, I don’t agree with his frequently expressed philosophy that your job as an author is to make money for your publisher and pump your advance into promotion. It’s nice if you’re in the financial position to do that (it’s what I did with many of my books), but most authors aren’t. They write to support their families and, from a business stand-point, it isn’t cost-effective for them to donate a significant portion of their advances to their publisher.
Joe frequently talks about how important it is to promote your books and assure that each title earns out. For those not in the biz, "earning out" simply means that you’ve sold enough books to earn back the advance against royalties that the publisher paid you. That doesn’t mean that once you hit that point you are making tons of money, it just makes it more likely the publisher will buy your next book.
I agree that authors need to promote themselves and their work…and that you need to earn out if you’re going to survive in this business. But the publishers have a responsibility to do more than merely publish and distribute the book. They also have to advertise and promote. They can’t expect the author to shoulder most of that burden.
Or can they? More and more, it seems, publishers are expecting authors to use their advances for promotion, pay for their own websites, and send themselves on tour … and if they don’t, they are seen as being "unsupportive" and "difficult to work with." And that is scary, especially with the midlist disappearing and advances shrinking. The advance is supposed to support an author while he works, not act as a replacement for corporate spending on advertising and promotion…it is NOT a replacement for the publisher’s advertising budget.
But if authors like my friend Joe keep advocating that it’s the author’s responsibility to devote some or all of their advance for promotion, and authors and publishers buy into that thinking, we will see publishers spending less on advertising and promotion and earnings for authors shrinking even more.
I’m NOT saying authors shouldn’t promote their work — God knows, I certainly work hard to promote myself (take this blog, for instance). But I have to admit that Joe’s "What have you done for your publisher today?" attitude often makes me cringe. He makes up for it my making me laugh a lot, and with his many keen insights into the biz, so it evens out.
Your thoughts?
UPDATE: Joe has responded in the comments below and also shares his views on his blog.
I got this email the other day from a publishing exec I know:
I have an author in Minnesota who is working with a production company to produce a movie from one of her books, but the production company is a little stuck. They are looking for funding and distribution but don’t know for sure where to begin. Do you have any advise on where they might start?
Of course they’re stuck. They don’t know what the hell they are doing. A real production company, which this company clearly isn’t, would know how to finance and distribute films. Clearly, the author optioned her book to amateurs and wanna-bes (or worse, complete frauds) who know nothing about the business they claim to be in. If it’s not too late, back out of the deal and run screaming from these people. Anybody can call himself a movie producer, that doesn’t mean he is one.
I got this email today from my brother Tod about my buddy James Kosub, worldwide President of the Lee Goldberg Fan Club:
You’ll be happy to know that the man who once lambasted you for writing
tie-ins, is now trying to get a job…writing tie-ins. I fucking love that guy!
I had to check this out for myself. Sure enough, Jim is sniffing around for tie-in work:
I sent an email to a gentleman at Black Flame
today, inquiring about possible work on the media tie-ins his imprint
produces… The way I figure it is this: go where the work is… It’ll be a challenge, I’m sure. It’s always easier to work with
wholly original material than with licensed properties, but it’s a
credit and a paycheck, and that’s what matters.
This struck me as an odd switcheroo, coming from a man who once described me as follows:
"For a man who makes his living writing television show
pastiches for those who cannot summon the intellectual wherewithal to tackle
original mystery fiction, he’s painfully full of himself…"
I wish Jim the best of luck in his endeavors to become as painfully full of himself as I am. If you would like to find out more about the tie-in field, I invite you to visit the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers and browse through their wealth of articles on the subject.
For some reason, I've received lots of emails lately asking about Tate Publishing. Here's one:
My daughter (14 years old) recently submitted (through her school) a children’s book that she wrote. Surprisingly, she received a contract to publish her book from Tate Publishing. However, they are asking us to invest almost $4,000. I am simply trying to determine if Tate is a vanity publisher, POD publisher, or what? I want to support my daughter, but I want to be educated first. I cannot find much on the internet about Tate Publishing. Any information you could provide would be greatly appreciated.
I can't imagine why any school or responsible teacher would submit student work to a vanity press, but that issue aside, here's what I told her (which will be familiar to any of you who read this blog on a regular basis): Legitimate publishers pay YOU, not the other way around. Any publisher that asks you for money in return for "publishing" your book is a vanity press. If you are intent on publishing your daughter's work in book form yourself, go to Lulu, you won't have to pay a penny out-0f-pocket, or you can create an ebook edition for the Kindle and sell it on Amazon absolutely free.
Here's another email I received about Tate:
What can you tell me about Tate Publishing Co? Unfortunately, I have already invested almost $ 8,000 in 2 books, both of which are now published. I visited their offices twice, met the staff and felt they were legit Christian organization.
I don't know what being Christian has to do with anything. What makes him think that a Christian won't rip him off? I guess he 's unfamiliar with most TV evangelists and their "send me your cash" brand of faith and spirituality. But that's a different issue.
As far as Tate goes, I told him basically the same thing I told the other person: Tate is a vanity press. They make their money selling books to desperate, naive, and gullible authors, not to readers. You can self-publish your book, for now cash out-of-pocket, elsewhere. But if you are intent on throwing your money away, I'm sure you can find some Christians at another, far less predatory, vanity press who will print your manuscript in book form for much, much less money.
Updated 2/10/2010
UPDATE 6/1/2012: Those lovely people at Tate are in the news again, this time for firing 25 employees and threatening others who dared to speak about the company's plans to outsource their sleazy vanity press operation to the Phillipines.
Tate Publishing President Ryan Tate said the company is opening an office in the Philippines, but denies there are any layoffs planned. He said the 25 workers who lost their jobs Thursday were terminated for breaching confidentiality agreements in their employment contracts after leaking rumors about the outsourcing.
[…]In a recording of an employee meeting held this week obtained from a Tate employee by The Journal Record, Ryan Tate threatened to sue staff members and file liens against their houses and cars if they violated their employee contracts by talking to the media or sharing information about the company on Facebook and Twitter.
In the recording, Ryan Tate said he would fire 25 production workers after no one came forward to take responsibility for the anonymous email sent out to employees on Sunday that decried the rumored layoffs.
“Good people are going to lose their jobs – it’s not fair,” Ryan Tate said in the recording. “It’s not right, but that’s the reality of the situation. Jesus himself is the perfect mix of mercy, grace and justice. I have probably failed you in that I have been a little too lenient and a little too on the side of mercy and grace and not on the side of justice.”
At the meeting, Ryan Tate then went on to say several employees had already been named as defendants in a $7.8 million lawsuit for breaching their employee confidentiality agreements. A search of state and federal court filings revealed that no such litigation has been filed as of Thursday, a fact Ryan Tate later confirmed.
I leave the country for just a couple of days and the nation falls into anarchy. I got this email while I was away:
Your friend James Kosub has posted some damn fine — and damn patriotic —
PUNISHER fan fiction on his blog. I’ve read it and, well, it made me think
and it moved me on an emotional level. And, of course, he mentions you in
the premamble to the post…
Jim is, afterall, the President of my fan club. So I took a peek at his introductory comments:
It isn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever dumped out of my brain and onto
paper, but it’s still a solid, post-9/11 action/commentary story.[…]Coupled with my very positive
experience playing The Punisher on the Xbox, and finally seeing the new movie with Thomas Jane, I figured now was as good a time as any to share.
And already the critical raves are coming in…from his wife.
Still a powerful and effective piece, and it could easily be expanded beyond the "Punisher" main character.
I haven’t read the fanfic, but I doubt anything could capture the enormous cultural, political, and emotional impact of 9-11 quite as well as some of James Kosub’s fanfic stylings. But I’m with Jim’s wife on this one. It’s a crying shame that he chose The Punisher as his muse instead of Willy Wonka.