Elliott Hall

(There’s a lot going on here, so I’ve decided to split this into three parts. The first part is background, so if you’re familiar with the Amazon-Macmillan dispute, you can skip most of it. Part two is about how the idea of what a publisher is and what it does is changing, and part three concerns whether I, as an author, could replace the functions a publisher performs and whether it would be desirable.)

I wanted to talk about the cost of books and what publishers do in this part, because the two are intimately related. I’ve only had one complete go round through the publishing sausage grinder, so consider my lack of experience in what follows.

Here is one breakdown I found from Money magazine, via BookFinder

Based on a list price of $27.95

$3.55 – Pre-preduction – This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
$2.83 – Printing – Ink, glue, paper, etc
$2.00 – Marketing – Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
$2.80 – Wholesaler – The take of the middlemen who handle distrobution for publishers
$4.19 – Author Royalties – A bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Also the author will be paying a slice of this pie piece to his agent, publicist, etc.

This leaves $12.58, Money magazine calls this the profit margin for the retailer, however when was the last time you saw a bestselling novel sold at its cover price.

These numbers shouldn’t be taken as Gospel by any means, but the ratios seem right based on other accounts I’ve seen. What makes this even more difficult to work out is the discounting mentioned above, as no one expects that any book will actually be sold for the price on the back. (We’ll set that aside for the moment)

I think people underestimate just how many people are involved with a book. It is not just one person with a pen, any more than acoustic albums are just one person and a guitar.

Tobias Buckell has a good summary of the people involved in his post on this subject:

An editor: the man who works with the author on the big picture of the book. How are these chapters hanging together? Does this character make sense? What book should we work on next?

A typesetter: makes the inside of the book look professional and easy to read, well put together

Designer: interior art, layout, more look and feel of the inside. The look and feel of the outside of the book and how it incorporates the cover art

Art: someone has to paint, create, or put together the graphics that sell the book

Copy editor: this person goes through and makes sure the book is readable, looks for internal consistency (your character has blue eyes here, but brown here. Suns don’t actually go nova like that).

Proofreader: this final pass looks for any final typos that have slipped through everyone else.

Those are the people involved just in the production of the finished manuscript. We haven’t included marketing, PR, etc. I would add that if you’re writing non-fiction, even more people can be involved. You might need someone to do picture research, or fact checking. If you intend to say some sensational things, the manuscript might have to be run past a lawyer.

Back to the cost breakdown above, you can see why the intellectual work put into making a book costs more than its printing. As someone who enjoys reading more than the average bear but still has little experience of publishing, I would have expected the costs to be reversed, and I imagine many readers would think the same.

Publishers are investors in the books they release. They front all the costs above long before they see a dime of revenue. They provide the capital a writer probably doesn’t have access to. Beyond simple money, they also bring intellectual capital: their reputation. Publishers have contacts with people in journalism and retailing, and it’s those contacts that make a big difference in where a book ends up in a store, or whether it’s reviewed. These relationships are created and maintained at significant cost, but I don’t know how you’d break them down for a single book.

So the point is that eBooks won’t be hugely cheaper than print books, assuming the same amount of effort goes into both. Printing and warehousing could take up as much as twenty percent of a book’s cost, but it’s a lot less than the difference between a $10 eBook and a $27.95 hard back. (I’ll stick with US numbers, since the Kindle isn’t over here in any significant way yet.)

That hard back number comes down pretty quick, but the eBook one many not. The only people who buy hard backs are serious fans of an author, or his relatives (thank you, by the way.) I was glad that The First Stone came out as a trade instead of a hard back for that reason; it’s more portable and less intimidating. A publisher doesn’t expect to sell nearly as many copies as they would a mass market paperback, but the margins are a lot better. After they soak the willing suckers, they then release cheaper paperback versions. This isn’t a nefarious plot so much as the only way they can make money; publishing margins have been razor-thin for as long as the industry has existed. Going back to the dispute, what Amazon was trying to do was force publishers to undercut themselves during the most profitable time of a book’s release.

So should books be $9.99? Yes, eventually. The problem isn’t publishers but Amazon thinking they’re entitled to the traditional cut of the retailer and wholesaler. I don’t blame them. They’re businessmen after all. What they don’t realize, or are in denial about, is that they no longer add anything close to the value that would justify the cut they’re trying to get. Apple has the right idea: the Apple store is less a retailer and more of a market. They lease you a stall for a fixed cost or a percentage, and after that you’re on your own.

Now that we know what publishers do, can we live without them? On to part three.

(There’s a lot going on here, so I’ve decided to split this into three parts. The first part is background, so if you’re familiar with the Amazon-Macmillan dispute, you can skip most of it. Part two is about how the idea of what a publisher is and what it does is changing, and part three concerns whether I, as an author, could replace the functions a publisher performs and whether it would be desirable.)

Charlie Stross has a good summary of a weird fight between MacMillan and Amazon:

Last Friday, Amazon.com unilaterally pulled most or all of Macmillan’s books (edit: including all paper editions, not just electronic) from their online store. (You can still find them via afilliates or second-hand stores, but Amazon themselves won’t sell them to you. Note that this only affects me via my Merchant Princes books — published by Tor, a Macmillan subsidiary — in the US Amazon store. My Ace titles are safe … for now.)

Amazon has relented on this, but I think this will be just the first of many disputes between publishers and distributors and within publishing itself.

To give a very short summary, right now Amazon fixes the price for all new release Kindle novels at $9.99. This is considerably less than the physical version. MacMillan wanted the right to set their own pricing like the people who sell through the Apple store do (more on that later.) Amazon said natch, and the knives came out.

The first part of this dispute was about simple market domination. Amazon is attempting to corner the market on eBooks. They don’t mind taking a loss on every Kindle book they sell (they pay more than $9.99 to the publishers) on the theory they’ll make it back later when all eBooks belong to them. The problem for MacMillan was that Amazon was going to accomplish this by forcing publishers to essentially compete against themselves, undercutting their own hardback sales with artificially cheap electronic sales.

I’d recommend all of Stross’ post, because it’s a great distillation of all the market forces at play. For lazy people, here is what you need to know:

This whole mess is basically about duelling supply chain models.
Publishing is made out of pipes. Traditionally the supply chain ran: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer.
Then the internet came along, a communications medium the main effect of which is to disintermediate indirect relationships, for example by collapsing supply chains with lots of middle-men.
From the point of view of the public, to whom they sell, Amazon is a bookstore.
From the point of view of the publishers, from whom they buy, Amazon is a wholesaler.
From the point of view of Jeff Bezos’ bank account, Amazon is the entire supply chain and should take that share of the cake that formerly went to both wholesalers and booksellers.
…
The agency model Apple proposed — and that publishers like Macmillan enthusiastically endorse — collapses the supply chain in a different direction, so it looks like: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader. In this model Amazon is shoved back into the box labelled ‘fixed-price distributor’ and get to take the retail cut only. Meanwhile: fewer supply chain links mean lower overheads and, ultimately, cheaper books without cutting into the authors or publishers profits.

As he points out, this fight is really about how the supply chain is changing. Amazon, like Walmart, forged its dominant position by supply chain management. They could offer more books at a lower cost than normal book stores. The rise of Amazon has certainly benefited me as a reader and a researcher, allowing me to get obscure books cheaply, or at least conveniently. The problem with Amazon going into the Kindle is that one part of its business is devaluing the other. With eBooks, Amazon loses all its supply chain advantages and becomes just like the Apple store, a position that is much less profitable than the one it currently occupies. So for the moment Amazon is trying to leverage its current position to eat its cake and have it too for as long as it can: it wants to be a retailer when it comes to physical books, and a publisher when it comes to eBooks.

So what is Amazon, should eBooks only be $9.99, and what the hell is a publisher in a paperless future? Part two tomorrow.

Via Pandagon, I learn that Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. George Tiller, has been convicted:

A jury took just 37 minutes Friday to convict an anti-abortion activist of murder for putting a gun to the head of abortion doctor George Tiller and pulling the trigger in the foyer of a church.
Attorneys for Scott Roeder had hoped to argue for a lesser conviction of voluntary manslaughter, based on the defendant’s belief that the killing was justified to save the lives of unborn children. But the judge threw out that defense a day earlier, leaving the jurors to choose between a murder conviction or acquittal.

I’ve blogged about this before, but I thought it worth bringing up again in light of the demands by the US right wing that the underpants bomber should have been tortured, not mirandized. As Amanda Marcotte points, Scott Roeder wasn’t just a lone gunman, he had links to a prominent anti-abortion group:

But is Operation Rescue really anti-violence? Their #2 person is Cheryl Sullenger, who has done time for conspiring to bomb a clinic. Roeder had her phone number on his dashboard when he was caught. As you can see at that link, Sullenger and the president of Operation Rescue stalked and harassed the Tillers constantly—they didn’t just stalk them, but they stalked and harassed everyone who knew the Tillers, it seems, including the dry cleaners.

I have to ask the question again: why was Cheryl Sullenger, an associate of a known terrorist, not subjected to enhanced interrogation? Why wasn’t she hung from her wrists for hours, deprived of sleep, beaten at any imagined provocation? Why wasn’t she kidnapped at an airport and put on a plane? If torture really was the most effective method of gaining information, she would have been chained to a floor within six hours of the murder of Dr. Tiller.

Via Yglesias, we have Keynes v. Hayek:

I posted the above mostly for DesRosiers. I imagine this is what goes on in his head just before sleep; this, or a 50-foot Ayn Rand terrorizing Manhattan. Don’t hate on Keynes just because the lord gets all the ladies…

The third book has provided a good excuse to get into the blues. So far, this song is my favourite. The Rev. Gary Davis, singing Death Don’t Have No Mercy:

I’d recommend that those of you who use Spotify look it up there; they have a much better version.

In answer to your question: yes, the Children’s Crusade will be a romantic comedy with all sorts of heart-warming/madcap antics, scrapes and japes aplenty. But will those two crazy kids ever realize they’re perfect for each other? You’ll have to wait until 2011 to find out.

Via Matt Yglesias, I learn one of the worst human beings in the world is still up to his old tricks:

[S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.” True story. And so the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” They kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle, on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island.

Let me just get this out of the way: Fuck this guy. Nope, not strong enough. Let me bring in Ta-Neisi Coates:

The next time your wondering why there are so few black Republicans, consider the fact this unreconstructed Confederate was not long ago one of their greatest crusaders. Consider that he is equating the resistance of slavery, with a rejection of Christ. And there’s an African-American right next to him, nodding in agreement.

Fuck Pat Robertson. Fuck the “Christian” Broadcasting Network. And fuck any black person who’d nod reverently while a white supremacist slanders our founding fathers. She should be ashamed of herself.

That this hateful old con man has no real interest in the religion he claims to espouse should be obvious by now. Mr. Family Values gave the game away when he endorsed Mr. Infidelity Rudy Giuliani for President. When you hear someone talk about the Christian Taliban (it will probably be me) this is who I’m talking about. Him and the late Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on gays, secular culture, and feminism.(The Post article also outlines the lovely deals Robertson made with former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor.) Could you imagine the reaction if a Muslim cleric had said the same thing? When it comes to who the ‘real’ enemies are, Robertson and the Taliban are in complete agreement; they only disagree on which God the world must obey.

Younger members of the religious right have tried to hide Robertson away like a crazy uncle in the attic, but they can’t condemn him. He’s not a fringe figure. Robertson has been was a powerful force in Republican politics for decades. His presidential campaign was a catalyst for the modern religious right. He’s one of their founding fathers.

Robert Farley, over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, has his students work on an interesting scenario:

Every spring, Patterson runs a policy simulation designed to illustrate the difficulty of operating an organization in the context of asymmetric and limited information. Every fall, I run a two hour mini-simulation designed to give students a sense of how the larger simulation will play out. In my first year, I did zombies; the year after was the aftermath of Independence Day, and last year I asked our 35 first year graduate students to develop a strategy for containing or killing Godzilla. Since vampires seem to be in the news lately, this year I chose a vampire oriented scenario.

The scenario was broadly organized around the motivating concept of True Blood; vampires, in existence throughout human history, reveal themselves and demand civil recognition.

The students are split up into the various US federal agencies, and tasked with coming up with a response to vampires coming out. I think my favourites come from the FBI:

Current tools such as handguns, steel handcuffs, and bullet proof vests will not be appropriate weapons in dealing with vampire criminals. The FBI must integrate silver handcuffs that resist shape-shifting, be armed with wooden stakes and bows and arrows, and trained in archery.
Underreporting of crimes related to blood sucking poses a threat to the FBI and to American citizens. The FBI will need to adapt our intelligence collecting methods to detect when humans change into vampires unwillingly by vampire attack. In the event of such attacks, the FBI must ensure that the vampire database is updated with new members of the species for both the protection of FBI agents as well as American citizens.

Many of the departments are worried about vampire attacks on humans, and involuntary conversion into a vampire. I’m as interested in how they’d manage people who want to become the undead. What kind of form would they have to fill out? Is it too nanny state to make pre-conversion counseling mandatory for prospective vampires? The release and liability forms would be a nightmare.

I think Farley puts his finger why I love stuff like this:

Altogether, it was a very professional and carefully considered set of responses to an absurd question.

I was home in Canada when the crotch bomber tried to blow up a plane, just in time to screw up what is already a horrible time of year to travel. I’ve held off talking about it. I hoped some actual facts would emerge, and was having too much fun watching the hyenas of confusion on cable news. Almost everything that’s been said so far has been a sad repeat of the bedwetting chorus, demands for as much bombing torturing and killing as possible in the vague hope that that will somehow keep us safe.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The clip above is a face off between one of my favourite bloggers, Spencer Ackerman, and noted bigot Pat Buchanan. First of all, serious bonus points to Spencer for saying ‘Muslim Heat Vision’ on American network news, though for some reason it sounds to me like a very niche porn channel. He’s right to point out the ridiculousness of treating this spoiled fuckhead like he’s a fundamentalist ninja, but it’s the other crazy thing Pat is saying that I’m interested in.
He is basically outraged that Farouk Abdulmutallab was arrested and mirandized, even though no one complained when the Bush administration did the same for Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. Even though Abdulmutallab began talking to authorities almost as soon as he was arrested, Buchanan wanted them to withhold his pain medication until he told them ‘everything,’ and then has audacity to say right after that that isn’t torture. Leaving that aside, the thinking of the far right in America is that the only way to get all the information they can from someone is to torture the shit out of them. It begs for a regime where torture is not only routine, but mandatory.
I’ll be returning to this idea a lot in the coming months, as it’s a major theme of The Rapture. Yes, in the second book, things get even worse.

As of today, The First Stone is now available in a smaller, easier-to-carry format. Cheapskates rejoice! It’s also cheaper. For my Canadian friends, you can get it from the Canadian Amazon, instead of paying a man you met in an alley to smuggle it across the Atlantic in a shipping container.

If you don’t have it, then I have no idea how you discovered this blog. Congratulations, you have found a needle in a haystack that has been thrown down a well. Everyone else is reading this damn kid.

I saw The Misanthrope on Monday, courtesy of my lady’s spider-sense for all things theatrical. You will be surprised to learn that what follows is not a long discussion of Keira Knightley’s merits as an actor. I was unimpressed, though I think part of that was that I found her nasal American accent insufferable, even though I knew it was designed to be that way. Alice disagreed.
Can we move on now?

A quick summary of the plot, so we’re all on the same page:

Damian Lewis leads an outstanding ensemble with Tara Fitzgerald, Keira Knightley and Dominic Rowan in Martin Crimp’s blistering version of Molière’s greatest comedy, The Misanthrope.

Transported from 17th century Paris to modern-day London, Alceste (Damian Lewis) is a famous British playwright disillusioned and angry with the hypocrisy, shallowness and vanity of the contemporary world.

Vowing to reject society, Alceste’s plans are derailed when he falls madly in love with Jennifer (Keira Knightley). An ambitious American film star and darling of the social scene, she may prove to be his biggest challenge yet.

Most of the characters are types by design: the conceited critic with pretensions to being a writer (Covington), the duplicitous agent Alexander, party boy Julian and rag reporter Ellen. They form the entourage of Jennifer, a shallow American starlet. Thrown into their midst like a hand grenade is Alceste, a man obsessed with truth and ideas in a world contemptuous of both, chained to human society by his hopeless love for Jennifer.

Martin Crimp’s translation of Molière is playful and very funny, using a lot of rhyme to highlight to triviality of most of what the characters say. The pacing and rhythm of the lines was brilliant. It was tremendously enjoyable for all those reasons, but what’s prompted me to post about it was the question of whether the play is actually satire. The original is, and I think my misgivings have less to do with Martin Crimp’s translation than the society he’s trying to update it for. As shallow and self-obsessed as these characters are, our newstands are choked with actual human beings that make these fictional characters look like Quakers by comparison.

This problem takes a lot of the sting out of The Misanthrope, and unbalances the relationship between the characters. As fun as it is to watch Alceste rage at the hypocrisy and stupidity around him – Damian Lewis does this brilliantly, never turning into a one-note shoutfest but instead portraying a man who’s fuse is perpetually lit – in the modern setting it feels quixotic, maybe even pointless. Most of what he’s raging against is basically insecure douchebags saying mean things about each other. That’s the foundation of reality television, and we’ve seen it all before. It was only when Covington tried to sue Alceste for rubbishing his play that I saw a way out of this forest; the superficial world was now trying to persecute Alceste for railing against it.  Unfortunately this is only a side plot, but it could have led to interesting territory.

I think The Misanthrope unintentionally highlights the dilemma for a satirist of celebrity culture:  Is it even possible to satirize someone like Jordan? You can mock her, parody her, but satire is the business of stretching things to the extreme in order to highlight the contradictions and imperfections of what you’re satirizing. Is there any way to make Jordan appear more ridiculous than she actually is? Twenty years ago a satirist would have invented a character like her as the end result of celebrity. Now that we have reached that end, where is there to go?

Sorry to go meta on y’all. It’s an occupational hazard.