About my agent…

So my agent announced the other day that she has started to provide self-publishing services for her authors, and, as I’ve been relatively outspoken in this area, people have asked me to comment.

I think I’ve made my feelings fairly clear. I believe that agents who publish clients are engaged in an unethical conflict of interest. I also think that agents have always provided clients with services, and that an agent can ethically provide services to a client. The salient difference between the two is that an agent who takes rights is publishing, and an agent who facilitates self-publishing is providing publishing services.

Kristin says in her post that she talked to her clients. I can’t speak for the substance of her conversation with other clients, but she and I had a very long conversation, both about what I did to perfect the work that I published to the level that I did, and about the models that she proposed. I cannot tell you the number of times we went back and forth, both on her models and on the contract–I lost count somewhere around seven or eight. I can tell you that every time I expressed a concern and said, “This looks like a problem,” she came up with a solution. I think I am personally responsible for adding about four pages to her DLP contract to make sure we were spelling out termination, various rights and responsibilities and obligations, and so forth in a way that made sense for an author. (And that’s only a tiny little bit of a joke.)

I can tell you that when I expressed concern about a way that her contract might allow authors to take advantage of her, she told me–more than once–and I paraphrase–“That’s a risk I take. I’m not going to bind my authors to do something that they don’t think is in their best interest just because I’m afraid of what they’ll do.”

One of the things that Kristin is doing that I think is different (in a good way!) from anything else that I’ve seen is that she is making it possible for her authors to use her to get on venues they wouldn’t get on in any other way, without requiring them to make any commitments or representations to her regarding exclusivity in time or over venues.

I’m mostly going to let Kristin speak for herself on this, but I want to clarify my understanding of her distribution venue option. I can send Kristin a valid ePub file for one of my books with a cover and say, “Kristin, please put this up on Overdrive.”

She does so. She only puts it up on Overdrive (unless I ask her to put it up elsewhere, too). I get 85% of the take from Overdrive. She gets 15%. I don’t have to deal with getting on Overdrive myself, or fuss with making sure I get the Onix metadata formatted properly or any of the other headaches.

If I go to her a week later and say, “Kristin, take it down,” she’ll do that, too. (It might annoy her, but she’ll do it. The contract gives her some time to make it so, since no venue is going to be perfect about removing material, but that’s it.)

In the meantime, I’m posting that same file on Amazon and B&N and a number of other venues personally, and getting 100% of that income without any obligation to Kristin whatsoever.

There’s no exclusivity for the distribution venue option. It’s simply that she is representing me to vendors and helping me license works to entities where I wouldn’t be able to license it myself. In short, she is acting as an agent to get me onto venues that are either too much of a pain for me individually, or flatly not available. If I decide that I no longer want Kristin to assist me in distributing my works through Overdrive, I can walk away from it and do it some other way with no obligation.

I plan to use this to get my work more widely distributed. It will make me more money than I can make for myself. That is what agents do.

As for her other option… Right now, I’m not planning on publishing my next series through her full-service option. There are a number of reasons for that, but the biggest one is that I’m not convinced that it is the right choice for me at this time. This is not to say that it’s a bad choice for others, or that I will always make that choice. Just that it is not right for me at this time. There are circumstances when it would be right for me, though, and I recognize that where I am is not where other people are. She and I have discussed this together, and she is and has always been 100% supportive of my making the decisions that I feel are the right choice for me.

I do not think her plan is unethical, which would be a concern. I have read through her contract multiple times, and while she says in her post “we ask them to commit to a two-year term of license,” the contract itself (IIRC) does not use the term “term of license” but “term of liaison.” The difference between those two matters. It matters because if an author grants her a term of liaison, the author can pull the work from self-publication and hold it back, and so long as it is not published anywhere else for two years, Kristin has no claim. It matters because an author can choose not to have the work on a particular venue, and Kristin must respect that choice, even if it costs her money.

It matters because if an author breaches the contract and places the work for sale herself on another venue, Kristin’s only remedy is to file suit for breach of contract and ask for 15% of the amount made. She cannot file a takedown notification with the service. She has no claim or right to the material in question. This is precisely the same remedy Kristin would have if she negotiated a deal with a publisher, the client fired her, and then signed directly with that publisher. In other words, she has the claim of an agent–a contract claim–and not a claim in property.

Anticircumvention

The copyright page in Unraveled contains this statement:

Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the end user the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.

I added this because some of the places where the ebook is available for download automatically apply DRM. I am not left with a choice in the matter.

I don’t like DRM. If I had a choice, I would kick DRM to the curb, effective immediately, and I would never, ever see it again. It doesn’t work–a well-trained two-year-old child could strip DRM in about 12 seconds–and once stripped, it doesn’t ever need to be put back. All DRM has ever done for me is prevent me from enjoying the books that I have purchased legitimately.

But it is illegal to strip DRM. In particular, it is illegal under 17 U.S.C. s 1201(1)(A), which says: “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”

But Subsection (3) explains that “to ‘circumvent a technological measure’ means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner.” (emphasis mine).

I’m fairly certain I am the owner of the copyright. But the statute doesn’t say, “without the permission of the copyright owner”–it says, “without the authority of the copyright owner.” I don’t pretend to know how this will be interpreted, and I can’t actually encourage anyone to do something that would be illegal in reliance on my say-so. So you should consult a lawyer before you do something illegal. (Or, you should do it in private, and not, like, tell people about it. But don’t tell anyone I said that.)

I suspect–and this is rumination, and not legal advice–that my permission is effective authorization to allow DRM stripping for my self-published works, and so to the extent that this may be necessary, if you’ve bought a DRM-crippled version of my self-published works, I extend to you whatever additional license might be necessary to uncripple it. (And I can do that, so there we are.)

I also suspect that I may not be able to authorize anyone to strip DRM from my works that are traditionally published. That’s because I’ve given Harlequin the exclusive right to distribute my works, and I suspect that I lack the authority to tell people what they can and can’t do.

I don’t know this for a fact, though. The case law on DRM-stripping says that the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA are independent of copyright. Having carefully checked my contract with Harlequin, nowhere in it do I grant them exclusive rights–or any rights at all–with respect to authorization of anticircumvention. My contract only refers to “copyright rights.” So I may still have the authority to allow you to strip DRM.

There are other things to think about, that I won’t go into here. This is certainly a tangled legal issue. If you really want to be safe…typically, I’d say, “talk to a lawyer,” but I doubt any lawyer today knows the answer. It’s an open legal question.

I haven’t seen any case law centering on this point, as very few copyright owners have granted DRM-stripping permission–and so to the extent that it is within my power to grant, which it probably isn’t at all, I’m okay with anyone who wants to strip DRM from my traditionally published works as well in order to enjoy any of their fair use rights.

If anyone is aware of any case law that decides the meaning of “the authority of the copyright owner” in this subsection, I’d love to see it–but a brief skim suggests that this is an open issue.

Unlocked (for free!)

Unlocked is available for free on Amazon and on Apple. The free promotion is scheduled to sunset on Apple on the evening of December 21st. It will come down from Amazon shortly thereafter (I don’t know how long it will take to become unfree; someone will have to set it unfree manually over there). So if by some chance you haven’t had a chance to grab it yet, this is your opportunity.

Print! Barnes and Noble!

For those of you who have been waiting, Unraveled is now up at the Diesel eBook Store and at Barnes and Noble. (This means we’re waiting on two more stores now: Sony and Kobo.)

Also, I’ve just approved the print version of Unraveled, which means it should start showing up at various establishments (like Amazon, B&N.com, and so forth) soon-ish, where “soon-ish” means somewhere between 5 days and 3 weeks. (Yes, I cringe, too–sorry!)  Actually, it’s already up on Amazon US. Buy it here. The print version of Unraveled is a trade paperback–which means it’s larger than the mass markets I’ve come out in before (no way to get around that), and, unfortunately, pricier.

For those of you who don’t want to wait that long, you can buy it right now from CreateSpace. The URL to buy it is: https://www.createspace.com/3740680

And because buying from CreateSpace is more of a pain from buying from Amazon, I’ve set up a discount code you can use for now. If you put in code 4NQ3HZ2S, you’ll get $2 off, which will bring the price down from $11.99 to $9.99. I wish I could produce mass-market print versions–but for now, it’s trade paperback, and I’ve done my best to price the trade paperback comparable to industry standards.

The best thing about self-publishing

So let me tell you the worst thing about self-publishing.

The worst thing about self-publishing is the final build up to the end. Now, not only do I have to do page proofs, but I have to proof the proofreading, proof the copy-edits, proof the formatting… I read the book aloud twice during the proofing process, and then read it again in formatted version, and then read aloud every paragraph any time I have to make a change. I read my book about 10 times more self-publishing than I would if I were traditionally published.

And by the time I get to the copy-editing/proofing stage, I have already read the book 10-20 times, depending on the scene. It used to be that when I handed my editor the final version of the book, I despised it.

So I’m already sick of the book by the first copy-editing pass. By the time I’m doing my second read aloud–a truly painful experience–I want to hurl the pages across the room and stomp up and down on them. I put the work down every 50 pages or so and whimper, “Why me?” It’s not pretty. By the time I hit “publish,” I hate my book with a passion engendered of boredom and overwork and overexposure. I want to cry. I want to vomit with rage. (And in case you are wondering, I can tell a book is ready to publish because my fury at the thought of having to sit through another reading exceeds my pride in having something not perfect out there.)

Once I hit publish, something magical happens. People start reading it. And they tell me things like, “I loved this scene!” That scene? The one I read 25 times, and wrote 6 different ways? Really? You…you love it? They read it and by some strange magical alchemy, they usually do not want to vomit with rage. It’s the best present ever–to be able to rediscover the book through 1000 eyes.

So thank you to all my readers for making my book fun for me again.

 

Unraveled is out!

So this is a little note to say… Unraveled is out, just about everywhere. It is on Amazon. It is on iBooks. It is on All Romance eBooks and Smashwords.

It is not up yet on Barnes and Noble–but they’ve had the file 48 hours, and hopefully they should be making it available soon. It should also (eventually) be up on Kobo, Sony, and Diesel–but those vendors have always taken a little more time. (If you’re too impatient to wait, both Smashwords and All Romance sell epub files which can be used on Kobo and Sony Readers.) Unraveled will be available in print, too–the print formatting is finished, and right now, I’m just waiting to get the proof.

This is the final book in the Turner series, and I hope you enjoy it!

For those of you who are curious what is coming next… Spring of 2012 will bring a new novella entitled The Governess Affair, which will be the kick off of a new series about a group of friends called the Brothers Sinister. But don’t worry–there’s nothing cloak-and-dagger about any of them. They’re just left-handed.

Enjoy!

eek!

So: It is the end of November. That means two things.

First, tonight–in fact, in a scant few hours–there will be a book club chat at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where people will be talking about Unclaimed. The book clubs are usually pretty awesomely lively. If you’ve never done one, you’ll really enjoy it. Link here. I’ll be joining in at 10 PM EST, but the chat starts at 9 PM EST. I can’t wait to talk to everyone about it yet!

Second, it is the end of November…and there is no Unraveled yet.

I’m sorry.

There’s no good answer for this, except that I’m obviously not very good at determining when things get done. These last few months have also had me busier with non-writing things than usual for a variety of reasons, none of which are interesting, not even to me. 🙂

But it’s close. It’s really close. It’s so close that I could upload a copy right now, and the difference between this version and the final version would be small–maybe 1%. But that 1% would include typos and some rough edges that needed to be smoothed, and a handful of extraneous sentences that I really don’t need–that kind of thing.

It will be soon. It will be as fast as I can possibly manage. And I promise that as soon as it’s available, I will let everyone know. Thanks so much for your patience and understanding!

Winners, and Unraveled Update

So, here are the winners of a copy of The Lady’s Secret: Sara Anne, azteclady, and Clavis.

E-mail me at courtney@courtneymilan.com and tell me how you’d like your copy. As far as I can tell, I can give gifts on Amazon, All Romance eBooks, and … maybe others, still to be explored. Let me know how you prefer to get your e-copy, and I’ll see how best to get it to you.

Also, I promised an update on Unraveled in the comments section. I have had a lot of e-mails and the like asking me the following questions:

  • Q. When is it going to be out?
    A. When it is done.
  • Q. No, really, when is it going to be out?
    A. There is one thing I can fairly well promise you: It won’t be out before Thanksgiving. I am working very, very hard to try to make it land in the “late November” date rather than, say, early December. “Late November” almost certainly means November 30th. If it doesn’t, I’ll let you know. At this point, the book requires essentially nothing more than the application of work to book. (This is not always true. There are points in the writing of the book when it requires the pulling of hair and the gnashing of teeth. I am past that point.) I am not sure how much work will be needed. Here is the other thing I will promise you: If my choice is between releasing it late and releasing it unready, I will release it late. Hopefully I will do neither.
  • Q. So does this mean the book sucks?
    A. No. I actually love it. I love it a lot. That is why I’m working hard on it, because I don’t want to mess it up.
  • Q. Why can’t I preorder it?
    A. Because it’s self-published, and the major accounts do not make it possible to preorder a book. It will be available, promise.
  • Q. Will it be available in print?
    A. Yes. I’m arguing with myself over various aspects of print pricing.
  • Q. Is there an excerpt?
    A. Why, yes. Yes there is. I’ve delayed putting it up because I’m still fussing with bits and pieces. I will be fussing with bits and pieces up until the day that I post this sucker, so expect changes. But from this point onward, changes will be largely cosmetic. And so I’ve forced myself to put up the first chapter. It’s here.

The Lady’s Secrets: A Giveaway

So, a while back, I got sent a copy of Joanna Chamber’s debut novel The Lady’s Secrets.

I admit that I didn’t read it right away. Actually, I picked it up, started reading, and realized that the heroine and her brother were part of an actor’s troupe. I stopped reading instantly, because I was writing a book where the heroine had grown up in a traveling actor’s troupe. (Ahem.) Sometimes, you just don’t want to bias what you’re writing.

But a few months later, someone tweeted about that book, and I remembered how awesome the premise sounded–truly, utterly awesome! This is a book about a young woman who dresses up as another man’s valet. I love books about cross-dressing, in part because it allows members of the opposite sex to go places that were forbidden–gaming clubs and duels and Whites and Tattersalls. But having the heroine masquerade as a valet? That takes forbidden to a whole new level. Valets, after all, don’t just go places that are forbidden. They help their master dress, shave, and bathe. It’s like forbidden times two.

So I picked up the book again, and I’m so glad I did. The execution was even better than the promise. Not only did Joanna Chambers do the “forbidden” things that I looked forward to (and if you want to convince yourself how awesome she is, read this amazing scene on her website), but she managed to capture the intimate, asymmetric relationship that arises between servants and their master. Georgy (the heroine) takes her job very seriously. In learning to anticipate her master’s needs and desires, she actually learns quite a bit about who her master is. He’s a staid, responsible gentleman, who sees his attire as armor that he wears against the rest of the world. He readies himself for the day by putting on clothing with exacting taste.

But because Georgy is the one who is responsible for helping him put on and take off his armor, she gets to see behind the mask that he wears. She sees who he is when he’s not playing the Lord. And what develops between the two is something special. Not friendship at first; Nathan isn’t the sort of person who would make friends with his servants on a whim. It’s something deeper and more intimate, because Nathan casually trusts Georgy with the essence of him, and Georgy learns to treasure it.

I would say more, but I don’t want to spoil the discovery for you. Suffice to say that I utterly adored this book, and I hope you will too!

It’s available only in electronic copy right now. I’ve actually never given away e-copies, but this is definitely the time for me to figure out how that works. I’m going to give away three copies of this book to various commenters. Comment by tomorrow, and I’ll pick the winners and we’ll figure out the giveaways!

In the meantime, you can buy it at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Help! Help! I’m being oppressed!

One of the kerfuffles that has rolled around lately has to do with a post that Barry Eisler did on J.A. Konrath’s blog, where Barry referenced Michael Stackpole’s consistent rhetoric that writers for NY publishing are like “house slaves” and pointed to another consistent theme in much of the indie-publishing meme which is that those who write for NY publishers are suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome.

I want to note that Barry was clear enough that these were analogies–he wasn’t making an actual psychological diagnosis of Stockholm Syndrome, and was referencing other people’s rhetoric. He also apologized for the analogy later on, and admitted it wasn’t helpful, and I appreciate that.

But the language of abuse and slavery and Stockholm Syndrome is rampant among self-publishing proponents. Konrath and Eisler are by no means the worst offenders. It drives me absolutely bonkers. The “abuse” I had to put up with from my publisher was two six-figure deals and inclusion in an anthology with a New York Times bestseller. Weep for me.

I haven’t given up self-pubbing at this point, and I won’t. But I do think that traditional New York publishing has value. I believe in diversification, and I wouldn’t have a problem signing a New York contract for a limited number of books under a limited set of circumstances. After all, book sales multiply with the number of books out. Having more books out–and having paper copies of books on more shelves–would grow my audience so that even if I make less on those books, I could actually make more money in total. So I am perfectly open to the possibility of a NY contract as a method of diversifying myself. That’s a business decision. You might disagree with my reasoning, but I’m surely not oppressed.

I have friends who have worked with utterly magical editors, who would sell books to those editors any chance they get. It’s a business decision to get a smaller percentage for the chance to work with someone who will help you produce books at the height of your capacity. I have friends who do not have the time, inclination, or patience to self-publish–and self-publishing requires a very distinct skillset. It’s a business decision on their part to focus on writing.

I recognize that a critique of tone isn’t always valuable. But I think what this incident demonstrates is that egregious tone can lead to substantive problems and a lack of discussion on the salient issues altogether. Excessive rhetoric strips away nuance. It’s very hard to say, “Publishing is like slavery! But, you know, to each their own individualized circumstances! Sometimes, for some people, maybe it’s a decent business decision. Just not for me, you know, and maybe not for lots of other people.”

The result of the tone issue was that people got pissed off and screamed and yelled about rhetoric. Some people said, “YES! GO! SLAY THE INFIDELS!” and some responded by arguing the analogy instead of talking about Amazon and the future of the publishing industry. Some really interesting and important points that Barry made in that post have basically been ignored because of the rhetoric employed on a side-issue.

There are times when there is no nuance to be had, and so I’m fine with shrill tones under those circumstances. Actual slavery should be opposed. Genocide, ditto. Egregious violations of human rights? Very, very bad. But a decision about how to get your book in the hands of readers? That does not rise to the level of “crimes against humanity.” And using that rhetoric to discuss it means that instead of having a discussion about substance, you end up with accusations flying. And that’s a shame.

One final point: in Eisler’s piece, the question of whether authors are abused (if only by analogy) is ancillary to the point of what we think of Amazon’s power. But Barry claims that NY publishing’s cartel would be equivalent to an Amazon monopoly. There are, of course, a few salient differences between an Amazon monopoly and the NY publishing “cartel” (which I put in quotes since I have no direct evidence that it’s a cartel).

  • Economically speaking, cartels are preferable to a monopoly because there is economic pressure to defect from a cartel. There is no way to defect from a monopoly.
  • Economically speaking, what Amazon is doing right now is seeking not only horizontal domination over book selling but vertical integration, whereas traditional publishing is only concerned with horizontal domination, at least insofar as it touches the book supply chain. (I’m aware that most publishing houses are part of a vertical integration of media corporations generally–and that in fact does have real consequences, and ones I’m not happy with. But they are not as of yet integrated with retail sales.) Vertical integration raises a different set of economic risks.

These are interesting questions, and I’m sorry they haven’t been explored.

As a personal matter, I like Amazon–how could I not?–but I’m very aware that the reason that Amazon gave authors 70% was not because they were feeling generous, but because Apple entered the market at 70% and Amazon felt pressure to match them.

I’m wary of any large concentration of power. And I’m exceedingly wary of a large concentration of power that doesn’t have a large concentration of power elsewhere to match it. At this point, I think that Amazon is providing healthy competition. But I also believe that the competition would stop being healthy if we stopped pitting Amazon’s near-monopoly market power in the e-book market against the NY publishers.

And that’s the nuance that’s getting stripped from this conversation by the tone: We can’t talk rationally about relative concentrations of power and the future of the market if we persist in labeling one side as an abuser and the other a rescuer. It’s not an abuser-rescuer dynamic.

So there. Those are my two cents. I respect both Konrath and Eisler immensely (which is not something I will say for all the indie prophets out there)–they’re both clever and thoughtful and successful. I’ve talked to Barry several times in the past, and I really value his insight and intelligence. But I don’t think that the rhetoric employed is actually aiding discussion–which is a darned shame, because I think they have a lot to add to a rational discussion. I wish that they were using rhetoric that would facilitate that discussion instead of hindering it.