Let's set the record straight

I'm always a little uneasy whenever anyone thinks my opinionating actually leads to a valid point. Paul Carr, whom I both praised and criticized in my last post, admits in a new post that I'm on to something: there is probably nothing in publishing that merits the term "cash cow."

So, to rebalance the universe, let me add that he strikes me as a smart guy, and I didn't emphasize enough the usefulness of his discussion of the agency model of book pricing. Very interesting stuff, in the same blog entry I criticized.

Log-rolling, or fair-is-fair? I mean it to be the latter.

Insight and Oversight regarding Amazon & e-books

Over at techcrunch.com, blogger Paul Carr has some smart things and some not-so-smart things to say about e-books and Amazon.com. As readers of this blog know, both are a special concern of mine.

First, the smart thing from Carr: In this post, he criticizes Amazon for allowing customers to post 1-star reviews of books simply because a Kindle edition isn't available yet, or because it's priced at more than $9.99. These "reviews" make a book look lousy at first glance, but on closer inspection it turns out that "reviewers" pointedly refuse to even read the book in question. The latest high-profile victim of this campaign is Michael Lewis, for his new book The Big Short.

As Carr correctly points out, authors have no control over e-book pricing or the appearance of digital editions. Yet authors are the ones who suffer most from this sort of campaign. Even worse, these 1-star reviews violate Amazon's own stated policy that reviews cannot be about price or format. I myself suffered from this when my most recent book came out. Until Amazon decided to price the Kindle edition of my book at $9.99, a slew of 1-star reviews appeared on the hardcover page, all complaining about the Kindle price. Amazon refused to take these malicious non-reviews down, even after it lowered the Kindle price to $9.99!

The point: Amazon doesn't care about authors, or even about books. It wants its customers complaining about the prices or availability of Kindle editions, because it is trying to dominate the e-book market, and it wants leverage with publishers. In fact, it takes a loss currently on its $9.99 price—a price set by Amazon, not the publisher—because it is trying to monopolize the market.

Mr. Carr nails this issue on the head. Unfortunately, I must differ with him on another issue: whether it is a good idea to delay the release of e-book editions until after the hardcover publication. He addresses it, and e-book pricing, here. Mr. Carr focuses on publishers' desire to preserve the "cash cow," the hardcover, and complains of the inconvenience to those who have invested in expensive e-readers. He also makes much of the fact that e-book sales are growing rapidly.

Let's set the record straight: Publishers (and authors) make much more money from hardcovers, it's true. That is one reason why they have always delayed the release of cheaper paperbacks. But to refer to anything in publishing as a "cash cow" is to suggest a level of profitability that simply does not exist in this narrow-margin industry. "Life line" would be a better cliché. Did publishers cut that life line when the paperback was invented? No. Why should they now for the e-book?

The fact is, e-books are just another format. The millenarian talk about e-books destroying the traditional book is just nonsense—the expensive e-reader being one reason, the ephemeral nature of e-books being another. So to sacrifice all other formats to serve e-books is just idiotic. It's suicidal. Indeed, e-books may be growing rapidly, but mainly because they start from such a low base. Random House, the largest English-language publishing corporation, just reported that e-books represent just 2% of sales. That's one plus one percent. Two percent.

And where are those buyers coming from? Are e-books expanding the number of book buyers out there? No, they are cannibalizing hardcover sales. So the total number of books sold is not going up. Publishers cannot justify cutting the price dramatically, beyond the roughly 12-15% that represents printing and distribution costs for physical books, unless e-books are radically increasing the number sold (and, again, they're not). I'm sorry that Kindle owners invested so much in their machines, but that doesn't give them a divine right to a Kindle edition at the same time as a hardcover, any more than anyone has a right to a paperback on the day of hardcover publication.

But there's another critical factor that Mr. Carr overlooks: The survival of bookstores.

E-books are sold almost exclusively online. To give e-books, then, a decisive advantage over physical books (publishing them simultaneously and at a lower price than hardcovers) is to undercut bookstores. But why should any wholesaler deliberately destroy a critical distribution chain? And let's not kid ourselves: Bookstores are not simply a disposable part of the publishing ecosystem—a Dodo bird that no one will miss. Bookstores, especially independent bookstores, are where new authors get discovered, where obscure books break out, where authors and readers connect through personal appearances.

Online bookselling funnels customers toward a few bestselling and well-publicized books. And, since all online booksellers compete against all other online booksellers, only a tiny handful dominate the market: mainly Amazon, to a lesser extent Barnes & Noble, and then perhaps Powell's. With Apple jumping in, maybe it will come down to Amazon and Apple. Having a monopoly or a duopoly in bookselling is good for no one, neither customer nor publisher nor author alike.

Again, let me state clearly that I welcome the rise of e-books. Greater convenience in book buying and book reading is a great thing, and whatever continues to give life to books can only be good—in principle. But the ways in which e-book are being used to distort the marketplace, encouraging monopoly and hurting authors, must be recognized. Authors and, ultimately, readers cannot afford to let e-books, with their 2% of the market, destroy the entire ecosystem of the written word.

Politics, politics...

Having come out for the health-insurance reform bill last week, I naturally take full credit for it passing.

Seriously, I am pleased. It's far from perfect, but it will be a huge help for the self-employed—including writers such as myself. But it makes me think of another issue facing us in our work: politics.

As if we needed a reminder of how partisan views of history can be, we now have the recent decision by the Texas state textbook commission to rewrite history (removing Thomas Jefferson from the list of Founders to be studied, for example, because he was insufficiently Christian). I have ventured into hotly disputed terrain—slavery, the rise of American capitalism—and have faced some blatantly political criticism as a result. With Jesse James, some readers were upset that I stressed the importance of slavery in James's life, and discussed in detail the atrocities he committed. With regard to The First Tycoon, Steve Fraser criticized me through the use of statistics and incidents that postdated the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt, to argue that my book should have been a study of workplace safety in the railroad industry.

If only I were kidding. Fortunately, these sorts of criticisms have been rare, for the very reason that they are not fair-minded, but driven by an ideological agenda. For the writer, such attacks are not really the problem. The problem is in the self-consciousness that can creep into one's writing, knowing that such assaults will surely follow publication. Even worse, a writer might follow her own ideological agenda, perhaps even unconsciously.

It is one thing to say, "Be honest. Be fair." It is much harder to actually be honest and fair, because it isn't necessarily obvious. Take Jesse James. I cannot hide my moral revulsion at his crimes—cold-blooded murders and possible dismemberments, carried out in the name of defending slavery. And yet, it was my duty as a biographer to understand how society could become so polarized that such atrocities could take place at all, let alone be celebrated. With Vanderbilt, I had to constantly think about the many repercussions, and contexts, of his business career. How did his private interests conflict with public interests? How was he judged at the time? How did morals among businessmen differ from the public morals of larger society? How did moral standards change during his lifetime? What were the concrete benefits and concrete costs of his actions?

As former President Bush might say, this is hard work. It requires thoughtful reflection, a determination to rise above one's own politics. In fact, truly honest and impartial historical writing demands that we shed the mistaken notion that the moral conflicts of the past can be framed according to the standards or politics of today. To take just one example, laissez faire is a conservative ideology in our own time, but it was considered radical in the 1830s.

It may be impossible to get it right, but we must always try. We have to strive to see the world of the past as it was, yet still with an understanding of that period's repercussions for our own time.

A Writer's Priority: Health-Insurance Reform

Long ago, before the 2008 election, I started blogging by discussing current events. I soon realized that the world was full of well-informed people blogging about current events—my expertise was in writing, specifically biography-writing. But there is one issue of the moment that bears directly on the writing life.

Health-insurance reform.

I have friends and relatives who believe that the current health-insurance reform package being pushed by President Obama is unwise, impractical, or downright tyrannical. I have a different view. Allow me to address the issue strictly from the perspective of my material interests, as a writer.

The current system is tilted heavily against risk-taking. Reporting by the New York Times verifies what common sense and anecdotal evidence tells us: that people decline to leave their jobs in order to start businesses (or write full-time) because they cannot risk losing their health insurance. It can be terribly frightening, or downright impossible.

I have managed to do it, but it has been expensive, not to mention complicated. I have a privately-purchased insurance policy, rather than an employer-based group plan. To be honest, I feel pretty lucky: My insurance is not as expensive as it is for many, and I haven't had one fight with my insurer. (If you're wondering, it's Pacificare, available in California.) So I am not writing this to pick a fight with an insurer that I can honestly recommend, given our current system.

However, my situation is complicated. Let's say I or one of my family have a chronic ailment, such as asthma. Under current law, private insurers don't have to cover it. I would be locked into the plan I have, no matter how much they raise the premium (and previous increases have been, well, enormous). I would like to apply for residential fellowships elsewhere in the country, and abroad. It appears that I would have to keep paying the monthly premium, even if I'm outside of the coverage area, because I can't afford to lose my existing insurance upon my return. I am anchored in place. If I do go away for a few months, I'll face a situation in which I might have to buy a second policy for my temporary location, and that new policy might not even cover a pre-existing condition.

The fact is, for entrepreneurs and writers—in fact, for independent contractors, small business people, and anyone else who is willing to take risks and create wealth—our current health-insurance system is broken. It is weighted against us. It is weighted against taking risks. It is anti-free-market, anti-capitalist, anti-growth. It keeps us locked in our geographical locations. It prevents us from fulfilling our potential.

The current reform proposals aren't perfect, but nothing in this world is. Writers need it. I need it. Please pass health-insurance reform.

It's Good to Have Smart Friends

I am on my way home from my week in New York, where I spent every spare minute in the manuscripts room of the New York Public Library (one of my favorite rooms in one of my favorite institutions), gave a talk, attended a talk, and had a great session speaking with the Biography Seminar at New York University.

This trip was a treat because it brought me into contact (or back into contact) with friends and colleagues who are highly respected writers. Writing is often considered a solitary life, as indeed it is much of the time. But, like many of my peers, I love to get together and talk shop. I often find that I not only learn something from other writers, but understand better what I think about writing, through the act of articulating my ideas and approach.

Last's night event is a case in point. This meeting of the Biography Seminar included some terrific biographers, including Patricia O'Toole, Neil Baldwin, and Deirdre Bair, to name just three. Ms. Bair repeated the quote from Virginia Woolf (if I'm not mistaken), that the biographer is the "artist under oath." To that, of course, I couldn't agree more. I contrast this with the view of another of my favorite writers and friends: Colum McCann, the great novelist, who says that there is no line between fiction and nonfiction. That is true—of fiction. When it comes to facts, to information, you can import as much nonfiction into fiction as you like, even make an entire novel largely factual—but you absolutely cannot import fiction into nonfiction.

Except! Yes, except: A biographer can import some of the method, or perhaps style, of fiction. In fact, this is an excellent idea much of the time. Allow me to explain. One of the worst things to do, when writing biography, is to turn it into what someone once called history: "one damn thing after another." You should shape the narrative, create a sense of momentum—of causal chains and, most of all, consequences. You do well to artfully define your characters, and show how their personalities and choices shape the flow of events. And you should do your best to make contextual information a part of the narrative, to convince the reader that she must know this information to make the most of the story.

On the other hand, not all factual information should go into a narrative, no matter how well-grounded or superbly researched. Let me give you an example. I submitted an early chapter of The First Tycoon to my fellow fellows at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Nathan Englander pointed out that some of the details of the scene that opened the chapter seemed out of place. He said, in essence, I don't doubt that your research proves that there were pigs running in the street, but they don't seem an organic part of the portrait you're painting at this point in the narrative. Later on, he criticized my reference to an enormous fireball in the sky. It doesn't matter if it's an absolutely factual event, he observed; by including it you're connecting your main character to the universe. Do you really want to do that?

Such exchanges made me realize that a richly drawn nonfiction scene shouldn't simply be a pile of confirmed details. It must be a thoughtfully crafted piece of writing, in which the details form an organic part of the world you are presenting to the reader, and an organic part of the flow of events. There's no science to it; it's a matter of art, instinct, and experience.

And it doesn't hurt to have smart friends tell you where you've gone wrong.

Maybe I'll Listen for a Change

I'm in New York, wrapping up a week of research, public events, and catching up with colleagues (in scholarship, literature, and karate-do). In five minutes I will depart Columbia University, where I dropped in after meeting a friend nearby, to take the subway downtown to the Biography Seminar, a professional conclave that meets at New York University (around 100 yards from the spot where Commodore Vanderbilt lived and died, in fact.)

The Seminar consists of published biographers who meet to talk about the art and craft of biography, the ostensible purpose of this blog. I tend to think that I will get more out of this session than they will, if I can keep my yap shut for a few minutes and listen. So instead of moaning about e-book pricing and whatnot, I hope to have a few thoughts about biography-writing for my next posting—not my own thoughts, but what I've taken away from talking with these colleagues.

Lest I sound snarky...

I'm on the road, conducting research and giving talks in New York and vicinity. On reading my response to Michael Kinsley's rip on publishing, I should say that yes, I do realize that I sound as snarky as he does.

Apologies.

Here's the deal: Anyone who writes for a living is facing huge challenges due to digitization. I just want an informed discussion. Journalists and authors face very different challenges.

Journalism is being hit by the Internet specifically. How? First, content is being given away for free. Second, not enough advertising can be sold in proportion to a given amount of journalism than is possible in print. The Internet browser just doesn't allow it; the reading experience is too different. Since advertising, not subscriptions, provided most income historically for newspapers and magazines, this loss of advertising per column inch is what is devastating the field.

Add on top of that the fact that the universal access offered by the Internet pits every newspaper against every other newspaper in the world. For national, world, and cultural news, American readers are foregoing their local papers to jump to a few high-prestige publications, such as the New York Times and Washington Post.

None of these challenges apply to authors. Instead, we authors face a very different problem: The misperception that e-books are produced differently, and far more cheaply, than physical books. A misperception is not the same thing as the blind market force of, say, instant access to any newspaper in the world, which creates universal competition. A misperception can be created by a deliberate, self-interested act by a major player in a market.

For example, let's say Blamagon.com is a huge online retailer that controls 80% of the online market. Blamagon.com starts selling an expensive electronic device for reading e-books, called the Spindle. But who would pay $489 for a mere mechanism to read books that themselves cost $30 each? How could Blamagon.com guarantee a continuing demand for this electronic reader, when there are other devices on the market? Tough questions. Hey, how about Blamagon.com cuts e-book prices so low—lower than Blamagon.com itself pays for e-books—that the expensive Spindle looks like a bargain. Let's say Blamagon.com decides to sell its most popular new books at $9.99, half or a third of the list price. (Blamagon.com gets 50% of the list price of books it retails.) It doesn't let on to the public that it is taking a loss. Suddenly Blamagon.com is dominating sales not only of e-books, but of e-book devices. It is creating a monopoly. And, by the way, it is teaching its customers to believe that e-books are way, way cheaper to make than physical books—far cheaper than the 10-15% that would be saved if printing and distribution were taken out of the picture. Now, with a well-trained and angry customer base, Blamagon.com has leverage over publishers, to force them to reduce their prices, to help sustain its monopoly.

Could happen.

If it did, and I'm not saying it ever would, then the reduced price of books would result in lower-quality editing and design. Worse than that, author advances would be slashed (and they ain't that high to begin with.) The output of high-quality, research-intensive, painstakingly written books by professional authors would fall off dramatically. Take it from me: If you do not pay them, they will not come.

Look, I believe that everyone wants authors to get their fair share. I don't believe the future is a bleak landscape of literary famine. But these are real concerns, and as an author it behooves me to speak up. I want to add one more voice to spell out how books come into being, and how that process is jeopardized by some of the plans proposed by various parties—parties that have their own particular interests.

My interest: to be able to make a living from writing books. To be paid well enough, and have my intellectual-property rights protected well enough, so that I have a reason to keep on producing more books.

What happened to Michael Kinsley's brain?(Revised and Expanded)

When did Michael Kinsley become snarky and, well, stupid?

Over at The Atlantic, Kinsley has published a snide and simply wrong-headed attack on publishers. You can read it here. That's disappointing, because he's usually one of the smartest and clearest-thinking journalists working today. It goes to show that most journalists, even published authors, don't have a clear understanding of book publishing. They tend to see it as essentially the same business as newspaper and magazine publishing, and it's not at all.

Kinsley's wrong from his very first sentence. He writes, "The Internet tsunami that has swept through the newspaper and magazine industries . . . has at last arrived at book publishers." No, it hasn't. Book publishing is not being undermined by the distribution of content for free over the Internet; newspaper and magazine publishing are. Few readers ever read books online. The business of book publishing is entirely different than that of short-form, short-lived journalism. He's confusing digitization with the Internet.

He goes on to make a snarky list of what publishers spend money on (see my comments on that below), and then concludes:

"The book industry is one of the most custom-laden and set in its ways. It still can take over a year from the time an author submits a manuscript until the time the book comes out. Even if a manuscript is submitted electronically, it may very well be printed out, edited in pencil with sticky notes, and then keyed back in with new typographical errors."

Horrible, eh? Is there anything more backwards than printing something out?

The point of Kinsley's essay (which is not at all clear) seems to be that publishers must cut costs and make their methods more flexible and dynamic in a digital age. But this closing paragraph does not speak to that at all.

First, we have to ask: Does it actually matter if most books take a year to produce? Why is that a problem? What is the saving or gain by rushing one through? I've seen rushed books: They are full of errors, and often look like crap. Again, here we have a short-form journalist confusing the production of ephemeral, time-sensitive news stories and opinion pieces with the production of books. Let's take the National Book Award winners in fiction and nonfiction, Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin and my own The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. How would they have been improved by producing them in less time? One was a work of pure imaginative art, written in lyrical prose. The other was the product of intensive research, analysis, and storytelling, synthesized into a lengthy narrative, supported by thousands of endnotes, a half-dozen maps, and 79 illustrations. Why is it a concern that the publisher took a year to produce either one?

Second, what conceivable difference does it make if a manuscript is printed out for editing or not? Does Kinsley mean to say that printing slows things down, or makes publishing more expensive? Or does he want to throw out the words paper and pencil to conjure up a vague sort of unease: Those publishers sure are old fashioned! I think the latter, and it's not a valid criticism.

Third, we must ask: Why does it take as much as a year from delivery of manuscript to publication? Michael Kinsley offers no answers, except to darkly hint that the Post-It note plays a sinister role in the process. The real answer is that there is something fundamental to taking a book from manuscript to final form, something that is simply eternal, no matter what medium transmits it to the reader's eye: Reading.

Yes, the editor must read the manuscript. And edit, if the editor is worth anything. Then the writer must read it. Then the copy-editor has to read it, really, really carefully. Then the author reads it again. And let's not forget the page designer, the lawyer who conducts a legal review, the proofreader, the copywriter who creates jacket and catalog copy, and so on.

Now, I admire Kinsley's work immensely. But here I think I need to provide him with a short lesson, explaining what I'm talking about.

Newspaper stories: short.

Magazine stories: short to not-quite-so-short.

Books: Long. Sometimes very, very long.

I hope that helps. I don't know about anyone else, but no technological development is going to make me a faster reader. In fact, as an author I want everyone involved in the process (including me) to read slowly and carefully.

But reading (and rewriting, and correcting, and reviewing, and designing) is not the only thing that takes time. The book market needs lead time to see what's coming. Book reviewers, bookstore managers, even Amazon need to decide how many books to order. And please, no millennial talk about how physical books will disappear in a year or two. But what if they did? Even in a pure e-book world, we'd still need lead time for the groundwork involved in generating publicity—something publishers work on with great energy.

It's a common assumption that the Internet, by giving everyone and anyone a soapbox, is a democratizing force that allows individuals to skip around institutions. The author can generate her own publicity! In fact, the opposite is often true. Consumers are drowning in an information deluge. They figure out what books to buy based on radio interviews, newspaper and magazine reviews and profiles, and talking to bookstore clerks (well, at independent bookstores, at least). They don't go online and read every blog they can find. The fact is, publishing houses provide order to a chaotic marketplace, and provide a service that would be extremely expensive for the author to do properly for herself. A website ain't enough.

Look, I have beefs with publishers too. When I was a grunt in the industry, we mocked the fat cats at the top. You bet there's waste. You bet they make stupid decisions. But that doesn't translate into Kinsley's apparent conclusion, which I would summarize as: Digital technology means no one will ever have to work on a manuscript ever again before it is published. I'm sorry, that's just stupid. All you have to do is look at the thousands of books that are already being self-published every year. You've never heard of them, and it's not because of greedy publishers monopolizing our attention. It's because, with honorable exceptions, those self-published books stink.

As I have written again and again, publishers are essential. They add value. They do indeed provide countless services that most authors could never provide on their own—or would be bankrupted by paying for on their own. Books like mine, which require an upfront investment, wouldn't exist, because advances would disappear without publishers.

One more thing: Let's take a quick look at Kinsley's snarky list of what publishers spend money on, out of a $26 list price. It shows how little he knows about book publishing. Really: $2.00 for lunches? $1.50 for drinks at the Frankfurt Book Fair? $7.00 for the book party? Where does he get his ideas about publishers—Mad Men?

Publishing is a narrow-margin business, and they've been cutting corners for a long time. I honestly know of no author (and I know a lot of them) who had a book party paid for by the publisher. Lunching on the company is actually pretty uncommon, and limited to a handful at any house; working until 9:00 at night, on the other hand, is extremely common.

Yes, publishers spend their money unwisely at times, but much of the problem is not with "old fashioned" publishing types, but with pressure from shareholders who don't understand the business. Acquisition editors need to be free to lose money on a large percentage of their books. They only grow their profitable lists by bringing up new authors, investing in their careers, helping them break through. They will fail much of the time, because there is no science to explaining what will succeed and what will not. But corporate managers who don't understand that put pressure on editors to cut costs, which leads to downward pressure on things that matter—especially advances, which are the seed money of future profits, and of longterm relationships with successful authors.

This is the real problem with publishing. It's not phantoms like too many Post-It notes or too much time spent in editing. It's a process of downward pressure on costs that began long before e-books, when "custom-laden" publishers were bought up by media conglomerates that demanded returns that book publishers could never provide. And when costs are cut, there's one group that is guaranteed to suffer: authors. And the worst part is that it's not necessary. Digitization is being used as an excuse by retailers (who are attempting to carve out market share in the new field of e-books) to train readers to think that e-books produce themselves.

It's shameful that someone so smart as Michael Kinsley should be pouring more manure on the fire.

Pellegrino Update

Well, I'm not ready to condemn Charles Pellegrino outright, but things that looked wrong before look a whole lot worse now.

The New York Times reports today that publisher Henry Holt & Co. is halting the printing and distribution of Pellegrino's book The Last Train from Hiroshima. The reason? There are still more troubling problems with his purported sources.

I've blogged about this before. I expressed respect for his immediate response to the revelation that one of his sources was a fake, though I also wrote that he should have been far more skeptical, and thorough, in the first place. The latest revelations, however, look like a pattern.

But is it? I simply don't know enough to say. When books go bad, they do so in one of two ways: In one, a single revelation of poor craftsmanship leads to further discoveries, exposing a pattern of wrongdoing or simply shoddy work. In this case, the book justifiably implodes. But sometimes a feeding frenzy starts. People who dislike a book because of what it argues, or who have a beef with the author, tear into it, creating an appearance of far greater problems than a book really has. I have no desire to take part in the second sort of book-destruction.

Mind you, I'm not defending Pellegrino. I'm simply not stomping on him while he's down. This is precisely the moment for dispassionate inspection of his work. The charges against it raise troubling questions—but the questions must be answered, and answered honestly.