I read an article today by an a guest on an agent blog that I follow. She said that writers should find their “voice” and their writing identity and stick with it. A well-written article that gave the accepted facts about writing for major publishers.
http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2011/05/finding-your-authentic-voice.html
Except that the writing world is in flux, and nobody knows what is going to happen next.
It’s a fact that the big publishers are losing their grip on the market. The advent of e-publishing and the growth of Amazon and other third-party sites caught them on the hop. They fought back with the Agency pricing model, and it’s catching them even worse. Because people who have shelled out for Kindles don’t expect to pay more for the ebook than they would for the paperback, especially when the arrangement is more like leasing than owning. I’ve seen it happening. It depresses digital publishing with the big publishers, but even with that, the market is growing bigger and faster than most pundits predicted.
This lets in the smaller publisher, the one that can react faster to market demands. Big conglomerates always move slower than the smaller ones. They have higher overheads and a corporate culture built around the old model, with staff welded to the old ideas. And they need to make higher profits to cover the higher costs. Working with established agents has always been a good way for them to filter the submissions to ones that they might actually be able to publish, given their requirements and areas of expertise. And the aforesaid corporate culture. But it’s also their weakness. They can’t spot trends until they’re almost over and these days, when news travels faster on Twitter than it does anywhere else, that’s a big problem. The lead time of a year, maybe two, before releases means they can’t swivel on a sixpence as their smaller counterparts can, and they need big sales to make profits that can only be garnered from the more homogenized product. That’s basic marketing sense, always has been. But the relative elements are changing.
It’s always been a fact that smaller publishers like Sourcebooks, Ellora’s Cave, Samhain and so on don’t require agented submissions. Some discourage it, and agents have never been interested in sales that are in the hundreds rather than the thousands. Now sales are growing and authors are making more decisions about their own careers and what they want to do.
There have always been writers who prefer to write in a variety of genres—Jayne Ann Krentz/Amanda Quick and Ann Maxwell spring to mind, as well as Lisa Kleypas. With a slight tweak to the author photo, maybe different websites, or website pages, authors are increasingly writing in more than one genre and becoming more difficult to classify. I do it, too.
I write around themes, things that interest me, for instance, “difference.” People who are different from the others around them, for one reason or another. I love exploring the ways they cope with that, and how they meet others who might be different. So the ex drug addict heroine of “Learning to Trust” who comes from a wealthy family, the teacher who happens to be a shape-shifting dragon, the daughter of a courtesan trying to make a life of her own in Georgian England, or the woman who enjoys making love in public but belongs to a hidebound, snobbish social group: they are all fodder to my particular writing mill. And I wouldn’t give any one of them up. But you see, that covers four genres—romantic suspense, paranormal romance, historical romance and erotic romance.
Do I have to pick one of them above the others, and shoehorn what I love writing about into one shelf?
I decided no. Writing in different genres refreshes my outlook and enables me to take different looks, take my theme from new angles. If I wrote purely historical romance, for instance, I’d become jaded and the themes would get samey. But I wouldn’t give up writing the historicals for anything.
Of course I have to keep my eye on the genres, write what’s most popular at the time, but that way I’m writing to the market, ie, looking at it as a day job, but still retaining my area of interest, my artistic integrity, if I want to be precious about it. Authors have been forced into genres that don’t quite fit with what they love writing, what their hearts and muses tell them to write. And okay, that does sound precious, but in effect, it leads to blanding out, the kind of cookie-cutter books that dilute the author’s voice and heart. If she wants to make a decent living, if she wants to sell enough copies to enable her children to go to school and keep a roof over her head. But things are changing, and fast.
I heard about an author today, Candace Hern, who is self-publishing her old traditional Regencies. The big publishers dropped the sweet, kisses-only Regencies years ago, after strangling them to death, and they asked all authors to write in a bit of the sensual. Me, I love writing the sensual and erotic. I’d do it anyway, but Candace wasn’t so keen. She did it, but her heart was in the trad. And now she has a chance to follow her heart and write what she truly loves. She’s revising some of her newer books to be the books she really wanted to write, as well as publishing the older titles.
With the new push to self-publishing and going with smaller publishers, the writer has a chance to write what she really wants, rather than what she is told the market wants, sometimes at third hand (the publisher tells the agent who tells the writer). Candace has a fair chance of doing well with her books, because enough people remember them and love them. Not enough for a big publisher, but enough for a smaller one. My books have elements that mean they don’t slot easily into a currently popular genre. My rejection letters from bigger publishers and agents are showing a common theme “You write well, but we can’t place the book right now.” Nice to know I write well, so I’ve not been particularly hurt or surprised. They need the instant winners. It was when I realised that I was doing all right without their help, and when I talked to authors with big houses at conventions and chapter meetings that I got my first real shock. I’m actually earning more than some of them. Not the Kleypases and Robertses of this world, of course, but still, I’m doing fine. So far (nothing is certain!)
The received wisdom is that the publisher goes with what sells. After all, what sells is what’s popular, right? Well yes and no. Because you can only buy what’s there to be bought.
I think the reader may be tiring of the homogenized, packaged book. They’re easy to read, and instantly forgettable. Good for long air journeys, bad for stickability. As usual, the savvy publisher, Harlequin, has noticed, perhaps more than many of the readers. My recent glom of the Bad Blood series had a purpose. I wanted to know what new themes and new ideas were moving into a Harlequin/Mills and Boon mainstay. The Modern/Presents line is one of the oldest established and also the best selling lines that company has. Not one to take chances with, you’d think. But HMB, who have been in business a hell of a long time, have seen trends come and go, and they know better than anyone else, that if you don’t move with the times, or even a little in advance, you eventually lose out. Your particular sales line on the graph starts to plateau and then dip. The revamp in the covers is being followed up by a revamp in content.
At least three of the Bad Blood series had what are radically different themes for the line, while still taking account of the line’s basic identity. This is the line of high living and billionaires, princesses and Cinderellas. That’s still there, but introducing a non-white heroine where her race isn’t the focal point of the story, a story about a couple in love having marital problems, and one about a heroine with a severe physical disability were new and to a line where requirements are so strict, definitely different.
So how does that pan in to my own career? Well before, I thought about getting to the big publishers through an agent. This year, I’ve hunted for agents. But they want best sellers, and although I’m a best seller for one publisher in one genre, that genre isn’t the biggest one that publisher has. If you see what I mean. Big fish, little pond. And these days, agents seem to want writers who are already selling scads and scads of books, the guaranteed best sellers who they can move to the big publishers with little change in content and still make loadsamoney.
It’s starting not to work, that approach. Because the writers they take aren’t necessarily that good, and readers aren’t stupid. They know they’re reading the books for the sex/laughs/screams or whatever. But after half a dozen or so, they’re ready to move on.
So time for a huge rethink, for me. I’d still like to write for a big publisher, and I’ve kind of achieved that by accepting an offer from Carina. But Carina is run by two very savvy women who have their fingers on the pulse, and know where they’re going. Not a conglomerate, a committee, who are deciding on the basis of sales and image.
Time for the big girl knickers.
After publishing 40 books, I think I can handle my own career. I don’t need anyone to give me advice on what to write or how to write it, unless it’s my editor, and that’s another reason to love the smaller publishers. Editors edit. Some people need that guidance, I know. But it’s about time I stood on my own feet and made my own creative decisions. If I hadn’t, when I decided to write a book that I didn’t have a publisher for, then I wouldn’t have signed with Carina, and wouldn’t have had Malle Valik telling me that she liked that my heroine was an ex drug addict, and that I’d gone with the book rather than the genre I was trying to write for.
Publishers will try to retain the cozy “you send us what we want and we’ll publish it” for a while, until they figure out the new models. They have the money, after all. But there’s a very important article put up over at Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blog on the same theme. Go and read it. It’s on the changing role of the agent in the publishing world.
http://kriswrites.com/2011/05/04/the-business-rusch-advocates-addendums-and-sneaks-oh-my/
Perhaps we need lawyers and negotiators rather than the old fashioned agent. Perhaps we need authors in the same genre to band together and form their own marketing and selling group, to make it easy for readers to find what they like, instead of trying to find it in an undefined sea of authors.
One thing’s for sure. Everything is changing and there’s a revolution afoot. Who knows what will be left when the dust has settled? If it ever does.
