5 Ways Publishing's Changed in the Last Decade

     For anyone who's written anything more ambitious than a 52 year-old barfly's phone number on a cocktail napkin at last call or a Facebook update dedicated to how they drank too many Sex on the Beaches last night at the local dive bar and "who the fuck were those swarthy guys stealing my kidneys, OMFG, you mean that 52 y/o barfly's in cahoots with them? Is her phone number even real?! Why didn't they cut out my fucking heart, too, while they were at it?", publishing's undergone some serious-ass changes in the last decade.

     From the rise of POD (Poverty on Demand), publishing mergers and a radical acceleration of digital technology that only James Cameron could've foreseen, it's a Brave New World for novice authors and established ones seeking to dip their toes in the digital ether. What follows are the five biggest changes in publishing since we decided invading a sovereign nation with no more involvement in 9/11 than they had WMDs not much more dangerous than a zip gun and then giving publishing contracts to the top war criminals who pulled off this heist of the Iraqi oil fields were great ideas.

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     1) Literary Agents Are Slowly Becoming the New Buggy Whips.

     Ever since 1980-5, or when we thought it was cool to roll up our suit coat sleeves to the elbows and tease our hair like it been washed in liquid Viagra, publishers got together with literary agents in a small, ill-lit, smoke-filled back room at the Four Seasons. In between being served aqua vit and Calamari Fra Diavolo by 400 pound enforcers with shoulder holsters, they hashed out a deal that basically went like this:
     "Yo, Binky, Swifty, lissen up. We don't feel dere's a poi-centage in slush piles. They're gettin' bigger than my wife Sophie's tits after our 5th kid. So dissiz what we're gonna do: We'll cut ya in on the action. We ain't talkin' to no more writers an' we ain't readin' their shit 'cuz yer gonna, capish? Then ya can skim whatever you want off da top. 15% seems about right."
     Then they all belched and farted in agreement, shook hands and celebrated their collusive new business deal by defenestrating some literary properties (and probably the authors who wrote them). A generation later, this corrupt business model's still firmly in place despite more and more literary agents making themselves harder reach than JD Salinger after an alien abduction. POD, however, is also making literary agents as redundant as they insist on acting like head cheerleaders toward the freshmen on try outs. Still, publishers who are approaching digital publishing like a horny sailor on a 12 hour liberty would that hot Filipino tranny with the suspicious Ann Coulter Adam's Apple are thinking of their agent henchmen. Some publishers with digital imprints still insist on you being fronted by an agent as if they were fencing stolen jewels. This is akin to a plumber who insists on employing his otherwise unemployable semi-retarded brother in law and bringing him into your home so he can piss all over your toilet seat, lick your frozen hamburger patties and driving up your repair bill.
     But this insistence on keeping these parasites firmly embedded on the underside of your nut sack just delays the inevitable: Literary agents will eventually become more redundant and useless than a female Strip-O-Gram at the Vatican's College of Cardinals.

2) The Blob

     The sight of two behemoths like Random House and the Penguin Publishing Group merge into one is what Steve McQueen must've seen in The Blob. The merger, when completed, will corner a quarter of the book market, making it the Optimus Prime better suited to take on Nemesis Prime (aka Jeff Bezos and Amazon). Despite the official press releases glowing about this corporate coitus, mergers mean only two things: Fewer book titles and selling opportunities for agents and authors, fewer reading choices for readers and expendable employees being stripped naked and excommunicated at gunpoint into the Siberian wilderness (Not really. Considering today's job market, I'm actually soft-pedaling it). To get an idea of the sheer size and scale this merger, one would have to go to the Hubble Space telescope when it witnessed galaxies merging.

     The Random-Penguin merger (which sounds like an homage to Tom Tomorrow) is designed solely to enrich top executives and shareholders who apparently make no distinctions between selling books and rolls of Charmin, making the Big Six the Big Five. And publishing pundits are telling us this is far from the last merger we can expect. Before they finally get around to publishing An Idiot's Guide to Antitrust Laws for the express edification of the Federal Trade Commission, there will be only one publisher and the American reader will be given a choice between only James Patterson, Stephen King, Tom Clancy's ghost writer and Lena Dunham.

     Like rats leaving a sinking ship, this only drives more of us off the rickety gang plank and on the deceptively palmy, balmy shores of self-publication.

3) You Are a Spammer Who Should be Flogged

     Publishing today is like walking into a whorehouse where virtually the only people there are johns who also ambled in after the whores had long since been outsourced to Bangladesh. You're told by the holographic image of a madame that if you want to get off, you'll have to pleasure yourself because paying whores is too expensive and we had to outsource them or lay them off. Maybe, if you're lucky, these editors/madames will hand you some Jergens and a travel 10 pack of Kleenexes doubling as bare-bones PR press kits that may or may not include a mention in your old high school newspaper.

     That's basically the fate of all writers who are allegedly lucky enough to get into traditional publishing unless you're shtupping the executive editor's niece, in which case you'll have plenty of oomph put behind your memoir of how you went on a coke and meth-fueled killing spree and got a literary agent catapulted at you right after the hung jury convened.

     For the rest of us. we have to publicize our own work and be whore and pimp rolled into one like those poor seedy Frank Sinatra hat-wearing bastards you used to see on 42nd Street handing out mimeographs for peep shows. Here's the problem: Whether you're traditionally published or self-published, good luck finding a venue that'll put up with even moderate street hawking of your book. I'm living proof that just putting up permalinks without even mentioning your books can get you banned for life on Amazon.com if the beneath-the-bridge-dwelling trolls have a problem with blatant capitalism.

     Yeah, they don't tell you that. Luckily, you have me to give you the 411. But the facts are, lazy-ass publishers and literary agents who think a good day's work consists of updating their index page want your audience lined up in advance, your book edited in advance and your marketing platform set up in advance. Then when you get out there and do what you're told, you're treated like a Nigerian banker or that email in your spam box from Hannah Golightly who wants to extend your penis length by 400% with Canadian Viagra while offering you payday loans to refinance your nonexistent home.

 4) "Baby, Come Back. You Can Blame it All on Me!"

      Last Wednesday, Mercy Pilkington of Goodreader posted a fascinating article about a new trend that's been emerging not even in the last few years but the last few months: Traditional publishers (Aka TPs, which share the same abbreviation as toilet paper and for good reason) crawling back to independent authors. The source for this article is a Pravda-style post from Amazon.com about the fabulous Amazon-subsidized success of Vincent Zandri, the new king of independent authors. What Amazon fails to insert into the record is that Zandri used to be a traditionally published author who made a name for himself long before he'd crawled into bed with Jeff Bezos.

          Amazon's despicably self-aggrandizing post about self publishing was a more of a commercial for its own POD services (Kindle & Create Space) than a celebration of independent authors & their work. Amazon obviously is trying to dominate the book market from publishing to distribution to sales & to ultimately wipe out dead tree publishers. They're a corporation. This is what corporations do. Imagine a roast pig coming to life at an all-you-can-eat buffet and preying on the steamed crabs and lobster tails.

     As for TPs crawling back to indie authors, it's notable they're interested only in sales & still insist that we have a ready-made, built-in readership and fan base because they're still too lazy to cultivate careers & actually drum up demand for their own products. Name me one other industry on earth that refuses to give adequate advertising for 90% of its product. Think of Betty White throwing a lead-lined bull elephant. That's about how far such a strategy would fly in the real world.

This new development strikes me as a classic abuser-abused relationship: "Oh, baby, that wasn't me. I'm so sorry. I'll turn over a new leaf. I swear, I won't use basket accounting & short you on your PR press kit ever again. C'mon, babe, come back to me. We can make beautiful P&Ls together. But make sure you still live under my rules & bring your assets back in with you, m'kay?"
      Independent author: "You blew your chance, now blow me for a change." 

      After 30 years of broken promises, orphaned titles, bad advances, shitty royalties, basket accounting dirty tricks, no creative control, bait-and-switch promises of hard cover deals & having doors slammed in our faces, insisting we get repped by agents, who can blame us? 

What's interesting is that they're directly approaching the most successful indie authors (Shades of 50 SHADES OF GRAY) instead of waiting for agents to approach them with properties. I think publishers, as stupid & dim-witted as most of them are, are finally beginning to connect the two dots of 90% of their books failing with the 90-95% failure rate of agents trying to place adult fiction. It's not traditional authors who are being endangered, it's literary agents.
      Dogma, meet Karma. Squish. Goodbye, dogma.
      Problem: the number of successful indie authors are rarer than unicorns and honest Republicans. They're the only ones being sought out by publishers & if & when it comes time to approach midlist indie authors and newbies, they'll jump at an actual publishing contract with alacrity & the whole corrupt process and spousal abuser way of life will begin anew with battered and bruised authors insisting they fell down the stairs and crying out, "You don't see my acquisition editor's other, more tender side!". It'll also put agents not only back on the playing field but between the hashmarks. And we need literary agents in our lives about as much as Bob Marley needed another cancer.

 5) I'd Only Fuck You With Someone Else's Vagina

     Because that's precisely what modern publishing is like: babymaking by proxy. Editors ostensibly want to crawl between the sheets with you to bring your baby into the world but only if they can make it a threesome with an agent. It's kind of like those sex scenes in A Handmaid's Tale where Robert Duvall is fucking Faye Dunaway through their handmaid. Then when the product is stillborn for lack of support or doesn't come out at all, neither Robert Duvall nor his dowager wife get the rap, you do. Then you wind up in a plastic bag on Soylent Green Day and sold to the proles while Robert and Faye start womb-shopping again from their gated mansion. OK, maybe I'm mixing my metaphors and sci fi movies but you get the point.

     Dealing with an indie author, on the other hand, is often a personal, almost face-to-face process that at least brings some humanity back into this medium of the humanities. With Amazon author profiles, social networking through Facebook and Twitter, email addresses that authors may or may not put on their back covers, readers can directly interact (and even buy through) with authors in ways they still can't with hoity-toity traditional authors and their army of flaks. And if the author is charismatic enough, being able to interact with an author of a quality product may be an added incentive to go through them rather than the impersonal bookseller, publisher or even Amazon (if the author sells through their website or blog).

     Of course, actually reaching those readers is another thing entirely but, unlike before when book readings and signings were the only way to do so, independent publishing over the past decade has made the author, especially the independent one, more theoretically accessible than ever.

You Do Not Need a Literary Agent

     What follows is a long comment I left at a literary agency's website earlier today. Every once in a great while (like, once every couple of years), I'll go to Janet Reid's website and she usually never fails to satisfy and validate my cynicism of agents in general when she misrepresents her profession, its MO and mouthing pieties she knows we authors want to hear. Note the epigraph I used below, the closing line of a post she'd written early this month.
     By way of illustrating exactly what I mean about agents being an unnecessary evil, let me relate a story that had occurred just before Janet Reid wrote that post in which she misrepresents agents and their actual intentions.
     Earlier this year, my intermediary exhaust pipe had become disengaged from the muffler. fearing the pipe was corroded and an expensive fix, I decided to continue driving the car until such time as when I had the money to fix. I took it to a mechanic whose boss had taken over the same service station at which I'd worked off and on for eight years and I thought I'd get a fair deal.
     Without putting the car on a lift or even a portable hydraulic jack, the disinterested mechanic pronounced the intermediary pipe was corroded and needed to be fixed immediately (although how he could've seen that when I myself couldn't get a good view of the pipe is beyond me). I asked him if he could find a matching pipe from a junk yard and he dismissed that idea out of hand as not being worth his time. He said a new pipe would cost me about $180, without labor, which was exactly $10 more than I had in my wallet. When I told him that, he just walked away as if irritated by my very physical existence.
     I drove to the local Auto Zone and explained my situation to a young Hispanic kid behind the counter. He was the honest sort and told me what I needed was a collar, likely a 4" one, that I could slip into the flanges of the intermediary and the muffler. He said Auto Zone didn't carry that kind of stuff and recommended I drive to the local NAPA Auto Parts. In about 45 seconds flat, they found precisely what I needed and the 4" collar and the two clamps that it needed came to $11 and change.
     I took it to another mechanic who, even though I'd dropped it off near the end of the day, then put the connecting collar on and my car was silent again. After $40 in labor, the total fix was $51+ and my car was once again inspection-ready.
     Now, I tell you this rather uninteresting tale in order to illustrate that just because someone says you need them and need them in a certain capacity, it doesn't make it so. True, I needed a mechanic to do the half hour's worth of work that I could've done had I a jack that would've given me the elevation I needed but $40 flat is a far cry from the $220+ the guy across the street was quoting me.
     Literary agents will tell you the same thing over and over and over again. "You need us. You can't get your foot in the door without us. You can't negotiate a contract without us, blah blah blah."
     Bull-fucking-shit.
     Just remember why literary agents like Janet Reid tell you such bullshit. They have a vested financial interest at stake. Maybe not $80 an hour in automotive repair work, but in their case 15%. 15% of a huge runaway best seller could mean millions down the road for an agency, especially if their client is a coddled, naval-gazing little teeny-bopper like Lena Dunham whose Oberlin-educated opus sells at auction to Random-Penguin for a $3.6 million advance.
     Other professionals will tell you the same thing. Plumbers will say, "Don't fiddle with your pipes, let us do it." Contractors will tell you if you want your drywall hung right, let them do it. And in many cases, especially regarding electrical work in your house, they'd be correct. Sometimes you do want an expert to do the job and take the headache away.
     But I've done minor plumbing in my house. I've hung sheet rock before and have painted and hung paper and I've learned how to lay down floor tiles and all sorts of contracting skills. I do basic maintenance on my car and, if I had the right jack, I could've clamped that collar on myself. And I certainly know how to negotiate my own contract and query publishers. By extension, if I can learn to do these things, so can you.

Quit fulminating about gatekeepers. We're not. We're your first step on the road to success, and we're looking for you every single day. - Janet Reid, literary agent

     Oh, man, where does one start? And it's not even my birthday. And I know this stands a Chinaman's chance in hell of getting by the censor but here goes...
     Literary agents aren't gatekeepers?! Are you kidding me, Reid? That's precisely what you guys are. Or have you forgotten about the scummy, collusive deal that publishers began striking with your colleagues about 30 years ago when they decided they didn't feel like doing their jobs, anymore, and hired you agents out as their unpaid slush pile weeder-outers? The whole idea was to stop getting so much dreck from authors and wouldbes and to foist off the job to agents without adding anything to their overhead expenses. In return, they promised them guaranteed income of 15% or whatever percentage they mutually decided to siphon from authors by telling them, "Ain't no one not repped by one of you guys is getting through this front door." But something strange happened "on the road to success" which neatly dovetails into your insistence on trying to get us to believe that you're looking for us "every single day" (except for weekends, holidays, vacations, August, when you're jetting off to the Frankfurt Book Fair or any number of conventions and fairs):
     The younger agents coming up forgot about that "gentleman's agreement" that was collusively signed between their predecessors and publishers (while forgetting to send authors the memo). Some of the veterans of that bygone day and age when authors actually interacted with their publishers (such as the aforementioned Binky Urban of ICM) have also forgotten about said collusive deal. Many agencies, both big and small, have long since closed their doors to tiresome little doorknockers like us. Now they work by "referral or invitation only", meaning their new business model of skeeving perfectly good and publishable authors depends entirely on serendipity (and where does say just because an author is referred by another or is invited to submit by an agent actually has a higher chance of success for both agent and author than cold-querying?).
     If you're a genre author like me, that leaves, after weeding out the fee-charging agents, those that don't rep fiction or your particular genre, the scam artists and the ones that have slammed the door shut to brilliant unpublished authors like me, perhaps a few dozen agencies to which one can make a calculated pitch.
     And Janet Reid, far from being the agent she presents herself as here, has imperiously ignored or form rejected through flunkies I'd never addressed several of my novels.
     Literary agencies are set up to make you fail whether you deserve to or not. Agents look for reasons to reject you, not to sign you. They're solipsistic, greedy, stupid and arrogant. It's rapidly getting to the point where the only people who can get inked to a deal are those who've either made it or those who are connected. It's turning into an old boy's network.
     Folks, you don't need a literary agent and stop listening to people like Janet Reid who try to fool you into thinking otherwise. I've reached acquisitions editors, senior editors and even a publishing executive or two by going over the transom and just writing out the middle man entirely. And if I can learn how to get their interest and if I can learn how to negotiate a contract and what to watch out for, so can you. 
     I repeat: You don't need a literary agent. They're fast becoming as relevant as buggy whips in the age of POD publishing.