Once upon a time (probably around when most people reading this were in middle school), a series of ads for Budweiser beer started up on the radio that I found highly entertaining. The ads were patterned as tributes to "real American heroes" who had contributed something ridiculously mundane and useless, let strangely beloved, to our society. They came complete with goofy, over-the-top hymns of exultation and spirited oration praising the greatness of "Mr. Footlong Hotdog Inventor" and his fellows of great accomplishment.
Post September 11th, the ads mysteriously disappeared--we had American heroes on the brain, and parodies thereof wouldn't have generated much positive publicity, regardless of how funny they were. Within the year, though, the ads came back; but instead of "real American heroes," they focused their attention on "real men of genius."
The ads are still on in that form today. Following the pattern of most ads, they never did increase my opinion of Budweiser beer, but I used to find them pretty entertaining. Once they took up the "real men of genius" trope... not so much. They lose me when I hear the background singer try to cram the words "real men of genius" into a jingle that clearly was not patterned for those words, but more importantly, the whole premise that made them funny in the first place--a satire on the element of our culture that holds useless crap so dear to our hearts--is gone behind a thin veil of political correctness.
I hear comedians rant about political correctness a lot, and I feel what they're saying--sometimes. The theater I write for is close to the most artsy, liberal neighborhood in Columbus (i.e. The Short North), so I need to be careful when it comes to jokes involving environmentalists, gay people, and a few other topics.
Now, that doesn't mean I can't write jokes about those things; it just means that if I do, then they'd better be really, really, really funny.
In some ways, comedians are still filling the role of the medieval court jester; being the funny guy in the room allows us to breach some otherwise very touchy subjects. It also wasn't unusual for jesters to be executed (thank goodness that isn't still part of the job) if they did that in a way that just wasn't very funny, and therefore wasn't much different from a normal person saying the same thing.
Political correctness is always a concern in the comedy business, but the comedians who complain about it (most of the ones I know hang around the Boston comedy circuit and have acts in which they try to be Lewis Black and fail desperately) are generally comedians who aren't very good at what they do. Like the "real American heroes" ads: were they funny? Sure. Were they that funny? Not enough to excuse them post-9/11. Thus the reason for the switch (though, if you ask me, they should have just quit while they were ahead).
This is an equation that's true not just for comedy, but for pretty much all forms of entertainment. Think of John Lennon saying The Beatles are bigger than Jesus. Clever? Maybe. That clever? Definitely not.
Or, more recently, Don Imus's "nappy-headed hoes" remark.
In my case, I think of Gone with the Wind. The movie I can stand, but I've tried to read the book, and I just can't; for me, no level of literary quality will ever excuse the racism that pervades it.
Now think of Dave Chappelle, Strangers with Candy, Lewis Black, and South Park, all of which are as far from PC as you can get. The difference is, they're funny. Stanley Kubrick was an asshole of cosmic proportions, but he made incredible movies in so being. Ray Bradbury, if you read the subtext of his books the way he wants you to, is saying some pretty horrible stuff. For me, that's not enough to excuse Fahrenheit 451, but The Martian Chronicles? Sure.
One could point out that this kind of double-standard isn't fair to us in the business. All I can say is, if your work isn't good enough to get around that, quit complaining.
You Can't Say That Again
Why I'm Not Including This Blog in My Job Applications
I'm leading a double life. Or at least, I'd like to be leading a double life. The one I'm running now doesn't make much money.
This is something I've been telling myself more and more this past week in between finishing up the first editing/ghostwriting job I've done on a complete, book-length manuscript. The feeling of getting it done is pretty sweet, but always in the background has been the knowledge that, with what I'll earn this year from copyediting jobs, I'll be lucky if I can do more than pay the rent (food, car, and other self-employment-related expenses are still a problem).
So, at least for the time being, I'm looking for a job--you know, one of those things where you go to some place and do certain stuff for a certain number of hours everyday and get paid for it if your employer isn't a cheat. Whenever I've got a spare moment, I'm filling out applications like crazy for pretty much any place that's hiring (I was even about the apply at Anthropologie until my girlfriend gave me a quick reality check).
No matter how many I fill out, though, I'm always given a bit of pause when I get to the "current and previous employment" segment. I always think about the jobs I've done recently and, a moment later, realize that my last job job ended at the Cutler Majestic Theater a few months ago. The last one before that was almost a year ago.
Mind you, I have been busy in the meantime. However, the things I've been busy with--blogging, editing, reviewing, and sketch-writing--are things that I can't list because they're not, by definition, current or previous employment. If you go by tax rules, they would be what are called independent contracts, meaning that when I do these things I'm basically selling a service to a customer. I'm not, legally speaking, their employee any more than the guys who change my oil at Jiffy Lube are my employees.
Thus the double life. In the process of balancing freelance work with (attempted) regular employment, what I'm developing is two kind-of-pseudo-careers that don't really have anything to do with each other--even if I did put my freelance work on my applications, Microcenter and Starbucks wouldn't care about them any more than a book publisher would care that I drove a golf cart around the Ohio State Fairgrounds for a few months three years ago.
A couple years back, when I talked with author Ellen Kushner about wanting to be a writer (and, as I now realize, probably made a total anus of myself in so doing), she advised me to always have skills to fall back on. I kinda-sorta listened. Right now I can fix bicycles and make bubble tea; not hugely employable skills, but employable no less. Both are things I picked up along with summer jobs in between years of college, once I figured out that "will train" are two of the most important words to look for in the job ads.
In spite of my mad skills, though, I'm still looking. One city only needs so many bike repair shops and bubble tea cafes, sadly. Still, it helps to know that, while I'm working with a minimally useful BA, there are some areas where I have a major leg up on the competition, and I'm grateful that in my desperate fight to stay afloat financially during my junior and senior years, I managed to pick up something other than just money. (Of course, thankfulness is an odd thing when you've been awake for the last 40 hours.)
Tomorrow I'm applying at Pizza Hut and Bob Evans, and hoping that my kitchen experience at the bubble tea cafe counts for something. O, ye romantique life of the artiste.
Edutainment: Even Funnier than the Name
I got a good laugh this weekend when my girlfriend got ahold of a copy of The American Girls Premiere, a hilariously bad computer game from the Windows 95 era. The idea of the game is that you create your own "plays" using characters from Pleasant Company's American Girls line of books and toys, which gets funny when you boot it up and realize the characters move like they've had some kind of nerve damage, talk in Stephen Hawking-like voices, and malfunction constantly when you play back your creations.
This immediately brought back memories of more "educational software" from my childhood. My elementary school occasionally let us boot up games on the Apple IIe computers that were so functionally limited that their only possible use was to type dirty words into the inputs and laugh as the computer printed them very matter-of-factly on the screen.
The paragon of these games was, of course, Oregon Trail. In case you don't remember it, here's a rundown:
You play as a family of settlers in a covered wagon. You have to provide food, clothing, and other needs while making decisions about how you travel across a historical rendition of the United States. The point of the game is to name your family members Poop Head, Booger, Fatso, and Butt Breath. After doing this, you starve them until you start getting such disconcerting messages as "Butt Breath is ill," "Butt Breath has dyssentary," and finally, "Butt Breath has died." At this point, you are presented with a tombstone on which you leave the epitaph "Yo mama is fat." This way, anybody who plays the same copy of the game for years to come will pass by this same spot and be shown a tombstone reading "Here lies Butt Breath. Yo mama is fat." They will have no clue who did this or when because, honestly, it could be anybody.
The funniest thing about games like these is that they're supposed to be educational. Of the two I've mentioned (both of which were produced by The Learning Company), though, one of them actually succeeds in that purpose.
That would be Oregon Trail. Even though I spent 100% of the time I played that game goofing off with it, in the course of goofing off I still learned something. If you'd asked me, back then, what the Oregon Trail was, I could have told you.
The American Girls Premiere doesn't quite work that way. Check out this video (may or may not be safe for work) and feel free to leave a comment if you learn anything from it.
Another example of this is Highlights for Children, which my parents subscribed to when I was a kid. One of their perennial features, Goofus and Gallant, had great goof-off potential in predicting Goofus's bad behavior. If Panel A shows Gallant brushing his teeth every night, what must Panel B show Goofus doing? Simply not brushing his teeth, or perhaps turning on all of the bathroom faucets and flooding the entire house every night? (a concept that, if I remember, was often parodied in an Animaniacs segment called "Good Idea, Bad Idea.")
Once again, it was a situation where, despite using the product for my own twisted purposes, I couldn't help but learn (in this case, what people consider to be socially acceptable behavior) from it.
Before I graduated, I considered seeking a job with Highlights, which has offices in my area. After checking their job board, I determined that it wasn't a prospect, what with my not having an education degree or "equivalent experience" and all (make a note: good way to specialize).
Aside from the proper education and experience, it almost goes without saying that one of the main points of creating entertainment for children involves getting inside a child's mind to find the proper mix of educational elements (or possibly when to exclude those elements altogether)--being able to think, "if pushing the boundaries was one of the first things on my mind, what would I do with this book/game/video/etc.?" and then go back to being an adult and find out how to make the product still functional.
I'm often disappointed by how stringently unoriginal a lot of educational entertainment (or educators themselves, for that matter) seems to be. When I look back, some of the stuff I learned the most from is the same stuff that makes me think, "What the hell was I on?"
Here's Cookie Monster at the disco. I challenge you again: find the learning.
Look What I Made! (Part 2 of 2)
Last time, we looked at user-created content as a force of nature. Now it's time to look at it as a force of the market, and the potential benefits that awareness of it can have on job searchers.
FanLib, as documented in my S&S case study, has been one of the more recent attempts to commercialize fanfiction. Why they felt new attempts were necessary is beyond me, because fanfiction (if we're defining fanfiction as derivative literary works created by fans of other creative work) has already been commercialized for years in a form that's doing quite well.
What I'm referring to here is tie-in novels. If you're not familiar with the concept, examples here, here, here, here, and here. Basically, they're published long-form fanfiction, though it's a point of debate whether all of them actually qualify as fanfiction (since some are commissioned to established authors rather than written by fans). In any case, they're some of the most lucrative books on the market.
The business of tie-ins is a little tricky. To publish them, a publisher naturally has to acquire the proper rights from whoever holds them--a movie or video game's production company, for instance. The rights usually go wholesale (rather than on a book-by-book basis), so anyone who wants to take their fanfiction pro needs to figure out who own what rights before making any inquiries. Unless, of course, their work is derived from something in the public domain, as is the case with Phantom.
Tie-in novels, like fanfiction, tend to be viewed as garbage. For the most part, I have to admit, that's a fair assessment. Most tie-in novels (and I've read a few) are of generally poor quality. But, like fanfiction, that's not a necessary function. Timothy Zahn's Star Wars novels are (I'm told by those in the know) quite good, and one of my favorite authors, who holds a few major award nominations to his name, recently announced he's writing a novel based on Predator. Ultimately, though, the purpose of these books is to satisfy people who are looking for something very particular in their reading experience, and more often than not, they find it.
It's a bit more difficult to write on the current or potential commercialization of fan films. The business just doesn't look at itself the same way. If a movie gets made into a book, it's a tie-in; if a book gets made into a movie, that's an adaptation. Would Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings count as a fan film? How about Dagon, by virtue of coming from a smaller studio with a smaller budget and not being very good besides? If not that, then maybe The Death of Doctor Island?
Pretending that we've figured out some kind of definition, I will say that rights licensing works much the same way for films as it does with books, but add that quite a few professed fan films go forward without proper licensing. For the most part, they're viewed as relatively harmless, and though I've heard that there have been incidents of prosecution, I've never actually encountered one.
If I go into other media at this point, I'll likely be doling out more of the same. The point here is that commercializing user-created content--at least so far--has only worked as long as there's a tangible product of some value to the consumer. The Ye-Olde-Star-Trekke-y silent film I linked to in part one of this article is all well and good, but would you pay $19.99 for a DVD of it?
The online potential isn't enormous. Notice how fanfiction.net only has that one banner ad at the top of the screen? There's three problems with trying to make money off of those nifty online communities generating tons of traffic. The first problem is that people who come to those sites are looking to get something for free; try to make them pay for it, and they'll just go somewhere else that doesn't. The second problem is that it's not an expanding market. There's just not a huge demand for new fanfiction communities.
The third is: if you want to make money through ads in one of those online communities, what do you advertise? People who go there are looking for something very specific; most of what you can advertise that would be of interest to them will be things that they either already own or already know that they want to buy.
(This could be an opportunity for a little creative innovation. Cracking the code of what to cross-market where on sites like these is a valuable skill to have.)
Of course, the real answer to all this is that we don't have to commercialize user-created content because it already works for us by perpetuating interest in entertainment franchises. Star Trek, which continues to be a lucrative franchise to this day, probably never would have survived the 1960's if it hadn't been for the creation of its fan club, a source of fan content maintaining and promoting existing interest in it. The idea that fan works should be given free reign is necessarily a little disconcerting to the professional world (what if they do something that tarnishes our hard work?), but any threats it presents are no different from the ones that come from presenting any creative work to the public.
And so I'll conclude with the warm and fuzzy message that user-created content needs to be embraced and encouraged. But I'll also say that it is definitely a source of jobs and money for the industry, to an extent that is not to be discounted.
Look What I Made! (Part 1 of 2)
Back in the first part of my case study on Simon & Schuster, I mentioned the questionable business model of FanLib, a forthcoming fanfiction community, but I don't believe I gave much background on what that means. Fanfiction is an important topic, because it's part of the ever-expanding circle of what's called "user-created content" available today. User-created content is one of the many things that gets some people spooked--as usual, probably unjustly so.
I'm not sure quite how to describe user-created content (since all content is, to some degree, created by its own users), so I'll start with examples. Fanfiction, since I've already started on that, refers to works of fiction using characters and settings borrowed from popular books, movies, TV shows, and so on. One of the larger repositories is fanfiction.net. It's by no means a new thing; such works have been created for hundreds of years, though they weren't called fanfiction at the time, but it's something that really took off in the later half of the twentieth century.
I'll say right now that most fanfiction is pretty bad; a small ratio is good, but most is pretty bad. The vast majority of it exists for the purpose of romantic hookups between fans' favorite characters, fans' favorite villains becoming good guys, and for fans to insert themselves into their favorite TV show, movie, and so on. Some of it is really bizarre, but it fills a niche; people enjoy it.
But the world of user-created content goes beyond that. The field naturally expands into fan films. A good example is Steam Trek, though again, good examples are by no means the standard. Three or four years ago, I was part of an (admittedly) horrendous Star Trek fanfilm that must have set some kind of record when every single person who came to see it (for free, in our defense) had walked out by the end.
One of the newer forms revolves around user-created content for video games. "Modding" is the creation by amateurs of new levels, campaigns, or even entirely new games based on existing, professionally made video games. Certain computer games come pre-packaged with modding tools that make it easy to do this, while others are modded by savvy programmers based on the game's source code. Large online communities, such as the Neverwinter Nights Vault have grown up around modding. Some mods are highly impressive, such as this work-in-progress which uses the source code from Freespace 2 for a mod based on the Battlestar Galactica TV series.
Despite how majorly into video games I was since I was 7, I now only own three games for my computer, those being Neverwinter Nights, Unreal II, and Titan Quest--each of which come packaged with a modding tool. With the amount of player-made mods I can download for free, I could go for a long time without any of those games getting old.
Really, if you name any type of media, there probably exists some sort of user-created version of it. Japan, where certain derivative works are legal in the commercial market, is home to a large number of fan comics. Numerous online communities revolve around remixing popular songs. The list goes on.
Admittedly, user-created content is not for everyone. Fan comics really don't interest me, given that I could spend years trudging through all the back issues of some of the comics I do read; and even with my favorite movies, derivative films and stories of compromised quality generally aren't at the top of my things-to-do list.
Though a lot of people are similarly ambivalent, others hate it. I mean, really hate it. Bestselling author Anne Rice has expressly forbidden fan-created work based on her books (though how successful she is or can be in enforcing such a ban, I have no idea), and music companies aren't known for reacting well to anything they might be able to yell "copyright infringement!" at.
For the companies and professionals who create the original work on which user-created content is based, the scariest thing about it is that it's so darned impossible to control. Like DRM, it's just not something that can be policed by any level of regulation. Even if all the fanfiction communities and modding networks were closed down, people would still be handing around phocopies and burned CD's of their own fan works. In an industry that's increasingly paranoid about copyright and the violation thereof, this is not always an easy notion to deal with.
A question that comes up pretty regularly is what we in the industry can do to make user-created content work in our favor. FanLib made a spectacular pratfall in that regard, but it's certainly not true that fan works are an inevitable blight on the industry. Come back soon for a little more about how it does and can work for us.
Things You Can Do: Sketch Writing
I figure, now that I'm out there, ya know, working, it would be a good idea to start profiling jobs. There's a lot of them out there, especially in entertainment--which means I can't get to all of them, but it also means you very well might see something you haven't thought of before.
I'll start with some things I'm doing now.
What: Writing comedy sketches. Think Second City, Saturday Night Live, MadTV, etc. Now divide the budget for those shows by 1,000 and the size of their audience by about 100,000 and you're thinking more about the average comedy outlet.
How big a job market: Not huge. Like most kinds of creative writing, the market isn't exactly pandering on the streets for talented sketch writers. However, if drama and playwrighting is something you enjoy, you may have better chances here than with long-form pieces. Comedy clubs aren't hard to find in urban areas, and many of them run sketch shows. The sketches are a few minutes long, and shows made up of them don't tend to run for a huge number of performances. It takes a revolving door of writers and material to run a sketch show; even small shows (like the one I work on) tend to keep a bullpen of circa one dozen writers--in my case, turning out a couple sketches a month.
What it takes:
- Knowledge of the proper format for plays (or screenplays, depending where you work).
- Ability to work with deadlines, especially short ones (being asked to edit a sketch to make it 1 minute shorter by tomorrow may not sound hard until you realize that the sketch is only 4 1/2 minutes long to begin with).
- Ability to write jokes. A sense of humor is something unique to each individual person, but it is possible to learn what makes something funny, and how to appeal to other people's senses of humor. I used to love SNL's Weekend Update segments, but pretty much every one of their jokes came down to the same thing: take a news headline (sometimes real, sometimes not), say the headline, then say something else that turns it on his head. You can take classes and workshops and read books for this; Advanced Creative Writing: Comedy probably taught me more than any of my other college writing courses, so it's something to think about.
- Ability to string those jokes together. Sketches need more than one thing going on to make them work. Sometimes it's a pretty narrow range of things (think "It's Pat!"), but you can never get by with just one operative joke. Thinking about it, I realize this is probably why I've never read an issue of Mad Magazine. Unless you've got a weak stomach, take a look at this month's cover. It's Spiderman shooting web out of his butt. Okay, whatever. Is that funny? Maybe, but where else can you really go with that? Chuckle and move on; nothing else to see here.
- Ability to write a coherent short narrative. Something with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end in a few minutes. Takes practice.
How it works: Sketch-writing gigs are usually picked up based on a writing sample and/or portfolio. For getting your samples to the right people, networking connections are your biggest asset, though you will find an open call for writers occasionally. Production credits may also be helpful. A portfolio that includes good, videotaped performances of any of your past work looks good; if your school has a comedy troup, this would be a good reason to join (or if it doesn't have one, start one!).
Things I'm Doing: Reviews, Networking, and MPAA Ratings
Between funerals, graduations, and Father's Day this past week, I went to a sneak preview of A Mighty Heart, an adaptation of the memoir by the same name. This was part of my trial run for a movie reviewing job prospect I picked up on a few weeks back. After that I had a couple days to write the trial review and send it in, which was fairly difficult; not exactly because writing reviews is hard, but because A Mighty Heart is probably one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It portrays the entire Muslim religion as a doctrine of soulless brutality and is an insult to the values it allegedly supports. It tries way too hard to be "gritty and realistic" and a result ends up just being narratively obnoxious.
So basically, I didn't like the movie. If my assignment was to write an opinionated review, I probably would have blown a gasket (the same way I did about The Passion of the Christ and World Trade Center, because it's that bad). Luckily, I wasn't writing an opinionated review.
Before I go any further, this site is awesome. If you look at one of their reviews, that's basically the kind of thing I'm writing. Let's get started on why Kids in Mind is awesome, especially now.
As you're probably aware, there's somewhat of a hoopla going on over a recent decision by the MPAA. As of now, having the characters in a movie smoke can be grounds for an R rating. From what I've seen, the popular position (among people I hang out with, anyway) is that this is unreasonable censorship. I don't exactly think so, but I'm not exactly in favor either.
Screenwriter Craig Mazin (of Scary Movie cred) has what I think is a pretty thoughtful post up about why the MPAA's decision may be a good one. I read Mr. Mazin's blog fairly often. I find he has some great stuff to say, though I almost never totally agree with it.
In this case, the part I don't agree with is the idea that MPAA ratings are not censorship. It's true that it is the choice of theaters to ban movies above a certain rating, and it's true that theaters that do so are, as Mr. Mazin says, "way out of line." But with a system like MPAA's, a situation like that is inevitable.
To use an analogy, let's say you live in a country where people happen to work a lot of overtime, and students happen to get a lot of homework, and there happens to be a fast food restaurant on every block, and where obesity, especially in young people, is mysteriously increasing over time. Yes, it's each person's individual choice to work lots of overtime, and it's each person's individual choice to eath fast food frequently, but let's be honest: WTF else do you expect to happen?
The problem with MPAA ratings is that they're ambiguous. An R rating could mean anything; it could mean there's full-frontal nudity, it could mean there are guys getting disemboweled on Normandy beach, it could mean there are 74 f-bombs, it could mean there are junkies shooting up... you get the idea. And yes, it's possible for somebody who wants to to find out why a movie is rated R, but how many people do you know who actually do that?
An MPAA rating is not a guideline to help people judge which movies their kids should see. It's a stigma with no useful meaning, a magic word used to instruct people on what's socially acceptable to let people of a certain age watch. It's a completely empty rule. And it's not balanced, and it doesn't work; if you don't remember what happened when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out with a PG rating, ask your parents.
Parents who carry even the semblance of giving a flip about their kids' movies are better off doing their research on a site like Kids in Mind. If they're not willing to do that, then why even pretend to care?
Anyway, that's my MPAA rant. What's important is that, like every prospect I run into these days, I'm invoking every major deity I know in hopes of this freelance reviewing gig working out. To be honest, it's not a Big Money kind of opportunity; if all goes well, I might be able to pay for some insurance with a job like this. But that's how it works in freelancing: you build it up by bricks.
Also, jobs like this are of more than financial importance. More than one reviewer comes to each of these screenings, leaving networking opportunities ripe for the picking. Plus there's one of the usual perks of entertainment jobs: free movies.
Simon & Schuster Case Study, Part 5: In Case of Emergency...
Don't panic.
Whether my hypothesis proposed in parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of this study is correct or not, it's probable that America's major book publishers will put an end to the return system while most of us are in college, at an internship, or in the middle of our first job. When this happens, somebody is going to take a hit. I'm not 100% sure that large bookstores like Barnes & Noble could even survive the change; returns are such a pivotal part of their business model (in that it allows them to stock a huge number of books) that it's questionable whether they could keep going without them.
Nevertheless, this is not a call to immediately bail on any book-related career. In the event of such a massive change in the industry, there would be jobs lost purely as a cost-cutting measure where it was needed. Most of this would be in the bookselling sector of things, but other parts of the business would feel it as well. For example, if Barnes & Noble had to close many of its stores, Hollywood might take a hit from losing a venue for DVD sales (though there are enough other places to sell them that this wouldn't affect a major change).
But while these are areas in which things might become more difficult, a change in the book industry wouldn't spontaneously eliminate demand for books. Here are some ideas for areas in which things might improve.
Specialty Retail
As you must have noticed, books are sold in more places than just bookstores. Urban Outfitters, Anothropologie, Hallmark, and the recently departed Discovery Channel Store are all examples. Even now, non-bookstore sales are a growing part of the way publishers do business; publishers love them because they're willing to buy copies of older books that fit their store's theme, and because they seldom return books (a few aren't even aware of the return system).
If specialty retail outlets are expanding in the book market now, the collapse of the return system would likely shift even more focus there, creating more of a need for bookselling expertise in more general retail industries. A combination of experience in bookselling and another area might be of great service in a job search.
Sales
This is something that would come with an increase in specialty retail as well as a decrease in big chain bookstores (since a few of them closing their doors would open things up for more small and indie bookstores to fill in the gaps).
Sales reps are an important part of the book industry, and they're very specialized to books. Books sales reps don't just sell; they need to have a mind for who they're selling to and where they are. Selling a store more copies of a book than they can realistically sell can be disastrous, and when a single rep often has dozens or hundreds of titles to pass around, book expertise is absolutely crucial.
Right now, sales reps in the book trade are a smaller population than they used to be. Most houses have only one rep who sells to the entire Barnes & Noble chain, one for Borders, one for Target, etc. Moving things to a state of more specialty and independent retail would create a need for more reps to cover more ground.
If you're not aiming for a sales degree, don't worry; you don't always need to one to be a sales rep for a publisher. Lots of people get there through publishing internships or bookstore experience, and I'm sure those aren't the only ways to get in. In any case, it's the kind of job that involves--and requires--working around books and people who buy them a lot. And you get lots of free books as part of the job.
If anything, an end to the book industry's return system would drive things into a more diverse and specialized state. The key is not to be frightened by impending changes in the way things work. Part of the fun of the entertainment business is that it's constantly changing--which means you do have to watch yourself and be aware of what's happening, but not that any of it signifies the apocalyptic doom of the industry.
Simon & Schuster Case Study, Part 4: So You've Conquered the World... Now What?
For those of you just joining us, read parts 1, 2, and 3 first.
I've spent this week going over a pattern of odd behavior by publisher Simon & Schuster that, to my eyes, suggests that they are trying to somehow corner their market through heavy branding, customer loyalty, and complete dominion over the rights to their books. The question one must ask is, of all the possible ways to skin a cat, why pick this one?
(I should reiterate here that I have no connection to S&S and am totally following my nose on this one; so, you can quote me on this as long as we're clear that I may be completely wrong).
To start with, have a look at S&S's webpage. Now, take a look at Amazon.com's homepage. Notice any similarities? For comparison, here are the homepages for Random House, Houghton Mifflin Trade, and St. Martin's Press. Now we're on Sesame Street: one of these things is not like the others.
Those of you who guessed that the S&S website doesn't belong because, in many ways, it looks more like a bookstore than a publishing house were right. From the Father's Day sale to the category browser and the high number of products placed right before the viewer, it's clear that the site is oriented toward selling books to individual people (as opposed to, say, bookstore accounts).
Now, there are a lot of places to buy books these days, but getting them directly from the publisher isn't something many people do. Some publishers (such as Houghton Mifflin Trade) don't even bother selling books through their website (called "direct mail" selling). Between S&S's brand loyalty chess game and their direct mail-oriented website, I'd guess they're trying to change that and divert as many book sales to direct mail orders as possible. If nothing else, they can make people more aware that it's possible to buy books this way.
This would have several advantages for S&S, the main one of which being that they'll make more money by selling books for full price instead of selling them through bookstores at a discount. But it could be even more useful than that.
A while ago, I mentioned the financial hurt that Scholastic takes by publishing Harry Potter. That's universally true; retail discounts and the return system (a relic of the WWII era that allows bookstores to return books they don't sell for a full refund) are and have long been a thorn in the side of publishers. Especially the return system--it's not unusual for more than 1/3 of all the copies of a book to be returned. No other retail industry works this way.
The problem is that book publishers can't just get rid of the return system. Believe me, they've tried, and it usually results in bookstores refusing to carry their books. Mind you, nobody as big as S&S has tried it, mainly because they've got relationships with booksellers to uphold.
But then, that's not going entirely well either. Wal-Mart is currently the most profitable venue for bookselling, but they expect huge discounts and will return their entire stock if it doesn't sell in a week or two. Other big box stores like Costco and Target are a similar story. Publishers have, increasingly, started refusing to sell books to stores like Costco, since they don't feel it's worth the substantial risk of all the books being returned.
I don't imagine that Barnes & Noble and Borders starting up their own proprietary publishing imprints strikes a fabulous chord either.
Neither, I think, do comments I hear increasingly often from booksellers regarding how they'd react if the return system went under, threatening to demand absolutely insane discounts and/or stop buying altogether. Apparently they don't like the idea of having to behave like every single other retail industry in the country.
If the return system goes, it won't be pretty. People will cry, moan, threaten, and say things they'll probably later wish they hadn't. However, most publishing professionals I've ever met have agreed that the system will probably be gone within the next ten years. The publishers just can't survive this way anymore.
When I see what S&S is doing, I have to ask myself: Is Simon & Schuster preparing to kill the return system?
I personally wouldn't doubt it. Increasing awareness of the S&S brand and directing book buyers to their website--which is what they seem to be doing--would be a massive safeguard for the publisher if they made a move that would create enmity among bookstores.
I still don't expect anyone as big as S&S to make their books non-returnable, like, tomorrow. It's not that time yet--though I'm sure that when it happens, it will be when we least expect it.
If nothing else, S&S does seem to be hiding something. Remember their refusal to discuss the contract change openly close to the beginning? And their on-the-record comments about their involvement in Sobol, First Chapters, and Project Publish seem suspiciously stock-ish, more like what the contest organizers expect them to say than the words of experienced publishing professionals.
Now, maybe I'm right and maybe not, but what's most important is how a change like this would affect students and recent grads like you and I. Find out in part 5: what to do when the industry goes bonkers.
Simon & Schuster Case Study, Part 3: Cola Wars for the Book World?
To see how I'm drawing these conclusions, read part 1 and part 2.
Given Simon & Schuster's pattern of odd behavior lately, it's not hard to imagine that they're trying to exact some change upon the way the industry works, or at least the way they work. But what is it? I don't have any contacts at S&S, and even if I did, we'd probably be talking about trade secrets they wouldn't be allowed to disclose, if they even knew of them in the first place. So this is all conjecture, but here's what I think.
S&S is trying to build brand loyalty. I'm sure this is a familiar term, and I'm sure that when I bring up brand loyalty, a number of things come to mind: soft drinks, cigarettes, sometimes clothing or cosmetics, and some types of services (taxi companies, video rentals, etc.). But books? Probably not at the top of your list.
Though it may sound like an unlikely explanation, it is one that ties things together.
Besides being high-profile, many of S&S's recent moves have no perceivable benefit. Sponsoring a series of risky writing contests and then rushing the winning entries to press too quick to ensure quality or marketing? Putting money into a questionable fanfiction community? And what about that new contract clause that's sure to piss people off and make reputable agents and big name authors hesitant to deal with them, even if does somehow benefit S&S?
Let's take this one at a time. What marks S&S's visible sponsorship of the unusual endeavors explained in part 1 is that they don't seem to be about the work itself. Based on what's being put into them, it's unlikely that the winners of the First Chapters contest will do very well in print, and probably neither would any of the work produced by Project Publish or Fanlib. The only thing that would make these moves by S&S sane is if the point is not for the work to do well.
What these gigs are more about, I'm guessing, is the fact that S&S's name will be all over them. The things they're targeting--writing contests and websites that display creative writing--are venues that hit a sizable and growing segment of the population. More people consider themselves creative writers now than ever before; I've heard it said (probably correctly) that more people write poetry than read it, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true for fiction. If their objective in doing this is to make their name as constantly visible as possible to people who are interested in and talk about books, then I'd say they've hit something.
The question is, if they want to make their name as visible as possible to people who like books, why not just do it through their books?
Well, because people generally don't care. There's a reason you don't see much brand loyalty in the book world. Off the top of my head, I can only name a few publishers who command any sort of brand loyalty at all: Harlequin, Wizards of the Coast (formerly TSR), and arguably Triple Crown. But in those cases, it's not about the publishers themselves, but about the books they publish; people who buy a Harlequin book are looking for a specific type of book, as are people who buy a Forgotten Realms book or hip hop novel.
For a publisher like S&S, though, it doesn't quite work that way. S&S and its imprints publish pretty much everything. It's the same with all the other major publishers. They can build series loyalty, like Scholastic with Harry Potter or Houghton Mifflin with Peterson's Field Guides, but if the author of that series goes to another publisher, the readers probably won't give a flip (I know a lot of people who love Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and very few of them even know who its publisher is). Brand loyalty, the way other companies have it, is out of the question.
So if S&S wants brand loyalty, they'll need to look other places to find it. One of these places might involve courting the affection of aspiring writers (which is, like, everybody these days) through Big Break-granting contests, possibly combined with more noticible branding of the books they do publish--which might start with the First Chapters winners.
The new contract clause, I suspect, is a way of further enforcing the brand. By putting it in there and insuring that titles they acquire never go out of print, there's no danger of S&S brand books having their rights revert to the author, who could then get them back in print with a different publisher--which does happen. They can make sure that the stuff with their mark on it keeps that mark.
If this is the plan, then S&S would end up with total control over a "brand" of books, with loyalty to that brand bought through a lot of sneaky, undercover publicity (and I suspect we'll be seeing more odd moves by them in coming months).
That's a pretty powerful thing to command. But why would a publisher want to do this? It seems like a pretty roundabout way of driving sales; could there be another motive?
That's my favorite part. Look for part 4 soon.
Simon & Schuster Case Study, Part 2: Who the *Bleep* Do They Think They Are?
Part 1 of the study here.
Simon & Schuster has been raising more than a few eyebrows lately, but none of their moves have raised more than their recent change to their boilerplate author contract. News of this has been popping up for a little more than two weeks, but it's not exactly clear to me when S&S made the change--and the reason for that is because they didn't tell anybody. From what I've read, the change seems to have been noticed mainly by literary agents reviewing new contracts, who found that S&S was (at least at first) not keen on talking about or negotiating on it.
The change, to summarize, was a clause that granted S&S the right to continue publishing and selling any book they buy until its copyright runs out. Previously (and, for other publishers, currently) the policy was that rights reverted to the author when the book went out of print--"out of print" meaning it sells less than a certain number of copies per year, usually a few hundred.
If you want the full story, I suggest the Authors Guild news.
Naturally, the change has been viewed as "author unfriendly." The Authors Guild came out against it, as did several other organizations. S&S has backed up on itself since, announcing that the clause will be negotiable, though just how negotiable it will be is still murky, and it seems likely that authors who are not represented by literary agents will be left out in the cold.
Making Light spotlighted the most important part of this case when it was first developing:
S&S apparently decided to be the first bastard anyway. Notice the negative commentary. The second publisher to follow suit won't get anywhere near as bad a rap. By the time the third one flips, it'll be the standard practice.
So it's easy to see why authors' groups are so vehemently against the clause; if there's one thing they don't want, it's for another point against them--not being able to get rights to their books back from a publisher who isn't behind them--to become standard across the industry, and who can blame them?
What's not so easy to see is why S&S is doing this in the first place. If they wanted to piss off authors and their agents, then they've struck gold, but while their recent behavior has been odd, I'm not quite ready to chalk it up to supervillian-level evil.
One predominant theory is that it has something to do with electronic rights, i.e. eBooks, and the speculation that they may become valuable in the future, thus necessitating a hold on books' rights even after they are technically out of print. The wording of the clause certainly suggests it.
Another theory is that having life-of-copyright-length control over the books they publish will allow S&S to cut costs in areas like marketing and publicity. By keeping a bullpen of books never go out of print, they could keep selling every title they acquire for a hundred years without any of them needing to sell many copies.
Both theories have something to them, but after looking at the big picture for a while, I think there may be other forces at work. It seems to me like S&S is trying to change the way that the industry works, in a way that can't necessarily be gleaned from looking at any one angle on the issue. I'll save that for part 3.
Simon & Schuster Case Study, Part 1: What the *Bleep* Are They Doing?
Yesterday morning, I learned from Publishers Weekly (which means this story will probably appear in The New York Times sometime next week) that publishing giant Simon & Schuster is suing the CIA over Valerie Plame's memoir. Plame, you will recall, is the former CIA operative whose identity was leaked to the press by the Bush administration. The CIA has apparently attempted to stop Plame and S&S from revealing the dates of her service in her forthcoming memoir, despite the fact that they are already public knowledge.
This news by itself didn't strike me as huge. The case looks like unjustified saber rattling by the CIA and a show trial that S&S can't possibly lose. What hearing about it did make me think is, "Gee, where else have I heard about Simon & Schuster recently?"
Well, lots of places, most of them questionable.
Later that day, I discovered that S&S and Gather.com had announced the winners of the First Chapters writing contest. If you've been reading this blog for a while, First Chapters may sound familiar. To keep the record straight, I've always felt that the American Idol-esque contest was a little off (read the linked post for more info). They seem to have gone through with it as planned, but there's still something peculiar about it.
Victoria Strauss over at Writer Beware puts her finger on it: the two selected winners are to be on bookshelves in a mere three months. Highly unusual; I talked to authors last year who had just sold books that wouldn't be published until 2008.
This highlights just what was weird about S&S's stake in First Chapters to begin with: it seemed then, and still does now, that their decision to do this is more of a publicity stunt than anything. Three months is barely enough time to have the books printed; no editorial or marketing work can go into them, and review copies can't be sent out pre-release. All the books have behind them is the built-in publicity from the contest, or so it would seem.
(The authors aren't getting very generous terms either, which I'll be covering in part 2).
This is not to say that the project is doomed to failure. Despite its suspiciousness, there's still a chance that the books may go well.
Still, that's not a huge chance, and it's a bold experiment in any case. You'd think that S&S would wait to see how the venture turns out before trying something like this again, right?
Well, they're not. Even before First Chapters, S&S hopped on board with the Sobol Award (which tanked), and even before winners were announced for the Gather.com contest, S&S got together with "online game" Media Predict to create Project Publish, which, when you get to the core of it, is more-or-less First Chapters under a different name.
And the weirdness doesn't stop there. Around the same time, S&S popped up as a sponsor (this time along with two other mega-publishers, HarperCollins and Penguin) of FanLib, a company with a slimy, amateurish, boneheaded plan to make money off of fanfiction (I get "slimy, amateurish, and boneheaded" from the fact that their plan seems to involve treating their target audience like cattle; more here).
If you're skipping to the end of the article, I'll digest it for you here: Simon & Schuster has, for the past several months, been behaving very, very, very oddly, taking enough out-of-the-box risks to make industry experts question their sanity. And it's not just their own necks they're risking either. Some of their recent shenanigans are causing a lot more uproar from people--mostly authors, but editors and literary agents are joining the fray too--who are purely looking out for their own interests. That's for part 2 of this case study.
