Last week I started this series on Kindle publishing with a look at some of its biggest players (Konrath, Hocking, and Eisler), and then spent a while discussing the technological changes that have made this publishing revolution possible.

But even with the technological shift well and firmly established, there’s another shift that has to happen before Kindle publishing goes mainstream. Writers, every bit as much as newspapermen and prime time anchors face a credibility gap.

The Publishers

Naturally, the harshest critics of the credibility of Kindle publishing are those who have the most to lose with it. Legacy publishers collectively provide a sneering disregard for the opportunities available to authors today. A recent Time magazine article on the topic of digital publishing quoted Michael Cader, founder and editor of trade e-newsletter Publishers Lunch,

“The trick is not that the digital isn’t profitable,” says Cader. “Digital at its current level makes few or none of the costs of running a print business go away.” That means big warehouses, broad sales forces and extensive systems. The hope, of course, is that in time, digital will be cheaper to produce, but currently, publishers face a big expense in converting to digital.

Cader’s comment is absurd on its face. Digital does makes the cost of running a print business go away from the point of view of the author, of the reader, and even of the digital publisher. It’s only established print publishers that have those costs.

It’s astonishing how much the legacy publishers equate their business methods with “the publishing industry.” The whole shakeup going on in publishing right now is happening because these are two different ways of getting books to readers, but the established players are quick to describe digital as just an aspect of their legacy process.

And the trade press is carrying the publishers’ spin. Konrath linked to an unflattering Publisher’s Weekly article about his self-publishing “schemes” that seemed deliberately and harshly slanted against him, manipulating and omitting key facts in order to position Konrath’s choice to self-publish as one of desperation.

That is precisely the message publishers like to spread: that self-publishing is the last resort of an inadequate author so desperate to see his unfit book in print that he’s unwilling to spend the time and effort honing his craft and learning the market to get a deal with a traditional publisher. As we discussed last earlier, there was some grain of truth to those accusations when the technology and cost of self-publishing made legacy publishing the most legitimate path for an author.

Legacy publishers also insist their business model is the best (and perhaps only, as Cader’s quote above implies) in terms of sales and income. When Barry Eisler announced his decision to turn down a lucrative print deal to self-publish through Amazon, Mike Shatzkin wrote on another industry blog analyzing the decision.

They didn’t do the math on what the loss of print sales and print merchandising might mean in dollars and cents and how to address it….

Even if the math Konrath and Eisler put forth showing that the author share of ebook sales can increase by three or four times through self-publishing; even if we ignore (as they did) the fact that the higher percentage will be on a lower retail price (they trumpet the lower retail price they can charge as a key motivation for the shift); and even if we forget about the costs in time and actual expense involved in self-publishing, the author who follows this formula has to take into account the loss of presence and revenue from the retail channel.

All of that seems perfectly reasonable. That’s the core of the legacy publishers’ argument. It’s also completely wrong. The “math Konrath and Eisler put forth” is founded on some of the very elements Shatzkin accuses them of ignoring. Yes, Kindle publishing offers a higher percentage on a lower retail price, but that’s only true of gross sales. For authors, there is no loss. The higher percentage is so much higher that it completely offsets the lower price, in terms of author income, and the lower price can generate far more sales.

That’s not to say Kindle publishing is guaranteed to earn an author more money, but the industry analysts consistently repeat arguments so deeply rooted in the perspective of legacy publishers’ business model that it has no connection to the real situation of authors — or of readers, which is to say, of their customers.

The Readers

Even as publishers have fought to maintain a credibility gap between self-published and legacy-published books, readers have largely ignored their message. Perhaps it’s because they so effectively controlled legitimacy during the print era, but legacy publishers have so completely owned the market that (unlike their counterparts in news media) they have done astonishingly little to establish themselves as popular brand names among readers.

By and large, readers ignore publishers. Readers tend to buy books by author, by genre, or by cover. Publishers efforts at branding have focused on those last two, running separate lines and imprints specialized in popular categories and stamping the spines of their book covers with imprint logos. But apart from Harlequin, few fiction publishers have ever managed to become household names among buyers.

As a result, readers’ credibility assessment of novels has less to do with the pedigree of the publishing company than with the professional appearance of the book. Until recent years that has been a fairly insignificant distinction, as expensive printing technology reserved that professional appearance only to the large publishing companies that could afford it, but as we saw before, that has all changed.

Authors can now hire freelance editors, cover designers, interior designers, and technical formatting to prepare digital books for small, one-time costs, and it’s a simple matter for a good cover designer to imitate and even duplicate the look and feel of popular legacy-published covers within a given genre.

It’s really no surprise that readers are willing to overlook the pedigree of a book’s publisher. For much of the last twenty years, the trend society-wide has been away from respect for legitimizing “gatekeepers” and toward a larger respect for group approval — not just in the publishing industry, but across all of mass communication.

That shift goes hand in hand with the rise of the digital era. As it gets easier and easier for authors to reach wide audiences without the need for broadcast intermediaries (legacy publishers), and as it gets easier and easier for readers to find books by individual authors or on specific topics, the value and significance of the gatekeeper’s approval rapidly diminishes.

And that shift is exactly what Amazon has facilitated. Through their Kindle and Kindle Direct Publishing they’ve made it possible to produce books at an extraordinarily low cost. And through their browsing categories, widespread bestseller lists, and personalized recommendations, they’ve made it possible for readers to find book even without the huge promotional backing of a major publisher.

The result is precisely what we saw in Eisler’s anecdote above. His daughter, a member of the digital native generation, easily and immediately considered self-publishing a legitimate (and, in fact, obvious) direction for her father’s career.

There are still plenty of entrenched beliefs, but with every day that passes the reading public gets more access to the liberating digital tools provided by Amazon and their competitors in the e-Book industry, and the market for digital publishing grows larger and larger.

Sadly, the last true holdouts of the self-publishing credibility gap are those who have the most to gain with Kindle publishing: the authors. Come back tomorrow and we’ll talk about their role.

In the midst of all this talk about the Kindle publishing explosion, I get to take a break to provide one more case study. She’s no Konrath or Eisler or Hocking (yet), but our own Courtney Cantrell has become a part of the phenomenon.

Or perhaps I should say we’ve made her a part of it. Consortium Books officially released her book today, April 12, 2011, although it’s been available on Amazon for most of a week now. If you haven’t already gotten a copy, go pick one up for 99 cents.

Publishing Colors of Deception has been quite the learning experience. Before that, I’d been playing the dual role of President of Consortium Books and published author for the last eight months, working two of my own books through from start to finish, but back in February we got to work on Courtney’s book, and for the first time I got to approach the process as just the publisher.

That gave me a new perspective, and an opportunity to see how much we’re doing right (and to fix a handful of things we’ve been doing wrong). Overall it was an incredibly encouraging experience.

Of course, it was made easier by the fact that Courtney has written a fabulous book with a striking setting, and that she brought her enthusiasm to every stage of the design process. She has carried it on since the final edits, too, promoting the book on Twitter and Facebook so effectively that she has, in a matter of days, achieved more sales of her book than either of mine has ever done in a given month.

Go Courtney!

And she didn’t stop there. She worked with our Director of Marketing, Joshua Unruh, to plan a book giveaway themed around her novel. Check it out:

In celebration of the publication of her first book, Colors of Deception, Courtney Cantrell is giving some copies away! Over the next two weeks, she’ll be collecting entries for a contest. Her two favorites will each win a free, signed paperback.

In Colors of Deception, cute college sophomore Holly Idaho discovers that a demon in stalking her. Over the course of the story, Holly realizes that this demon has a rabid and morbid fascination with the music of rock band INXS.

Why INXS? You’d have to ask the demon.

According to this demon’s favorite band, we all have “the devil inside.” But maybe this devil prefers a different kind of music?

Maybe you think a demon should prefer Country & Western. Or might demons just sing the Blues? Perhaps they go for the classics like Black Sabbath.

Maybe they’re insidious and love The Girl from Ipanema.

So here is Courtney’s challenge to you: In one hundred words or less, tell her what music you think demons listen to and why.

Be scary, be humorous, be ridiculous, or be whatever you want to be. Courtney’s two completely arbitrary favorite entries will each receive:

• a signed copy of Color of Deception,
• a mention on Courtney’s blog,
• and the winning entry posted on Courtney’s blog.

Courtney will probably post some other non-winning entries she thinks are clever as well.

Submit your entries here, in Courtney’s email form. The contest ends at midnight, Central Standard Time [UTC-06:00], April 26th. Thanks for playing — and happy writing!

I started the week with a brief introduction to a long series on Kindle publishing. I finished that introduction with the promise of some case studies.

If you’re at all familiar with Kindle publishing or the indie publishing “scene” that’s developing even as we speak, you probably could have guessed at least two of the three names that would show up in that discussion. Let’s start with the most obvious.

J. A. Konrath

J. A. Konrath, also known as Jack Kilborn, is the biggest poster-child for the Kindle publishing movement. The story goes that he was a mid-list horror/thriller writer with a multi-book contract with Hyperion when his imprint went under. That quickly, Konrath found himself back in the “query-go-round.”

He had an agent but no publisher, and as Konrath began shopping his novel to other publishers he faced much the same barrier to entry that so many unknown writers have to battle. Wherever he finally did find interest from a publisher, his editor insisted on major changes to the manuscript that Konrath felt would compromise the story he wanted to tell.

So he walked away. He walked away from the offer of a multi-book contract with a handsome advance, deciding to take advantage of the digital revolution and publish his own books. He started small, producing and selling his own PDF e-books through his personal website, but eventually stumbled across Kindle Direct Publishing and began releasing his books directly to Amazon.

Konrath was a success. He was a phenomenal success, and he continues to see growth in his sales, but much of Konrath’s importance has been his transparency. Konrath maintains a popular blog called “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing” at jakonrath.blogspot.com, and as soon as he committed to self-publishing, he started talking about it.

As early as 2009 Konrath was encouraging other writers to consider self-publishing on the Kindle. And as often as he recommended it, he backed up the discussion with numbers. He shared his monthly sales numbers, and the distribution across different platforms. He openly compared the success of his self-published titles to those of his handful of traditionally-published books.

For several years, Konrath was widely dismissed — usually as an anomaly. Critics suggested he’d only found the success he had because of his background in traditional publishing. Others said he only sold so many book because of the popularity of his blog, built on his outspoken criticism of the traditional publishing industry.

Konrath responded in 2010 with several blog posts rounding up and presenting other indie authors finding similar success on the Kindle platform. Month after month he dug up examples of authors with no traditional publishing cred and no major internet presence who were competing with him and other big name authors in terms of sales and income.

He started out with simple lists of names, paired up with Amazon sales ranks. Sometimes these posts included simple charts showing the distribution of indie-published books in various Amazon Top 100 lists, compared with Big 6 titles.

These posts built a pretty compelling case that Konrath was more than an anomaly. A trailblazer, perhaps, but hardly an outlier. And as the year wore on, he moved from long lists to detailed spotlights on other successful authors, often bringing them in to guest post with their own story of self-publishing success.

Amanda Hocking

One of the most impressive of these spotlights was on an indie writer named Amanda Hocking. While Konrath arbitrarily set his criterion for a “successful” self-published author at “thousands of sales a month” (Konrath himself was averaging around 4,000 sales a month across all his self-published titles at the time), Amanda Hocking started as a total unknown and, within less than a year, rose to eclipse Konrath completely.

He spotlighted Amanda Hocking on his blog in December 2010. At the time, she was selling an average of 10,000 books a week. He said of her,

She has no name-recognition. If you look at her blog, she only has a few comments per post. She has no traditional publishing background, either.

Compare that to me, who has some name recognition, and a prior platform in the print world. I’ve been doing this longer than she has by years, have a large installed fanbase, have a blog that gets a million hits a year, and it’s tough to find a discussion about self-pubbing or Kindle that doesn’t mention me.

Yet Amanda is creaming me in sales.

Her story went on to gain some mainstream attention in early 2011, and by then the stories were about her selling 100,000 copies in January and February. It made the news when she bought a house for cash with her self-published earnings.

And then in March she made news again when she began entertaining offers for a traditional publishing contract. She eventually agreed to a three-book deal including an advance well over two million dollars.

She made a blog post announcing the successful conclusion of that rights auction, and explaining the thinking that led her back to a traditional publisher, but the clearest explanation came in a post she published mid-auction:

But here’s what I can say – I’m writer. I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling emails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full time corporation…. I am spending so much time on things that are not writing.

That explanation not only reveals the appeal of traditional publishing, it also shows how a self-published success story is built.

Barry Eisler

And even as Amanda Hocking was announcing her happy entry into the world of superstar traditionally-published authors, another “brand name” author was announcing his exit. Thriller author Barry Eisler famously turned down a $500,000 two-book deal from traditional publishers to seek his own fortune with self-publishing.

Eisler made this big announcement in a 13,000-word interview with Konrath that was published on Konrath’s blog. When Konrath commented on the significance of Eisler’s decision, Eisler told a little story.

Here’s something that happened about a year ago. Anecdotal, but still telling, I think. My wife and daughter and I were sitting around the dinner table, talking about what kind of contract I would do next, and with what publisher. And my then eleven-year-old daughter said, “Daddy, why don’t you just self-publish?”

And I thought, wow, no one would have said something like that even a year ago. I mean, it used to be that self-publishing was what you did if you couldn’t get a traditional deal. And if you were really, really lucky, maybe the self-published route would lead to a real contract with a real publisher.

But I realized from that one innocent comment from my daughter that the new generation was looking at self-publishing differently. And that the question–“Should I self-publish?”–was going to be asked by more and more authors going forward. And that, over time, more and more of them were going to be answering the question, “Yes.”

This is exactly what’s happening now. I’m not the first example, though I might be a noteworthy one because of the numbers I’m walking away from. But there will be others, more and more of them.

He went on there, and on his own blog, to discuss this decision openly and with lots of hard numbers. In the end, he said, the decision was a purely financial one, and he was convinced that he could make a lot more selling the books on his own than he could selling them through a traditional publisher.

Many of the calculations and reasoning he used would be familiar to any Konrath fan, because Eisler was leaning heavily on Konrath’s logic. In fact, Eisler (a friend of Konrath’s) admitted that even though Konrath has been pushing him, he was a long-time holdout on the self-publishing game.

But the core of Konrath’s argument hinged on some pretty simple and straightforward factors: the time value of money, the disinterest and decline of the publishing industry, and the brand power of individual authors. When Barry Eisler weighed those issues, his ultimate decision was to self-publish.

The desire to self-publish — to shed the burden of publishers’ timetables and marketing departments’ meddling and, at the same time, to keep a larger portion of the profits — is not a new desire. The difference today technology. It’s the resources available to writers that now tilt those three factors listed away from legacy publishers and toward self- and indie-publishers.

We’ll talk about the technology of Kindle publishing in tomorrow’s article, and exactly how it’s so disrupted the established publishing industry.

In January of 2011, I started taking a class called “Readings in Mass Communication” in pursuit of my Master of Professional Writing degree at the University of Oklahoma. It’s an interdisciplinary theory course that combines lectures and select readings in the academic literature to explore the changing role of mass communication in society, its withering credibility, and the role of today’s rapidly-changing technology in that shift.

The professor came from a newspaper background and the majority of the students in the program owed their allegiance to the college’s journalism school. That frame of reference shaped the conversation some, so when we talked about the credibility crisis in mass communication, we were primarily discussing the credibility crisis of journalists and public relations professionals and news shows.

As the discussion unfolded, though, I came to recognize clear parallels between the changing state of news media and the publishing industry. The technology developed in the last decade has allowed a massive upheaval in the established ways of doing business, the importance of centralized distributors is collapsing, and the most successful participants in the new market have established themselves not through the authority of a central source but by participating effectively in the digital supernetwork and encouraging discussion of them and their products within local networks.

And nowhere is that industry shift more visible than in the rise of the Kindle publisher. I’ve discussed Kindle publishing here before, and while it represents just one of many new (and viable) distribution methods available to the self-published or indie-published author, digital publishing through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing provides a clear and powerful look into the future of the publishing industry.

Over the following weeks I’ll look at several examples of major participants in the Kindle publishing phenomenon, then discuss how new technology has impacted each of their stories, what their stories reveal about the credibility and authority of traditional publishers (and how that differs among writers, readers, and distributors), and finally look at the role of the supernetwork as the new medium for mass communication, and how Kindle publishers can best engage with it.

It should be an interesting conversation. I’m looking forward to the things I’ll have to research to fill it out, and I really like the idea of having a complete take on the topic down on paper.

I’d originally intended to address the topic of copyright pretty heavily in the discussion, too, but my preliminary research into that topic revealed a lot of legal opinion and a lot of personal opinion, and virtually nothing in between. I think an investigation of the process of Kindle publishing, rather than the legal incentives and risks behind it, will reveal far more about the topics we really want to discuss.

So come back Thursday and we’ll talk about J. A. Konrath (you knew that was coming), and a couple others.

Last week I told you all about classical scene structure for novels. The core of it is that the scenes driving your story should always be tightly focused on a direct conflict between two characters, and the scene should end in catastrophe for the protagonist.

One More Word on Catastrophe

Now…there is a great range of things that can be called “catastrophes,” and your story’s genre, your own style, and the desired tone of the book can all determine just how grave the catastrophes really are. If you’re writing a cute little story about deers and bunnies, you don’t have to end a scene with the protagonist’s mother dying tragically.

Then again, Disney made it work.

Whatever your catastrophe is, relative to the protagonist’s story goal it needs to represent a significant setback. In fact, the catastrophe should be as significant as you want the scene to be. And they should get progressively bigger and bigger as the story goes along.

That doesn’t mean things have to get crazy-out-of-control by the end of your novel. It means you’ve got to pace yourself and plan ahead. It requires a delicate balance, but managing these things is exactly how we build gripping stories that drag the reader from start to end and deprive them of much-needed sleep.

A good scene drives the reader through it, without leaving a moment to breathe, plunging straight toward the catastrophe. And then the catastrophe should generate enough concern to keep them reading to the next scene. It’s fiendishly clever.

Filling in the Gaps

So! I’ve talked a lot about scenes now. I just mentioned the need to hook readers until the next scene. And if you read last week’s articles, you know that a scene is a very specific, rigorously-defined thing. The scenes make up the most interesting portion of your story, but they can’t be all of it.

So what’s left? There are actually a couple designations Deborah Chester uses, but by and large the most common of them is the “sequel.” In classical scene structure, a sequel is a moment of reflection following a fast-paced scene.

During a scene, there is no backstory, no explanation, no exposition at all. Everything is action and reaction — stimulus and response — and every word of a scene is tightly focused on the conflict in question. That gives a scene much of its power, but you can’t tell a whole story that way.

So we use the sequel as a chance to go back over the ground we just covered, filling in the missing pieces. Our protagonist pounds a fist on her hip and asks herself, “How could I be so stupid? I’ve known for years that the Knights of St. Newton never use indigo-colored laser blasts!”

(Actually, that didn’t turn out to be a good example at all, but I cherish the concept so much that I refuse to cut it out. Let’s forge on!)

Post-Traumatic Stress

During the sequel, the protagonist reflects on the things that happened during the scene, providing necessary context or explanation. He might tie the scene question into the larger story question, figure out some key element he’d overlooked during the heat of the conflict, or just provide a slow-motion recap of what actually just went down.

And during this moment of reflection, one of the main things the protagonist is going to think about is the catastrophe. That’s the nature of catastrophes. It makes for easy writing, and it’s usually a compelling read, too. We learn a lot about a character by how he reacts to adversity, and scene-ending catastrophes are excellent sources of adversity.

So the protagonist needs to review the overarching story goal, and figure out how this setback plays into his plans. He needs to recalibrate, and pick a new path. That’s the natural evolution of a sequel — it starts with an emotional reaction to catastrophe, moves through a thoughtful processing of the new dilemma, and leads to a decision as to how the protagonist will forge ahead.

And that part is critical. We want our protagonists to be active heroes, not reactive wimps. The first time I heard this noise about every scene ending in catastrophe, I thought, “If you do that, how can you avoid having a protagonist in a constant state of battered post-traumatic stress, reacting (at best) or driven to a standstill (at worst).”

The answer is in a well-made sequel. If you manage it right, the scenes make your story while the sequels make your characters. I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.