Print media is in trouble

Now, as we enter a new decade, print media is in genuine trouble. Newspapers have long been in decline and magazines are following, sunk not only by the speed of online information, but by the rising costs of mail delivery. Book publishing is also making rapid changes. Bestsellers are still bestsellers, but for the first time, online books are starting to make real headway. The iPad and the Kindle are now solid sources for books. This has made self-publishing and small press publishing more viable than they have been in years. When you can search for what you want online, the press to get on shelves at stores is lessened somewhat. It becomes more important to be the book that people search for, rather than the book that publishers promote.

You are not as ready as you think

If you are on the cusp of the technological wave, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. Sure, blogs are more popular, but a livable income as a blogger is still a challenge. The same goes for podcasting and social media. You hear about the people who make money at it, but you hear about them because they are the exception rather than the rule. People are more immune to advertising than ever before, and if they aren’t buying something, you aren’t going to make much money.

There is no roadmap

Change is in motion, and accelerating. The financial landscape of publishing and media in general is in the midst of a major transition, and there is no definitive idea of where it will end up. This makes picking a career, especially in the writing field, a tricky matter. We currently live in a crowded publishing world. Anyone who wants to publish can. That brings great freedom, but it pushes the level of competition through the roof. When media was controlled by a few gatekeepers, the goal was to get past the gate. Now, the big gatekeepers are still there, and can still offer a measure of success, but your true competition is the crowd. When everyone can be heard, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand out. When someone else is offering what you have for free, it is very hard to charge.

Fortune favors the adaptable

My point is that if you want to have a career as a writer, be prepared for change. Be prepared for an entire world of competition, but also a world of possible readers. Understand that the way you make money writing today may soon change and that you will have to adapt to that change. We see this most in the freelance world, but don’t be surprised if corporate writing world follows. No one is immune to change.

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Don’t get to the point. Editors are very busy. When they read a query letter or a submission cover, what they really want to know is what you are proposing and how it fits their needs. The longer you can keep yourself from telling them that, the better your chances of getting an editor to hate you.

Don’t use enough postage. Guess what? No one is going to pay the mailman just to see your submission. If you really want to aggravate an editor, send your submissions via certified mail and make them sign for it.

Get the editor’s name wrong. There’s no quicker way to get on an editor’s bad side than to misspell their name. This is a great way to get your query letter thrown away before it even gets opened. While you’re at it, get their title wrong too. That should ensure a quick trip to the garbage can.

Ignore the editor’s needs. Send the editor of an arts journal an article about ways to avoid a hangover. Send your proposal for a microwave recipe book to a publisher specializing in historical fiction. It may not quite make the editor hate you, but it will certainly be good for a laugh.

Insult other people’s work. The book you’re proposing? It’s way better than any other book in the genre and the editor should know that. Take the time to insult the competition. If you get lucky, you may just insult something the editor has worked on in the past. That should really tick them off.

Send the editor a letter that stinks. Chances are, your proposal will stink anyway. What I mean is send them one that smells bad. Smoke while you write it, or scent it with perfume. While you’re at it, use an obnoxious paper color like pink or orange. Make your query as unpleasant to smell as it is to read.

Talk money. Make it clear in the first few sentences that you expect a certain amount of money for your efforts and you will accept nothing less. Whether your demands are in the editor’s range or not doesn’t matter. Your demands will make them hate you either way.

Tell the editor how much your friends and family love your work. If you’re really out to convince the editor that you know next to nothing about the publishing industry, including the opinions of people the editor doesn’t know and has no reason to respect ought to do it.

Try to sound cocky and sarcastic. You know you’ve got the goods, why should you try to be polite and businesslike? This should make it clear to the editor just how big of a hassle it will be to work with you. Note: Feel free to use this article as a guide.

Use a cheap printer, or better yet, a typewriter. Nothing screams “not worth the effort to read” more than poorly printed, smudged text.

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In order to make the writer more money than the advance, a book has to sell well. If it does, your payment as the author comes from royalties, which you can calculate using the system below. A book that sells moderately well, but is not a bestseller, may or may not make the author a few extra thousand dollars. Royalties (ranging from 4% to 8% in most cases) are generally based on the cover price of the book, but that does not include books that are discounted or remaindered. So, for the sake of argument, say you sold 20,000 full-price copies of a paperback priced at $7 (I know it would more likely be $6.95 but I am going to use round numbers.) If your royalty percentage were a generous 8% you would make a total of $11,200.

Now remember that your advance is an advance on these royalties, so your publisher would subtract the initial advance from the $11,200. If your initial advance equaled $10,000 you would eventually receive $1,200 in additional royalties. An author who makes a total of $50,000 or more from a fiction book should consider himself or herself to be doing very well. For the sake of argument, however, let us say that Oprah Winfrey chooses your book for her book club and you sell 500,000 copies of your book. With this same formula, at 8% you would make $280,000 and would have no trouble finding a publisher and getting a big advance for your next book.

Surprisingly, the publisher does not make most of the money from your book. The party that makes the most money off the sale of a book is the retailer. By the time a publisher pays all of the related expenses of publishing a book (production, distribution, salaries, promotion, etc.), they generally clear a profit of about a dollar a book for a book with sales of about 20,000. Therefore, the publisher made more than you, but not that much more and they took on all the risk. Remember, if the book never sells a copy, you still get to keep your advance.

For this reason, the market for mid-range books (under 100,000 copy sellers) is very tough, and major publishers are looking for books they expect to sell in large numbers. This is why it is hard to get a fiction book published in today’s market. A first-time author or even an author with modest previous sales is going to have a hard time finding a publisher. When they do, they can expect very little by way of promotion because the publisher expects so little return for their investment.

If you do get your book published, and you want it to sell well, be prepared to spend a great deal of your own time marketing the book. Most authors think it should be up to the publisher to promote the sale of the book, but the author is the one who really needs to be out there making phone calls to bookstores, lining up press interviews and setting up readings and signings.

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4000 Articles a Day

According to the RWW piece, Demand Studios produces approximately 4000 articles a day through its combination of freelancers and editors. The one issue that I have with the article is that they use this as an indictment of the quality. They ask:

The bigger question is: there are surely many examples of good Demand Media content on the Web, but how many of the 4,000 articles it produces every day aren’t?

To me this is a poor argument. Yes, I’m sure that some of the 4000 articles aren’t great, but no one can judge what the percentage of this is so it is a specious question. I mainly read blogs by single authors. Mass produced blogs leave me a little cold. As a follower of individuals I can tell you that even the best bloggers put out lousy articles on occasion. Lord knows I do. No one is brilliant every day.

The better point the article makes is that the Demand Studios assembly line style and fast turnaround time creates a certain sameness to the articles being written, that there is a Demand Studios style, and it isn’t very interesting or incisive. I don’t read enough of their types of articles (like I said, I follow individual bloggers) to know if this is true, but it seems like a legitimate possibility.

In the Eighties the Definition of a Content Mill was “Associated Press”

Miami Vice Meets AP Style

Way back in the eighties, I served as the Associated Press Wire Editor for my college newspaper. Having an AP feed back then was as close as you could get to having Google News now. Article after article printed out on the dot matrix printer they provided, and I looked at them all (while dressed in my linen Miami Vice jacket) to see if they were relevant. I can tell you that AP’s style (they do have their own stylebook after all) was pretty bland even then. For most articles, you got the facts, and nothing but the facts. There was little room for color or individuality. A single article might get published in 500 different newspapers all over the world. Any sort of colorful writing had to be killed in case someone out there didn’t get it, or worse, was offended by it. Another interesting similarity between the Associated Press and Demand Studios is that AP has always used a number of low-paid writers (they call them stringers) to freelance for them. In the eighties, the saying was, “You can’t spell stupid without UPI and you can’t spell cheap without AP.”

Obviously Demand Studios is not identical to AP. The journalistic standards and the general level of talent at AP are considerably higher than at Demand Studios. AP is more selective about who they hire and more stringent about the sources for their articles. It is the similarities though, not the differences, that catch my eye. Both organizations tap a worldwide pool of writers. Both organizations exist to provide content to other organizations. Both organizations rely heavily on freelance work. Most importantly, both organizations have writing philosophies based on a universal cookie-cutter style.

I believe that sort of generic writing was the beginning of the end for newspapers, and I think that it can only have limited success on the Internet. A certain number of people will be satisfied with these articles, and search engines may never be able to tell good articles from bad articles, but there will always be plenty of room for individuals with distinctive voices to keep writing. A loyal audience that comes back again and again is in most cases preferable to a large number of casual readers who never return.

Demand Studios is a company that is filling a content niche quite successfully. The fact that they have enough writers and customers to be publishing 4000 articles a day shows that they are filling a need that exists on both sides. That said, if someone else comes up with a better way to do it, then the market will change again. I think Demand Studios does a lot of things well, but I also think there is plenty of room for improvement. If they can make a profit doing things their way, then surely someone who improves on the concept can do even better.

For Further Information:

• Is Demand Studios Worth Your Time?
• The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model
• About Hub Pages: An Interview with Ryan “Hup” Hupfer
• FakeAPStylebook on Twitter

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There are two advantages to pitching very specific subjects. The first is that it makes you look more knowledgeable. Specificity and knowledge go hand in hand. Anyone can pitch an idea about picking up women. Even “six pickup lines” is general. If you dig deeper, you might find a more unique perspective. For example, if you have studied linguistics, you might pitch, Why Your Pickup Lines Don’t Work, Six Tips from a Cunning Linguist. If you used to be a bartender you might pitch, The Bartender’s Guide to Picking up Women: Six lines that never work (and three that do).

The second advantage of specificity is that it reduces the risk of you pitching the same idea as someone else. The last thing you want is to pitch a topic your potential publisher has seen (or even published) before. There are limits to how much research a writer can do into the past topics at a magazine, especially if you want to spend more time writing articles than pitching them. Specificity gives you the best chance at originality.

Realistic ideas are the other side of that coin. If you don’t know anything about pickup lines, don’t pitch an article about them. Your query letter should start with some flash, but the body of your letter is going to have to back up that flash. You will need to give examples of what you intend to write about. You not only have to convince your potential publisher that your idea is perfect for them; you have to convince them that you can turn that idea into a great article. If you can’t convince them you are the right person to write the article, your great idea won’t help you.

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• Acquisitions Editor: An editor whose job it is to find new books and authors to publish.
• Advance: Money paid by a publisher to an author for the right to publish a book. It is called an advance because it is payment on “potential” royalties in advance. In other words, until your book sells enough copies to generate a percentage of profits above what you have been paid in advance, you will not receive any more money.
• Backlist: A list of books, published more than twelve months earlier, which are available for sale from a publisher.
• Best seller: A fairly ambiguous term that will be applied by a publisher to just about any book that makes a profit.
• Book proposal: A sales tool consisting of information about a possible book that an author sends to a publisher. The proposal often includes sample chapters, an outline, a discussion of possible markets and a list of the author’s credentials. The goal of the author is to persuade the publisher to pay to produce the book and to share the profits with the author.
• E-book: A book produced digitally, often in the absence of a printed book.
• First printing: The number of books produced in the initial print run.
• In print: A book that is still available to be ordered directly through the publisher.
• Independent bookseller: A locally owned book store that is not affiliated with a large chain such as Barnes & Noble or Borders. Independent booksellers, in general, are more likely to display and sell books by local authors.
• ISBN: Short for International Standard Book Number. This number is required if a book is to be stocked or available to order by a major chain or sold through an online publisher. If a book is only going to be sold directly by the author (such as at readings or through a personal web site) an ISBN is not required.
• Midlist book: A book acquired by a publisher for a relatively small advance and given a smaller print run and less publicity than a book that the publisher expects to be a best seller.
• Niche book: A book that is aimed at a smaller market of possible buyers. Most books of poetry are considered niche books because few of these books sell more than 5000 copies. Many “how-to” books also fall into the niche category.
• Out-of-print: A book that can no longer be ordered directly from the publisher.
• Print-on-demand: A book publishing process mainly associated with self-publishing, in which a book is printed in small runs (sometimes as small as a single book) from an electronic file. This process makes it possible to produce niche books more cheaply.
• Publisher: A company or individual who is in charge of producing, printing and distributing a book or other material.
• Publishing: The process of producing, printing and distributing a book or other material.
• Review Copy: A free copy of a book that is sent to the media with the hope that the book will be reviewed.
• Royalty: The percentage of book sale profits paid to the author.
• SASE: Self-addressed, stamped envelope. Often used when submitting a query to make it easier for the editor/publisher to respond.
• Self-publishing: The production, printing and distribution of a book (or other material) by the author of the book or at the author’s expense, rather than by a third-party publishers.
• Slush pile: Unsolicited (not requested) queries/manuscripts that may or may not get read by the editor or (more likely) an assistant.

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As a blogger, I keep and update a blog. I do it as a business. Because of this, I have many other roles besides blogger.

I am a writer

I write just about every day of the year. If I am not writing for my own blog, I am writing for someone else’s blog or I am working on an assignment that came from my blogging. Whatever the case, I am always writing.

I am an editor

I am often in the rather uncomfortable position of editing my own work. This is a situation in which my abilities and flaws as a writer do not mesh well with my abilities and flaws as an editor. I don’t always catch my mistakes. When I don’t, it is the editor’s fault. As editor, I also solicit and edit articles from outside sources. There, I am at least dealing with someone else’s flaws, which are often easier to recognize and fix.

I am a publisher

I own my blog. That means I own a publication. That publication has to have standards, and I am in charge of setting those standards. I am responsible for all of the things that appear on my site. I set the direction I want my blog to go in. In the end, everything about the publication is my decision. I am often put in a position of having to overrule the writer and the editor because I have to think of the big picture.

I am a designer

I wish I was a better one. I am at least smart enough not to rely entirely upon myself, although I assure you that it wasn’t an easy decision. I use a blog theme, and I paid some real money to make sure that I have a good theme. In the end though, the way things are placed on a page, the graphics I use, the font style, the font size, those are all up to me as the designer.

I am a marketer

I maintain a marketing strategy. It isn’t as well thought-out as it probably should be, but it includes advertising, networking, contests, branding, and publicity. I have a small budget (though better than some others) so I have to be creative and I have to stay on top of the latest trends.

I am a customer service representative

When I get a complaint about my blog, anything from the content to the design to the technical features, I am in charge of getting the problem fixed if it can be fixed. I am also in charge of making sure that the customer gets a satisfactory response that keeps them coming back. It isn’t always easy.

I am an analyst

I spend a great deal of my time looking at my web statistics. I pay attention to where people come from, what they look at while they are on my site, how long they stay and where they go when they leave. I also monitor revenue sources closely, because when they go down or up, I want to know why. Having this knowledge helps me plan for the future and to correct problems as they occur.

I am a web programmer

There are plenty of people who are better at this than I am, but I know enough to fix errors as they come up, and to make minor changes when needed. In the old days I could build a site from scratch, but at this point I have to be happy with being able to tweak someone else’s work to fit my needs.

I am a small business owner

As a small business owner I have to collect revenue and keep a budget. I have to weigh the pros and cons of investing money in the business versus taking the profit out of the business and using it to provide for my family. I have to do the accounting and the taxes and I have to decide when it is appropriate to buy new hardware, software, furniture and equipment. I have to decide whether the business is succeeding or failing and what to do to make things better.

I am all of these things and more

All of these role spring from my life as a blogger. They can be difficult to maintain and to separate. My needs as a small business owner or as a publisher are often at odds with my desires as a writer. I sometimes write or don’t write about a topic based on how I think it will be received versus the level of interest I have. I have to determine how far from my central topic (writing) I can stray. I have to decide if another writer is more appropriate for a topic than I am. I have to weigh issues of revenue versus design and content. I sometimes have to be nice when I really don’t want to be because the success of my blog carries more weight than my personal issues.

I am a blogger

These are the issues I deal with. I love it, but anyone thinking of blogging, especially for profit, had better be prepared to fill all of these roles and more. It is one hell of a ride.

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I’ve been picking on newspapers for a while, for much longer than I have been a blogger. To me the decline became apparent in the eighties and nineties when the big corporations started snapping newspapers up and the focus of newspapers drifted away from news and moved toward profits. Newspapers, at their best, are a very personal enterprise. Corporations, especially ones that are big enough to buy a slew of newspapers, know nothing about passion. Still, for a long time they only had television to compete with. TV is just as bland and corporate as newspapers are. It took the Internet, and passionate individuals, to dig the grave for newspapers.

A Lack of Interest

I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper since the early nineties. I occasionally buy the local paper, but it is usually because I want the car or the grocery ads or because I have some time to kill in a restaurant. I certainly don’t buy the local paper looking for a great reading experience. Every newspaper runs the same canned stories off of the news wire. Their local coverage consists of mostly basic police/court coverage, business stories, road construction updates and reasonably good coverage of the sports scene. None of these are things I can’t do without. More importantly, I can find any of it on online if I bother to look. For the record, I also don’t watch the news, local or national, on television. Television “news” is all about blood, pundits and car chases. I don’t need it.

New News Sources

I am far from uninformed. I read the news just about every day, spending at least ten minutes and as much as an hour scanning headlines and reading anything that seems interesting. I do almost all of my reading online. Google News is my primary source, but I also subscribe to feeds from a number of specific publications and many blogs. I would subscribe to my local papers’ news feeds, if they had them. Unfortunately. the two daily papers don’t seem to have much interest in allowing people to read their articles without being subjected to their ad-filled web sites. I don’t really blame them, but I don’t miss them either.

A Very Long Decline

Print journalism is in the middle stages of what I expect will be a very long decline. Newspaper readership has been dropping for many years now, but over the past couple years that drop has been accelerating. There is no reason to expect this drop to end any time soon. Sadder yet, newspapers are having trouble online as well. People aren’t just leaving their print version behind, they are leaving their online versions behind too. I am sure this is because of the focus on wire feeds and canned news. You can get that kind of news anywhere. In fact, you have to make a deliberate effort if you want to avoid it.

An Outdated Model

The biggest problem is the lack of real journalism. For years now, newspapers have been getting by on wire feeds from AP, Reuters and a variety of smaller news services. Back before the Internet, this model worked because a person in Tucson wouldn’t have access to a newspaper in San Antonio, so it didn’t matter if they ran the exact same stories. Now, however, all that duplicate national and international coverage can be accessed by anyone anywhere. Why read your local paper’s limited international section when you can access the news from anywhere in the world through the web. With Google News and other news aggregators, it is just as easy to find out the news in England from England as it is from your local paper. As for that AP article, it is repeated so endlessly online that you are bound to catch it too, if you bother to look.

Raw VS. Canned and Bland

Print journalists endlessly deride bloggers, and some of their criticisms are valid. Many, though by no means all, bloggers have less news experience and greater political and personal bias than newspaper reporters do. They make up for those shortcomings, however, by being more timely, more passionate, and more detailed in their coverage. The world of journalistic blogging (there are many blogs that have nothing to do with the news) is uneven, but when it is good, it is far better than the canned, bland news stories that the newspapers reprint. Because there are so many sources to choose from, it is easy to decide for yourself what is good and what is worth reading.

Decline and Rebirth

Newspapers are going to continue to decline in readership and relevance as long as they continue to follow the old model of wire stories and short, uninteresting local articles. The only reason to pick up a newspaper (or visit a newspaper’s website) in Fresno is to find out what happened in Fresno. Only newspapers that invest heavily in local coverage and allow their writers to spend more than 300 words on an article will be relevant as the years pass. That probably won’t happen until the giant corporations that own most newspapers lose interest in these now unprofitable entities and move on to other media. It is difficult to image any conglomeration of newspapers embracing individual voices and local reporting. Once it becomes unprofitable enough, however, I predict that as newspapers begin to fold and be sold, passionate local people will return to print. Until then, I’ll continue to get my news online.

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Amazon Goes to the Dark Side

Amazon has been squeezing print-on-demand publishers, trying to force them to use their print services in order to get a buy-now listing with them. To me this is a case of a big company using near-monopoly tactics to put smaller companies out of business. I’ve been a big fan of Amazon over the years, but this stinks. Anne Wayman has been covering this over at The Golden Pencil, I advise you to take a look.

The Television Networks Blew It

As I predicted months ago, the television networks are seeing significant drops in viewers. Now that almost all of their shows are back the networks are assessing the damage and trying to convince themselves that the cause is anything but the WGA strike. Oh no, it couldn’t be that! The true test will come next fall, when the new season debuts. I predict that we will see an erosion of about ten percent from last fall’s already record low numbers. Of course, if the actors go out on strike over the summer, things could get much worse.

My Local Newspapers Suck, Again

I’ve chronicled the downward spiral of my local daily newspapers a few times. At this point they mainly serve as a place to recycle day-old national headlines (the kind I can get up to the minute on Google News) criticize the local sports teams and send some poor schlep to city council meetings. Oh, and they love telling you who got shot, though they generally get the details wrong (it turns out that loudmouth neighbors don’t make for reliable sources). Thats all fine, but now they’ve decided to charge more for their useless rag. It now costs 75 cents a day to pick up a copy of the morning paper at the newsstand. The afternoon paper, always known for its irrelevance, only raised their price to 50 cents. At this point, I am beginning to suspect that the papers want to drive readers away.

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• I feel I have the right to profit from my work without having to compete with myself.
• I often encourage writers to post creative work in my comments (such as the 30 Poems in 30 Days project) and I do so with the understanding that I consider their work their own.
• I have paid for and published articles from other writers in the past and I have done so with the reasonable expectation that I respect their ownership of the copyright.

Yesterday, I read that Zenhabits.net, one of my favorite sites, is giving up all of its copyrights for the material published there. Leo Babauta, the author of the site wrote a post that says, in part:

From now on, there is no need to email me for permission. Use it however you want! Email it, share it, reprint it with or without credit. Change it around, put in a bunch of swear words and attribute them to me. It’s OK.

He goes on to discuss the ways that he would prefer that people share his work, but he makes it clear that his preferences are merely preferences. They are not binding. He has no intention of fighting ANY use of his site’s material. He has freely given up all rights.

I must admit that the idea intrigues me, and it is one I have thought about in the past. If I did so, however, I would have to do the following, just to feel right about it:

• I would have to either eliminate all previous articles by other writers OR get their permission to release their rights as well.
• I would have to give any past commenters the opportunity to remove their comments if they feel the need to keep their copyright intact.
• I would have to create a new comment policy that made it clear that all comments would be considered public domain, something that may discourage people from posting their creative work in the future.
• I would have to review the policies behind the stock photos I buy to determine any limitations and if I could not find a way to stay within their guidelines, I would have to replace that artwork.
• I would have to accept that there people will use words to make money without ever giving me credit, much less payment. However, I would no longer have to worry about enforcing my rights, which is always a painful process.

I am not saying I’m going to make this change. I am only considering it because I do feel it would make my life easier and give plenty of people legitimate opportunities to reuse my work without worry.

I want people’s input. I especially want input from people who have posted creative work for this site in the past, either as articles or comments. What do you think of a public domain policy? Is it a brilliant idea or the worst idea ever?

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