Writer J. Steven York has done one of the best posts about agents I have ever read. This should be must-reading for any new writer.  And it’s funny as well.

Click here.

Cheers

Dean

This series of posts is taking the wonderful series on The History Chanel called Life After People and using the format to take a look at different areas of publishing. So far I’ve done two on Life After Returns and one on Life After Agents. This is the second part of Life After Agents, taking up where the first one left off. Please read the first post right below this one or this one will make no sense.

Again, I am not suggesting that agents as people should go away. I have many friends who are agents and I like them all. I’m just talking about what would happen if their job suddenly vanished from the face of publishing.

Life After Agents: 1 Week.

Writers would still be in a panic, at least all the newer writers and writers who believed the myth that once they got an agent, that person would “take care of them.” Of course, taking care of a writer is not an agent’s job, but after one week, the writers who believed the myth would still be in a panic or giving up.

Established long-term professionals (meaning writers with more than ten or twenty novels published) would be just going on, more than likely trying to calm down their younger writer friends. The vanishing of someone doing an agent’s job to these long term writers would be nothing more than an annoyance. Most of them had been without an agent at one point or another in the past, this would be nothing different.

Book publishers and imprints would be going along with getting out their lists, bookstores and readers wouldn’t even have noticed.

After one week, one focus would be inside the publishing houses concerning the slush pile. Publishers had suddenly been forced back into doing their own searching for books and dealing with the mass of slush manuscripts. Of course, this will end up being a good thing for the entire industry, but after one week, the struggle of setting up new systems will be a focus of many meetings.

What kind of slush systems might fill the gap?

1) Slush piles, more than likely situated out of New York, with hired assistant editors to go through the piles. More than likely these assistant editors would be hired by the editors in New York and would work directly with assistants. Of course, the only way the assistant is going to escape the warehouse outside of New York and get into the main office is to find good manuscripts. Sort of a training system for all the Vassar grads going into editing. This would be a return to an old system and I doubt many publishers would use it except for a temporary solution.

2) E-mail/web-based systems of forms. The writer fills out a form exactly, meaning there is a certain number of manuscript pages included, a certain length synopsis of the book, a certain length of bio material. This form would be done online in some fashion. This form would then be slotted to an editorial area where the assistant editors would spend a percentage of their days weeding through the e-mail submissions and sending form rejections. More than likely this system of exact forms will soon replace the agent system anyway, since agents are blocking far too much these days from editor’s eyes. (See my last post as to why this is happening.) This form system is already in place in a number of publishers.

3) Editorial contests where other readers read what a writer has posted on a site and vote and if there are enough votes, editors take a look. This system is already in place in a number of houses and more than likely will fail as an overall system.

4) Closed system completely. Many houses without the agent block would just shut their doors to any new work coming in. Of course, to fill their lists, they have to see new work. Sounds like one excludes the other, but it doesn’t. The new system would be for the editors to find the writers in any way they want. More writer’s conferences, talking with their existing writers for names of new writers, following the short fiction for new writers publishing in the magazines, buying writers away from other houses. Again, this system is in place already in a few houses and is a throw-back to an older system. I was asked for my first novel because an editor had seen some of my short fiction in magazines.

So, after one week, what other issues would be starting to crop up without the writers having an agent as employee?

The main job an agent does is negotiate contracts. Writers, for numbers of reasons, don’t want to learn business and publishing contracts before stepping onto a national stage. This is like saying a surgeon doesn’t want to go to school before doing an operation on your brain. Yet writers fire out manuscripts all the time and don’t understand a book publishing contract when it is offered. They will sign it, often with a beginning agent saying it is all right, and then complain when the term of the contract screwed them.

I can’t begin to say how many times I have read contracts for friends who had younger agents who actually made contracts worse for the writer. Having an agent negotiate a contract is critical, but having the wrong agent do it can make things worse. Most beginning writers don’t understand that they need to learn contracts and business, not leave it up to their agent. Of course, with agents being gone, they would be forced into learning or leaving.

A side note: Agents are not regulated in any fashion and are not required in any way to take any training, including learning publishing contracts or money management. Yet young writers who want someone to “take care of them” put all their faith and complete income into agents’ hands. As we all discovered recently in the financial world, having an unregulated group of people control money is always a route to disaster. Agents are unregulated and have no required training. Just keep that in mind.

Agents have played the roll of protecting the baby writers who don’t have a clue, even though experienced agents don’t like to do it. Somewhere around the fifth contract, new writers start gaining some knowledge about what they are signing. This learning curve is backwards from what it should be and leads to disaster more often than not, especially when there are young and inexperienced agents helping them. As credit card companies have discovered, the stupidity of the consumer in not reading or understanding contracts can make a lot of money for a company.

Publishing companies will be no different than credit card companies at this point without any agents in the picture. Long term writers won’t be hurt at all because we all understand contracts, otherwise we would have been gone long ago. But newer writers who hoped someone would “take care of them” would have no clue, and not even know where to go learn publishing contracts, and even worse, not even think they had to. Publishers would have a field day, a feeding frenzy, until this knowledge gap found a new way to get closed.

Life After Agents: 1 Month

Writer’s organizations, at least the powerful ones, would be trying to step in to fill the education gap on contracts. Standard contracts for each house would be circulating and lists of intellectual property lawyers would be forming. Lawyers who understand publishing contracts (your local attorney wouldn’t have a clue) will be able to help on the negotiating the contract, but writers would have to learn how to stand up for themselves. After one month, this might not be clear yet, but many writers with contracts in the pipelines would be discovering the problem.

A personal aside here. As I said last post, I have sold over 90 novels. My agents never sold a one of them. I sold them all. But I had a top agent on almost every one of the contracts to negotiate it for me. This is the area that agents will be missed the most. In the current climate of thinking that agents are needed to sell books and take care of writers and help them rewrite books, this true job of negotiating contracts with writers has been lost in the noise.

Now understand, a long term professional writer like me would have the same problems of spending more time on things we used to let our employee do. Unlike the beginning writers who expect agents to take care of them, I use an agent to not only negotiate the contract, but do some of the work I don’t feel like doing on a book. If agents suddenly vanished, I think I would miss that employee side the most.

On the slush side, at one month, the publishers would all have new systems up and running and in various stages of testing. Younger pros and beginning writers would still be in a state of panic that their myth-like crutch has been taken away. Older pros would mostly just be searching to make sure channels were open to their overseas publishers and that they liked their new lawyer.

A side point here. Agents take 15% and 20% overseas. Writers using intellectual lawyers tend to pay far less for the negotiating and contracts side, thus this would be a raise for writers, which would make up for the extra time we would have to spend.

After a month, another aspect that would be shoving hard would be the writers going directly to print in one form or another. POD publishing would be increasing. Kindle and other e-book forms of writer-as-publisher would be increasing as well. It would be a small push, but it would get a lot of press among the writers feeling lost without their caretaker agent.

A huge positive side of all agents suddenly vanishing is that the low level scam agents would also be gone. The “book doctors” and other scam fee agents would no longer be around to feed on a young writer’s dreams. A very positive thing.

Life After Agents: Six Months.

Publishing houses would have completely leveled out and got their slush under control in one way or another. The lists of books have to be put out every month. Having agented submissions or regular submissions will mean nothing to publishers after a short adjustment and a few new systems.

Writer’s organizations would have gained in power and would be doing their best to step in and start new educational programs very focused on contracts, negotiating and other aspects. Romance Writers of America already does much of this, but after six months, most of the writers organizations would have lists of lawyers, would have standard contracts, and would be having more experienced professionals running contract and negotiating workshops.

But there is no getting around it, during the transition, some publishers would take advantage of writers in contracts and subrights. But after six months, this would be starting to level out.

At the moment, agents block many books from getting to editors, and make writers who let them rewrite a book into sameness. Without this blockage, editors after six months would be discovering some fine new talent flowing at them, some new and very different voices. This can only be good for publishing and readers.

At six months, the publishing industry would be chugging right on without agents as if they had never existed.

At the moment, agents and their relationship with publishers is one area of publishing that is seriously flawed. Agents work for writers, yet they have relationships with publishers and are forced on writers by the publishers. I want an agent who understands clearly that they stand on my side of the contract in negotiations.

Some agents act like they are in charge of their writers, that they know more about writing fiction than their writers do, that they can hire and fire writers, or make them rewrite books. Silly, just plain silly. They are an employee, nothing more.

And this belief that agents are the only people who can mail books to publishers is also silly, just flat silly. And the growth of that belief is hurting publishers in so many ways that are just starting to show. For example, I heard of many, many agents over the past four months who were deciding to not mail out their client’s work because this was a “slow time” in publishing. Think of that in business terms, in employee terms. You are running a production plant and your employee says “I’m not sending any product to our customers because I have a feeling things are bad right now.” As the boss, you would laugh and fire the employee and get an employee who would send out the product you produced to your customers.  Yet many writers are letting agents get away with such things. See how fantastically silly things have become.

This is a new problem to publishing, growing over the last ten plus years. It is a problem that writers organizations, publishers, and the writers have to fix. I don’t want agents to vanish from publishing. But I do believe that writers need to get back in charge of their own employees.

Coming next: Life After Publishers. And yes, I will do Life After Writers at some point, just for kicks.

As I said with the last series of Life After Returns, I am a fan of the History Channel series Life After People. So I thought it might be fun to take a look at some areas of the publishing industry in that format. All of what I am saying here is just my opinion of what might happen. Remember that. Comments are welcome.

To start off with, any writer at any moment can simply fire his agent and have a “life after agents.” But I’m going to pretend that agents suddenly didn’t exist in the entire industry. No reason why, just that the job is gone, vanished into thin air.

Now understand, I have some good friends that are agents and I am in no way saying they should vanish. Just saying they suddenly are looking for a new job is all.

So, in the same way the History Channel looks at things, I’ll start one minute after the job vanishes and go from there.

Life After Agents: 1 Minute

No one would really notice except the former agents suddenly realizing they are looking for a new job. Sort of silly to start at one minute, but it gives me a moment here to explain what agents actually are in this business.

Agents are employees of writers.

Now, let me say that again simply because many, many newer writers are confused at this moment in time about what an agent is. An agent is a writer’s employee. They are not a salvation, they are not a god to be worshiped, they can’t write you a check for your book, and they earn all their money from you. They are an employee. Nothing more. They work for you and do what you ask and if they don’t, like any employee, they should be fired. They do not run your business, you do.

Agents are not your editors. I know this part has really been confused lately, so let me say that again as well. Agents are not your editors. An editor works for a publisher, an agent works for you. An editor can fight for your book in editorial and sales meetings and put good covers on them and get your book published and write you checks. An agent can do none of that.

What does an agent do? They help you fight for a better contract with a publisher. Agents can say things on your behalf that are hard for you to say, so in essence, they are a negotiator. They do not sign the contract, you do. They just help you, but you need to understand the contract better than they do because you are signing it. Often an agency will have already negotiated the basic boilerplate with a big publishers, so you get that as well depending on where your agent works.

An agent fights for checks from the publisher when they are late. Agents can help at certain levels with dealing with the publicity departments and such. Agents get your books into Hollywood and to overseas agents. If you want them to, an agent will even will mail a book for you to an editor or editors that you tell them to.

A personal aside here. I have sold over 90 novels. No agent has ever sold one of them for me. I sold every one myself, but had good agents on the contracts and secondary rights and such.

A little history of agents in general. In the early part of the last century, they didn’t exist in the book publishing industry. They did exist in Hollywood and in theater in New York, but not in books. Editors and writers worked directly with each other.

Into the late 1930s and early 1940s, book and story agents started to drift over from the Hollywood and theater side, and a great deal from the early days of television. Authors had agents to deal with Hollywood or television and often the agent would just deal with the book contracts as well. And authors who lived outside of the New York area could get their books delivered by hand if they had an agent who lived in New York.

From the 1950s until about 1990, agents negotiated contracts and chased the money and didn’t do much else, maybe mailing books for clients who wanted them mailed. When I sold a book, I would tell the editor my agent’s name and then call my agent and tell the agent that the editor would be calling to negotiate the terms. A very simple system that most of us long-term writers still use just fine.

Life After Agents: 1 Hour

From the former agents side, they would be making calls, trying to find jobs as editors or in sales or maybe starting to think about writing that book they had never had the time to write before. Just as with factory workers in a shutdown car plant, they would be looking for work.

Long term professionals like me would just shrug and find the name of a good intellectual property lawyer to hire when we needed one to look over and negotiate some contracts.

Beginning writers would be in a complete panic. More on why later.

Publishers would start having meetings, as they tend to do just about all the time anyway. Why would publishers and editors care? Well, again I need to back up and give some history as to how we got into this position.

In the early part of the last century, writers would deliver their manuscripts by hand to editor’s officers in New York. When the editor’s door was closed, it meant they did not want to be disturbed or were not in the office, so the writer who had just hauled his manuscript across the city on the subway would toss the manuscript through the window over the top of the door. The bar over the top of a door is called a transom and thus the term “over the transom” was born. Writers tossed their books through windows to get editors to read them. Not kidding.

The door was closed. Writers found a way around that problem to get a manuscript into an editor’s hands. Keep that thought in mind.

When an editor pushed open his door after coming back from lunch, it would pile the manuscripts up into a white and black pile that looked a lot like the dirty slush off of the street, thus the term “slush pile” was born.

Into the 1960s, the publishing industry started to explode and often as editorial departments got bigger, they would combine the slush pile in rooms. These slush pile collections lasted through the boom of the 1970s and into the eighties when publishers starting putting on guidelines “no unsolicited submissions” to try to slow the wave of garbage headed to them.

If you have never read slush for a magazine or book publisher, you have no idea how much complete garbage is sent in. A manuscript done in manuscript format, with an exciting opening, jumps out of the piles. Hard to believe, but completely true.

Now, for anyone with a half a brain, this “closed door” was easy to go around. You met the editor at a conference and talked to them about your book, or you sent them a query letter and they said “Sure, send me the book” if they were interested and the book seemed to fit their line. (Today you can still meet editors at writers’ conferences and have this same system work just fine.)

But then into the late 1990s as houses merged and the distribution system collapsed, editors were forced to take on much more and they found that too many writers were figuring out ways around this “closed door” so they came up with a new one to keep the mass of junk out.

They simply put on their guidelines “No unagented submissions.”

To put it simply, the publishers simply shoved off their slush piles onto the agents, who work for the writers.

To put it in business terms, a publisher was forcing a supplier of a product to hire an employee before they would look at the product. Anyone in any normal business would look at this as head-shaking, and it is.

Of course this slammed the existing agents with a ton of work. When this happened, most of the existing agents already had a bunch of writers they were working for, so they mostly just shut down new writers coming in, and many of them went and hid. Finding some of the top agencies is a tough thing for a beginning writer to do because they just don’t want the mass of garbage coming at them that the publishers are forcing at them.

Back to the original concept. An agent is the employee of a writer. If I have an agent, I want that agent working for me and my books, not reading through some lazy publisher’s slush pile. I want my employee working for me.

Interesting isn’t it how this industry has gotten sort of screwed up? Bookstore owners take no responsibility for their own inventory with the return system and publishers take no responsibility for their own slush piles.

So this change and other factors in the business forced a ton of editors to quit and move over to agenting (more money was the major factor), and when editors became agents, they brought along what had been their right as editors with publishers, to make writers rewrite books. They forgot that when they left editing and crossed to the other side of that contract line, they worked for the writer, not the publisher, and thus was born the nasty habit of having an agent tell a writer to rewrite.

And for almost ten years, younger writers have let their employees do this to them, all because of that stupid closed door and younger writers inability to think their way around or over it.

During this time, some agents started to think of themselves as a lot more than just an employee of the writer, they started thinking that they were in charge of the writer. And everyone knows when you start letting an employee run a business what happens: Nothing pretty, and that’s where we sit now.

At this point in history, the system has become so warped, it’s almost funny if it wasn’t killing so many writer’s dreams. An employee who works for an employer is telling the employer they can’t sell their product. Imagine that happening in any other business? You work at a production factory (which is what a writer is) and you tell your boss that you won’t sell their product. What would happen? You would be fired, of course.

Yet beginning writers let agents do this exact same thing to them at the moment and even some writers with a few books under their belt fall into this pit, writing and rewriting over and over for an audience of one. And the audience works for them. Let me simply say that’s impossible to do. Not even my wife loves everything I have written and have sold to major houses. And she’s won a Hugo Award for her editing.

One side note that most don’t know. Agents need nothing to become an agent. No training, no license, nothing. Anyone who says they are an agent and can get a card printed can go to writers’ conferences and get new writers to sign on. Scams are everywhere.

Now at this point in time, not surprisingly, editors and publishers on the other side are finding it difficult to find books that are new, that are different, that have a new voice. I wonder why?? Duh. The agents aren’t mailing them, or having their writer rewrite all the newness and excitement right out of it. In other words, the publishers have set up a road block, a closed door, that is just a little too good. I even heard of a few agents who had decided lately to not send out anything for six months because they didn’t think they could get enough money for the projects right now.

I would fire an agent like that so quickly, they wouldn’t even have time to know what happened. After all, I need to make a living as well.

Right now let me state a few real basic principles of book publishing.

1) There is no perfect book.

2) Editors can’t buy books they don’t see.

3) Agents work for writers.

Writers have to do their best with every book, then get it on editor’s desks. It is not the agent’s responsibility to get a book to a publisher, it is the writers. History is full of stories of books being rejected 50 or 60 or more times before finding the right editor and going on to become a bestseller. Books that are different and really new face a lot of rejection before they are bought. When your agent refuses to send out a book, you are letting one opinion, one rejection stop you. Silly, just flat silly.

One more fact right here. Agents in this business gain their power to have their calls returned because of who they represent. The writers are the power base and if an agent represents a major bestseller, that agent gets his phone calls returned by publishers and editors and vice presidents of companies. If an agent lives in the boondocks and represents only writers who sell at 5,000 copy levels, that agent gets no phone calls returned and has to mail books exactly as a writer would mail them to editors. The power is always in the writers.

So today we find ourselves with two different kinds of agents. There are still some old-fashioned agents who understand who they work for, and the new must-rewrite agents who think they are in control of the writer. Both exist, but let’s go on pretending they have all just lost their jobs.

So at one hour after agents have vanished, publishers would be working to set up systems to allow the slush back in the door. Actually, this is being done in experiments in a couple publishers right now, where authors post on a web site part or all of their books and readers read them and if the book gets some good positive reviews from readers, the editors ask the author to see it. Interesting way to get readers to read slush which makes a lot more sense than agents reading it.

Other new systems of online submissions would be set up. I doubt highly if any of the publishers would go back to the big rooms full of submissions. Too expensive with New York prices. I can see a publisher setting up a couple assistant editors in a place a hundred miles outside of New York in a cheap warehouse to do nothing but read slush. That would be possible and worth the occasional good book they would find. At one hour, discussions would be starting about all of this.

More than likely, in one office or another, an editor thinking ahead will be suggesting they start sponsoring contract workshops for writers to learn contracts through different writer’s organizations. Romance Writers already does this, and this summer Kris and I are teaching a contracts/copyright workshop. But at the moment, most writers do not understand copyright and contracts until faced with that 12 page novel contract for the first time. And by that point, it’s too late without good help.

More contract lawyers would be thinking of shifting to publishing law as word got out.

Without overseas agents, writers would be going directly to those publishers as well. The Hollywood system would break down completely and I honestly have no idea how it would rebuild, so not talking about that area.

Life After Agents: 1 Day

Many, many beginning writers will be giving up at this point because they just don’t understand how the business could function without agents. These are the type of writers you hear say, “I don’t understand business, that’s why I want to be a writer.” This statement shows a vast lack of understanding about publishing and writing, and if these writers do end up selling a novel, they always end up sitting in a bar, not being able to sell their next book, and complaining they got screwed.

Nope. In all our workshops, Kris and I put a sign up. It says simply: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN CAREER.

No one else. You sign the contracts, you write the books, you make the decisions. It’s your career and if you expect others to take care of you, you are lost. It won’t happen and like any employee, your agent won’t really care beyond the next paycheck. Nature of employees. We all know that.

So after one day the writers who are giving up because there now are no agents to “take care of them” are better off staying in their day jobs anyway. Blunt but true.

Publishers will be getting ready to handle books flowing at them. You see, the ugly truth about publishing is that it is a machine. Every book line must fill its list every month, and if there are four books on that list, the editor’s jobs are on the line to fill those spots every month with books that will sell.

Writers must get their books to those editors, so with agents suddenly being gone, this temporary roadblock that publishers have made up will allow books to start flowing back at them. With e-mail and online submissions, the process can become much, much easier, and after one day publishers would be scrambling to set up the new systems and get out the new guidelines.

Will the vanishing of agents effect anything else in publishing? Nope.

Again, agents are employees of writers. Books flow from writers to publishers to distributors to bookstores and then into customer hands. Notice that nowhere in that traditional model does a book have to go through an agent. Having them vanish will make no difference to the system in general or readers who buy books.

In a few minor ways, some writers are already trying to go around publishers and distributors and bookstores and go direct to readers, and this might get even more of a push from some writers who think their one hope of getting into a regular publisher has vanished with the agents. It might be a good thing in some ways, bad in others. It’s a huge topic I might cover later in another article.

Next up, Part Two of Life After Agents. Stay tuned. Comments welcome.

I wanted to point anyone interested in the last two articles to the comments following the first Life After Returns post.  There is discussion there about the POD machines and Scan-Based returns. Both really didn’t fit into my focus of showing what would happen if returns suddenly stopped, but they are worth looking at.

Print on demand in stores and point of sale has been a hopeful method of getting rid of returns for over a decade now, but the speed is too slow, the costs per book still too high. We all hope they can get those problems worked out, but at the moment the machines are still just an interesting possibility of a down-the-road solution.

Scan-Based returns are explained in the comments wonderfully, so take a look to see how really ugly the returns system is about to become. Those of us in the industry have seen this coming as well for years, but it’s almost here for books and is here for magazines. It’s going to affect how publishers do business and how writers get paid, and not in a good way.

Great comments. Thanks, everyone.

Next up: Life After Agents.

Cheers, Dean

If you are not reading Kris’s Freelancers Survival Guide on her web site every week, start doing so.  In this last post she talked a lot about some of what I talked about this last December.  And she mentioned how streaks keep her going as well.

And on that note, get me your monthly streak updates. I’ll be updating the streak page shortly, before putting up the Life After Agents post.

Cheers, Dean

If you haven’t read the first installment of Life After Returns, please do so before reading this. It is right below this post and this one will make a ton more sense if you do.

I am patterning this series of articles after the wonderful History Channel series Life After People. It is my opinion only, trying to figure out what might happen if suddenly, one instant, all returns in publishing just stopped. It’s a huge topic and the deeper I got into it, the more I realized I’m only going to be able to scratch the surface. But it’s fun trying and I got a ton of great comments, both by e-mail and under the first installment. Thanks everyone.

So picking up where the last installment left off, it’s now one month after that fateful moment when all returns in publishing stopped.

Life After Returns: One Month

Today, under normal circumstances, one month in publishing is a very short time, but at one month after the returns system suddenly stopped, the business earthquakes caused by the event are knocking down old systems everywhere.

On the publisher’s side, they have managed to put into place new discount schedules for bookstores, large chains, and the big discount box stores, not counting the new discount schedules for the three major distributors and direct sale middlemen such as Ingrams and Baker and Taylor.

The biggest problem at one month that publishers will be facing is the slashing of print runs. All books and printing schedules will have been completely revamped with the big web presses as the publishers scramble to fill the printing time they have bought years ahead.

If two books don’t have to be printed and then destroyed to sell one, publishers don’t need to print as many to start with. The huge web presses that are used to print most books are scheduled a long ways out and that time, down to the second, is very expensive. The publishers have to fill it with something or lose the money. Publishers will be sliding books ahead in their schedules and starting to push authors to get books in early. Those giant web presses don’t wait for anything and the time was all contracted out way ahead. And it is very, very expensive time.

For independent bookstores at one month, all kinds of things are happening.

Now, today, even with returns, bookstores can order books non-returnable, and get a higher discount and maybe a deal off of freight charges. I talked with two different bookstore owners this past week and both told me they seldom used that option at the moment. They also told me that returns do cost them, as I knew. Returns cost them the employee time to pull and destroy the books and send the covers or the hardbacks back to the distributor or publisher. They also get maybe a 1% difference in discount from a returned book from the price they originally paid. And they have to pay the shipping to have the stripped covers sent back. Minor costs, but nothing like they will be facing without returns. Both bookstore owners sort of went white at the idea of returns suddenly stopping across the board.

I asked them how long it would take for them to set up discount tables for books. Both said by the end of the first week they would have discount tables started and by the end of the first month it would be taking a larger percentage of their floor space.

Bookstores, until they could really get a feel for it, and get their cash flow under control, would be slashing orders as well. At one month it would be their cash flow that would be hurting them the most. Often bookstores floated a large percentage of the costs of ordering the new books with the credits they got from returns. That credit would suddenly stop, so every bookstore owner would be sweating cash flow to even get some new books into their stores.

So, as two of the bookstore owners told me, they would be ordering more on special orders and directly from Baker and Taylor in small batches, and watching their inventory very, very closely to keep as many books as possible off of the discount tables.

In the larger chains, at one month all ordering from discount only publishers would have stopped and those companies would be basically out of business. There would be a scramble at the national level to adjust order levels and much more attention paid to what was selling and where in the country it was selling. The major bookstore chains corporate stock will have dropped on the markets, but at one month that should have leveled and investors would be playing a waiting game to see how it all worked out.

Middle-men distributors such as Ingrams and Baker and Taylor will be adjusting and passing along the extra discounts they are getting from publishers, and special ordering of books will be helping their business as more bookstores and the chains pull back and cause customers to special order books more. They should float right through the sudden vanishing of returns just fine, maybe even getting stronger.

Of course, the old system of having four books sitting on a shelf to get customers to buy two will have to be rethought. Publishers need to get their books out into the market to have customers know they are there, so higher discount schedules will help bookstores cover their losses to discount tables.

Where books will be hurt the worst is mass market paperbacks on racks in such places like Safeway. Over the past few decades the number of pockets and space books take up in stores like Safeway has been shrinking, but without returns, more than likely publishers are going to have to come up with an entirely new way to get those big stores to even take the books. More than likely all books sent into a store chain like Safeway would be lost leaders, given to the store for free or very deep discount to promote an author’s book sales elsewhere.

From the writers side, at one month most of the panic will have been exchanged for the next thing on Facebook or Twitter and word will be passing that editors are starting to buy again as they rush to fill holes in publishing schedules caused by the moving up of books to fill printing holes. Writers who turn in books early or on time and who are fast will be getting even more work at this point as this adjustment is made. Royalty statements coming out at this point will surprise many writers because of the lack of reserve against returns. This will be a sudden windfall for a bunch of writers who were caught in the middle of this.

At one month the biggest crisis going on will be in the magazine publishing industry.

A little bit about magazine publishing. To start off with, seven out of ten magazines you see on a stand are destroyed and credit is given for the return. Sometimes higher. Actually in magazine publishing there are no physical returns. Someone goes in on the pull date on the magazine and takes it off the stands, replacing it with the next issue. The magazines are destroyed and the publisher is told how many were destroyed and how many sold.

Now, if you wonder how much cheating goes on in this system, you are not alone. As a former magazine publisher, I had no doubt more got sold than I got credited for, but could I ever prove it? Nope. It is how the system works.

For the most part, magazines are paid for by ads and all a publisher of a magazine is interested in is how many copies they ship out and have sitting on the stands. That’s the number they tell their advertisers and how they set their ad rates.

Also understand that when you are standing in line at a grocery store, every magazine you see in line has paid the store and the distributor for the spot. The closer to the cash register, the more expensive the spot. In fact, inch-by-inch, those spots are some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. And this is a major source of income for the stores.

The advertisers don’t care how many magazines actually sell, they just care about the placement and how many are shipped and the stores don’t care about how many are sold, they just want their fee for the spot. The suddenly stopping of returns will threaten to destroy this system.

At one month, the magazine publishers are struggling to figure out new discount schedules that stores will accept, and more than likely, many of the top magazines will just be giving their magazines to the stores and paying for the slots just to keep their ad rates up. Stores like Safeway and Walmart will be ahead because of this change. Magazine publishers will be struggling even more than they already are. Many will go out of business in the first month after returns stop.

Smaller magazines who depend on the newsstand sales at one level or another will flat stop appearing on newsstands. Common knowledge is that newsstand sales is where you get new subscribers. Of course, that’s been mostly a myth now for a decade or more, but it will force magazine publishers into new ways of thinking very quickly.

At this point their will be rumblings of the end of books, which will help the e-book market some, but in reality it won’t dent the old system. The sky always seems to be falling for one reason or another and this would just be another reason for the people who shout warnings to run into the streets.

There was some discussions about print-on-demand (POD) books after the last article. Without returns, POD publishing will slow down, actually. It is the returns system that is shoving POD research and publishing at the moment. Without returns, the POD will simply settle into its place and become a small part of the entire industry.

Life After Returns: 6 Months.

Frighteningly enough, life in publishing by six months will have leveled out again. The ID bookstores that could make the quick adjustments in order levels, in cash flow, and in customer retainment will have stayed in business. Numbers of stores will have failed, but the failure rate would be leveled at six months back to normal levels.

Many bookstores would have started to adopt the Powell’s Bookstore model as well. Putting discount books with an author’s new book, selling used books right beside new books, and maybe even starting to expand in size. If you have never been in the city block of books that is Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, make a point to do so. One of the systems that Powell’s uses is a bar coded inventory system, where they sell all their books online as well as in their store. Smart ID stores will adjust to this quickly and use the internet for sales a lot more than before, listing their inventory on their own sites and expanding income instead of just churning books through with the old return system.

But just to be clear, the sudden stopping of returns will have caused a percentage of ID stores to go out of business at six months. The specialty science fiction and mystery stores will have mostly survived because of their very nature.

Publishers at six months will have adjusted their big problems of discount schedules, printing schedules with the big web presses, and cash flow with stores failing and not paying. At six months most of this will be through the system.

Publishers selling to bookstores will be ramping up at light speed at six months. That practice is starting now and used to be the normal way of doing business. Without returns, this system becomes possible for publishers to push, especially with online marketing and ID stores being more receptive. More than likely in a few years, many distributor will be lost as this direct-from-publisher system comes back into full force as it was in the first half of last century when the returns system started. What goes around comes around, as the old saying goes.

Writers will have adjusted and will know for the first time in 70 years how many of their books exactly are selling, not just rough estimates with reserves held out for returns. Accounting will be a lot easier, but in new contracts, publishers will be asking the writers to share more of the increased costs of higher discounts. It will be a fight for writers over a few years.

There will be a lot fewer magazines out there, mostly slick, ad-driven ones, while a boom for magazines will be happening on-line as it is now. News stands will look a lot thinner as only specialty magazines will be able to afford to stay alive with ads and subscribers and giving away their magazines to stores as lost leaders.

And the best thing about six months after returns is that paper demand will be way down. Seven out of ten magazines and every other book will no longer be doomed to the landfills and recycle bins.

Life without Returns is a dream for this business at the moment. It can’t be done in any reality because of anti-trust laws and other aspects such as a publisher not wanting to just flat commit corporate suicide by switching completely to non-returns will all the other companies stay full returnable. It has to all switch at once or it never will. Or we have to develop new book delivery systems outside the return system.

Maybe if someone really looked at this returns problem in Congress, they could stop this wasteful practice suddenly and completely. But of course, now I am really dreaming.

Next up: First installment of Life after Agents.

I’m a big fan of the History Channel program Life After People. During this last workshop, a number of us got into discussions about what would happen in publishing if this thing happened, or that thing suddenly stopped. That conversation got me thinking that it might be fun to try to be a science fiction writer and extrapolate what might happen if some things in publishing suddenly changed.

Now first, understand, this is my opinion, and I welcome discussion and responses. And I could use ideas for topics in this general line of thinking about publishing. I have three or four already, including Life After Agents. I’m going to start with returns first. This might take me a few posts to cover as comments come in, so stay with me.

Also please remember I’m going to slant this from the writer perspective, giving that area the biggest attention. I’m not going to even try to get into how these changes might happen. Just as the History Channel does, I’m going to assume it suddenly happened and go from there.

So, generally following the format of the History Channel series, let me just jump in.

Life After Returns: 1 Hour.

Besides some cheering in publishing houses and a lot of mis-information being spread by writers who don’t understand returns, I doubt in one hour much would change. Some bookstore owners would suddenly be panicked and some publishers after a short amount of cheering would also be calling emergency meetings, but in one hour, not much else would be happening.

A little bit about returns. In the book publishing industry, the bookstore owners are in a rare and wonderful position of having to take no responsibility for their own inventory. This burden is held completely by the publishers. The bookstores can get between a 40% and 55% or more discount off the cover price and take no risk other than their own overhead. If the product doesn’t sell, they simply send it back for full credit.

How did such a really silly idea start? Back in the Depression, publishers stepped in to help bookstores stay open by offering this full return on some books. This allowed many bookstores of the day to remain open and selling the publisher’s books, so during the Depression it was a win/win situation for the industry.

During the Depression, all stores were owned by independent booksellers, and they ordered pretty much directly from each publisher through a sales representative of the publisher. Pulp magazines and comics had their own methods of getting into the corner stores and drug stores and never really got into this mess until later. Paperbacks as we know them did not exist when this started.

As the years went by, because the bookstores had grown to expect it, the publishers kept offering these full returns on some lines and books they wanted to promote until by the 1960s or so it was standard practice that almost all books were fully returnable for full credit.

Now, if you are starting to ask what happens to these books when they are returned, you are asking a good question. Paperbacks have their covers stripped by the bookstore and the covers sent back for the credit and the books trashed. Hardbacks are sent back and sometimes trashed by the publisher, sometimes sold again, depending on a number of factors.

A paperback can have returns of between 30% and 60% and still be successful. That means that if a publisher needs to sell 20,000 copies of a mass market book for it to break even, they have to print and ship at least 40,000 copies. 20,000 copies sell, 20,000 copies end up in landfills or recycled paper bins. A fantastically wasteful way to do business, especially in this new world of saving energy.

And there are a ton of hidden costs. Every book that is destroyed has to be shipped to the bookstore which costs gas and oil and energy, every book that is destroyed has to be printed, which takes energy and costs, and the paper created, and we all know that paper production is one of the most wasteful of all energy industries. Add in the boxes created to ship the books and you start getting an idea of how wasteful the returns system really is.

Life After Returns: 1 Day.

Publishers are scrambling, having tons of meetings at all levels. Publishers would have to revamp overnight all their discount schedules to the bookstores. They would be cutting press runs, but at the same time, they would have no idea how much to cut. Publishers, to sell books must still have market penetration, meaning they have to get the books to the shelves and the reader’s hands. For decades this market penetration has been covered by bookstore owners just not really caring how many of any title they order, thus if the publisher really wanted to put a book out, they could with good sales people and good discounts. But without returns, that all changes quickly.

The sales force would also be going nuts at this point and would be in the middle of all the publisher meetings trying to figure new discounts, talking with their bookstore reps and so on.

Writers will be panicked and cheering at the same time. Those of us who have been around long enough to go through a major collapse of the distribution system (1990s) know that this too shall pass, but it will take some time. For beginning writers, they will have a fear that selling will get harder for a time and they would be right.

For writers, returns show up as a figure on our royalty statements called “Reserve Against Returns.” On the first royalty statement this number can range from 50% and up. Suddenly this will no longer be the case. If a publisher actually ships and sells 20,000 copies, that’s what will show up. So for writers, on the surface, this is a good thing. A very good thing. One major way writers’ careers are killed is by simply having too many returns. And that often is the fault of a bad cover or bad cover copy or a sales force that dropped the ball and sent out too many copies.

Yes, I said too many copies. A book that ships at 40,000 copies and only has returns of 10,000 copies is a success, selling 30,000 copies. But the same book, shipped at 80,000 copies and returning 50,000 copies is a complete failure at the same 30,000 copy sales. See why anyone who really understands returns from the writer side will be cheering during the first day?

Bookstores on the other hand will be in full-fledged panic, but all but the most experienced bookstore owners won’t really understand the problem coming at them just yet. Why should they? They have never understood a business model that forces full responsibility for purchasing an inventory.

I owned a comic book store at one point back in the late 1970s. Comics were bought non-return and I can tell you that every week I worked hard over that order form for the comics to buy. I knew that if I thought I could sell five copies and I only sold two, I ate the other three. They went into my discount bin a few months later and I would be lucky to get even a part of my money back on them. So I was very careful. Bookstores owners will be forced into this mindset very suddenly.

Life After Returns: One Week

One area of publishing that will be in full blown panic at one week are the discount publishers. These are the companies that print books only for discount tables and discount stores. They will be coming quickly to the understanding that their business is in deep danger by the disappearance of the returns.

When you walk into superstore, all the books you see on the discount tables were printed especially for those tables. With the return system, it is better for the store to destroy the book and return the book for full credit than it is to discount it up front. So entire companies have grown up to fill the shoppers desire to have discount books. I have written a number of books and many short stories for those discount tables, my books never seeing the regular part of the store. And mall discount bookstores are the same way with a large part of their inventories. Not all, but some. Often publishers will print a certain number just for those stores at a deep discount. Authors, check your contracts. You don’t get anything for those books, even though they were printed and sold just like any other store.

So when returns disappear, bookstores will suddenly not need the discount publishers, they will simply move their unsold books to discount tables and cut the price. The discount publishers will soon find themselves out of business.

From the writer perspective, this move the book to a discount table instead of destroying it will be a stunningly good thing. A reader finds one of your discounted books on the front table of a store. You have already been paid for it so it’s no big deal to you. But to the reader, they buy your book cheap, take it home and read it. And if you did your job and they like the book, they will return to the store and buy your new book at full price. Having books on these discount tables, given enough time, will be a boon to writers and careers. With the return system, writers are robbed of this natural way to find new readers. Their books are destroyed instead and taken off of their royalty statement.

At one week, the books caught shipping in the middle of this sudden change will end up with a ton more copies in the warehouses and on discount tables because the numbers of copies had already been printed under the old system. This problem has happened to authors throughout time. Cold War thriller writers one day had careers, then when the Berlin Wall fell, they suddenly didn’t. Books scheduled to ship around 9/11 were completely lost and had huge returns. After 9/11, no one moved for a week or more, thus bookstores had no sales and those books were sent back without any reader getting the chance to buy them. Under the current system, a bookstore inventory, at least the new books and the ones up front, are in a state of constant change. You lose a week of sales due to a world event and all the books that were to be pushed that week are lost and quickly replaced by the books coming in behind them. This has killed many an author’s career.

At one week after returns, editors will pretty much freeze buying until all this settles out. They would be far too busy helping the publisher and sales force figure out real numbers and redo all their book profit and loss statements without returns.

Currently all books before they are bought have a profit and loss statement of one sort or another done for them, far before the writer ever knows the book will be bought. This calculation is an attempt to figure out all the costs of the book, from art to overhead to author costs to shipping costs and warehouse costs and everything. If suddenly a book that the publisher and sales and editor thought would sell 20,000 copies only needed to be figured on that number instead of 40,000 copies, it would make a major difference in all the profit and loss statements of every book. So during this first week editors would be spending a great deal of time trying to get all this done for the 100 plus books they have in different areas of their pipelines. No buying of new books for this week, and more than likely for a month to come. The buying will restart. The lists have to be filled each month.

Of course, as word of this got out, writers boards would panic, and many would shout that the sky was falling and all publishing was coming to an end. That’s normal for writer’s boards. Writers, after all, are people who make things up for a living, and often these writers don’t know when to stop making stuff up. Long time pros will just be writing their next books knowing that a system without returns will be a lot better for everyone.

Next installment in Life After Returns coming soon.

It was a great and long week with a good number of professional writers working on marketing their work.  Because of this new world of publishing, the discussions ranged over just about every topic and I learned a ton. And I hoped those attending learned a bunch as well.

Kris and I have done this week-long marketing workshop now three times in the last year, and we will do it again next year. Dates and costs to be announced later this summer. Each time we hold this workshop, I learn new things, tons of new ways to look at marketing, lots of new ways of marketing our work. And I’m not talking publicity or selling my work after it has been published, although those topics did come up as well. I’m talking about how to market your work after you finish it to editors, how to deal with agents in this new world, and so much more.

We also still have a few spots open in the Kris and Dean Shows in June and September, open to any writer at any level. In two days we cover the entire business, from how to write a selling story or novel to what goes on in editor’s offices, how books get bought, how to deal with agents, and so much more. No writing, just a ton of taking notes.

So, that’s the reason I haven’t been here for almost two weeks. I did get the updates mostly in on the streak list, although I have a few more yet to do. And I have come up with a brand new series of blogs I’m going to start this week sometime. The blog will follow the format of that wonderful History Channel show about the planet without humans, only in my series, I’m going to talk about publishing without such things as returns, agents, and other changes that are coming down the road for all of us. So stay tuned for that. It could be fun.

I’m back, getting caught up, and having fun. See you again soon.

Cheers, Dean

First of a new month.  Anyone working on a writing streak, send me your end of the month data and I’ll get it posted over under the Streak page. If you are thinking of firing up a writing streak, read the instructions on that page and then let me know.

Great writing, everyone.  Have fun.

Cheers, Dean

Great news. My wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award for best novella for her story “Room of Lost Souls.” Congrats, Kris!

For those of you who don’t know, “Room of Lost Souls” is part of the book “Diving into the Wreck” which as a novella also won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award for best novella. And both are part of her upcoming novel Diving in the Wreck which you can order now.

I’ve read the entire book and it’s stunning. And I’ve read the first part of the next book and it also is stunning. She’s creating one of the niftiest science fiction worlds, blending in history and family and lots of conflicts and mystery. Trust me, folks, from a very lucky first reader, this is a book and a series you want to follow.

Below is a picture of the cover of the novel coming out of Pyr Books.

Cheers, Dean