Money Should Flow to The Writer, But Always?
The business of publishing is changing every day, faster and faster, since digital technology has sprang to popularity for many readers and writers. This change in publishing technology brings new business models, new forms of publishing and more. Is it time writers also changed the way they think of the business?
Among fiction writers there is an old saying that “money should always flow TO the writer.” Basically, this means fiction writers should be paid by publishers, and should not pay their own money to be published.
It’s become a cliche.
However, most times it is true.
That old saying is basically an attack against vanity publishing, in which a publisher charges the writer to be published. By many fiction writers, this is considered a scam, and they’re not necessarily wrong. If a writer is paying to be published, the publisher is making their money from writers, not from the readers, and that’s not really publishing, at least not traditional publishing.
Until recently, most self-publishing ventures were some form or other of vanity publishing, and have long been looked down upon by more traditional writers and publishers.
But technology has changed much in the book publishing world in the last few years. Digital books are exploding, becoming more and more popular by the day. With digital publishing of e-books, writers can now publish their own works online at sites such as Smashwords or for e-reader devices such as the Kindle by Amazon without having to lay down any cash because these companies make their money through percentages of sales of the writers’ e-books.
The writer doesn’t have to shell out any money, the companies distributing the e-books make money, and everyone’s happy. Right?
No, not really. Technically, this new wave of digital publishing is still self publishing, though it’s no longer vanity publishing because the writer doesn’t have to pay to be published. Unfortunately, self publishing raises the hackles of a lot of people, many of them working within the traditional print publishing field.
But not everyone. Some writers and even editors and publishers are joining in this wave of digital publishing.
The arguments on blogs, boards and forums become quite heated at times, but the truth of the matter is that the technology is here to stay. Currently there is nothing to stop a writer from digitally self-publishing their own work, despite a number of people frowning upon it.
It’s also generally looked down upon for writers to spend any of their own money to promote their own work. The publisher is traditionally supposed to take care of that.
But does that thinking hold with today’s technology?
Not entirely.
Yes, money should flow to the writer, and yes, writers should not pay to be published.
But guess what? Once a writer begins publishing their own works, they are no longer just a writer. They are also a publisher.
Which means, maybe there’s nothing wrong with a writer spending his or her own money for promotions, marketing, etc.
Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe writers should go out and spend tons of money to get published or to purchase advertising or anything like that. But I also feel writers shouldn’t limit themselves because of some stigma of spending their own money to promote their business.
Because a self-published writer is indeed endeavoring upon a business. In the U.S., if you make more than $600 a year from your writing, that’s a business. If you make less than $600, that’s a hobby.
One secret successful writers have learned is that the writing is the easy part (and often the most fun part). It’s the promotions that’s the real hard work. Promoting one’s own writing, especially in an appropriate manner that is not spamming potential readers, takes a lot of time and effort. In fact, it can take more time to promote a book than it can to write the book!
Again, I’m not advocating writers spending a bunch of money. But I am suggesting writers consider doing some research into promotions, then possibly spending wisely. Remember another old saying, “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” So beware of all the scams trying to take your money, because plenty of them are out there.
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Published in: Personal Finance
Comments: 8 | Post a CommentPost a Comment
Abhilash Thekkel | Aug 26, 2010 | Reply
I agree with your point… Thanks for sharing
Bruce Officer | Aug 26, 2010 | Reply
I agree with you.
A lot of the heated debate comes down to confusing the terms vanity publishing and self-publishing. A vanity publisher is still the legal publisher of a printed work, but since they’ve taken money up front from the author they don’t take the promotion and selling aspects of their job seriously – they books they print will languish in a store room and they’ve still made their profit. That’s no good for the author as they’ll never see the royalties to recoup the fees they paid up front.
Self-publishing really means YOU THE AUTHOR are the legal publisher. That can be just as true for print books as for e-books. Pay a printer to print and bind for you (BUT NOT PUBLISH) and YOU own the books that were printed. It’s up to you to promote and sell them, and you keep the profit after recouping the printer’s fees. It’s different from vanity publishing in that you have to do the publisher’s work too, but you are motivated to do it properly unlike a vanity publisher, ‘cos it’s the only way you’ll see your money back! And it can work well when you have a niche market to which you have good personal access which a traditional publisher would find to finicky to get access to. An example is local history. If you have a reputation as a local historian and an existing relationship with your local museum you might self-publish and get their shop to stock the book, along with the tourist info office and a few independent local bookshops.
Vanity publishing only exists because of the high initial costs of getting a book printed and the laziness or fear of those who can’t find a proper publisher but don’t want to go it alone with proper self-publishing. It’s not such a big problem in the online world because set-up costs are tiny (a bit of file conversion from wordprocessor format to website or ebook reader format) and inventory costs are tiny (a few megabytes on a server somewhere). But the distinction between corporately published and self-published still exists. If I converted a story I’d written to kindle format and submitted it to Amazon I’d be both author and publisher, with Amazon merely the retailer. But with some e-publishers, they’d want the copyright and they become true publishers.
It comes down to copyright. If I give away the copyright to a firm then they become the publisher and I expect to be handsomely rewarded through them for that and not pay a penny – the copyright is effectively my up front payment to them. But if I retain copyright then everyone else is merely a conduit to market and it’s OK for them to ask for a cut of the selling price, but NOT an up front fee. The only people I’d pay an up front fee to are people I contract to do a specific job for me, for example to print X hundred copies of a book I still have the copyright to, or convert something into a specific e-book file format (and I reckon I could do that with free tools anyway).
Diverseblogger | Aug 26, 2010 | Reply
This is infact something that is very creative to write about and I commend you for writing something this powerful and thank you for sharing your point. Keep up the amazing work
Will definitely re-tweet your article!
jharmon | Aug 26, 2010 | Reply
Bruce, just to clarify for others reading this: Unless it’s a work-for-hire situation in which a publisher has paid a writer an up-front salary to write a book for them, the copyright ALWAYS stays with the author unless that author gives it to someone else (as through a will, or through power-of-attorney or somesuch).
What happens in a publishing situation is the author agrees, through a contract, to allow the publisher CERTAIN rights, not all rights. And this is usually for a fixed period of time, or for as long as the publisher keeps the book in print.
Writers have a bad habit of talking about selling a story or selling their rights, but they’re not really selling anything. They are lending.
Any rights allowed to a publisher will revert back to the author at some point, depending upon the contract.
Kinga | Aug 26, 2010 | Reply
Great article!
Inna Tysoe | Aug 26, 2010 | Reply
Good overview of how things stand right now. However, I get the feeling that things are going to change (and rather drastically) in the near future. For starters, the Internet is becoming less and less free and that will have an effect on self-publishing. For another, google is no longer the only real search engine out there. (I actually prefer bing)
That’s just two factors off of the top of my head. I am sure there are others.
regards,
Inna
allpurposeguru | Aug 27, 2010 | Reply
Thanks for this article. It appears that book authors as Internet publishers must promote their work in much the same way that we article authors do as Internet publishers. That does not necessarily require money. Book authors can write articles about their book for sites like this to drive traffic, for example. There’s also the whole world of social bookmarking–emphasis on social. I’m sure every successful article writer spends a lot of time on promotion that they’d rather spend writing a new article. In principle, Internet books don’t seem much different.
jharmon | Aug 27, 2010 | Reply
allpurposeguru, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, but few e-book authors seem to realize it. Then again, relatively few of them (so far) have utilized content publishing sites such as Triond, Helium, Associated Content, etc.