I've seen so many writers who got into difficult situations with their webmasters. It could be anything from the webmaster going MIA, doing shoddy work, whatever. In the eventuality that you want to break up with your designer / webmaster, you should always ensure that your website design (including CSS, graphics, header, buttons, everything) is yours to take with you, and that you don't have to continue hiring the designer / webmaster you no longer find “professional” in order to be able to use the template, etc. you've paid for.

BTW — don't let your designers register your domain for you. Domain registration is easy. A few clicks of the mouse and you're done. If your designers / webmasters did it for you, make sure to get it transferred to you as soon as possible. Transferring a domain name when your tech people go missing can be very time-consuming and stressful. Go to a place like 1and1.com and register it yourself. It's not that expensive, and 1and1 gives you free private registration.

P.S. In case you're interested, the ever-amazing Frauke from CrocoDesigns is doing a free author website workshop right here.

Some of you are aware of the discussion Colleen Lindsay started about how agents get paid, and you know how I feel about raising agent commissions to 20%.

Wylie-Merrick agents seem to support reading fees. I think it's fair to charge low industry-standard reading fees. Let's say…about a buck or two per query / synopsis and the first five pages. I don't think writers should pay reading fees for requested partials or fulls, because agents have said they wanted to see them.

So here's why I think it's better to charge a very low reading fee for a query / synopsis and the first five pages than raising agent commissions from 15% to 20%.

These days, it's so easy to fire off an email. It's also very easy and cheap to mass-produce hard copies of a query letter. A lot of queries aren't very well-written. I'm not saying this to be a jerk, it's just a fact. I brutalized the query that helped me sign with my agent for months before I thought it was ready. I had the thing workshopped at various different venues, including Evil Editor and BookEnds LLC‘s Jessica Faust.

Evil Editor was truly evil. He mocked my title (in retrospect, it really sucked) and made fun of my pitch. But who cares? He gave me really good pointers: change the title and simplify the pitch!

Jessica Faust was the last one to critique it on her blog. I sent her a query letter containing a 158 word-long pitch. I thought it was ready for prime time but wanted to make sure. Jessica thought the pitch part was too long. Ouch. So I condensed it down to 57 words. (No, that's not a typo. I cut 101 words — practically two-thirds — out of the pitch I sent to Jessica to critique.)

I know a lot of writers who don't spend much time or effort on their query. Now, a few people are just naturally gifted and can write amazing pitches in one try. But for most people? Just not possible.

If people want to spend their money on sending out query letters that they spent an hour on, it's their prerogative. But it's a thankless job that agents must do, and the probability of them finding something worthy of a partial / full request is pretty slim. So why should agents' clients bear the cost of agents reading unsolicited mails (among other things) by paying higher commissions? It doesn't make any sense.

If reading fees are low (like a buck or so in my example), standard and industry-regulated, then there will be much less potential for abuse.

Now there's a possibility that some writers will fail to do their research and send hundreds of dollars to scammers. I sympathize, but at the same time I don't see how we must keep everything status quo just because some people don't want to do their homework. There are so many resources out there about the agent-hunting process that it's getting increasingly hard to justify why someone “didn't know any better”.

What do you think?

Hypothetical Scenario:

Suzy just received an offer of publication. She wishes to be paid 10% royalties, but Publisher says it can only pay 8%. Publisher says it's only a 2% difference. So Suzy agrees to the offer.

Later, Suzy writes another book and receives an offer of publication from Publisher. She wants to get paid 8% royalties, but Publisher says it can only pay 6%. Publisher says the economy's really bad, and that it really can't pay 8%. It tells Suzy that the royalty difference is only 2% just like before, so why not play the ball?

Suzy, feeling like it's only 2% just like before, signs the contract.

How much total earning potential Suzy gave up in both contracts? (Please calculate in percentages!)

.
.
.
.
.

Ready?

Answer: It's not 2% for both cases. In the first case (10% to 8%), Suzy gave up 20% of her total earning potential. (If Suzy were to have earned $500 if she were getting 10%, then she would get $400 at 8%. The difference from $500 to $400 is $100, or 20%.) In the second case (8% to 6%), she gave up 25% of her total earning potential.

So Publisher's assertion that it's only 2% lower for both cases appears correct only if you're thinking about the total revenue that the book will make, which of course doesn't really matter to Suzy because she's never going to see that total amount of money. All she should be worrying about is her cut, and her cut is being cut by 20% (or 25%, depending on the scenario).

Why am I “lecturing” on math?

Recently I saw a discussion on Twitter about agent pay (#agentpay). Victoria Strauss, for whom I have great respect, said maybe the agent commission could be changed. You can read her entire post here.

The comments from some writers showed that some of them aren't thinking about the issue in the right way.

If agent's commission were to jump from 15% to 20%, it's not a 5% increase. It's actually a 33.3% increase. Look at Emily's math here.

This is probably the same reason why people think that giving up a few percentage points here and there in royalties affects them very little. But it's actually pretty significant.

So don't throw away your earnings, thinking it's only 1%. It's not! Do yourself a favor and punch in some numbers on your calculator before agreeing to anything.

Random House decided that all your eright are belong to us them. According to Publishers Weekly:

A letter sent to agents Friday by Random House chairman Markus Dohle has renewed the debate about who controls the right to publish the e-book editions of older backlist titles. In his letter, Dohle makes clear that RH believes the “vast majority” of its backlist contracts “grant us the right to publish books in electronic formats,” while older agreements “often give us the exclusive right to publish ‘in book form' or ‘in any and all editions.'” Random spokesperson Stuart Applebaum said the letter was “in the works for many weeks and is the product of the thinking of our publishers sales colleagues and others.” The letter, Applebaum added, was sent in the spirit of collaboration not confrontation, and was mailed (or e-mailed) before the holiday break to give agents time to think about its contents.

I don't know if agents feel the “spirit of collaboration”.

• Kristin Nelson's response: RH Gets Brazen.
• Dystel & Goderich's response: Random House eBook Rights Grab
• Richard Curtis's response: Random Serves Notice on Would-Be E-Interlopers

Jane from Dear Author summed up the situation well, and I wanted to highlight it:

The legal foundation that Random House rests upon is shaky at best. Author contracts are largely contracts of adhesion and as such any ambiguity is resolved against the drafter of the contract, meaning if a term “book” is deemed to be ambiguous by the court, then the interpretation that favors the non drafting party (the author) is usually upheld…. Further, the court in the Rosetta cases determined that new uses referred to new uses in the same medium (ie print), not a different one (digital). Perhaps Random House is convinced that it could convince a different judge to come to a different conclusion. This move is meant to strike fear in the hearts of authors who think to take their backlist titles elsewhere and for the majority of authors, this tactic will likely work.

P.S. For those of you unfamiliar with where the title for this blog post comes from, check out the video below. You can hear the now immortalized “All Your Base Are Belong to Us!” at the 0:18 mark.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw this video on YouTube. It's about forming a weekly accountability group. Please watch it if you'd like:

Okay. Done? :)

I think it's a brilliant idea to have an accountability group with goals that are tailored to individual members. I've been in groups like “100 words a day” or something, which is great for some people, but for me, I need more flexibility. I don't (and sometimes can't) write 100 words/day, and there are times when I want to take a week off to read or do research or whatever.

I also thought identifying the most highly leveraged activity(ies) for each week was fantastic. Not all activities are created equal, and some give you better return than the others.

So I figured I'd create a group. Laura (the lady who made the video) said she does it over the phone, but I thought maybe a mailing group might be easier, so people can post their previous week's results and share their new week's goals with the group on weekends.

Anybody with me? If so, sign up below or click here. To make the group more manageable, I'm thinking about limiting it to about 4-6 serious career-minded writers.

Thanks!

Subscribe to Weekly Accountability Group

I'm sure many of you have heard that RWA has decided that Harlequin Enterprises, as a whole, is no longer a non-vanity / subsidy publishing house.

So many people seemed confused about why many writers are unhappy about the Harlequin Horizons situation. I do not believe that Harlequin Horizons is a true self-publishing house. It's really a vanity press, no matter what Harlequin calls it.

Let's look how Harlequin Horizons works — I'm going to use an example to illustrate the situation. (Judging from what's going on in the Blogsphere, using a poor new unpublished writer seems to muddy the water…)

Harlequin Horizons Scenario Explained — in layman's terms:

Let's say you're a salsa maker. Your dream is to distribute your salsa so everyone in the world can buy it from supermarkets, etc.

So you go to…Pace. Pace says, “Your salsa recipe isn't good enough to add to our Pace lineup, but you should consider taking your salsa recipe to Pace Self-Salsa. If you sell a lot under that brand, we may considering adding your salsa to our main lineup.”

So you contact Pace Self-Salsa (PSS). PSS says you have to pay them money to make and bottle and label your salsa. For every bottle of your salsa that sells, PSS gets to keep half of the profit and you get the other half. So — after paying Pace a bunch of money up front — you have to split the profits with PSS 50-50.

You decide to pay PSS because you figure you can use the Pace brand and its distribution and marketing power to sell your salsa. But later you learn that PSS has no intention of associating its Pace brand with your salsa. Pace tells you that the brand “Pace” is the “gold standard” in salsa and that it will not be “compromised” to help you sell your PSS salsa. Nor does Pace plan to allow you to use their distribution network to sell your salsa. (But you can, for an additional $12K or so, get access to the Pace mailing list. This will allow you to spam 10 million Pace customers with entreaties to try your judged-to-be-not-up-to-snuff salsa all you like. And for extra $20K, you can make a commercial video that you can upload to YouTube and other social networking sites to promote your salsa (but nothing on TV channels).) And your PSS salsa will not appear next to Pace salsa on grocery store shelves. You have to do all the legwork, etc. and you have to split any profits 50-50, even though — remember — you paid a lot of money at the start for the bottling and labeling service.

That's vanity. And, frankly, it's exploitation. There's virtually NO CHANCE that you will recoup the cost of investment (the bottling & labeling fees and so on). But PSS makes lots of money because it charges you and other salsa makers a premium for its bottling & labeling services, and it gets to keep 50% of profit made on each bottle of salsa sold. Just in case you missed it: Pace will make money up front, even if you never sell a single bottle of salsa. You, on the other hand, will need to sell a hell of a lot of salsa just to break even.

The true self-publishing model can be explained using a similar example:

Again let's say you're a salsa maker. Your dream is to distribute your salsa so everyone in the world can buy it from supermarkets, etc.

So you go to…Pace. Pace says, “Your salsa recipe isn't good enough to add to our Pace lineup.” So you decide you're going to make your own salsa company, just like Pace.

So you put in your money to bottle and label your own salsa by either contracting it out to an independent bottler or learning how to do it yourself. You study how to distribute your salsa, and you get some of your local supermarkets, etc. to carry your salsa.

People try out your salsa and buy some.

You may lose money because you can't sell enough salsa. But if you do make profit, you keep 100% of the profit.

(If you're very very successful, your salsa may become a worldwide bestseller. And who knows? Some big company (like Pace) might buy you out. Again, you assume the financial risk and you keep all the losses / profits.)

So that's the difference, ladies and gentlemen. That's why I do not consider Harlequin Horizons to be a viable option for anyone who's serious about being a career-minded writer.

Disclaimer: I like Pace salsa a lot. Pace did not pay me to use its name or to say that I like their salsa. The above are just hypothetical examples I made up.

Any questions or comments?