Mid-list Riches

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There's an interesting article at Publishing Perspectives on what a goldmine self-publishing ebooks has become for midlist authors. But that's not news to anybody who has been reading this blog, is it? The article concludes:

There was a time when self-publishing produced little to no revenue, and doing so was often the last resort for a project that had been rejected by everyone it had been put in front of. Now, in the post digital revolution, the model has been turned upside down. Authors are going to e-books first based on earning potential and a quick time to market. If they do well, then they leverage their sales for larger advances and favorable contract terms. Of course self publishing is not for everyone, but at least for those that decide to go this route, they won’t have to be that one in a million outlier—if they can achieve the e-book midlist status, they stand a good chance of telling their boss, “I quit, I’m going to stay home and write for a living.”

The Latest News…from 1861

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Imagine Rachel Maddow covering the Civil War and you have THE MASON DIXON REPORT, William Rabkin’s smart and funny new web series, starring Dan Gilvezan.

Bill writes today on the History News Network site about how the series came about.

…one reason why so many Americans have such little interest in history [is that] they can’t make a connection with the people who the books tell them lived lives so completely different from their own.

That disconnect is what led the brilliant producer Steve Ecclesine and me to create our original web series, The Mason Dixon Report.  We’d been watching the parade of Civil War programming, and while the shows ranged from superb to, um, less so, they had one alienating element in common:  

They all insisted that the war was History.

In fact, the best of them, Ken Burns’ massive documentary series, was the most guilty of this, full of slow pans across battered photographs and self-consciously old-timey music in the background screaming out in every frame that this was an event that could only have happened to those other people who weren’t anything like we are today.

We wanted to strip the History out of the Civil War and drop our audience into the middle of it.  To give people the sense of what it’s like to live in a time when you don’t know whether or not your country will survive another day.

The conceit of our web series is simple:  Cable news existed in 1861, and this was the flagship series.  And it turns out that nineteenth century cable news looks a lot like today’s.  We’ve got a host who gets the news of the day from our regular reporter, and then turns to a rotating panel of pundits, politicians, and consultants to explore the meaning of what just happened.

It’s a lot of fun and think you’ll enjoy it. I certainly am!

Mason Dixon Report Coming Attractions from ron schneider on Vimeo.

Bish is Back

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51WJM8QQsQL._SS500_ Paul Bishop's terrific crime novels, inexplicably out-of-print for the last few years, are back in new ebook editions, including CITADEL RUN (retitled HOT PURSUIT). Now is a good time to find out for yourself why the Los Angeles Times calls him "“The closest equivalent to Joe Wambaugh yet" and the New York Times calls him "a first-class writer" who delivers "a lively, bloody adventure."

Show Me the Money

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The Guardian reports in a lengthy piece today that more established authors are thinking about self-publishing their work in the wake of such high-profile deserters of traditional publishing as JK Rowling, Barry Eisler, and John Edgar Wideman.  it all comes down to dollars and sense, as my friend Barry told them:

Thriller novelist Barry Eisler turned down a reported $500,000 from St Martin's Press to go his own way. "The key dynamic at work in self-publishing is legacy publishers' loss of their lock on distribution," he says. "It used to be that if you wanted to distribute your book in meaningful numbers, you needed a partner with a sales force, and relationships with wholesalers, retailers, and printing presses. Digital has changed that. Before, the question that had to be asked by a would-be self-published author was, 'How will I distribute?' It used to be that there was no good answer. Today, digital has definitively answered it. The question for a would-be self-published author now is just, 'How will I market?' And that question has a lot of available answers." 

[…]The thriller author is an interesting case. After turning down the St Martin's deal to self-publish, he subsequently signed up to a one-book deal with Amazon for a six-figure sum, but will continue to self-publish other titles. The way he explains it, the numbers make sense. 

"To understand what the traditional advance really represents, you have to break it down. Start by taking out your agent's commission: your $500,000 is now $425,000. Then divide that $425,000 over the anticipated life of the contract, which is three years (execution, first hardback publication, second hardback publication, second paperback publication). That's about $142,000 a year. This is a more realistic way of looking at that $500,000," he says. 

"But there's more. Some people have mistakenly argued that, for my move to make financial sense, I'll have to earn $142,000 a year for three years. But this is one time when you don't want to be comparing apples to apples. Because the question isn't whether I can make $425,000 in three years in self-publishing; the question is what happens regardless of when I hit that number. What happens whenever I hit that point is that I'll have 'beaten' the contract, and then I'll go on beating it for the rest of my life. If I don't earn out the legacy contract, the only money I'll ever see from it is $142,000 per year for three years. Even if I do earn out, I'll only see 14.9% of each digital sale thereafter. But once I beat the contract in digital, even if it takes longer than three years, I go on earning 70% of each digital sale forever thereafter." 

Barry just took a deal to publish his book THE DETACHMENT through Amazon's new imprint, Thomas & Mercer, but that's because they offered him a total rethink of the typical author contract. He says:

[…]"Amazon offered me the best of both worlds, legacy and indie. The advance and marketing muscle you (might) get in a legacy contract; the kind of digital royalties, creative control, and time-to-market you get with indie". So he's giving up "something like 20% or 30%" of his digital retail channels, but he's gaining Amazon's "marketing muscle" – "and if Amazon blows out the marketing for The Detachment, [his current and future self-published books] will benefit enormously".

JK Rowling, meanwhile, is self-publishing the ebook versions of her HARRY POTTER novels, but is going one bold step further… she's cutting out booksellers… brick-and-mortar and e-retailers…entirely.

She's going to sell the books through her own storefront. She stands to make millions more than she would have if she'd let a publisher or e-retailer release her ebooks. Instead of splitting the royalties with anyone…she's taking them ALL for herself.

This is a very compelling model…one I wouldn't be surprised to see other "franchise" authors like James Patterson, Stephen King, Janet Evanovich, or Michael Connelly try in the very near future.

The changes in the publishing world are happening with astonishing speed…and, for once, they are favoring authors more than corporations…at least for now.

Just One More Thing…

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OB-OL738_pf14_E_20110624145933 I wrote about Peter Falk, and his portrayal of Lt. Columbo, for the Wall Street Journal today. I said, in part:

Before Peter Falk came along with his iconic portrayal of Lt. Columbo, TV detectives were never people like us. For the most part, they were a smug and self-assured bunch, comfortable in their mental, moral, and physical attributes and their obvious superiority over not only the bad guys, but everybody else, too.

They were smooth and elegant, like Gene Barry’s millionaire homicide cop Amos Burke, or stalwart do-gooders like Jack Webb’s by-the-book Joe Friday, or handsome tough guys like Burt Reynolds’s Dan August. We watched them because they were better versions of ourselves, wish-fulfillment caricatures who didn’t have our imperfections, our doubts, our anxieties. They weren’t so much characters as they were a means of escape from our dreary lives.

But we watched…no, we adored…Peter Falk’s Columbo because he was us:  an everyman, working class, messy, and imperfect, dealing with the physical and domestic woes we know so well, and constantly underestimated by wealthier, better-educated people as a result.

 

 

More Good Stuff

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Top Suspense Remaindered My short story REMAINDERED is now available as a standalone  on the Kindle and the Nook…and this special edition includes a link that will take you to a private, streaming video of the movie version of the tale: 

Kevin Dangler is a once-famous author desperate to regain his lost glory while traveling the back-roads of middle America, selling remaindered, fifth-editions of his first book out of the trunk of his car. When he meets a woman who loves his work, he believes she might be his salvation…or perhaps his nightmare.

This story was an Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice finalist and has previously appeared in the anthologies "Three Ways to Die" and "Top Suspense." 

But wait, there's more…

DIE LOVER DIE, a Top Suspense short story, is now available on the Kindle and the Nook for just 99 cents. It's 10,000 words of non-stop action, violence and sex…a wild ride like nothing else you've read before…from twelve masters of suspense, who teamed up to write this rollicking story 250 rapid-fire words at a time, tag-team style, without an outline, without knowing what was coming next. The result is a pure, literary adrenaline rush:

401 Top Suspense ecover Die Lover Die_4

Lauren Blaine is on the run…fleeing across the country, pursued by a pack of ruthless, skilled, and psychopathic killers. That's because she's dumped her husband and he hasn't taken it well. Of course, he might have taken it better if he wasn't a major drug dealer with a gale-force temper… and if she hadn't run off with all of his cash. Now she's marked-for-death, a moving target for every mercenary, hitman, and sadist in the midwest. What they don't know is that Lauren is nobody's victim… she's a resourceful, brave, and cunning woman who won't go down without a fight.

We Are Family

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Famcroppedb My brother Tod wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal today about what it's like being part of a family of writers…and the dymanics that have shaped us into the authors were are today. He  says, in part:

the truth is that I didn’t really grow up surrounded by writers as much as all the people I grew up with – my older brother, Lee Goldberg, and my two older sisters, Karen Dinino and Linda Woods, who often collaborate – all became authors. We are separated by nine years, oldest to youngest, yet we managed to end up in the same place, at least metaphorically speaking.

My brother was first. His debut novel, .357 Vigilante, a slim men’s action adventure written under the absurd pen-name Ian Ludlow, was released in 1985 after he got a book deal through his writing teacher at UCLA. I would follow fifteen years later with my first novel and then my sisters, writing as a team, published their first book in 2006. Combined, we’ve published 50 books, hundreds of short stories, essays and features and, in my brother Lee’s case, written or produced 26 different television shows.

[…]We had a difficult childhood, all of us: our mother was dying for most of our lives, the victim of both lupus and cancer, though she’d actually live for 73 years, but that specter hung over us, along with her propensity towards madness. And our father was simply gone, long before he was actually gone. We each escaped into words from an early age. That’s the sad truth that lives under the happy result. The “how” is easily revealed: we enjoyed the escape so much that it became our physical world.

For more, check out the article. You'll know more about us afterwards than you'd ever want to.

 (Pictured: l-r Linda Woods, Lee Goldberg, Maddie Goldberg, Valerie Goldberg, Tod Goldberg, Wendy Goldberg, Karen Dinino, and Jan Curran)