Follow-up to Yesterday’s Post about The Fault in Our Stars

Yesterday I posted about why I think The Fault in Our Stars has sold so well, and there were hundreds of very interesting responses. Among them:

1. Valerie2776 pointed out that the mechanics of sharing online changed tremendously between 2008 and 2012, which meant that TFiOS’ first readers (fans of my previous books and/or nerdfighters, mostly) could respond to the book in a public way (on tumblr and twitter especially) that just didn’t exist in the same way in 2008 when Paper Towns came out.

This also reminded me that both Paper Towns and WGWG had under 5,000 preorders, whereas TFiOS had something like 65,000 (primarily because I signed all the preorders*) so the initial activation energy was much larger. So there were both more people talking about the book and more places online to be heard talking about the book.

2. Jutze (who wrote the brilliant 52-second song The Fault in the Fault in Our Stars) pointed out that in fact there was in fact a statistically significant decline in goodreads ratings in the past six months, although a relatively small one.

Publishers take note: You should hire this guy to do quant analysis. Anyway, if you’re wondering why Amazon bought goodreads….this is why.

3. Many people argued the The Fault in Our Stars is just BETTER than my other books. I think this is probably true, and certainly the data agrees: The overall goodreads ratings:

The Fault in Our Stars - 4.52 - 234,000 ratings
Looking for Alaska - 4.26 - 152,000 ratings
Paper Towns - 4.13 - 84,000 ratings
Katherines - 3.87 - 60,000 ratings

How strong is the correlation between number of readers (as represented by number of ratings) and overall rating? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Jutze. But there certainly is a correlation (and consistently, every week, TFiOS sells better than Alaska which sells better than Paper Towns which sells better than Katherines)**.

Publishers take note:After you hire someone to do quantitative analysis, you can find books on your backlist that are beloved but selling less than they should and then market them more aggressively.

4. Jemappellery points out, “I want to read this book again. I need to buy another copy, though, because my aunt’s dog threw up on mine.” This is also an important component of my sales strategy.

5. Genre. till-therewas-you points out that people like romantic tragedies, which has been true for quite some time. My previous books were less genre-conscious. Alaska is a boarding school novel, but that is a less well-established genre.

6. And lastly, toloveandlivejess points out “another factor is the thyca community.” (Thyroid cancer survivors.) So have many young people living with cancer and their families have supported the book. This has really surprised me, but I am grateful for it. It means a lot to me personally, but on a purely professional level, it speaks to the power that niche communities have today to make a book/movie/vlog/game successful. Whether it’s nerdfighteria or book clubs or the online network of thyroid cancer survivors, communities matter.

* Except those of you living in the UK/Germany. SORRY.

** Of course statistical analysis can’t reflect passion or enthusiasm or quantify the importance of a book to someone. People on average may like Katherines less than my other books, but the people who do like it often feel a deep connection to it, which is wonderful and I’m in no way trying to say that sales are the only (or even the best) measure of value. I’m just trying to put together some thoughts on what shapes sales.

Why Has The Fault in Our Stars Been So Successful?

The Fault in Our Stars is my fourth (4.5th?) novel, and it has found a very wide readership. I often get questions asking what my secret is, or why the book has been successful, and then of course there are also lots of people out there speculating about the reasons for the book’s success.

So I thought I’d try to add what I can to the conversation. I’m interested in the question partly because I want to see more YA books find broad readerships and partly because I want to understand why this book has done so much better than my previous novels (although they are now, happily, riding on TFiOS’s coattails).

So:

1. The Fault in Our Stars is NOT successful primarily because I am famous on the Internet. I know this because I was famous on the Internet when Paper Towns was published, and also when Will Grayson, Will Grayson was published. (TFiOS has almost a million copies in print; Paper Towns sold perhaps 4% as much in its first year.) Having the built-in audience of nerdfighteria is tremendously important to me and to my work, but both Paper Towns and WGWG sold less in hardcover than Looking for Alaska, which was published when I was entirely unknown online. 

For many reasons—partly because I’d built a readership over the past six years, partly because I signed the entire first print run—TFiOS had far more preorders than my previous novels. But when you have the kind of regular relationship with your audience that I do, pretty much 100% of that built-in fan base buys your book within the first month.* It’s not something they find browsing at a bookstore three months later, as shown by the huge drop-off in sales for Paper Towns and WGWG. Why did this not happen with TFiOS? I think for a few reasons, which I’ll discuss below.

(Some people will say that I have a broader audience online now than I did in 2008 or 2010. True, but social media is generally much more crowded and fractured. Like, the video I made announcing the cover of Paper Towns got more views than the video I made announcing the cover of TFiOS, for instance.)

I do think the initial goodwill that nerdfighters showed the book—streaming onto amazon and goodreads to give the book positive reviews—probably helped the book begin to reach outside the community. But this also raises a critical point, which is that on average nerdfighters seem to like The Fault in Our Stars almost exactly as much as what I will call for lack of a better term “regular people.” We have pretty good data here thanks to goodreads, where more than 130,000 people have now rated The Fault in Our Stars. The average rating of the first 50,000 goodreads raters (who are more likely to be nerdfighters) is almost identical to the average rating of the most reading 50,000 goodreads raters (who are less likely to be nerdfighters). The same is true on amazon, where the book’s average rating has actually gone up a bit in the past six months (although not in a statistically significant way).

So while the enthusiasm of early readers, who tended to be nerdfighters, gave the book tremendous activation energy, it could’ve gone the way of Paper Towns and WGWG—books that did well and found wonderful readerships but almost immediately fell off bestseller lists. Instead, 72 weeks after publication, it’s still at #1.

2. The Fault in Our Stars has not been successful because I am male. I hear this a lot, and I just don’t think it’s true, except insofar as I have a bunch of privileges. (I am also cisgendered and heterosexual and grew up in the United States and write in English and graduated from college without debt and so on.) I think there is sexism in the critical discourse surrounding YA books and in many cases with how books are marketed. (The marketing problem is I think largely born from two incorrect beliefs still widely held in some corners of YA publishing: first, that young men do not purchase books and can never be convinced to, and second, that young women enjoy being condescended to.)

For one thing, I was also male when I wrote my other novels, none of which came close to the commercial or critical success of The Fault in Our Stars. Also, the other breakout non-series, realistic children’s titles of 2012 were Wonder and Out of My Mind, both written by women.

The truth is, no YA novel has ever been chosen as the best fiction book of the year by TIME Magazine**, or appeared on so many adult-oriented best-of-the-year lists (Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, etc.). Did this happen because TFiOS is the best YA book ever? No. It means that someone got a bunch of adult literary critics to read a YA novel that those adult literary critics really liked. This someone is named Elyse Marshall. (More on her in a moment.)

The other oft-repeated line here is that The Fault in Our Stars got a cool, literary cover because I’m a guy, and if I’d been female it would’ve had a pink cover with a decpitated girl head. And it might have, if I’d been a female first novelist with someone other than Julie Strauss-Gabel as my editor. (More on her in a moment.)

SO WHY DO I THINK THE FAULT IN OUR STARS HAS BEEN SO EXTRAORDINARILY SUCCESSFUL?

1. People like it. This tends to be underappreciated, I think. As noted above, in the last few years we’ve gotten access to really rich data about readers’ tastes and opinions, which can be tremendously useful. With more than 233,000 ratings, TFiOS’s average rating of 4.52 is very high compared to comparable titles. (It’s worth noting that other breakout nonseries fiction titles—from Wonder to The Book Thief to Out of My Mind almost always have average ratings above 4.30, which is very high for goodreads.)

I don’t know why people like The Fault in Our Stars, but they do, and they seem to like it enough to recommend it to their friends and family.

2. I have the best editor in YA publishing and have been working with her for nine years. 

Obviously I’m biased, but I think Julie Strauss-Gabel is the best editor and publisher in young adult lit today. In the past 12 months, she has published New York Times bestsellers by Adam Gidwitz, Gayle Foreman, John Grisham, Ally Condie, and me. Her books are also critically acclaimed; in fact, I don’t know the last time she published a book that didn’t get any starred reviews. (2009, maybe?)

This is not because Julie has great taste; it is because she is a great editor who makes the books she works on far better than they would otherwise be. And because we’ve worked together for nine years, we have a great deal of trust in each other’s judgement. This is true when it comes to editorial decisions within the book; it’s also true when it comes to publishing decisions.

For instance, when I said, “Julie, I want to sign the whole first printing,” she didn’t say, “That will be expensive and very complicated” (although it was both). She said, “Yes.”

And when she said, “I think we should publish the book in January,” even though that defied all the conventional wisdom about when to publish a Big Book, I said yes.

And about that cover: Many people wanted TFiOS to have a broadly commercial YA-ish, girl-oriented cover. Julie really believed in something graphic and minimalist that would look different from other books on the YA shelf and would also lend itself to visual remixes and fan-driven creations. Although the brilliant sales and marketing team at Penguin were hesitant, they trusted Julie’s judgement. That’s why the cover exists.

3. My entire backlist is with the same publishing house.

This largely goes down to good luck, but since everything I’ve ever written was published by Dutton, it’s easier to work with bookstores and bookselling web sites to create displays and package deals and stuff. This sounds like a small matter, but in fact it has been critically important (and the biggest reason why the sales of TFiOS have lifted the sales of my other books so much). It has been much harder, for instance, for Scholastic, which published Markus Zusak’s brilliant I Am the Messenger to capitalize on the success of The Book Thief, which was published by Random House.

4. Elyse Marshall is my publicist. 

So I assume the reason TIME Magazine and USA Today and Entertainment Weekly chose The Fault in Our Stars as one of the best books of the year is because critics there did think very highly of the book. But Elyse is the reason they read it in the first place. If they don’t read it, they don’t review it. Thousands of books come out every year; as a reviewer, it’s very hard to figure out what to read and review, and it’s easy to dismiss YA novels, particularly if you are  Serious Real Book Reviewer. Elyse did an amazingly good job of convincing people to read TFiOS.

She also organized an improbably successful book tour by working with many of the best independent bookstores in the country. The tour sold more than 11,000 copies of The Fault in Our Stars and Elyse was able to do this while still adhering to my annoying restriction that we do the entire thing without flying.

5. Penguin just happens to the best right now. 

Power shifts quickly in publishing, but there’s little question that under the leadership of Don Weisberg, Felicia Frazier, and Jennifer Loja, Penguin has emerged as the most effective publishing house in YA. I also think Penguin has the best sales team, and it helps that I’ve known most of those people personally for eight years. Penguin has always been very good at facilitating relationships and collaborations between authors and employees. 

6. My readers are evangelists.

I don’t know why, but if you scroll through the Looking for Alaska or TFiOS tags on tumblr, you see a lot of people screaming at their friends to read my books, and making art about the books, and animating quotations from them, and so on. I am just really lucky in this respect. I do not understand this, and I wish I did, because I’d like to see it happen more often with more books. 

So that’s why I think The Fault in Our Stars has had such an extraordinary year, but I’m interested to know what you think.


* I can more or less prove this, because we tracked clickthroughs on affiliate links. We know exactly how many people clicked through to the TFiOS page on Amazon, indiebound, or B&N and ended up buying a book. Within two weeks of the book’s publication, the numbers dropped to literally single digits, which meant that almost none of the people who follow me on YouTube or twitter or tumblr were buying the book from my link. This continued until Hank and I just stopped linking to the book in mid-February.

** It’s worth noting that among TIME’s Top 10 was Catherynne Valente’s brilliant The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There. To me this kind of stuff is just good news for children’s and YA publishing, no matter who it happens to, because it allows us to expand our reach both to adults and to teens who think they dislike YA books because they don’t yet realize the breadth of contemporary YA lit.

johndarnielle: So, people ask me this sometimes, and I appreciate that they want me and Peter and Jon to get maximum paid for the records we make. And it is true that we’ll get the biggest cut from sales at shows, because those copies are copies we buy directly from the label. However, I am every bit just as happy and in fact in some ways happier to take a slightly reduced cut if you’re buying from your local record store, which is almost doubtless scrambling to survive every day, or from a cool mailorder, or directly from the label if the label does mailorder. I make a little bit of a big deal about this because more people than me need to get paid for the stuff I do to happen. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about labels and publishers as if they were hurdles to be cleared, obstacles to be circumnavigated. I can’t speak for anybody else’s experiences, though stories of label skullduggery abound, and shame on such labels. But my personal experience in independent music is that the people releasing Mountain Goats records aren’t “The Label.” They’re my friends, and they’re also almost all musicians themselves. They are people who share exactly equivalent praise or blame for the music I make, because you wouldn’t have heard it without them, by which I mean without their support and nurturing and faith I would never have made the music in the first place. So while I’m, again, grateful that people think of my well-being, it’s my opinion that the people who make the music available - especially independent labels, especially independent stores - deserve your patronage, and it’s 100% ok if I have to sell a few more records at retail to make as much as I’d make selling them at shows. I don’t do what I do in a vacuum. Without the labels that put out my stuff and the stores that stocked it and the people working in the stores who told people browsing to maybe check out the Mountain Goats, I would almost doubtless not even own a guitar right now. I’d be a nurse somewhere in California, and I’d write poetry in my downtime. Which would also be a good life, because every day above ground is a good day, unless you’re getting shot at, it sucks to get shot at, but you see my point This is very important.
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johndarnielle:

So, people ask me this sometimes, and I appreciate that they want me and Peter and Jon to get maximum paid for the records we make. And it is true that we’ll get the biggest cut from sales at shows, because those copies are copies we buy directly from the label. However, I am every bit just as happy and in fact in some ways happier to take a slightly reduced cut if you’re buying from your local record store, which is almost doubtless scrambling to survive every day, or from a cool mailorder, or directly from the label if the label does mailorder.

I make a little bit of a big deal about this because more people than me need to get paid for the stuff I do to happen. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about labels and publishers as if they were hurdles to be cleared, obstacles to be circumnavigated. I can’t speak for anybody else’s experiences, though stories of label skullduggery abound, and shame on such labels. But my personal experience in independent music is that the people releasing Mountain Goats records aren’t “The Label.” They’re my friends, and they’re also almost all musicians themselves. They are people who share exactly equivalent praise or blame for the music I make, because you wouldn’t have heard it without them, by which I mean without their support and nurturing and faith I would never have made the music in the first place. So while I’m, again, grateful that people think of my well-being, it’s my opinion that the people who make the music available - especially independent labels, especially independent stores - deserve your patronage, and it’s 100% ok if I have to sell a few more records at retail to make as much as I’d make selling them at shows. I don’t do what I do in a vacuum. Without the labels that put out my stuff and the stores that stocked it and the people working in the stores who told people browsing to maybe check out the Mountain Goats, I would almost doubtless not even own a guitar right now. I’d be a nurse somewhere in California, and I’d write poetry in my downtime. Which would also be a good life, because every day above ground is a good day, unless you’re getting shot at, it sucks to get shot at, but you see my point

This is very important.

Q:So, when are we getting DFTBA Publishing?

Anonymous

Well, DFTBA is distributing Mike Falzone’s book Never Stop Shutting Up, which is awesome. And we are considering publishing a few things at some point in the future. But there are a few important hurdles to consider here. This will be boring and businessy, but I like to be transparent with you guys:

1. Unlike music and merch, publishing is already pretty efficient at targeting niches. One of the reasons a small company like DFTBA can work is that we provide extremely high royalties to our artists (with very few exceptions, most of what you spend at DFTBA.com goes directly to the artist). We can do this because we work with creators who have established audiences and know what kinds of stuff those audiences want and how to make it for them. Books are different: The overall profit margins are slimmer, and the upfront costs are bigger. (This is primarily because good books need good editors, which is highly skilled and not-inexpensive work.)

2. Also, DFTBA is only interested in businesses where we can add value both to the lives of our customers and to the lives of the creators we work with. Writers don’t need our help to get their work available on the kindle, and they can use Amazon’s CreateSpace to publish printed books. So it seems to me the only place we could add value would be in fancy books—like, ones that are printed and bound with exceptional quality. CreateSpace doesn’t do that well, and there are some books you just want on your shelf instead of on your kindle.

3. Publishing a book involves big upfront costs with no assurance of sales, and because of the way inventory is taxed (NOW IT’S GETTING BORING!) you don’t really want to risk having lots of leftover stock in the warehouse for years and years.

So those are the barriers to entry for us. That said, we do hope to publish a few books in the coming years!

On Self-Publishing and Amazon

From Amy: “Seeing your facebook posts in relation to self-publishing today, i’m very curious as to why you seem to be so upset when continuously you encourage self publishing of other media. Just look at Vlogbrothers itself. In fact, you addressed this in Hitler and Sex. What about all of the amazing musicians that DFTBA Records picked up. The internet enabled these people to get out there and start something big. Why are books not okay?”

I haven’t sorted my feelings out, and I may be inconsistent/wrong. But to be clear: I did not intend to attack or criticize self-publishing itself. Many great books are being self-published, and that has been the case for centuries.

I wanted to criticize Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, because I felt that in his introduction of the new kindles, Bezos repeatedly peddled the lie that a book is created by one person, and that therefore a book’s author should be the sole entity to profit from the sale of the book. (Aside, of course, from Amazon itself.)

Bezos and Amazon are consistent in their promotion of this lie, because it encourages the idea that the publishing landscape today is bloated and inefficient and that there is a better, cheaper way to do it—a way where all books can cost $1.99 with most of that $1.99 going to the author. Readers and writers both win then, right?

Well, no. Because the truth is, most good books are NOT created solely by one person: Editors and publishers play a tremendously important role not just in the distribution of books, but in the creation of them. Without my editor, there would be no great perhaps in Looking for Alaska, no Augustus Waters in The Fault in Our Stars, and no Agloe, New York in Paper Towns. Without copyeditors and proofreaders, my books would be riddled with factual and grammatical errors that would pull you out of the story and give you a less immersive reading experience. This is true not only for traditional/legacy publishing but also for self-published books. Authors are not islands.

But I do believe that without publishers, the overall quality and diversity of books will suffer.

There is lots of room in this world for indie publishing, and I’m excited about all the reading opportunities that the Internet has given us, from blogs to fan fiction to direct-to-ereader novels. But comparing publishing to music or TV is really troubling to me, because people listen to a lot of music: In an average week, I probably listen to 200 songs. I probably watch 5 hours of television or YouTube. But in an average week, I read one book (and that puts me on the far end of the reading bell curve among Americans). Given how few books are read—perhaps 500 million a year—the current publishing landscape does an astonishingly good job of making sure there are plenty of books available to a wide variety of audiences. There are books about little people who survived the Holocaust and the Islamization of the Uzbeks and how to swing a golf club. 

My fear is that if there are only two or three voices in the publishing retail landscape—say, Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon—that diversity will dramatically decrease. Only a few dozen books a year will be available at large retailers like Wal-Mart; the rest of literature will exist only in the kindle store. Those books will have difficulty being discovered, because there are so few readers and so many titles. (You are starting to see a similar phenomenon on YouTube right now, actually, but in publishing it will be far worse, because it usually only takes a few minutes to watch a YouTube video.)

Here’s my concern: What will happen to the next generation’s Toni Morrison? How will she—a brilliant, Nobel-worthy writer who doesn’t have a huge built-in audience—get the financial and editorial support her talent deserves? (Toni Morrison may be America’s greatest living writer, but she’ll never have a broad enough audience to support her writing if her books sell for $1.99 in the kindle store.) Amazon will have absolutely no investment in that writer, and they won’t need to. Over time, I’m worried this lack of investment will hurt the quality and breadth of literature we actually read, even if literature remains broadly available.

So my issue is not with self-publishing. My issue is with Bezos profiting from this false narrative that an Amazon monopoly will benefit both readers and writers. In truth, I don’t think it will benefit anyone. In the long run, I don’t even think it will benefit Amazon, because if they succeed in destroying publishers, the quality of the books they sell will suffer, and even fewer people will be inclined to spend their evenings reading.

Radiohead wouldn’t exist without early major-label funding. The future won’t bring new Radioheads. All I want to say here, truly, is: let’s get used to it.

immutableinscrutable:

In the wake of recent future-of-music discussions—Louis CK’s direct-ticketing move, which may indeed revolutionize touring for artists with that large of an audience, and the Emily White/All Songs Considered/David Lowery thing—I’ve been having arguments about record labels and money.

I was kind of shocked that few people knew the ground-level math, the nuts-and-bolts inconvenient truth: the diminishment of labels means there’s little money to fund the initial touring costs of new bands.

It’s called tour support. Paying for a van/bus, gas, sound person, per diems (meals), motels, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s vital start-up money, it’s the impetus of scores of bands’ careers, and it’s not really available anymore—certainly not to the extent it was when there was more money in music.

This means that there will be fewer bands. 

In fact, most of the most interesting bands that began in the 90s wouldn’t exist.

I can’t prove that there’d otherwise be amazing bands that you would be deeply compelled by, and engaged with, that don’t exist—we’re talking Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life here.  But I think this is our reality. 

I’m not wagging fingers, or wringing my hands. I just think it’d be better for people to know what the deal is.

A guy tweeted: With sympathy, ‘end of labels’ support’ will chnge how we discver & support bands, not deprive.

Alas, that’s untrue. 

There will be fewer bands.

Less money to make movies would mean fewer movies. Less money to fund the start-up of bands means fewer bands.

Think of successful rock bands from the 90s, and imagine that they lacked the funds to circle North America and Europe four or five times within a couple of years. Without that funding, without the essential groundwork of developing an audience, most of the successful 90s bands just wouldn’t be around.

An example I used was Radiohead. No tour support in the early 90s = no Radiohead. This made a few people kinda mad.

(This is a heartbreaking time for Radiohead, after the recent stage collapse. I don’t mean to pick on them. I’m bringing them up because they’re beloved, they’ve made a career pushing themselves, creatively, and they’ve been making album after album, year after year—and, of course, they’re huge)

For a band of Radiohead’s ilk—five people, each an equal member, who need to make a living, after covering huge transportation, personnel (sound guy, tour manager) and production expenses—to put album after album out, year after year, for almost two decades, you need a sizable touring base. 

I estimate that it costs $3,000 to $6,000 a week for a bare-bones tour—yes, very bare-bones. You need to be out hustling on the road maybe 20 to 30 weeks per year, and it takes two or three or four years to develop a viable touring base. (I hate that kind of music-biz jargon, I avoid it whenever I can—please forgive me for not having more elegant terms) 

Averaging those numbers, an absolutely new band needs about $280,000—for very scrappy, uncomfortable touring.

With this budget, you’ll still need a job when you get home. One that doesn’t mind you only working a month at a time, then vanishing for seven weeks, then returning—repeatedly. For years. By nature, that’ll probably be a shitty job. 

Does anybody remember the part of Anvil! The Story of Anvil where the singer/guitarist is, in his fifties, working a minimum-wage food-service job, while his siblings are dentists and lawyers?

This imaginary version of Radiohead doesn’t have the benefit of historical hindsight.  How do you tell girlfriends and parents that pretty long-term poverty, well into adulthood—as your fellow former members of the high school chess club  graduate from medical school—will result in making an extremely nice living, not to mention important work?

Let’s say that “Creep” could’ve been a hit record without a generous promotional fund.

A song on the radio will not pack clubs instantly—and packed clubs, even theaters, are unlikely to be enough to tour without taking tour support from a label. Bands with hit songs still have to circle the country for a couple of years to build an audience, and, from there, a real career. Some people come because they love the single, and, if the show’s great, a live fanbase develops.

“Creep” was not such a gigantic hit that there was an immediate, overwhelming explosion of cash, such that Radiohead could’ve immediately toured, within 2 years of their first album, without money from the label.

That might sound absurd to you. Talk to any professional manager of 90s major-label bands: you may have hit it out of the park, but you’d still be taking tour support—you could’ve probably gotten the label to up the budget, you could’ve gotten stage techs, you could’ve been on an extremely nice bus, you could’ve gotten your own—not shared—rooms on days off, but you’d still be operating on the label’s dime.

No tour support = no Radiohead.

Their pay-what-you-wish experiment was noble. It absolutely would not have worked if they weren’t a huge band.

(I’m freestyling this—I didn’t call up their manager-circa-1994 and investigate numbers. I would be very surprised if Radiohead didn’t rely heavily on tour support for at least three to four years—possibly five to six)

When my first band, Soul Coughing, put out its first album on Slash/Warner Bros., they paid for basics, but no more. We shared rooms. We were crammed into a single van with our gear. It was extremely uncomfortable. We were resentful that we couldn’t get money for a second van. 

We were just scraping by—but we didn’t need jobs for our off-tour lives.

Today, any left-of-center band would be insanely lucky to get that. Radiohead would be an extreme longshot to get that. Soul Coughing wouldn’t have a chance in hell.

Vice published this letter I wrote, in response to a young musician’s pessimistic article, about how being a professional touring musician is still possible:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/dear-vice-anti-anti-touring

Summary: be solo, or a duo, because a full band is financially untenable; work much, much harder, under much more stressful conditions, than bands of earlier generations had to. Be very young, or have the ability to take the broke-ness, the physical and emotional knock-around, that very young people can.

My favorite New York band is called Moon Hooch: three super-fierce dudes in their early 20s. I think they’ll pull it off, and become a successful touring band, because they’re so young, so fiery, and so committed. They will commit to sleeping on floors repeatedly. They opened for me on a month’s worth of shows last year; I came to them kind of embarrassed, like, this is gonna be rough going, you guys in a car, us in a bus, hugely long drives, and the promoters aren’t gonna pay you well. They did it, and they killed it. They are extremely impressive in their warrior ethos.

Kids in punk rock bands will still be around. The Warped Tour will be in good shape.

But can people over 25 do that? For that matter, can people under 25, who are, like me, let’s say, drama-club kids?

One guy I know—super talented, younger musician with tremendous potential—did some touring by Greyhound, which is common these days. He said, “Interstate bus travel will kill your spirit.” 

I don’t think he’s done it since. I know I wouldn’t be able to hack it. 

I know ten or twelve young artists, equally as talented and promising, in the same boat.

I think Radiohead upgraded from a van to a tour bus pretty early in their touring life. Would they have slept on floors, traveled by Greyhound, lived on $10 a day? 

For two years? Or three?

It’s no dis to say that I don’t think they could—I couldn’t either.

I remember reading their press coverage in the 90s. Much of it focused on how they were worn down by a grueling touring life.  Meeting People Is Easy was basically an extended essay on the topic. This may or may not actually be the case—music writers often gravitate to a small part of a band’s story and magnify it, and it accumulates to a tipping point where that story becomes the conventional wisdom—but the impression I got, repeatedly, was that they were tired, and irritated by touring.

(I read a comment along the lines of, “Press coverage is 100% free.” No. Press coverage means somebody was paid money to make phonecalls for two months, cajoling writers into listening, and hopefully reviewing. There are examples of bands that took off like a shot with press by sheer momentum. They are in the extreme minority. Nearly everybody else needs to hire somebody to chase press. You can say to hell with it, but that’ll probably mean that all the other people who shelled out for a publicist will get that press instead. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and at some point nobody hires publicists, and then press becomes 100% free)

No tour support = no Radiohead.

I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m doing great. I make a nice living playing music that I’m fiercely engaged with. I have a fantastic, passionate audience. The Future is working out pretty OK for me. 

The kind of things available to an artist of Louis CK’s size are available to artists of my size, on a much, much lower level. I benefit a lot from having a direct connection to my audience—though Louis’ excellent new move probably isn’t in my near future. I don’t come with such a guaranteed profitable audience that rock clubs’ promoters will tell Ticketmaster to buzz off on my behalf.

I tour cheaply—mostly as a duo, or solo, and about once every three years with a full band, on a tour bus—and, in that case, as stingily as I can. This kind of budgetary vigilance means I make pretty good money.

But this wouldn’t be possible at all, at all, without having had the initial investment of a record company. My career is founded on a few years spent circling the country on tour support from Warner Bros.

I’m a pragmatist. Nobody’s going to cajole Emily White into spending money. We are where we are. People younger than me will spend money on gear, and wi-fi, but not on music. It’s a shame.

Short of the law intervening and imposing a mandatory royalty that huge companies implicitly benefiting from the new cultural landscape—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Optimum Cable, Spotify—must pay—which, of course, they wouldn’t just eat, they’d pass on to the consumer—the truth is that songs are a radically devalued commodity.

Musicians: we must adapt, and make our lives work.

Lowery got shit for bringing up Mark Linkous and Vic Chesnutt, but it’s honestly not off the mark to interpret some Lane-on-Mad-Men desperation. Money is absolutely not worth taking your own life over, but many, many people, in all professions, do it.

Musicians, we need to know more about our financial ins-and-outs than musicians in the past. One reason it sucks is that we tend to be exceptionally not-good at this—we relied on hopefully-trustworthy business managers and accountants, whom most of us can no longer afford—and, full disclosure, I still have one, because I was wretchedly hopeless doing it on my own, and it’s an expense I wish I didn’t have to deal with.

Listeners, understand what’s happening—not what’s going to happen, but what is happening.

There will be fewer people making a living playing music. 

There will be fewer bands.

There will probably never be a band of the same species as Radiohead. There would be no Radiohead if they’d started today.

I’m surprised—and saddened—that everybody didn’t, by now, fully understand this. 

I know it’s tumblr and long text posts are for scrolling past, but if you have a chance, read this. It’s true for music, and it’s also true for publishing.

Last year, Gigaom published a flattering story in which they used me as an example of why book publishers are no longer as important as they used to be. Authors can build their own brands now, and reach out to their own audiences.

But in fact, my career is an example of precisely the opposite: My publisher invested tons of time and money into me for a very long time: They paid for tours that hemorrhaged money. They paid for advertising. They fought to get me distributed in mass market channels even though my books were “literary.” And most importantly, they provided editorial support and guidance that made the books themselves far better than they would be if I published them by myself.

Not only that, but without Penguin there is no vlogbrothers, because Hank and I needed the initial activation energy of the first 500-1000 nerdfighters to make Brotherhood 2.0 work. Almost all of those nerdfighters were fans of my books who came to the project through Penguin’s marketing efforts.

So there is no Looking for Alaska or The Fault in Our Stars without the people who work at Penguin, and the narrative that Amazon wants you to believe—that publishers make books more expensive than they need to be and keep authors from making money—is a lie.

A world where everyone self publishes will mean fewer authors making a living and fewer books that reach their full potential as art. Period.

(via wilwheaton)

Source: immutableinscrutable

Julie Strauss-Gabel on Reading

My publisher, Julie Strauss-Gabel, has a tumblr but hasn’t quite figured out how to maximize the tumblr experience. However, she sent me this after reading my defense of critical reading and the kind of analysis that is done in literature classes. Read it:

I think at the heart of this matter is an inability for people to be comfortable with opening themselves up to enjoying and understanding their reactions to literature—and finding a way to discuss the humanity and experience and emotion they bring to it—without putting it in an intellectual scaffold that, as part of process, overlays intent and purpose from the author. We’re all of afraid of allowing our response to good literature to be emotion, and then needing to figure out ourselves as part that response (even though that’s the whole point, isn’t it?).

 To some extent, literary analysis gives us a framework to discuss literature together, to momentarily put aside the importance of our varied personal experiences and find some sort of common language that allows us to share the experience, because as personal as reading a good book is, there’s also an intense need to discuss those books. To whittle it down to symbolism and intent and analysis that implies some sort of singular valid method/response is partly a safe playground for starting that conversation. It kickstarts one’s ability to understand that there is more to his/her own personal response than enjoyment and plot. But we all take it too far when it becomes the conversation itself, allowing us to avoid understanding what we bring to a book and, more importantly, what’s essentially human and emotional about good literature. It also denies the same human experience that an author brings to the process.

Sadly, it also misdirects the dialogue about the way creativity works, how great authors create, and tells aspiring writers from early on that there are right and wrong ways to build narrative and tell stories, putting handcuffs on what can be considered “literature” by boxing in what is usually an indefinable and initiate and personal and creative process for that writer, sometimes keeping people from allowing themselves the sophistication and freedom and core of personal engagement that would actually make that expression of self—an expression of self that has great value to others—truly great.

I’m sure I did plenty of symbolic, literary analysis in high school and college. I don’t use it in that way now, but the one lasting effect is that I’ve learned ways to question what I’m reading and separate out my response to it—to be keenly aware of my own voice as a reader in the process of that creation. That lets me to know myself better through reading as much as it allows me to edit.

That said, writing (to publish/share) is also a process with purpose and part of the act of translation is building that bridge so the reader can jump the divide between experiences. A writer’s job (though symbolism or whatever) is building that bridge. I have spent years in critiques trying to explain to people that they cannot stand over a reader’s shoulder and tell them what to think as they read. If you are disappointed in the way people receive and translate your work, then you have to think—as with any form of two-way communication—about better ways to bridge the gap between yourself and the rest of the world; make peace with the truth that it’s never going to be a controlled, one-sided relationship.

Percy Jackson and the Well-Attended Funeral Service

cassandraclare:

smokeandbone13 asked you:

I have a writing question but idk of you can answer this but here it goes when you write the ending of a series and the publishers or who ever has control of your books does not agree with the ending like it wont be “commercial acceptable” do you tell them no this is how it’s suppose to end or do you listen to them and change it to be “commercial friendly”? Like say you kill the main character and enrage ur readers do you change the ending to make them happy or go with how your story?

I like the idea that out there, there are secretly super debauched, evil versions of YA books where everything ends in a total bloodbath that have been suppressed by editors.

Editor: So, I see you’ve turned in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince …

JK Rowling: Did you like it?

Editor: All except the part where Harry is gored to death by unicorns at the end. That was … unexpected.

JKR: Exactly! No one will see it coming.

Editor: If Harry’s dead, what are you going to call the next book? His name is in all the titles.

JKR: Harry Potter and the People Who Remembered Him Fondly?

Editor: I really don’t think that’s going to sell.

* * * 

Ah, fantasy world of publishing, you are so much funnier than actual publishing.

The actual answer is, no one can make you change anything about your book you don’t want to. People spend a lot of time worrying that when they get published they will be “made to change” aspects of their books but this seems largely bootless to me: you are in a partnership with your editor, with the common goal of making the book good. It is not in your interest to fight their suggestions. That said, editors can’t make you do anything. Your name is on the book and you decide what goes between the covers.  

That doesn’t mean authors don’t ever take what’s commercial into account. Some do, some don’t, according to their personality. (Authors who ever admit they take what might or might not sell better into account, or are even imagined to have done so, are generally treated like dirt, because the idea that you might want to make a living off what you write is apparently a deeply evil one, an opinion I can only assume is held mainly by people who have never lived for any length of time with no health insurance. The intersection of art and commerce is a complicated one, and there may be a lot of crashes at said intersection, but Dickens got paid by the word.)

Anyway. I cannot imagine an editor ever saying “this will not be commercially friendly” to an author rather than “this ending doesn’t suit the book” or perhaps the blunt “nobody will like it.” That’s all your editor can do: express their opinion. You don’t have to take their advice. If I wanted to end my series with Jace having been turned into a chicken salad sandwich I could. It’s really the marketing department that would be the angriest.

Also, just because you kill off the main character or whatever doesn’t mean the book won’t sell. Look at The Amber Spyglass. Jesus, that ending is depressing. People don’t really know “what’s commercial” and what isn’t. If they did, every movie and every book would be a blockbuster. Publishers aren’t in the business of altruism, they’re in the business of publishing and making money, but they generally let authors do what they want, simply because no better method of producing books that are going to sell has yet been found. 

This.

I get asked a lot what my editor made me change, what the “original” versions of my novels looked like, etc. The truth is that novels are not written by one person. Novels are a collaboration—for almost a decade now, my closest collaborator has been Julie Strauss-Gabel, my editor at Dutton. But I also collaborate with copyeditors and proofreaders and with every single person who reads the book, because the reader chooses how to read a novel (which paragraphs to skim, which to reread, how to fill in a novel’s many blanks).

So please believe me when I say that you ARE reading the original version of The Fault in Our Stars or Looking for Alaska or whatever. And you are reading the only original version that will ever exist, because the book you read will not be quite the same as the book that anyone else reads.

Christopher Paolini's Tuesday "Inheritance" Release Is Waterstone's Biggest Pre-Order Since Harry Potter

What’s interesting about this story is that Waterstone’s claims “tens of thousands” of preorders, which is of course a tiny fraction of what Deathly Hallows generated in 2007. The UK bookstore business has been so decimated by 1. Tesco, and 2. amazon/bookdepository that Waterstone’s is claiming their biggest success in four year off a book that presold only tens of thousands of copies.

I know presales represent a small (and shrinking) fraction of bookstore business, but even so: Let’s assume that somehow they presold 90,000 copies of the new Paolini book. (It’s much lower, but let’s be generous.) That means Waterstone’s took in somewhere in the neighborhood of 800,000 pounds on the book. Spread among Waterstone’s 300 locations leaves Waterstone’s with 2,666 pounds per store in presale receipts for their biggest book in a long time.

So preordering isn’t a big deal for bookstores (although I hope it will be again someday, and I’ll say again that I encourage my readers to preorder TFiOS from their local bookstores). But it is a big deal for contemporary readers: Half of the top 10 bestselling books on Amazon have not yet been released.

This is yet another way in which bookstores are finding it challenging to meet the expectations and buying habits of contemporary readers.

I love bookstores. As both an author and a reader, I think the world would be poorer without them. But the situation seems to grow more perilous every year.