Dear Author, a popular blog oriented at Romance readers, and John Scalzi, a popular SF author and owner of Whatever,  are going at it on the internet.

To summarize the issue, Scalzi highlights new and noteworthy books in his Big Idea feature on his blog.  Those posts are promotional and somewhat celebratory in nature.  Basically, he put the book up and says, “Hey, isn’t this neat?”A reader did a drive by and left a complaint, stating that they will not be buying the book because the price of the ebooks is too high. Scalzi took an exception to that, stating that he would delete such complaints in the future, because “Complaining about eBook prices on Big Idea threads is a) usually off-topic, b) kind of mean to the author, c) something I’m bored with at this point in any event.” Scalzi’s original post

DA, who have a strong bias toward the ebooks, have taken the consumer advocate position and said in essence that they will complain whenever and wherever, and since the publishers don’t care about the readers anyway, the author is the primary outlet for the readers complaints. DA response

Scalzi did a rebuttal, in which he states that according to his professional experience, publishers do care about the readers. Scalzi’s response

Just a side note: be careful in engaging in this fight, as both blogs do have a strong and loyal following, and the comments do get nasty.

So should the reader complain to the author about the ebooks prices?  It’s an interesting question.

Brace yourselves for a long-winded article about stuff most people don’t care about.  You have been warned.

Professors and Authors

The relationship between the author and a commercial fiction publisher has been described in many ways, including one of the commenters at DA likening the work of the author to that of a sweatshop worker in a third world country.

::raises hand:: I worked in a US sweatshop, for a tiny private company where I printed T-shirts twelve hours a day in a 110 degree temperature.  I quit because after I told the owner that I was pregnant and didn’t wish to handle hazardous chemicals, she agreed and later in the day she told me to scrub the tacky spray off the floor with turpentine.  Being an author is nothing like working in a sweatshop, in US or elsewhere.  Here is your ladder, come down off the cross, we have cookies down here.

However, the relationship between an author and a commercial publisher is somewhat similar to the relationship between a professor and a college.  When you just graduated after getting your doctorate in liberal arts and you would like to teach college, your options are limited.  There might be three tenured positions open across United States, one of them in the wilds of Alaska and the other somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and third is at a Big Name College.  There may be hundreds (not an exaggeration) of qualified applicants for these positions. You go, and you interview, and you hope to God that you get accepted, and if that college in Alaska makes an offer, you jump on it and thank your lucky stars.

When I attended college in Lawton, OK, one of the freshmen asked our history professor what brought him to Lawton. He laughed for about five minutes and then said, “They offered me a tenure-track position.”

Getting published by a commercial publisher is kind of like that: out of thousands of manuscripts – and a large commercial imprint may receive as many as 50,000 submissions per year – your manuscript is chosen.  Lightning has struck.  You don’t have much negotiation room, no matter how excellent your agent is.  You are an unproven commodity, but you did get hired at a Big Name College.

Alternatively our professor could’ve tried to obtain a position at a Community college, which came with less money, much smaller research budget, and may not come with tenure. (Tenure basically means that a professor can’t be fired without a cause. A tenured academic is very difficult to terminate, and not all community colleges offer it.)

But let’s say our college professor made it to Big Name College.  A newly minted college professor doesn’t have a lot of pull.  He is in the lowest spot on the totem poll.  His opinions are largely ignored and discounted.   Until, eventually he proves himself, gets experience, learns from his colleagues, and gets tenure.

For authors, there is no such thing as tenure, but there is the sales record.  The better the sales, the more pull an author has with the publisher.  That pull is still very limited, because publishers are large corporations and authors are independent contractors, but there is some wiggle room.  An author’s agent may negotiate over right to future work, over things like including a bonus novella into the book , or other promotional incentives.  There are certain points on which the publisher will not budge.  For example, the rights the publisher is buying.

Suppose the publisher purchases the World Rights for the first two books in the series, which grants them the right to negotiate sales to foreign market places.  No matter how much an author kicks and screams, the publisher will not scale down and purchase English-markets-only rights for the next two books.  So the negotiation room is limited.

But back to the professor example.  If our professor has written books and made a name for himself, and become a famous persona within his academic sphere, his influence over his department may become significant.  He might be highly sought by students.  He may negotiate his schedule and influence policies.  However, he will never be able to influence the prices.  No matter how much students complain to him, he can’t do much about the price per credit hour.  It’s not what he does.  He can, however, take those complaints to the appropriate department.

Control and Prices

If you’re a Big Name Author, you are much in the same position: you gave the publisher the right to distribute your books and set the prices.  You provide content, but you don’t control the price tag.

Let’s go back to the DA argument put forth in the comments of the post (comment #17), where Jane states that the author controls the price by controlling the distribution channel.  She is completely correct.

An author has an option to seek publication at a large commercial publisher – our professor and his Big Name College.  This is the position with the best resources: professional editors with years of experience, professional proofing services, art departments, marketing departments and so on. This is the option with least control.  But it is also the one with most exposure and best earning potential.

An author has option to seek publication at a smaller commercial publisher – our professor at a community college. A smaller publisher offers limited resources.  They can still put out beautiful books of high quality, but they put out fewer of them and charge more (Nightshade); or they put out good books, relatively cheaply, but their distribution is limited (Samhain); or they just put out anything as long as it sells, and editing be damned.  (Will not name names here.)  This is the middle ground in terms of control capabilities.

An author has the ability to self-publish -  our professor has decided not to seek a tenure position and lecture around the country instead.  Perhaps he would become wildly successful, but more likely he wouldn’t.  This is the option with the most control and the least resources.

I could’ve picked a different analogy.  I could’ve taken a law school graduate.  When you graduate from law school, you have choices: you can work for a large independent firm, you can work for the State, you can work for a small firm, or you can start your own.  How many of fresh-off-the-press lawyers start their own firms?  Not many.  You need seed money, and a lawyer just out of law school with enormous student debts isn’t likely to have funds and contacts that would make his or her firm successful.  You can do it, but it is a gamble.

How likely is the junior lawyer to influence how much the firm charges its clients?  Not very likely. However, if the lawyer owns the firm, they can charge whatever they want.

I am in the editorial input camp.  You guys have read our self-published work and you have read the commercially published work.  Which is better?  Which is a more polished product?

I like having an editor with experience.  I trust Anne and I respect her.  I am also very stubborn and sometimes I get infuriated by her proposed changes.  I’ve slammed doors and ranted before.  In the end, once I calm down, we make the changes, because Anne is trying to make the book better.  Would I still make the changes if this was an editor we hired on the side?  I don’t know.  Where am I going to find an editor with that many bestsellers under her belt?

Where should the reader complain?

So we’ve established that the author may or may not have control over the prices.  It only took like a thousand words to do it.  ::eye roll:: In that sense, Scalzi is justified in saying that complaining to the author doesn’t really accomplish much.  He is also justified in saying that Big Idea posts are not the right place for it – it’s his blog.

However, as a reader, I don’t care.  There you go. All my fancy talk aside, if a reader wants to complain about the price of the book, she will go to the easiest available channel – and that would be the author. The author’s name is front and center on the cover.  The publisher’s name you have to look for.  Suppose the reader finds the publisher’s page.  Here is Penguin Ace page: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/aboutus/contactus.html.  There is no “Customer Service” contact email for the reader and the site even states out right:

We appreciate the many questions and comments submitted by our readers and would like to answer them all individually. Because of the significant volume of e-mail received daily, however, we will not be able to respond if your question is one of our Frequently Asked Questions, or if the answer is provided in our General Information section.

You may not get an answer.  But an author is a living, breathing human right there, and most of them have Contact Us page. How many times did you yell into the phone, “Representative!” just so you can talk to a human?  Yeah, there you go.

Is it annoying to get email complaints about the price when you can’t do anything about it?  Yep.

Do we as authors have to put up with it? Yep. We also have the ability to copy and paste the form response, which is what a lot of us do.

Is it a waste of time? Yes and no.

Yes, because the prices are not affected by individual consumer complaints but by market place in general. Suppose an author gets fifty complaints that the price of the book is too high, but sells 25,000 books in the release week (this is a really large number.)  The book is a huge success.  Will the publisher care about 50 people who didn’t buy it?  Probably not, because 25,000 did.

No, because an author can collect the complaints and make a case to the publisher: Look, I am getting all these emails that say that the price of my books is too high.  Is there anything we can do?  Can we do a limited promotion and drop the price?  Can we get some sort of deal for the next book?  Can we maybe offer a freebie? The publisher may or may not take these requests into consideration, but at least the voice of the consumer was heard. Also if in the example above, the previous book had sold 40,000 copies and fifty people complained about the price being too high, this may serve as an indicator of what went wrong.

Reader Entitlement

I do have to say that if the reader’s stance is that all large commercial publishers are evil, it devalues his argument.  The reader no longer views the situation in economic terms.  His position is based on emotion, and I’m likely to discount his opinion, because his emotional involvement clouds his judgement.  He may never be a customer and it’s very difficult to reason with a person like that.  I’ve received email complaints about prices from people who have never read our books and said they would never read it and then another author mentioned receiving the same email word for word. At that point it becomes spam rather than a complaint.

Also I once replied to an email complaining about the price with a link to Amazon used book listing where our book could have been bought in paper for a dollar and got back a really unpleasant reply informing me that I should not expect her to change her reading habits.  She preferred to read in digital. She wanted a cheaper book, I gave her a link and got cussed out for it. Here is five minutes of my life I will never get back.

A publisher may often offer free promotions or put out digital editions: Avon does this, for example.  Harlequin.  Baen had a free library up for ages.  Those promotional effort do cost the publisher a fair amount of money.  However, a person who feels very strongly about the big New York publishers is unlikely to take any of that into account.

And some readers are entitled.  I’ve seen a review of a free novella, that complained because it wasn’t a full length novel.   Hell, I received reviews of a free short story on BN that chastises me for not making it into “a book”.  It says SHORT STORY on the cover and in description.

But here is the thing – there are entitled people in every industry and at every retail outlet.  They are the people who cut in line, who complain that this item is on sale, but not that, and so on.  It sucks to deal with them, but you kind of have to.

I leave you with this abbreviated reader email which I received while writing this post. Emphasis is mine.

I’ve heard how much you hate kindle and ebooks and I have a question and I refer to the subject for this -dont hate me- I have looked on the internet and magic bleeds is already on kindle in america and I have looked online and they sell it on paperback for british amazon so um I have bought the first three books on kindle and this is the second time I’ve read them all. May I ask if you have a date for when it may be put on for amazon. I feel bad for asking you since I’ve read the thing on how much you hate kindle. Please forgive me if your pissed at me.

(If you look on the contact page, it specifically states: “I’m in UK or Australia and I’m emailing because I can’t find MAGIC BLEEDS in e-format” and it gives an answer to that question. )

My response:

Dear ___

We own three Kindles.  We have a large section of self-published ebooks available on Amazon.  We just released a FREE novella in Kindle format.  Where in the world did you read that we hate Kindle?

Now to your question: as it states on the Contact page, for us to be able to sell our books in UK, a UK publisher would have to have purchased the rights to distribute our books there. The first three books in Kate series were purchased by Golliancz, but then our editor there left, and the publisher decided not to continue with the series.  We waited to see if anybody else would buy the rights, because that would also make our printed books more widely available  to UK fans, but that’s not happening.

Fortunately, since we still hold the rights to the books, we decided to self-publish them in UK.    So you should be able to buy them sometime after New Year.  We haven’t quite figured out yet how exactly we will go about it, so you have to give us a little bit of time to iron out the details.  The good news is that we will probably offer them at a discount. 

Reader’s response:

I am so grateful for you to even reply…

Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?