Caught in the middle: Amazon vs. IPG, Part II

Three months ago, I wrote a blog post detailing the contract battle between Amazon and IPG, book distributor for Medallion Press, publisher of my thriller, FINAL VECTOR. In that post I detailed the reasons why I found Medallion's support of IPG unacceptable. You can read the entire post here, if you're interested.

In the intervening three months, I asked for and received a reversion of rights letter from Medallion for FINAL VECTOR, leaving me free to pursue another publisher for the book or even, as was my intention, to publish the book myself.

I was just about at the point where I was ready to re-release FINAL VECTOR - I mean, literally, a week or so away - when I discovered IPG and Amazon have reached agreement on a new contract. This means Medallion's electronic titles (of which FINAL VECTOR was one) will once again be available for purchase at Amazon.

As I stated in my post back in February, the inability for readers to purchase my book at the world's largest ebook retailer was the reason why I wanted my rights to FINAL VECTOR back. Now that it will once again be available in that venue, I have withdrawn my request for a reversion of rights and plan to leave the book with Medallion Press.

Why would I do that? Why voluntarily stay with a publisher when I could release the book on my own and get a bigger cut of the royalties?

Here's why: Medallion Press showed faith in one of my novels when, to that point, no one else had. They believed in an unknown writer enough to offer me an advance and a path to publication at a time when self-publishing was still considered basically career suicide for a novelist.

I wanted all along to justify the faith they showed in me by earning out that advance through sales and then by making both of us - gasp! - money. I was well on my way to doing so when the rug was pulled out from under both myself and Medallion Press thanks to a contract dispute they had nothing to do with.

Am I crazy? Maybe. I have in my possession a letter enabling me to make more money from, and have more control over, a book that I wrote, and I am going to completely disregard that letter. If that makes me crazy, then so be it.

But some things are more valuable than the almighty dollar. Not many, I freely admit, but there are some. One of those is integrity. I like to think I have some. And I want to show Helen Rosburg and everyone at Medallion Press that they knew what they were doing when they signed me.

This is not to say I won't ever request my rights to FINAL VECTOR back from Medallion, but if I did it before earning out that advance I would always feel like I had walked away from a job before it was finished. My folks raised me better than that.

P.S. - Now that the book is available again, it is priced exactly where I was planning on pricing it - a very reasonable $3.99. If you've read and enjoyed my Amazon bestseller THE LONELY MILE, I think you might like to give this one a try as well...

Writer's block? We don't need no stinking writer's block!

There are a few things I get asked a lot when people find out I write books. Probably the most common question is, "Are you making any money?"

The answer, of course, is "Yes." The minute I sell one book I'm making money. A better question would be, "How much money are you making?", but most people are too classy to bring themselves to ask it.

And that's good, because I wouldn't answer anyway. At least, not until I'm making a shitload of money.

Probably the second-most common question I hear is, "Where do you get your ideas?"

That one's a little tougher, because in most cases, it's not the sort of question I can answer with one word, or even one sentence. Most of my plot ideas come from a mish-mash of sources, some of which I don't even understand.

Sometimes it's a song lyric that strikes me and gets my imagination racing. Sometimes it's a real-life situation, although when that happens, my story usually strays far from the actual situation that inspired it. Sometimes it's a dream, and I know that sounds silly, but I've gotten more than one idea for a kick-ass story that just popped into my head in the middle of the night.

Most often, though, the honest answer is, "I have no idea." A hint of a thread of an plot takes hold inside my head and begins to grow, like a plant. Or a cancer. In most cases, the idea has to simmer for awhile before I do anything with it. I mulled over the initial idea for my Derringer Award-nominated story, "Independence Day," for months - over an entire winter, as I recall - before I ever wrote a word on it.

But the question I really wanted to talk about today is the one that I would estimate I get third-most often: "Do you ever get writer's block?"

Easy answer: No, because I don't believe writer's block exists. Bestselling author Vincent Zandri wrote an outstanding blog post that included this subject a couple of weeks ago, one which I agree with wholeheartedly.

The gist of that blog post is this: If you're serious about selling your work, writing is a job. It's a fun job, to be sure, and it's a job where you can make your own hours and work in your underwear and take as many breaks as you want, but at the end of the day it's still a job.

And if you approach it as a job, you begin to realize that what many people view as "writer's block" is really nothing more than either laziness or a reluctance to put in the time at work. I suppose you could consider those two things to be one and the same.

Writing fiction is the act of stringing words together in entertaining ways while telling a story, so an unwillingness to put time in at the keyboard is the kiss of death if you consider yourself a writer. There are days when the words flow with an almost ridiculous ease, and there are other days when writing anything that makes even a minimal amount of sense is like pulling teeth, but at the end of the day, under either condition you need to sit at the keyboard and do your job.

As Vincent Zandri says, "If you're a writer your job is to show up at work every day and write...If your dad was a lawyer, did he ever get lawyer's block? If your mom was a nurse, did you ever hear her complain, 'I've had absolutely nothing to nurse about for the last six months'?"

That answer is perfect. Of course, it's also kind of long-winded to give to someone who really doesn't care that much, anyway. So most of the time when I'm asked the question about writer's block, I sort of mumble my way through an answer, saying something about working hard and continuing to write my way through it when it happens.

Okay, maybe I'm being just slightly less than honest, but, hey, I can only stay on break for so long; I've gotta get back to work!

Dinosaurs and the Borders Closure

I don't claim to be a business expert, okay? I'm lucky if I can match my khakis with my golf shirt without benefit of helpful Garanimals. So I don't mean to imply that I could be CEO of anything, particularly a business facing the challenges bookstore chains and publishers are facing in today's rapidly changing environment.

But I read a statement today that literally made my jaw drop, or at least hang open for a few seconds, giving me the look of a mouth-breathing idiot. Even more so than usual.

Inside a Wall Street Journal article by Mike Spector and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg discussing the pending closure of the remaining 399 Borders stores, which will result in 10,700 people losing their jobs, was the following statement: "The chain's demise could speed the decline in sales of hardcover and paperback books as consumers increasingly turn to downloading electronic books or having physical books mailed to their doorsteps."

Or, as explained by CEO of Hatchette Book Group, David Young: "When you lose literally miles of bookshelves, it's going to have an impact."

Am I the only one who sees the tail wagging the dog here? It amazes me that something which seems so obvious to me has apparently escaped the attention of both the people who write about the business side of books and the people who run the business side of books.

And that is this:

Readers aren't going to begin downloading more ebooks because the Borders chain is closing, it's the other way around. The Borders chain is closing because people are downloading more ebooks!

In my opinion, this perfectly illustrates the disconnect that will doom the dinosaurs of the publishing world, those publishers and booksellers who just simply cannot grasp that the literary universe has changed (not is changing, has changed) in a very fundamental way, and is never going back. Things will never be the way they were for hundreds of years; that ship has sailed and isn't coming back.

The ability or inability of the largest publishers and booksellers to adjust to these changes will ultimately play the dominant role in determining which of them will survive and in what form. Everybody knows that. The problem is, the more hide-bound and entrenched the organization, the harder it is to effect that change. It takes a lot longer for an aircraft carrier to change course than a speedboat.

I don't mean to imply that there was no understanding of publishing's new realities at the top of the Borders food chain specifically; it's entirely possible upper management did everything they could to help the company survive and just weren't able to pull it off.

And the apparent misunderstanding of the primary cause of Borders' demise by the article's authors is pretty harmless, too. But if I was employed by Hatchette Book Group and I read the quote attributed to their CEO, David Young, I would be pretty freaking nervous right now. Might be time to get a jump on things and start polishing up the ol' resume, before that Hatchette falls. On their heads.