Milestone Indie Newsletter - Jan 2023

Five Methods of Modern Publishing – 2023 Edition

By blaze ward and M.L. Buchman

Who Takes The Risk?

Matt and I sat down and tried to break down the state of publishing in the most recent mastermind call (Jan 2023, in re Breaking Publishing).

The world has changed. Again. Did you blink?

We came up with five (current) basic pillars by which your story could be published (published as a specific verb here. We will circle back to licensing at the bottom). Without further ado, let us look at each of the five, listed loosely in the order by which they came into prominence.

Traditional (including Periodicals)

Used to be, you submitted your short stories to various magazines, either literary or genre specific. Or submitted them to various open calls for anthologies, once you had gotten an in that let you know when those things occurred. After you got good enough, and known enough, you would seek out an agent (when they weren’t as obviously incompetent crooks as they seem to be today, to hear the horror stories and whisper campaigns) with your manuscript. They would shop it to one of the (then hundreds) of publishers, knowing who was interested in various things. They got a cut of your eventual income, so it was in their interest to help.

The risk, then, was all on the Publisher themselves, and to a lesser extent the agent. The publisher would pay an up-front advance against expected future royalties, so they wanted all of your rights in exchange for what used to be a lot of money (that has been ground down badly by inflation since at least 1970). Agents were out all of their work on your behalf until a contract was signed, so they had financial risk as well.

Today, there are five major publisher left, plus a few dozen medium-sized ones that are also being swallowed up by money players. The number of contracts awarded continues to go down every year, and the median advance (not average) has gone down with it, until you’ve gone from a contract worth several times annual median income, to enough money to maybe pay off your credit card or buy a used car. (Or, as a HUGE author in the 1990s explained it about ten years ago, “the era of the million dollar advance is over, and I have to make a living stringing together hundred thousand dollar advances.” And mind you, you’d know this person’s name if I said it out loud.)

Traditional publishing is still the dream of folks who don’t understand how the business works, so we include it here as a placeholder, for however many years it will continue to exist. I doubt that they remain viable for long. Five years. Maybe ten at the most. (Please, somebody show me this in 2033 and laugh in my face if I’m wrong.)

Small Publisher Indie (including royalty share)

In the modern era, there are a lot of smaller presses out there doing all manner of experimental, interesting things. Matt and I both fall under that rubric, because we publish third party writers in our various anthologies we put out, but we are not paying up front at any sort of professional or semi-professional rate. Instead, we’re working on the royalty share model. In my case (Boundary Shock Quarterly), the publishing house takes 25% of income, and splits the remaining 75% among all the writers, sometimes evenly, sometimes with an agreed-to formula.

I am not attempting to earn back all my expenses before the writers see a penny, but I also keep my expenses cheap and amortized. (One issue of BSQ costs about $25 to publish, not counting my time and energy editing.) Mystery, Crime, and Mayhem; Blaze Ward Presents; Cutter’s Final Cuts; and Buchman’s Thrill Ride Magazine all follow roughly similar patterns. We take some of the financial risk, but share it with the writers, giving them an incentive to do some marketing work on their own, for our joint success.

Third Party Distributors & Middlemen (Personal Indie)

The classic Indie Publishing Revolution started when various third party distributors (primarily Amazon) created a marketplace where anybody could publish a book and any buyer could find it and buy it. No more Gatekeepers of Traditional Press minimizing and silencing writers who did not fit “their socio-economic/gender-ethnic ideal” when publishing. (To say it nicely, m’kay?)

Anybody could put books out. Anybody could get rich. Matt and I these days guess that there are maybe 25,000-50,000 writers (usually-quietly) making six figures (annual income $100,000+) without having agents or Traditional Publisher contracts.

Today, Amazon, iTunes, and Barnes&Noble are the best known. There are also middlemen like Kobo (all ebooks sold by Walmart in the US use their catalog) and Draft2Digital (who can get you into everyone listed above for a slice of your income, plus many US Public Libraries and a whole raft of other distribution channels that might be too small for a one-woman-publishing-shop to know about or pursue). Additionally, D2D bought Smashwords in 2022 and has been slowly absorbing their distribution network as well, giving them an even greater reach.

When we talk Indie, this is usually the epicenter we’re talking about. You write and turn it into an ebook. They run the marketplace, or provide the catalog for someone else, taking a cut while providing you with most of the income that came in. Passive for them, as they recoup their initial buildout and ongoing expenses, but highly profitable, as most competent middlemen tend to be.

Crowdfunding (including Kickstarter)

Brandon Sanderson broke Kickstarter, in a good way. And finally convinced a lot of people that folks would buy books from a crowdfunding site. Those have finally matured.

We’ve talked here on Milestone about how some folks are utterly killing the crowdfunding game, and teaching others how to do it. Matt’s done it, as has Lucas. Russell is rocking it. I’m going to trigger off my first one (Corsac Fox #1) in a few weeks, hopefully with some level of success.

It is entirely possible to skip everybody above this and rely on crowdfunding your fiction, though that will take time and I don’t recommend it. Instead, it can launch something, then you do the Indie Press thing (Amazon and middlemen) once it is out, so that you can keep the long tail going and keep earning nickels on your book(s) for a long time.

Personal Website

The world has changed. I think I mentioned that above. Now there are tools that allow you to create a shop on your own website, where you can see both print as well as electronic books. And you keep a larger overall percentage of the cover price, because you don’t have to share with as many middlemen along the way. (Woocommerce and Shopify are but two of the players here.)

Print books can be drop-shipped from a central warehouse somewhere, or sent print-on-demand (Lulu, also BookVault in the UK, and expanding, plus others). You no longer have to maintain stock, get returns, or touch anything. No more trips to the post office. It operates very similar to ebooks that way.

And can be profitable for a small publisher (including just you). Several of us that I mastermind with are all building out our various personal webshops in sufficient detail to take advantage of the new tools that are cheap and relatively easy to set up. Most of the effort is getting all of your books uploaded to all the places they need to be (BookFunnel and Ingrams, for example).

Thoughts on Social Media

We have watched as social media suddenly had a LOT of problems in 2022. Facebook reached inflection sometime in late 2021, and the quarterly numbers of people using the site have started trending down. Partly, that’s an impression that Facebook is the social media site for old people, while the kids have moved on to something new. (As they do. Just ask Socrates.)

At the same time, Twitter got bought by a dipshit who seems intent on recreating the scene from the Dark Knight, where the Joker lights a warehouse full of money on fire, because he is Chaotic Evil, and not Lawful or Neutral Evil. Crazy.

Similarly, a lot of folks I know who had been previously keeping their careers alive by being narrow and relying heavily on advertising suddenly saw that fail in 2022. Like, career-ending failure, when the income fell 50-90% over the course of six months.

If you do not control the communications channel to your fans directly, then you are relying on someone else to do it for you. If they make money when you make money (Amazon, D2D, et al) then they have an interest in your success. If, on the other hand, they are selling ad space for the eyeballs they have accumulated (FB, Twit, etc.) then they don’t care if it works for you. Or if you suddenly can’t reach people to tell them about your new book.

I’ve personally been under a variety of shadowbans for about six months now, to the point that I’ve largely moved my social media engagement to a Mastadon account, because Eugen isn’t trying to monetize things. He wants people to talk to one another. I’ve lost fans that only followed me on FB, but I have warned them a few times that they need to follow me directly (blog and newsletter, plus my Patreon) if they want to stay up to date. Not everyone does. We’ll pay costs, until they realize that they have lost track. Then maybe they’ll come looking.

Or they won’t. Social media is a medium for communicating to your fans, and needs to be treated as such. And a lot of fairly sharp and important people as asking out loud if the era of social media (Web 2.0 for those of you old enough to know what that means) is reaching end-of-life.

Do not put all of your eggs in one bucket.

From a marketing and publishing standpoint, I need to remind some of you of Hugh Howey, who published his ebooks, then did a TradPub deal giving them the right to print paper books of his various series. (Last I checked, he had bought a 50’ sailboat and he and the wife were enjoying life instead of hustling books.)

If TradPub called and offered me a similar deal, I would not immediately reject it. Instead, I would run the numbers and see if it made sense to me. And they can offer me enough to say yes. (I merely doubt that they would. Different conversation.)

I am pursuing several of the above in 2023, all at the same time. You do not have to try all of these, but I highly recommend that you have an answer for each of these five categories in your personal business, so you understand what choices you are making and which avenues you are pursuing.

Licensing

Finally, a word about licensing, because none of the following are ways to publish your story directly. Instead, you can sign a deal with someone to produce Audio, Translation, Manga, Videos, etc. of your core IP. Maybe you pay for it out of your own pocket and reap the benefit. Maybe you do a royalty/profit-sharing model. Maybe someone else pays you for the right to adapt your book into a new format.

You still have to somehow publish it (there’s that verb again.) If you are writing screenplays primarily, and then novelizing them, good for you, but are in in the wrong place here with us genre fiction writers? (And welcome anyway.) Similarly, if you primarily produce graphic novels first, then novelize them, we’re back where we started.

(Btw, you can sub-license yourself. Hire yourself to record audio, translate, etc. But you’re still looking at one of the five legs to publish and distribute.)

I’m talking here about how you publish your story (book, novel, novelette, whatever) and get it out there to your public to consume, giving you money in the process. Matt and I were able to identify five pillars upholding the roof: Traditional, Small Press/Experimental, Middleman, Crowdfunding, and Personal Website.

Understanding that all of your licensing options are just that, derivative forms of your original IP, adapted to some new medium, do you have any ideas what a sixth might be that we’ve missed? How else can you think to make money from your story, in this 23rd year of the 21st Century?

The Five Legs (Matt’s take after reading the above)

Trad, Small Pub Indie, 3rd Party Indie, Crowdfunding, Direct Sales. These are not exclusive. Does a story in Hitchcock’s act as paid-to-you advertising and buys you fans for your direct sales? Maybe. Does crowdfunding front-load a 3rd-party indie campaign? Does a new social strategy drive sales, entice licensing, and so on? Does a paperback-only deal help or hinder?

There’s another set of pillars that Blaze alludes to here and that we’re bound to tear into in some future Milestone. It’s the outreach pillars: advertising, community, social media, sideways IP (my game based on my Miranda Chase thriller series being but one example), PR…

The number one cause of failure Blaze and I see is the 1-2 pillar folks. I land on trad (oh, they’re in free-fall collapse, axing entire genres [not lines, genres] from their catalog). I believe in KU and only KU (except they change the rules again [called the KU Apocalypse 1, 2, 3—can Apoc #4 be far off]). Advertising has gone through a devastating collapse in effectiveness in both the social platforms and the distributor platforms (I’m looking at you AMZ). I’ve watch folks living on the power of the churn, using $50k/month advertising budgets, collapse. In 2021, they were all bravado and “Ain’t I cool!” In 2022, they lurked at the edges of conversations in conferences and were asking questions of how to focus and build a brand by any other method.

As Kickstarter continues to prove its power in marketing fiction, as direct sales becomes more acceptable to consumers, as creative folks tackle the problem of the failure of keystones such as advertising and social media, where will you be looking? Where will you be taking your business?

Seriously, let us know. If there are enough cool ideas, we’ll Milestone the collective consciousness for all to see.

Until next month,

blaze & Matt

West of the Mountains, WA, and Bostonish