A Conversation with Jeremy Luke Hill: Part Two, the State of Publishing

 In the second part of my conversation with Jeremy Luke Hill, I get more into the "nuts and bolts" of publishing---especially in Guelph. 

Cloudwalking Owl · Social Media And Poetry

Hill mentioned Instagram poetry. That sounded worth checking out, so I found a couple articles on line that included lists of people the author liked, one in Huffpost and another in Bookriot. Here are examples from two people that I signed up to follow on Instagram. Jeremy's right, forcing yourself to think about short poems does do something to help calm my mind.

But having said that, you could read these Instagram poems as being part of an "arm's race" between different "social media influencers" who are trying to build a name for themselves in order to sell books. So that leads to my next question for Jeremy.

Cloudwalking Owl · Selling Books Through Social Media

Hill mentioned the Gordon Hill Press, which is his latest endeavour. This naturally led to a question about how it came about and where it fits into his vision.

Cloudwalking Owl · Gordon Hill Press

There are different types of publishing, so I think it's important for readers to understand that when Jeremy talks about "literary publishers" he's talking about a specific type of business---as opposed to several others. Definitions aren't totally universal, but from my research I came up with the following categories:

• Trade 
• Academic
• Self-Publishing
• Literary

Trade

The important issue to understand is that only one of these categories fits completely into the capitalist framework: "trade". That is the type of publishing where a corporation buys a manuscript from an author, edits it, then publishes it either in book, Ebook, or, magazine. If it sells well, they make a profit. If it doesn't, they lose money. That's how the last few books I read---Fatal Voyage, Mindhunter, and, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children---were paid for. (At least originally. I bought these particular copies at the St. Vincent de Paul store on Elizabeth street.)

Academic

Academic publishing is somewhat different. It has suffered for years from predatory, monopolistic exploitation by a small number of for-profit publishers. This has caused real hardships for academic libraries. This following chart shows the way subscriptions have tremendously exceeded the inflation rate for years and years. 

Increased costs of acquisitions (ie: "Annual Ongoing Resource Expenditures").
"CPI" means "Consumer Price Index (ie: rate of inflation).
(Click on the graphic for a clearer copy.)

Naive readers might be excused for thinking that the move towards "paperless libraries" would generally cut the costs for reading academic articles, but they'd be mistaken. The big publishers have been attempting to create giant "bundles" of academic journal titles and force libraries to go "all or nothing" with them. Moreover, they expect them to sign licenses that force Universities to exclude anyone who isn't a member of the community from being able to log into the database. This means that whereas in the past ordinary folks (ie: without computer sign-in privileges) could just walk into a library and read the hard copy, now they have to pay huge fees. 

Under the new business model of licensing access to journals online rather than distributing them in print, for-profit publishers often lock libraries into bundled subscriptions that wrap the majority of a publisher’s portfolio of journals – almost 3,000 in Elsevier’s case – into a single, multi-million dollar package. Rather than storing back issues on shelves, libraries can lose permanent access to journals when a contract expires. And members of the public can no longer read the library’s copy of a journal because the licenses are limited to members of the university. Now the public must buy online copies of academic articles for an average of US$35 to $40 a pop.

MacKenzie Smith in The Conversation

In response, academics have declared war on these for-profit publishers and created their own open source Web-based publishing system to allow free access to academic publications. This has been facilitated by the creation new technologies that automate and dramatically cut the costs of various stages of the publishing and distribution process. These include:

• print-on-demand hard-copy publishing for low demand academic titles
• robotic scanners to create digital versions of old public domain books
• E-publishing
• not-for-profit aggregators and search engine systems
• a network of not-for-profit server farms to store digital texts

These systems have been paid for by a combination of government and charitable grants plus on-going institutional funding based on reciprocal agreements between academic institutions. 

I don't want to go into too much detail on the subject (which is surprisingly large), but I think the situation can be summarized by saying that because of the excesses of monopoly exploitation, universities have decided to discard it and move towards a post-capitalist system based on the principles of the open source movement. This is less surprising as it sounds, because the free flow of information is one of the key principles of academic research. In a world where information is the new capital, scholars are all radical Marxists!

Self-Publishing

Self-publishing used to be confined to the "vanity presses", where people paid someone to knock off a few thousand copies of something so they could give them away and describe themselves as a "published author". Unfortunately, I still hear people who should know better who dismiss self-publishing as being ridiculous. But as a matter of fact, it is an already huge and very fast growing part of the market. There are a lot of people making real money self-publishing. 

It's hard to find any detailed information on the actual numbers, because self-publishing is fragmented and many of the larger distributors don't collect or publish separate figures for it. In addition, there is a lot of cross-pollination between different booksellers. To cite a personal example, I publish my Ebooks through Smashwords, but that means that they get distributed through other websites and services, such as Apple books, Walmart (yikes!), Barnes and Noble, Scribd, and others---including companies with names I can't even pronounce in countries like India and Brazil.

The "big five" legacy publishers. 

One thing that I could find a lot of information on is the percentage of royalties that authors get through self-publishing. The general consensus seems to be that if you go the regular route, the publisher will give you between 10% and 15%. In contrast, I get between 60% and 80% royalties on Ebooks because I self-publish on SmashWords. (The prices vary because when I sell a book through another seller---like Apple or Barnes and Noble---they pay less than directly through the SmashWords website, but it's still a whole lot more than through a traditional publisher. There is also the issue of selling through an online library service---like Scribd.) 

With regard to paperbacks, I publish through an on-demand printing service, Lulu Books. They don't set a percentage for royalties, authors like me do. But they do charge 20% of that as their payment. For example, I charge $10.30 US (or $15 Canadian) for Walking the Talk, and they say that it costs $5.17 per book to print it. The difference is $5.17. Twenty percent of that is $1.03, which leaves me $4.14 per book, or, 40% royalties.

I'm never going to get rich off my writing, but this new self-publishing infrastructure allows me to get the books "out there", and they do generate a very modest income for me. What's really nice is that they allow me to do so while at the same time dramatically lowering the price to the consumer. A while back someone got a copy of my first book and contacted me to say that he liked it so much that he was buying a bunch of copies for a study group. He made a point of saying that he thought the price of $10.30 US was very inexpensive, and, compared to most of the books sold through traditional publishers, it really is. 

Self-publishing is quickly becoming a large part of book sales. It's not easy to find any information about it, as things like best-seller lists and public data tend to be the property of the large publishing houses---and they have a vested interest in hiding the fact that their business model is in steep decline. This means that the latest info that I can find is around 2016, but the following graphs tell an interesting tale.

It appears that self-published Ebooks are "eating the lunch"
of the major publishers. This shouldn't be surprising, as they 
generally cost a lot less. Image from
the blog justpublishingadvice.com (JPA).

  

And here's the companion graph that explains why this 
is a good thing. By cutting out the publishing houses, 
authors end up making more money. Again from JPA.

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And, of course, here's my attempt to pay the bills through self-publishing. It's easy to support me through Patreon and Pay Pal. If you can afford it, you'll get a warm glow from doing so. And you will be helping create a growing, permanent collection of "Background Briefs" that will help people learn more about issues that affect people in Guelph. What could be more useful for the engaged citizenry?

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Cloudwalking Owl · Govt Support For Literary Publishing

Literary

This gets me back to Jeremy Luke Hill and his work. If you go to the Canada Council for the Arts website you will find a page for "Literary Publishing Projects". It defines what is or isn't available for a grant. It's pretty common sense. They don't want to channel money to people who are just seeking an "easy buck". And they also want to support the sort of literature that is going to have a hard time finding a mass market, but still holds artistic merit. 

Part of the problem is how you define that slippery term "artistic merit". There's a whole division of philosophy called "epistemology" which deals with how we know what we think we know. And within that, there is a sub-category called "aesthetics" which deals with understanding what is or isn't of "artistic merit". Like most issues in philosophy, there can be a wide variance of opinion. And like all issues of a similarly nebulous type, it gets dealt with by the creation of a rough consensus among experts. (That's how science proceeds, for example.) 

In the case of the Canada Council, this boils down to creating panels of people who are "experts" in the particular art that the applicant is pursuing, and who get to decide who does or doesn't get a grant. This really isn't that much different from what used to happen in the renaissance, only back then it was an individual, filthy-rich aristocrat who decided to toss some coin at an artist so he could create something amazing. The aristocrats were the government and the money they had was extracted from the peasants and burghers through taxes, so it was pretty much the same as what we have now. 

But as Jeremy himself says, this is far from an ideal situation. As an outside observer, I'd suggest that a key part of the system is an attempt to mimic the example of the mainstream legacy publishers. The hope is that someone will "make it big"---like Margaret Atwood---after having their artistic "pump primed" through Canada Council grants. Personally, I think it would make a lot more sense to instead follow the examples of Academic and self-publishing. But to create something that sustains the artistic traditions that the Canada Council and people like Luke Hill currently do, I'd suggest that a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) makes a lot of sense. 

The new technologies have dramatically reduced the non-human costs of publishing. That means that the only major cost now is the writer. If there was a basic social income administered through the same sort of mechanism as the Old Age Security (OAS) or the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) programs, artists would be able to keep a roof over their heads while building their skills. Hopefully, they could then self-publish their work and use that income to supplement and even replace the GAI. This would remove the need for peer-based panels to separate "deserving" from "non-deserving" artists and leave the income issue in the hands of readers.      

Cloudwalking Owl · Local Publishing Question

I mentioned in the beginning of this conversation how much I missed the pub nights and coffee shop evenings that Jeremy organizes as part of his "Friends of Vocamus Press" gig. I first met the guy through the Tool Library where he offered to help me with self-publishing advice. He turned me onto Lulu books for the on-demand paperback and Smashwords for the Ebook. So he certainly proved the points he made in the above answer. 

If you are interested in the Vocamus Writer's community, or, the Vocamus Press, I'd suggest you follow the hypertext links. If you read, consider buying a book. If you write, maybe get involved, if you have the bucks and want to support the arts, make a donation. 

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

This is the spacer I put in to deal with the Sound Cloud embedding problem.