#170 David
Succinctness is rarely one of my virtues.
Twitter not into temptation....
#167 Green
Paula @157, I understand the temptations of that business model. However, book buyers are repeat customers, and there are a lot of them. The pool of people willing and able to pay for this package is small-and-shrinking, and once the scheme has been running for a bit and the promised dreams weren't delivered, getting further people to pay will become harder. Also, you are continuously looking for _new_ customers. And you're competing not just with all the other divisions of ASI (who don't care which of their divisions you go with) but with Lulu and putting out an e-book on your website with a PayPal button.
The US population is 300 million. Doing a gross simplification, dividing that by 60, there are 5 million people in each age bracket 1 to 60 (I did type "gross simplication"). If one percent of them are susceptible to deceptions such as ASI publish, that's 500,000 new scammables per year coming into prime scammable age . If one out of 500 of the scammables wants desperately to be a Published Author, that's a thousand -new- people per year who'll bite on the baited hook.... A thousand new rubes per year is "a market" for producing a revenue stream, at the rate that ASI charges....
It's the same basis as spam runs on--a fraction of one percent, provides far more than enough return on investment to continuing spamming. ASI basically is a spammer...
So yes, short-term profit. Temptations galore. However, it seems to me as if ASI is running out of easily found marks, which is why they're now targetting major publishers to bring in new writers.
ASI has been getting hit with lawsuits which is has been losing. At the same time, it has expanded its sales operation.... Until and unless the management at publishers, particularly conglomerate ones, tell ASI to take their business model and walk off the side of a freight ship into the Pacific over the Marianas Trench, or someone manages to put the principles of ASI into a situation banning them from it on threat of rotting in a jail cell if they don't, I expect that the ASI principals and their backers are going to persist in their noxious scam behavior.... I sincerely wish they would suddenly and magically cease being shysters, but based on past history and behavior, I don't expect them to. I expect them to be sleazy slimy sales and marketing weasels, hawking inferior services at inflated prices, and conning the gullible and the greedy into collusion with them.
Give it ten years, and the number of new people you can successfully dupe into the venture is going to be very low.
Ponzi schemes haven't gone away, and again, there are fresh crops of gullible aspiring authors arriving daily....
On the other hand, today's bestselling authors are not unlikely to still be money spinners in ten years' time. It's a different business.
Craig Shaw Gardner was at Readercon, and is back working as an SF/F/gaming store store clerk, which is what he was doing before becoming a bestsellling author....
Regarding the efficiency of delivery services -- I think it was The Franklin Mint, that when I was doing market research studies (paid commercial research, that is....), I was told has the production lines terminate into a substation of a delivery company--the products go DIRECTLY from production line into the delivery service station and from there onto delivery service trucked headed out to delivery to the purchasers.... If retailers and wholesalers etc. are included in the purchasing, they get to do their own warehoue and merchandise storage on store shelves or in warehouses or in storerooms... the producer sends quite literally the merchandise all down the line to the freight company to deal with.
Oh, Bah! I messed up on the simple arithmetic [never trust the simple arithmetic of someone with a math degree....].
Anyway, the bottom line nonetheless is that return on investment is the ratio of the income, compared to what the business had to spend of its OWN money, as opposed to using OPM-- Other People's Money. The loan cost is the fraction of employee's time and travel and phonecalls for getting the loan approved, and the cost of money pying the interest on the loan, the rest of the loan "cost" evaporates if the company pays it all back-- the income pays off the loan principal and that gets listed as a business expense in the profit and loss statement--but for the purpose of Return on Investment, it doesn't exist.
That also is part of what drives e.g. Just In Time business practices, and "outsourcing -- somebody ELSE is paying the day to day salaries and the day to day warehousing fees and for the warehouse space, and the inventory and real estate taxes. The business is paying its partners service fees for services, which are completely expensible and tax deductible in the USA for the year the services occur in, and paying rent rather than owning, the cost of the facilities is fully expensible and deductible.
Tax laws drive a LOT of things....
#149 Green Knight
Simplified arithmetical case:
Assume each of 300,000,000 people in the USA buys 1 book per years Assume that a print publication book needs 50,000 copies to sell to be commercially profitable the the author get the next contract. Divide 300,000,000 by 50,000, ad the result is there there is a viable market for 6000 books published per year in the USA.... How many of these is Harlequin publishing?
Now look at shyster vanity press (SVP)--EACH rube spending at least $600 is donating money to the shyster. If there are 2000 rubes per year, that's a minimum of $120,000 that SVP is getting. Some of the rubes are going to drop more than $25,000 on SVP "services" without SVP necessarily providing two cents in royalty payments.... And for every disillusioned rube suckered by SVP, there are new rubes lining up to replace... SVP's expenses for getting the money, are the time and effort for advertising, for making partnering deals with publishers who are debasing themselves, and for the cost of providing such services as they actually provide--but first except for the advertising and partnership arrangements, the money comes -in- from the wannabeepublisheds....
Meanwhile, just what are the profits that the book publishers are getting from publishing the books?
There is a term, "return on investment" that is the true bottom line in big business--it's what the business earns, compared to to what it spends up front. It's why businesses paying what used to be apparently usurious interest rtes of 18% per annum borrowing money for production and such, were willing to borrow money at those rates -- the basis was they borrowed money for a few months, to pay for production, and paid back those short-term loans with money from product sales when the products got sold..... one big issue with the liquidity crisis at the moment is that stores couldn't get loans for Christmas Sales Season merchandise in the amount and at rates that they used to be able to get, and the result is that there is a lot less stock in stores than there used to be... yes, stores were deliberately cutting orders, but part of it, again, is not only the expectation that consumers are being parsimonious, but that the retailers had much lower and nastier term borrowing limits available, with which to order/buy merchandise for retail sale....
The plurality of retail goods sold in the USA, sell in November, December, and late October. Retailers borrow money to pay for orders, and then get their revenue when consumers give them money... the retail prices take into account that consumers use credit cards and pay over time, and that credit card companies charge percentage fees for the service, and that the retailer has to pay back the loans... if the sales fail to cover the loans, the business goes the way of Circuit City or Borders--either out of business outright, or renegotiating terms and loans with creditor and cutting back on merchandise available for sale,
shutting down stores, laying off people, etc.
The successful business does more accurate forecasting of customer spending months ahead of when the merchandise actuaally arrives and is available for purchase by consumers... in the case of "traditional" publishers, the buyers for Borders, Barnes and Noble, etc., make order decisions from the publishers' catalogs, which the publishers decide, years earlier, whether to offer an author a contract for a book or books the author is proposing to write, or has written and has submitted the manuscript to the publisher for publication consideration.
The "traditional" publisher therefore is making a bet usually at least two years in advance, of what the public is going to buy, and a bet more than a year in advance, about what retailers nd wholesalers will order in what quantities....
Now consider loan economics.... 20% loan for six months, means that the business will have expenses of the total loan value plus half a year's interest, or 110% of the value of the loan, to pay to the loan company if paying off in full at the end of the six months.
The publisher is paying more than that, because the loan is for longer period of time.
However, looking at "return on investment," the economics are somewhat different-- the retailer takes out a six month loan for say $20,000 for merchandise, and sells the merchandise for $40,000. Assume that the expenses are the $2000 in six months' of interest at a 20% annual percentage rate, and store running expenses of $16,000... $40,000 - ($4000 + $16,000) = $20,000 -- the return on investment is 100% !!! What the store -actually- spent of its own money was $20,000.... it leased the use of $20,000 from the creditor loaning it the money. Also, the store gets to deduct the $4000 of interest payment as cost of money expense, from its taxes....
Meanwhile, SVP is forward financed, the money comes -in- from the suckers, before any money actually gets spent on book production and such--so SVP has the use of the suckers' money for investing, in, loaning it out to agencies getting that 20% short-term interest.... if the SVP is brainy. If the SVP is typically greedy, it's busily hiring more marketing and salesweaselspeople and spending money advertising looking for more suckers, and then hiring people to do the increased expected workload from the more suckers....
Soylent Green!
I thought of Z but couldn't remember the name....
Harrumph.
More germane viewing
* Dr Strangelove
* High Noon
* Catch 22
* To Kill a Mockingbird
* The Crucible
* A Man for All Seasons
* Murder in the Cathedral
* Mr Roberts
* Lysistrata
#128, me
Make that, were IBM to enter into a major business deal partnership arrangement for a new division with.... Companies do business with the disreputable all the time, selling products to them so long as the check doesn't bounce and the FBI etc. doesn't come in investigating. Partnering with fraud convicts, however, tends to be bad for business (and for the partner... )..
Hmmm, -does- Author Solutions pays its bills on time or anything approaching on time?
#120 Julia
Harlequin was behaving a -bit- like IBM--waiting for other, smaller companies to prove there was/is a market large enough for the thousand ton gorilla's while to be worth. Unlike IBM, however, Harlequin entered into a business arrangement with an corportate entity having a shyster reputation and unsavory history and antecedents.... if IBM entered into business deal with a computer company with a reputation and legal history congruent to Author Solutions', I suspect that its existing suppliers, partners, and customers would rapidly examine their options for cutting loose from IBM and realign their businesses to deal with other organizations instead--and there would be an exodus of people looking for new positions, retiring, and starting up their own new businesses, eager to distance themselves from shitstorm, likely lawsuits, and business drops.
Believe it or not, Carmen Miranda's Ghost was not in my mind at all... I do tend to write in ballad form when doing verse or song. Tunes don't however show in ASCII.... often I have original tunes, not TTTO (To The Tune Of)--tunes get made up inside my head on a fairly frequent basis, with or without words, and verse with or without tune....
Ballad form is one of the more common forms that verse spontaneously comes into my mind in.
He's ill, he's had a highly unpleasant relapse, he's on drugs, he was in the hospital, he's upset and angry, and lashing out....
I remember when my father destroyed several discs in his back--he yelled at me for two weeks, I yelled back, and the arguments went on until he went into the hospital for back surgery.... surgery which the prognosis was 50/50 if he's be able to walk after it. The pain was so bad, though, that he was willing to take the risk, simply to lessen the pain.
He's ill, he's had a highly unpleasant relapse, he's on drugs, he was in the hospital, he's upset and angry, and lashing out....
I remember when my father destroyed several discs in his back--he yelled at me for two weeks, I yelled back, and the arguments went on until he went into the hospital for back surgery.... surgery which the prognosis was 50/50 if he's be able to walk after it. The pain was so bad, though, that he was willing to take the risk, simply to lessen the pain.
#201 Earl
I won't say here what I think patent trolls deserve....
#110 Julia
Polyamory and GLBT have been around in SF/F for a long time in the mainline publishers, going back decades, and including Heinleing (including Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Time Enough for Love, All You Zombies), Sturgeon, "Leonard Daventry," Diane Duane (The Door into... series), Chip Delany, Elizabeth Lynn, Melissa Scott and Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnet, Sharon Green, L. Sprague de Camp (though Jorian doesn't keep all the wives he starts off in the series with), Fritz Leiber (A Specter Is Haunting Texas), Marion Zimmer Bradley, Esther Friesner ("Mustapha and his Twelve Wives"), Tanith Lee (Don't Bite the Sun; Drinking Sapphire Wine), Thomas Burnett Swan, and anyone writing accurate historical or mythological fiction about the likes of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hadrian, most Asian emperors and Pashas and Khans and Sultans and such, Jacob with his two wives and two concubines, Pharonic Egypt pre-Ptolemy I (but then there's the field day with the Ptolemaic inbreeding....)... anyway, explicit sex scenes including GLBT ones, were around in SF/F long before Ellora's Cave ever showed up.... (There was at least one explicit though brief interspecies sex scene in The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson, published back in 1954 or so. )
Ellora's Cave hit a resonant chord and proved there was a market forporn aimed at womenexplicit "lush" erotica aimed at women (though Anais Nin was writing a long time ago.... and while I have never understood the appeal of The Story of O by whoever wrote it, that too predates Ellora's Cave by decades and decades). Perhaps the equation is that Ellora's Cave demonstrated that the market was large enough for the triumph of commercial capitalism over social control fanatics taking public offense and action....
There remain issues with covers of various printed books that go beyond social acceptability for a lot of US citizens (double standards remain in effect, comparing gazonga covers on various Bane books, with large amounts of male skin showing, and entwined nude or nearly nude couples on "spicy" romance covers), but generally, the level of "spice" in especially trade paperback books from Berkeley Sensation, Avon Red, Brava, Aphrodisia, Berkeley Heat, Harlequin something or other, etc., would have gotten the books trivially "Banned in Boston" (or most of the rest of the USA) decades ago.... the reality is that finding romance novels without explicit scenes, other than in non-adult parts of bookstores and libraries, has gotten difficult--the reader looking for such, needs to do something like look for the terms "inspirational" or "sweet romance" in pursuit of explicit sex scene avoidance....
The ghost of Roger Elwood glides
To Harlequin alights.
The ghost of Roger Elwood haunting
These November nights.
The man who killed anthologies
Of science fiction tales,
And now he's come to kill romance,
I hope that spirits fails--
The publishers who dealt with him
Those many years ago,
They outsourced books as packaging,
Creating reader woes--
A tidal wave of books came though
Of quality most low,
It killed the readers' interests
And caused the writers woe--
The harvest from the outsourced books
Was readers who refused
To purchase more anthologies
Because they felt abused
The stories in the books they'd bought
They felt quite cheated by,
And so they would not purchase more
And thus the market died.
And authors who had earned their fees
From stories writ for pay,
Bereft of income from that source,
Their livings gone away.
But that was not the only market
Elwood got involved,
For Harlequin contracted him
And details they resolved.
A line of science fiction books
All uniformly cast
With Harlequin distributing
The line did not long last. .
The SF readers of the time
They wanted novelty
And not a packaged product shelved
So interchangeably
Each month another one set out
Upon the retail rack,
The readers did not buy the books
Most covers got sent back.
And so the giant publisher
It then shutdown the line
And ended the experiment,
Like throwing out bad wine.
And for a generation
It's gone past thirty years
The focus stayed upon romance
Despite abundant sneers.
But hark the change crept in in time
And vampires' Nocturne nights,
The publisher revamped its lines
With paranormal sights
And then it's taken more steps out
From its former ways,
And now the horror full has struck
To authors' appalled gaze--
The ghost of Roger Elwood roosts
This time in subsidy
"You rejected aspirant,"
"We have a deal for thee,
"We are not going to buy your book
"Nor give you any fee,
"But if you pay Horizons now
"Then published you shall be!"
"Horizons is a brand new arm,
"Of our company,
"We have a partner who will handle
"Ev'rything you see
"Just hand in lots of money and
"They'll print your book and say,
"That you will be a published author,
"Career well underway."
"And for some money extra,'
"We've other service which,
"Will help you to promote your book,
"And might help find a niche,
"And if it does quite well enough
"With all that you have spent,
"Then Harlequin might possibly
"Let you get in its tent.
"A contract possibility,
"For those who do the best
"A paying contract for a book,
"Unlike most of the rest
"For those of you we raise a hope,
"That you could be the one,
"Who having paid those many fees,
"Shall come into the sun."
The ghost of Roger Elwood glides
To Harlequin alights.
The publisher it sees revenue
And authors and readers spites.
Hmm, I have a vaguely remembered image in my mind of a piece of Aubrey Beardsley art, involving two of three people--there is a servant powerpuffing someone else's ass.... Seems to me to apply to Horizons and the fraudulent claims of providing a "self-publishing" service....
Synchronicity! It was The Pleistocene Redemption that I gave obnoxious academic litcrit treatment to, to the author's face....
Via http://www.jackiekessler.com/blog/2009/11/19/harlequin-horizons-versus-rwa/
Excerpt from Harlequin promotional material:
The two new platforms that have been announced in the last week provide exposure to a growing stream of self-published new talent and give both Harlequin and romance readers the opportunity to evaluate new voices in the genre. Historically Harlequin, and other publishers, acted as a gateway for aspiring authors. Carina Press and Harlequin Horizons are 21st century vehicles for expanding these types of selection pools.
A) Hmm, "two new platforms" -- I smell Sales and Marketing Weasels! Since when is a publishing imprint/mechanism "a platform" ??!!
B) "exposure to a growing stream of self-published new talent...."
1) I am quite capable of doing searches, following links, ASKING people for recommendations, getting recommendations from friends and acquaintances (got one in email Wed. AM, in fact....), and browsing bookstores, looking in Locus, etc., for new writers.
2) Horizons is NOT self-publishing. Self-publishing is my friend who did an X-rated comic ZoneSix, and did the production and sales of it all by herself, without the likes of AuthorDISSolutions more than 100% overhead upfront money vacuuming. Horizons is, as has been said here again and again and again, a vanity press. Self-publishing is the Foglios producing Girl Genius page after page three days a week week after week year after year on-line, and publishing and republishing print editions of volumes of the series. Self-publishing is the newsletters than people put out, some as promotional efforts for books, even, others as promotional for getting contract work in the areas the person writes the newletter in.. Self-publishing is not handing over large sums of money to in effect a broker who for multiple times the cost of the actual service, will contract publication-related services out to third parties or poorly paid employees, with a void as regards quality control, to do actual production of books and provide information allowing ordering of the book by whomever happens to get apprised of the existence of the book and gets persuaded to buy the book--generally this consists of the author and the author's immediate coercible or obliging circle of friends and family...
3) The "exposure" doesn't to me bid to be particularly highly visible--given that publishers often don't do much in the way of books that they actually spent their own revenue stream on (including borrowing to pay for.... economic reality is that the world of commerce involved borrowing money, and paying it back from the proceeds of sales of the product the money was borrowed to produce.... tax laws reward borrowing for production, and renting, because those are expenses, as opposed to getting taxed on owned properties...leasing has a lot of business benefits, and borrowing money, also does.... it might seem counterintuitive, but....), why should a broker who's got -nothing- of their own money on the line, spend anything of its own money and effort, on promotion? The author paying the broker for "product placement" and mention, would be a lot better off at least in terms of cash flow, doing their own marketing--it's not as if authors published by paying markets... which Horizons and AuthorDISSolutions aren't--don't do or don't have to do promotion of their work....
C) give both Harlequin and romance readers the opportunity to evaluate new voices in the genre.
1) In the words of Yog, "You, too, can be a[n unpaid] slush reader!"
I am NOT interested in being an unpaid Harlequin slush reader. The samples I see of certain e-published authors, which got edited presumably by the publishers, are I expect rather more literate than the bulk of the Horizons slush are likely to be...but fail to meet my criteria for bothering with. Undigested slush perpetrated by Horizon as "published" I expect to be far worse.
2) I expect that "Harlequin"'s "evaluation" will consist of monitoring the sales figures, and cherrying picking the results. On the basis of that, Travis Tea I would expect could get offered a for pay contract..... (And for that matter, there are people who genuinely like and enjoy and are ecstatic about writing which to me is subliterate, and makes Eye of Argon look devoid of adverbs and adjectives. I use the term "lush" to refer to such writing when it's got the main focus as romance. "Gag-inducing" might be more accurately descriptive, but in the interests of limiting just how incensed I can get other people advertently as opposed to inadvertently....
D) "Historically Harlequin, and other publishers, acted as a gateway for aspiring authors"
Where do I start on this one? The business of a publisher is to publish --make work available to the public. Commercial publishers do it for profit (assuming they're competent, and/or not money-laundering or tax-writeoff operations....) Non-commercial publishers have other reasons, and may or may not be interested in a profit... The Washington Times is not publishing with the intention I expect of turning a profit, it's got ulterior motives as a branch of the Unification Church, and I have seen allegations that it is very heavily subsidized. (disclaimer, personal opinion ahead, not the Official Opinion of NESFA....) NESFA Press is a non-profit operation, which tends to publish books on the basis of merit of either "this should be in print but it's not available from commercial publishers and the majority of NESFA voting members agree that NESFA should (re)publish it," or, "This volume is being published as part of NESFA's honoring of the annual Boskone Guest of Honor, and consists of work by the GoH chosen for inclusion in the book, which also shows some of why the GoH was chosen as meriting being GoH."
1) Publishers act as gateways "for aspiring authors" only insofar as the publisher expect to get a benefit from publishing the work of the aspiring author--any of such things as:
a) The publisher expects that the author's work will earn a profit for the publisher, at the publisher's expected level of profit desired for a new author.
b) The publisher or an editor at the publisher feels an obligation for some reason to publish the work, though it might not earn out--perhaps the work is something the editor/publisher feels is seminal and that while it won't directly provide large profit, the publisher will benefit from the book being an award nominee, or from the effect of the book sparking other writers in the publisher's stable to write books that will sell well, or there could be media tie-in opportunities, or....
c) The author has written something that fills a hole in the publisher's lineup of books or fits in with the publisher's direction of what mix of books etc. the publisher is publishing.
2) Commercial publishers are not going to publish authors who fail to impress slush reader and editor as to the commercial value of the book, including how much or little effort there will have to be to make the book commercially worth publishing. (That is, if the book needs substantial editing and hand-holding to turn it into something commercially viable, unless there is some extraordinarily attractive about the book, the author is probably highly unlikely to get a contract for it as-is....)
E) Harlequin with Horizons, of course, is sidestepping all those issues in D) above. Since there is no quality control involved on the intake, and the only criterion is "How much will the author pay for "publication"?", there is, again, no direct financial risk to Harlequin and AuthorDISSolutions (or perhaps, Author Disillusions? Author Illusions?). The indirect financial risk is that the readership will decide they are being scammed and exploited and cease and desist purchasing Harlequin product generally.... Horizons is not a "gateway" -- the term gateway tends to imply that there is a gate check function involved, such as at an airport, checking for ID and ticket and shoebombs before allowing prospective passengers to boarding areas of the airport, and a winnowing process, that not everyone is going to merit going through the gating.... Horizons is a promotional device for separating wannabees from their money, with a premium provided to the wannabee of production, at high cost to the wannabee, of some number of bound books, and provision of other services which the wannabee hands more money over to Horizons for--services available for lesser amounts of money for higher quality from more reputable, named persons and agencies, than whatever faceless persons AuthorDISSolutions is employing/contracting out the services to.... Horizons is playing vacuum cleaner, sucking up as much loose money as the wannabee has hanging around as discretionary funds to expend on "becoming published" and "promoting" the "published" work output from Horizons.
F) Carina Press and Harlequin Horizons are 21st century vehicles for expanding these types of selection pools This is near-absurdity. There is little bar to self-publishing and self-promotion, other than such things as attacks of embarrassment, lack of self-confidence, limits on chutzpah, limits on ability/willingness to perform all the steps involves, and limits on the willingness of others to provide advice/support/enthusiasm/assistance/information. Also, there is the consideration that if someone is successfully selling books and earning a livelihood from writing with advances and royalties from paying publishers, self-publishing recedes as regards having actual attraction.
1) The Horizons author who was aspiring to publication, or "pre-published" is going to go out there probably and be likely more pushy than the person with the first novel out from a pays-advances-publisher imprint--the author who got an advance, at least collected some income! The Horizons author gets nothing of revenue until and unless there are orders/sales that are "real" to people other than the author....
2) Someone pushing their Horizons-published book at me, I am not likely to treat more nicely than the fellow with the tables full of truly self-published books at the San Antonio Worldcon (He got a structural analysis of his prose done by me at him, after I responded to his "look at what all these people said about my book!" with 'It's called "Quote whores,"' and her persisted in trying to sell me his book--I opened it up to a random page, and started in on the literary deconstruction... he grabbed back the book after I'd ruthlessly dissected his sentence and paragraphs for structure and content, said, "It's not for everyone," and shut the book--and ceased trying to push his book at me.)
3) As for expanding these types of selection pools, that is yet more drivelous marketroid moronicity. It's perpetration of slush as product.... that's not expanding anything but the noise level.... it's a scam on wannabee writers, and a scam on readers, it's insulting and demeaning, utterly squalid, and the latest corollary of Gresham's Law.
4) The more I think about it, the more dastardly and despicable it looks.
#209 Albatross
"Don't confuse me with the facts."
The Fux fans behave as Believers, not skeptics. They object to questioning Faith and Belief, and resist anything which threatens to chip away at their True Faith and Belief.
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