Hometown Tourist

Update: Paranormal Romance Bestseller, Lynn Viehl, posted her actual royalty statement for Twilight Fall. Her novel has sold over 89,142 copies, and she is straddling the povery line.

For most this might not be any news. To some, perhaps you’ve just read On Writing, by Stephen King this might be a bit of shock. Then you’ll want to sit down first. I’ll wait a minute while you find a chair.

The literary magazine is dead.

The first thing you might be asking, who done it? Was it Colonel Mustard? Or the Internet in the Parlor with the noose? Actually, this is more of a plant homicide. We forgot to water the short story industry. For like a decade.

I’m not going to list any names, mostly because I have forgotten them, but several magazines I have queried later sent a request for donations along with my form rejections. The problem is that literary magazines are incestous. Short stories are only being published in magazines to promote the house’s books and are only read by other authors.

Need proof? To quote Stephen King in On Writing, “Most literary magazines require that you already have a subscription.” This seems like a prime example of shitting where you eat to me. John Updike on recent episode of PRI’s Selected Shorts expressed his concern that no author could make a living on short stories like he did.

(Maybe Fitzgerald drank that option away for the rest of us.)

Magazines who were once the top of the fiction game like Playboy or GQ no longer publish short fiction. At least not on a regular basis. And only if your name is Neil Gaiman or Stephen King. Not that I feel this is unjust. No one else sells issues, but it would not surprise me at all if Playboy still pays King the same per word rate as it did in the ’70s.

But that is not to say short stories are pointless. No matter what You Look Nice Today says. As a career path, no, but there is the networking aspect of the short story market. If the audience are all writers it stands to reason at least one of them may have connections. Think of short stories as something akin to the Olympics.

There are groups and online magazines that are a little better like Vicious Writers and their Key Publications social network. Of course, fan fiction is also a favorite online. But once again the audience are all writers. Nothing about these sites bring in the average reader.

Now the publishing industry is constantly mining for the next tween romance messiah. All while the struggling writers of today pine for Stephen King’s ebook revolution. Douglas Adams was always annoyed that Stephen King beat him to the punch of putting out a story entirely in an Adobe PDF no one wanted to read. It’s the same reason that book piracy really isn’t a problem. Reading a story in a .PDF format on your computer monitor is a nuisance.

Now that the Kindle and the Nook are here both camps believe their Kwisatz Haderach has arrived. That has yet to be seen. These e-readers are not ubiquitous, and who knows if they ever will. In all honesty the Kindle iPhone app shows more promise. (Note: as of this writing the Apple Tablet is still a myth that has yet to be birthed from Steve Job’s brow.) Could there be an easier way to distribute and consume books online?

Now I present to you the real e-book revolution.

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Maybe not this audio short story per se, but the audio book is an enjoyable way to read a book and is easy to distribute online. All on a device so many people already have in their pockets. Just go check out Audible.com. Get the trial (please make me a sponsor).

Though really the heart of distribution in the e-book revolution is creator control. A huge publisher like Harper may not be the best thing for a budding author. Sure, publishers are great for cover art and distribution, but it’s a dirty little secret of the biz that they don’t do marketing. That’s up to the author and their publicity firm.

For the little guy controlling every aspect of sales would enable the author to make a living with a much smaller audience. A book sold via a huge publisher would make back one to two percent of cover price back. Then deduct fifteen percent for your agent. Not to mention various fees from your publisher and the agency, hiring a publicist, etc.

But with over head kept down a book distributed by yourself could rope you fifty percent of cover price and that’s being conservative. Of course, if you’re sales figures are in the millions then the system above is great, but if your selling only one thousand units its not even a drop in the bucket.

Creators just have to divorce themselves from the stigma that self-publishing is not legitimate and shameful. With success in creator owned content distribution like the comic Penny Arcade or musician Jonathan Coulton. They’re doing pretty good for themselves. The successes in new media continues to climb exponentially compared to old media. `