Beyond the Elements of Style

What’s an Author To Do?

A colleague remarked to me the other day that he sees publishing going the way of the music business, with more and more “indies” appearing. He predicted that eventually there will be no conglomerates, no large publishing houses.

It’s a question being debated long and hard in a lot of venues, that’s for sure. I disagree with my colleague to some extent — what we’re seeing is more and more consolidation of the book industry (like many others — Beatrice Foods owns just about everything these days, doesn’t it?) and right now there are only really about seven publishers out there that matter. Oh, there are tons of other ways of getting one’s book out, and I think that that’s what my colleague is talking about. But there are some real differences between the music industry and the book industry that stand in the way of our doing what they did:

1. More and more musicians are finding that they do better just “giving” away their music: creating buzz on the net, making downloads easy, that sort of thing. Music and viral marketing were made for each other. It’s much harder to get that kind of buzz going about an author: you can’t hear two minutes of their work and decide that it’s cool.
2. Those same musicians are finding that the money is coming in in different ways, now that they’re giving away the downloads. Two major places where they’re generating income is in swag (shirts, posters, hats, jewelry, etc.) and concert tours. Neither of these is a viable money-maker even for a major author, much less anybody else.

So I don’t see that as a model. Things will change, mind you; people will hack the ebook readers and get books for free, no question about that, and we need to be ready for it (and not many really are, so many authors I know are crying that the sky is falling but not looking for creative solutions for shelter); but I think we need to find another model for it all.

And until then, the only way to get an endcap at Borders or Barnes & Noble is to pay for it, and only the Big Publishers can do that. Being in a period of transition is uncomfortable, but there’s part of me that’s hopeful: the world was never changed by people living in their comfort zones, and it seems to me that the future holds a lot of opportunities for authors — we just have to figure out how to seize them.

And then we’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Help with Amazon

As Amazon grows (along with our dependency on it), I thought I’d take a moment to offer what might be some useful advice: points of contact.

If you find an error in your Amazon book listing, your name, etc., this is the email you want to use to try and sort it with the powers-that-be: book-typos@amazon.com. If that doesn’t work, or if you don’t receive a reply, you can also try community-help@amazon.com; at least one major distributor that I know of was able to correct some errors using that route.

With so little of what is “out there” on the web under our control, it’s good to be able to find some places where one’s voice can be heard. Email me and let me know if you have information on others, and I’ll share it here, too!

Amazon in particular does seem to experience more than its fair share of glitches. Any time Amazon launches anything new, it’s a given that something will have to be done to fix something or other that’s gone wrong – usually when Amazon lists something for sale that shouldn’t be. A colleague of mine guesses that they just snatch all the files in storage and do whatever they want with them, not bothering to check to see if the files are, in fact, available for publication. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that any ebook vendor that maintains libraries for their customers has to keep even out of print books in storage so they can be accessed by people who bought them.

It’s mostly sloppiness rather than any ill intent when this sort of thing happens, which doesn’t make it any less a pain for those of us who then have to jump through hoops to get it fixed. On the other hand, it always does get fixed, eventually.

So there’s hope! Contact Amazon today, and you’ll find yourself … beyond the elements of style!