More Reaction to Recent Facts About the Fiction Market

I recently wrote about some evidence on the state of the market for fiction. I was predominantly concerned with how small the sales numbers were for some recent highly praised literary releases, and what this might mean for author incomes in SFF.

A number of other authors has weighed in on similar issues, motivated in addition by three recently released studies on author incomes and book sales. The first study summarizes the results of a survey of members conducted by the Authors Guild. According to Publishers Weekly, the survey revealed that "the majority of authors would be living below the Federal Poverty Level if they relied solely on income from their writing."

This is a scary conclusion. Is it correct? There is some evidence that the survey sample may not be representative of the wider population of authors

is based on responses from 1,674 Guild members, 1,406 of whom identified either as a full-time author, or a part-time one. The majority of respondents also lean older—89% are over the age of 50—and toward the traditionally published end (64%).

Specifically, the sample seems to exclude a lot of self-published authors, focusing on older, more established and traditionally published authors. But punting on its accuracy for now, the numbers are grim

Given that a single person earning less than $11,670 annually sits below the poverty line, 56% of respondents would qualify, if they relied solely on income from their writing. The survey also indicated that not only are many authors earning little, they are, since 2009, also earning less. Overall, the median writing-related income among respondents dropped from $10,500 in 2009 to $8,000 2014 in 2014, a decline of 24%. The decline came for both full-time and part-time authors with full-time authors reporting a 30% drop in income to $17,500 and part-time authors seeing a 38% decrease, to $4,500.

The conclusion many have drawn is the one pushed by Mary Rasenberger, executive director at the Guild: “Authors need to be cut in more equitably on the profits their publishers see, or we’ll stop seeing the quality of work the industry was built on.”

The second study was conducted by Association of American Publishers (AAP), whose 1200 members include the “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette. The results were summarized by Alexandra Alter in the New York Times in an article whose title The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead summarizes the message:

Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.

The Times article also cites the rebound in the number of independent bookstores as evidence that print demand is stabilizing.

It is important to note, however, that the AAP study also focuses on sales of traditional publishers and ignores independents. Some evidence on independents can be gleaned from the third study, the recently released Author Earning Report, which looks at eBook sales through Amazon, and which finds that

the “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette — have seen their collective share of the US ebook market collapse:

• from 45% of all Kindle books sold down to 32%
• from 64% of Kindle publisher gross $ revenue down to 50%
• from 48% of all Kindle author net $ earnings down to 32%

Other authors have weighed in on this, and the data I discussed earlier this week, with some varying opinions.

Chuck Wendig weighed in with his thoughts in Peaks and Valleys: The Financial Realities of the Writers Life. Like me, he also noted that the sample may not be representative by pointing out that neither he, nor most authors he knows, are members of the Guild. As for whether excluding eBook sales matters, Wendig points to this:

Of course, what you also need to note is that publishers set the e-book prices, and have in the last several months bumped those prices up, up, up — and Amazon undercuts those prices by dropping the physical copy cost.

John Scalzi has also weighed in with eBook Sales and Author Incomes and All That Jazz. Scalzi addresses both issues raised above. On declining author incomes, he points to alternatives sources of incomes for writers that are probably not counted in the Guild survey:

But with respect to writer incomes dropping via the Author’s Guild survey, this is one place where I wish we had better (which is to say more comprehensive and in some way independently verifiable) reporting from indie authors, because I suspect there’s a lot of money not being reported out there, not only in terms of direct indie/self-publishing unit sales, but through other avenues like Kickstarters and Patreons, which I anecdotally see adding a non-trivial amount of income to writers’ bottom lines. I suspect these are avenues that a lot of writers who are used to particular income paths are either not aware of, or exploiting — or perhaps can’t exploit because their established audiences are used to paying in them in particular ways. I’d love to see the figures on who crowdfunds, in terms of age; my suspicion is that it skews younger.

Would this money I suspect is going missing substantially move the needle in terms of overall author incomes? I don’t know. I suspect it might, but it’s possible not as much as some people cheerleading indie/self-publishing would like to admit.

I’ve noted before that I think in general there are three kinds of authors: Dinosaurs, mammals and cockroaches, where the dinosaurs are authors tied to an existing publishing model and are threatened when it is diminished or goes away, mammals are the authors who rise to success with a new publishing model (but who then risk becoming dinosaurs at a later date), and cockroaches are the authors who survive regardless of era, because they adapt to how the market is, rather than how they want it to be. Right now, I think publishing might be top-heavy with dinosaurs, and we’re seeing that reflected in that Author’s Guild survey.

What we’re missing — or at least what I haven’t seen — is reliable data showing that the mammals — indie/self-publishing folks, in this case — are doing any better on average. If these writers are doing significantly better on average, then that would be huge. It’s worth knowing.

As far as eBooks, he is inclined to think the data reflect short run factors related to traditional publishers relationship with Amazon:

I don’t think declining eBook sales from publishers means they’re doomed, doomed, either. This is in part because (and this seems to be a point of some confusion) there’s more to publishing than maximizing eBook sales numbers in the short term. Publishers, for example, might decide that it’s in their long-term interest to stabilize and even grow the print market, and price both their eBooks and print books in a manner that advantages the latter over the former in the short term.

Why would they do that? For a number of reasons, including the fact that Amazon is still 65% of the eBook market in the US, and publishers, as business entities, are appropriately wary of a retailer which a) clearly has monopsonist ambitions and tendencies, b) has been happy to play hardball with publishers to get its way. Investing time in strengthening alternate retail paths makes sense in that case, especially if, as the article suggests, consumers are happy to receive the book in different formats for an advantageous price. If people fundamentally don’t care if they read something in print or electronic format, as long as they get a price they like, that leaves publishers a lot of room to maneuver.

He also points to other short term factors associated with the rise of the eBook market itself, such as this point made by a publisher:

.@scalzi A publisher's take: ebook sales inflated as people bought up backlist releases. Now down to more realistic levels overall.

— Beth Meacham (@bethmeacham) September 23, 2015

Cedar Sanderson, an independent author, gives us her two-cents worth in Publishing’s Bellwether. Sanderson pays particular attention to problems with data on book sales:

See, here’s the thing. Print books are, in theory, externally trackable through the Nielsen BookScan data, which is notoriously unreliable. In theory, publishers ought to know what their sales numbers are, but there are two problems with that data. First, they aren’t going to release proprietary and sensitive information to the public. Secondly, publishers themselves often rely on BookScan, and as Dorie Clark writing for the Harvard Business Review put it “Shockingly” slow and outmoded: “Publishing through a traditional house? Most of us get weekly Nielsen BookScan reports—courtesy of Amazon—and sales figures every six months from our publisher.” Studies compiling data from both BookScan and the Association of American Publishers have ‘holes’ in their data. “The AAP and Nielsen data, while providing useful information that can point to important trends, does have some holes. As mentioned, AAP data doesn’t cover the entire industry, while Nielsen BookScan data doesn’t cover e-books. And lack of reliable e-book data is the most important omission.”

Sanderson interpret the sales data that I talked about last time as evidence of cross-subsidization in book selling and, in particular, the subsidization of "literary" work by best-sellers:

So the books that pay off for the publisher obviously subsidize the books that are published solely on ‘literary merit’ and the scapegoat trots off blithely into the desert to take his chances with the fickle public. With the rise of Indie Publishing, the scapegoat is no longer a necessary thing. No one can force an independent to bear the burdens of his less fortunate fellow authors, who write for awards rather than to sell books and make money.

The flock is hearing that bell jingle, and they are changing their path to follow him toward the good green pastures. “It’s a world where authors with plenty of Big 5 sales experience choose to say, ‘You know what, I’m not playing this game any more.’ Where authors make a positive choice to walk away from the terms offered by good, regular publishers. This new era of publishing is one where authors have a meaningful choice.”

In her mind, the rise of independent publishing will result in the end of this cross-subsidization.

Amanda S. Green has views that are similar to Sanderson's.

I think there is a lot of truth in each of the above opinions. I suspect that the fiction market is in decent shape driven by the expansion of independent publishers, but also supported by some strength (if not strong growth) in the sales of traditional publishers. The experiments that traditional publishers have been running with the pricing of eBooks probably explain some of their recent sales results and especially the decline in their share of eBooks. I do not think this bodes well for their long-run financial health but suspect that they will eventually realize that they need to reform their eBook pricing model.

As for the end of cross-subsidization, I would point out that the inherent riskiness in publishing---it is hard to know in advance exactly which titles will sell---means that publishers will always release a portfolio of books knowing that some will do better than others. Ex post (after we know how sales turned out) some books will turn out to make money while others lose money. This looks like cross subsidization but is really just the outcome of holding a diversified portfolio of titles.

That does not mean that there is no ex ante cross subsidization: some well-known authors are no doubt surer bets than many new authors. But how much cross subsidization is going on here? I suspect the well known authors are commanding much bigger advances and more lavish supporting expenditures. But if there is cross-subsidization, I think Sanderson is correct that some of these bigger authors will eventually take the independent publishing route in order to collect some more of the profits that they generate. However, nothing in economic theory says that cross-subsidization is inevitably bad for consumers, and so in contrast to Sanderson's opinion, ending this system need not be a good thing for consumers as a whole.

Authors Behaving Badly

Kristen Houghton has an mildly interesting Huffington Post piece entitled A Bad Book Review Isn't the End of the World. It begins with the following quote

"Writers, fall into two groups" said Isaac Asimov, acclaimed science fiction author. "Those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review."

I say "mildly interesting" because apart from a few anecdotes it doesn't have much to say that is new. But it does serve as an interesting jumping off point into the recent controversy over Chuck Wendig's Star Wars book and the way he has handled the criticism from fans.

Authors reacting badly to reviews is not new. Every couple of months I see something on the internet about an author who has lost their shit at negative reviews on Goodreads or Amazon. Sometimes the author responds with the threat of a lawsuit, as in the example of the reviewer who titled her 1-star Amazon review "Taking a bullet for all readers - oh god save your money!" and posted the book cover and author photo on her own website only to have the author threaten to sue for copyright infringement.

There are even websites that collate lists of author explosions.

The motivating example here is Chuck Wendig's response to fans following the release of his book Star Wars: Aftermath. The book has attracted a lot of bad reviews (roughly 40% 1-star reviews on Amazon when I last checked). Critics have cited many factors as being important. These include a controversy over the introduction of gay and lesbian characters to the Star Wars Universe (which is apparently not all that new), the writers style, in particular the decision to use third person present tense, and the introduction of modern terms and notions that appear, if not anachronistic, then at least out of place in the setting (e.g. one character refers to social media concepts like "trending").

Perhaps predictably, the reaction to these negative reviews has been to blame them on homophobia. This narrative has been picked up by the press, as in The Guardian story Star Wars novelist strikes back at gay character slurs and the CNet story 'Star Wars' author compares homophobic fans to the Empire:

Some fans who don't believe the "Star Wars" universe has room for gay characters have flooded Amazon's "Aftermath" page with negative, one-star reviews. In fact, one-star reviews count for 40 percent of the book's overall reviews.

Wendig himself seems aware that the negative reaction is more than just the result of homophobia, and also reflects changes made to the Star Wars Universe and to his voice as an author. But he does tend to get prickly in his main blog post on the issue. On the issue of voice:

As for my voice: I can’t do much about that. I’m me. My writing is my writing. I took a long time to find my voice and if it’s not your thing, I respect that. (That said, it also doesn’t make it “bad” writing, as some have suggested. It’s just not what you prefer, which is entirely okay.)

I might quibble with that; if your writing alienates a large fraction of your readers, then it would appear to satisfy a reasonable definition of the term "bad writing". But I accept that some readers might really like the voice and so it might be "good writing" for them.

On the changes to the Universe and fans feeling betrayed by Disney's decisions, he does express some sorrow but ultimately shows contempt for the fans who express their upset through negative book reviews:

I’ll say only this — if the only reason you didn’t like the book or left a review like that is because of some kind of campaign against it based on the EU/Legends canon, I am sorry. Honestly. I get that it sucks that some of the stories you love will remain unconsidered and unfinished. That’s not awesome. I’m not really sure what else would’ve been an option in terms of carrying that forward, though I also don’t know that Disney has officially put Legends out to pasture in terms of no new content ever. I will say, though, if your love of the EU drives you to campaigns like this, or hate-tweeting me or hate-mailing me, you’ve stopped being a fan. That’s not what being a fan is. Loving something is fandom. Hate isn’t, or shouldn’t be, part of it. Fandom is about sharing awesome things with like-minded people. It isn’t about spreading hate and forming spiteful tribes. That’s heinous fuckery. Do not partake in heinous fuckery.

I disagree. I think passion is at the heart of fandom. Passionately debating the relative merits of works of fiction is at the heart of fandom. Not mutual love-fests with only like-minded people.

On twitter, he basically states that they should keep their opinions to themselves:

If you read the book and hated it, scream it into a pillow for maximum therapeutic value.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) September 8, 2015

Both Wendig and the commentators seem to be downplaying the problems many readers have with using third person present tense. I think they are wrong to do so. Unless it is done very well (and it is very hard to do very well) it can be very alienating for the reader. I rarely find that I enjoy books written this way.

Wendig threw a tantrum over this back in July:

(And to those complaining that it's in present tense ha ha ha I don't care and I can't fix it now, suckaz.)

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 17, 2015

This commentator seems to think complaints about writing style don't equate to "content" in the context of a negative review:

Most of the reviews have little in the way of actual content. There’s little discussion of what, exactly, is supposed to be bad about Aftermath, yet they are also very homogeneous in their opinion of what’s wrong with the book. The big target is Wendig’s writing style, which is third person present tense, a style that he’s honed over the majority of his work. Maybe I’m just cynical, but I’m surprised that this many reviewers have pinpointed this particular style as their main reason for hating the book.

It is also very wrong to try to distract from this criticism by focusing on the homophobia of a few commentators. When I looked, there were 233 1-star reviews on Amazon. I glanced at them all, although I got tired of quoting from them after the first couple. Most of them had content and their complaints were mostly about the quality of writing. Few zeroed in on the issue of gay characters (although many pointed to them as token characters with their sexuality irrelevant to the plot). Some early samples:

The author's diction choices and phraseology are a constant distraction.

This book—what can I say? It is written differently. Differently than anything I have ever read. Why? Never seen so many short sentences. Very short. Super short. Choppy? Yes. Hard to concentrate? Yes. Hyphens? Oh—the hyphens. Never seen so many hyphens—in my entire life. His writing style? Hard to follow. Just like this review. So many short sentences. Likes all these I am writing. I can be a writer too. Obviously. This is how the whole book is. Many examples. The hyphens—did I mention all the hyphens?

I do take issue, though, with the choppiness of most of it, the misused and abused punctuation, the literary laziness of it all.

The writing style is sloppy, to say the least. The characters are one dimensional and boring.

I was going to stand up for the author, and say that his writing style is for him to decide and that in the end what matters is the story, but having seen him unable to take any criticism, well then he is to blame too for this mess.

This is not just my view; other commentators have also come to the conclusion that it is about writing style and not homophobia:

Well...reading reviews of Chuck Wendig's Aftermath just highlights one thing: Star Wars fans really don't like the present tense.

— Doug Smith (@The_Idlewilder) September 10, 2015

@ChuckWendig It's the writing style. Present tense and sentence fragments just doesn't work for most people.

— Sean Koury (@SeanKoury) September 7, 2015

@ChuckWendig Every single 1-star review consists of "there used to be an EU and now there's not and I'm mad" or "what is the present tense"

— Brandon Carbaugh (@BMCarbaugh) September 7, 2015

@ChuckWendig No present tense. We aren't attacking your book for personal reasons. We genuinely think it's not good.

— Eric Schroeder (@schroederfett) September 6, 2015 

I think the problem is inadvertently well summarized in this tweet:

@thekineticpen @authorsahunt @ChuckWendig People keep trying to talk me out of present tense, but I love the challenge, the precision.

— Bronwyn Louise Emery (@b_louise_emery) June 2, 2015

That is, some authors (and I presume Wendig is one) choose to write in third person present tense for the challenge of doing so. They write this way to show off for their author friends. Reading these authors is akin to watching a gigantic circle jerk which, for most of us, is just not that enjoyable. And the authors that do it should be prepared to face the consequences in terms of fan backlash.

This is not to say that I have no sympathy at all for Wendig. Naturally, I am on Wendig's side when it comes to the homophobia.  His response here is pretty good:

And if you’re upset because I put gay characters and a gay protagonist in the book, I got nothing for you. Sorry, you squawking saurian — meteor’s coming. And it’s a fabulously gay Nyan Cat meteor with a rainbow trailing behind it and your mode of thought will be extinct. You’re not the Rebel Alliance. You’re not the good guys. You’re the fucking Empire, man. You’re the shitty, oppressive, totalitarian Empire. If you can imagine a world where Luke Skywalker would be irritated that there were gay people around him, you completely missed the point of Star Wars. It’s like trying to picture Jesus kicking lepers in the throat instead of curing them. Stop being the Empire. Join the Rebel Alliance. We have love and inclusion and great music and cute droids.

But he needs to learn that taking risks with your writing, and then attacking your readers and reviewers when your risks do not pay off, is going to drive readers away. I personally do not foresee reading any of his work in the future as a result of this incident. I don't want to be a guinea pig in an author's writing experiments. And I don't want to be exposed to contempt or outright abuse when I write that I did not enjoy a book. Nor do I want to be labeled a homophobe just for disagreeing with you.
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Other authors are weighing in, too.

Cedar Sanderson has a strongly worded response to Wendig on Mad Genius Club:

When you confront your reader with, in the first paragraphs, sentences that don’t make sense, you are doing the worst thing to readers an author can do. Mislectorism. Betrayal. You’re showing your readers you hate them, and they will respond to it. “This particular ship has seen action: plasma scarring across the wings and tail fins; a crumpled dent in the front end as if it was kicked by an Imperial walker.” Look at that sentence. Consider that it is not alone. I don’t think I have ever seen as many colons in one passage in all the thirty-some years I have been reading. Nor have I seen this many sentence fragments in once place. I shudder to think of how many dashes and hyphens met their ends here. If I had to name this style I’d call it post-Modern chop suey, because everything is minced and mixed together until it resembles a dog’s breakfast.

(I like the term Mislectorist, apparently due to Mike Hoover).

In a comment on Sanderson's post, Amanda S. Green reached much the same conclusions that I did from looking at the reviews:

I’ve taken the time to read the reviews not only on Amazon but on B&N as well. Let’s look at the B&N reviews to start. There are 17 reviews there for a 3.5 star cumulative review. 6 of those 17 reviews are 5 stars. However, and this is a big however, of those 6 reviews 4 are one line back and forth comments between reviewers that have nothing to do with the book. Another has no comment at all. So let’s toss them out. The final five star review is a true review by someone who liked the book. The rest of the reviews deal with the plot or writing style. One review, one of the more supportive ones, does say that the inclusion of a gay character felt forced. Over all, the complaint, even among those giving good reviews, was that the writing was not at the level it should be and that Wendig did not appear to love the universe he was writing in.

If you look closely at the Amazon reviews, you see much the same thing. Yes, there are those upset with the fact the EU was tossed out. But most of the reviews concern the writing style or the story structure. Sure, there are a few who object to having a gay lead character, there always will be someone who doesn’t approve of something. But the overall message is that the book is poorly written.

The key thing here is to look at the author’s behavior and how he is alienating a fan base. He has basically called all those who don’t like his work homophobes simply because they don’t like his work. That is not a way to win friends or influence people, at least not in a good way.