Charlie's Diary

Full transcript here.

According to the contents of my mailbox, Amazon appear to be cancelling pre-orders of "The Fuller Memorandum".

Do not panic if you have pre-ordered this book. It's still due for publication on July 1st (in the UK, from Orbit) or July 6th (US, from Ace). Amazon are just having one of their periodic database glitches, and re-setting the title to "unavailable" rather than "due out on July 1st". It does not imply the book has been cancelled, or that Amazon won't be selling it when it's published. You might want to re-order it elsewhere, or wait until May/June (by which time Amazon's database might have realized that the book is, in fact, going to come into stock at some forseeable date).

As some of you probably know, SF author, biologist, (and friend of mine) Peter Watts was charged a couple of months ago with assaulting a US border patrol officer. The case has now come to trial and Peter has been found guilty of obstruction, for failing to get on the floor immediately when told to do so after being punched in the face a couple of times. The more serious charge — that Peter had assaulted the officer in question directly — was thrown out of court. But failure to immediately and unquestioningly obey any order by a border patrol officer is apparently "obstruction", which in turn is a subset of "assault", carrying a maximum 2-year prison sentence. (Being incapacitated — for example, due to being dazed due to having been beaten up — is not, it seems, a mitigating factor.)

The problem behind this unjust and bizarre mess is buried a couple of layers deep.

Given: the assault (on Peter Watts, by the Border Patrol) shouldn't have happened. Nor should he have been charged, much less tried and convicted of assault in the opposite direction. Nor should failure to immediately and unquestioningly obey an order after being punched in the face be a crime — any kind of crime.

But there's a more alarming moral to be drawn here.

I note with some alarm that the saucepan of free international travel we've been swimming frog-like in for decades is now steaming.

It's not just the USA where border agencies have quietly acquired vast, unaccountable, and draconian powers. Here in the UK, the government is responding to anti-immigration sentiment by erecting a near-iron curtain around all ports and airports, monitoring all traffic, and dealing harshly with anyone who wants to travel for reason other than tourism or business. Ditto most of the EU (within the EU things are as different as they are within the United States, for much the same reason — it's a free trade/movement zone). The barriers are going up all around the developed world, and while the spikes are intended to point outward, other developed world travellers get caught on them. (I'm not just thinking of Peter Watts here; in SF fandom there's also the case of Cheryl Morgan. Just off the cuff, among friends of mine.)

Capital can flow freely, but labour is in shackles world-wide.

If you don't see a very specific political subtext here (being sold to the voting masses on the back of crude xenophobia and racism), let me be more explicit: labour wants to migrate where working conditions and pay are best. Capital wants to invest for growth where working conditions and pay are worst.

By penning us (the labour) in, capital can maintain, for a while, the wage imbalances that maximize profit. (Take raw material. Process as cheaply as possible. Sell for as much as possible.) In the long term, it's unsustainable — labour in the high-cost developed world is taking a hammering due to being uncompetitive, and wages will be forced down until it is competitive, while labour costs in the developing world are skyrocketing. It'll end when American and EU wages meet in the middle with Chinese and Indian wages ... unless American, EU, Chinese, and Indian wage-earners are forced to recalibrate their expectations against the DRC or Somalia.

f you don't think this affects you, if you don't think you're on the same side of the barricades as the sweatshop workers in Bangladesh and the marine biologists in Toronto, you're deluded; unless you've got a seven-digit trust fund to dine out on, the tidal flow of globalized capital is running against your class interests.

Welcome to the future that globalized capitalism has bought for us (and see also the vital, pressing need for election funding reform in the USA, which is the pivot on which this whole mess revolves). I'm beginning to think that, regardless of his prescription, Karl Marx's diagnosis of the crisis of capitalism was spot on the money. And crap like this is going to keep happening as long as we're workers first and citizens last.

Subject says it all. I'm on the book salon over at FireDogLake this Sunday, from 5pm EST (9pm GMT), talking to Paul Krugman and taking questions from readers about "The Trade of Queens". There'll be a chat transcript afterwards (and I'll link to it), but if you're there at the time you get the opportunity to join in.

(In other news, I just did an interview with the Yomiuri Shimbun. Being an author is a full time job — I could do it for 40 hours a week without writing a word!)

(I'm going to try and keep this one brief ...)

Many readers hold the charming misconception that authors not only write their books, but are responsible for the size, shape, texture, flavour, and appearance of the finished physical object.

(We're talking physical books here, not ebooks. That's yet another opportunity for discourse that I'm going to eschew for now.)

Here's the reality: as an author, I am required — per contract — to supply the publisher with a manuscript of approximately the correct length, on roughly the correct subject matter, that is substantially free from factual errors and libelous or criminal statements. I'm also required to participate in the editorial process. And I can suggest a title. That's all.

The title of the published book will usually conform to the author's suggestion, except when it doesn't. Reasons why the publisher might change it include: the author's idea of a title is going to repel readers, the editor has a better idea, or the publisher's list contains another book with a too-similar title and confusion will arise.

For example: my novel "Singularity Sky" was originally titled "Festival of Fools", but right after my editor at Ace acquired the North American rights one of their other editors published "Ship of Fools" by Richard Paul Russo. It was felt that two "... of Fools" titles on the front list at the same time would be a Bad Thing, so we haggled over a new title (and my editor wanted the S-word in it "because the Singularity is hot right now").

For another example: my short story collection "Wireless" was originally titled "Palimpsest" (after the novella it contains), but Catherynne Valente's novel "Palimpsest" came out right after I submitted the manuscript: although it was with a different publisher, we were, again, worried about the potential for confusion.

The confusion doesn't emerge between authors and their readers, but among the overworked staff at bookshops and wholesalers, or between the marketing department of publishers and the acquisitions managers at the big book chains. Every editor's nightmare is that their hot new novel is, through a namespace conflict, going to be confused with yesterday's tired midlist title by the buyer at Barnes and Noble or Borders, who will in consequence order only half as many copies. It may or may not be a nightmare with reality lurking behind it, but who wants to take that risk?

The author's name on the published book is probably safe. At least, there's a clause in my contracts that says they're supposed to attribute authorship to me, myself, and I, unless otherwise mutually agreed. It sometimes happens that authors who are in a spiral of diminishing bookstore orders are asked to start up a pseudonym (presumably to defeat the evil moustachio-twirling opera-cloak-wearing inventory computers who are persistently short-ordering their stock, and who can be confounded by the sudden appearance of a middle initial). But this is a big step, and it doesn't happen without heart-felt discussions between the author and their editor and/or agent.

(Full disclosure prompts me to reveal: my Merchant Princes books were nearly sold under a pseudonym, because of the degree to which they diverged from my other fiction. What finally stopped us going that way were the points that (a) I didn't need a new identity at that time, and (b) if either fiction track suddenly took off, selling lots of books, having them under different names would prevent follow-on sales going to the other.)

The book cover is not the author's job. In fact, the major imprints all have in-house book design departments with art directors to commission paintings, external contracts with professional photographers to commission back-flap author photos, and so on.

The job of the cover is to make a shopper pick the product up. Retail psychology studies indicate that shoppers are more likely to buy a product if they physically handle it, and this is as true in bookstores as it is in grocery or electronics stores. The cover design will therefore ideally be distinctive (to stand out from the crowd), colourful (to contrast with the crowd), and aesthetically appealing (ditto). Unfortunately these are all culturally variable and highly subjective. Fashion in book design is radically different between the USA and the UK, for example; the US market in SF at least is increasingly driven by saturated hues, while in the UK for a while the trend has been towards grainy monochrome, with one publisher going so far as to reissue an entire list of books with black and white covers.

There are exceptions, of course. Small presses involve the authors much more closely; I worked closely with the editor, publisher, and artist on refining a series of roughs to pick a final design for the Golden Gryphon editions of the first two Laundry novels, and although the book design was 100% Golden Gryphon house style, the cover artwork was a consensus decision. But if you're with a major publishing house, the first you will hear about your new cover is probably an email with a JPEG attachment saying, "hi, Charlie! Here's your new cover! All of us here at hte office think this is great! What do you think?"

(If you think this is just slightly passive-agressive, you would not be wrong. It is a well-understood constant of the publishing world that authors frequently hate their book covers so much that they feel compelled to bring Western Civilization to a crashing halt until they can get a minor detail — the heroine's hair colour, for example — changed. Ways of coping with this common problem have therefore been developed.)

NB: In a spirit of full disclosure, I have occasionally thrown my toys out of the pram over cover art. The worst three:

1) The US cover of "Halting State". Not the one you've seen on sale; the one I kicked up a fuss over was an earlier draft. Same design, but the police badge on the front cover was a Scotland Yard one, and it had the London Eye in the background. (Way to go for a Scottish crime/thriller, sort of like an LAPD police car parked in Time Square.) A fix was procured in the nick of time. (Lothian and Borders Police logo, and the Walter Scott Monument.)

2) The US cover of "Saturn's Children". I'd already played my "author objects to cover" card the previous year, and was overruled. I'm still conflicted about this cover. On the plus side, it's undeniably striking (and highly likely to get men of a certain age to pick it up). On the minus side, I've had mail from readers who bought a British copy, imported at great expense, because they were afraid of their partner's likely response.

3) The Czech cover of "The Family Trade". I'm told half the bookstores in Prague misfiled it under "romance". (As I mentioned earlier, authors going ballistic over their book covers is understood. When their agent joins in, publishers take it more seriously. We got the subsequent covers changed.)

The author's photograph on the dust jacket ... I have a lot more respect for the modelling profession after being on the receiving end of a five-hour photoshoot around the arse-end of a decaying naval warehouse in Boston in mid-February (for the cyberpunkish ambiance, according to the photographer). I've heard apocryphal stories of the Bad Old Days when unscrupulous publishers would substitute a photo of someone more attractive if they felt like it, but I don't know anyone that's actually happened to. I will note that it's a lot tougher for women; men in DJ photos are allowed to look middle-aged and slightly unkempt, but given what the purpose of a book's DJ is, you can figure out the sexist syllogism for yourself.

The blurb on the back cover/inside front flap ... they're usually written by someone in marketing, although I know at least one major publisher where the commissioning editor writes his own blurbs and runs them past the author for comment. The goal of the blurb is to convert the person handling the book from a handler to a purchaser; nothing more or less. It does not need to reflect the content of the book accurately, although most authors get awfully itchy and irritable in the presence of actively misleading blurbs. It shouldn't spoiler the contents if there's an element of surprise: this is one good reason for publishers to show marketing-written blurbs to authors before running with them. But that's all. The blurb is an advertisement, not a plot synopsis.

The review quotes on the back cover/inside the front matter ... obviously, good reviews are gold dust. But you don't need good lemons to make lemonade. If Kirkus Reviews say of a hardback "this was an exercise in meretricious misogyny, stunning in the depths of it's depravity", do not be surprised if you subsequently see a back-cover quote like this: "Stunning — Kirkus". (In general, the longer the quote, the more likely it is to accurately reflect the review. But see above about the purpose of a book cover.)

The author's biography on the inside back flap is entirely their own fault, but I will note that publishers are under no obligation to print one. Nor are they going to put much effort into updating a bio they've used on previous books, so don't be surprised if bios are a few years out of date. Or decades. Or full of lies. Whatever.

Anyway, as should be obvious by now, authors have little to no control over what goes on the cover of their books, because book covers are marketing tools. And if you're of a nasty disposition and want to needle an author at a public event? Here's your pin.

Blackwells have organized an evening launch for Ken MacLeod's new novel The Restoration Game at the Pleasance Theatre in Edinburgh (on The Pleasance), at 7pm on Wednesday the 17th. Tickets are free from the front desk at Blackwell Bookshop, 53—59 South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1YS.

Confusingly, the book in question isn't due out until July (these gigs are scheduled months in advance, so occasional whoopsies happen: in this case, the publication date slipped). But not to worry: Ken's doing a reading from "The Restoration Game", I'm doing a reading from "The Fuller Memorandum" (which is also not due out until July), and then there'll be a panel discussion on the state of Scottish SF chaired by The Scotsman's SF critic and reviewer Andrew J. Wilson. And there will be books on sale, a signing, and a retreat to the pub led by the survivors. Time traveling bibliophiles especially welcome.

My first author copies of "The Trade of Queens" arrived this morning; that's one of them, sitting on top of the pile of its predecessors on the step-stool. (Parenthetically, this means that copies should be showing up in warehouses and book stores over the next week, and in the mailboxes of folks who placed advance orders very soon thereafter.) The stack you're looking at is the culmination of eight years' work; I began work on these books in 2002, if I remember correctly. It's about 70-100 pages longer in total than "War and Peace". And I'd like to talk about them for a bit.

Back in early 2005, I wrote a somewhat cynical essay on an earlier incarnation of this blog, titled "Five rules for cold-bloodedly designing a fantasy series". Web rot and a change of publishing platform have made that essay somewhat hard to find, so I'm going to reproduce it in edited form right here (below the cut), with updates and further insights gathered on the road.

I don't normally run corporate press releases on my blog, or carry advertising — except insofar as the blog promotes my own writing. There's always a first time, though, and so here it is:

Cubicle 7 Entertainment to publish roleplaying game based on Charles Stross's Laundry Files novels

Cubicle 7 Entertainment is producing a roleplaying game based on the award-winning Laundry series (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, and the forthcoming The Fuller Memorandum) by the even-more-award-winning Charles Stross, and uses the also-award-winning Basic Roleplaying System (Call Of Cthulhu) by Chaosium Inc.

(For more details, keep reading below the fold. Meanwhile, here's the cover ...)

Publishing is a whole bunch of different businesses flying in loose formation; which is by way of saying that this particular topic is specific to commercial fiction publishing and has nothing to do with text books, technical reference manuals, autobiographies, or cookbooks.

Why are novels (the prevailing form of fictional entertainment on retail sale today) generally the length that they are?

I have a book coming out this month; "The Trade of Queens", the sixth novel in the Merchant Princes series, is shipping (the official publication date is the 16th, but it should be showing up in bookstores in the USA from Monday onwards). And the last, for the time being — if you've been holding off starting on the series because you wanted to know there was an ending in sight, this is it. Series climax: finale: fat lady sings.

(You can find links to buy my books — including all the Merchant Princes titles — here.)

While this is the last of the current cycle, I'm not ruling out writing more books in that universe — but I'm taking a couple of years of time out first, and if and when go back to there, it'll be with a new story and mostly new characters.

I'm still slightly gobsmacked that I actually managed to write (and more importantly finish) this thing; a multi-volume novel about 30,000 words longer than "War and Peace", with a political subtext about economic development and a marked lack of good guys. One of these days I'm going to bolt my thoughts about writing larger-than-novel-length fiction together. But not right now ...

(I'm going to try to keep this post a wee bit shorter than the preceeding ones, because they're eating into my writing time and, as Rule 2 of being a successful author goes, "paying words have priority". Rule 1 is "don't die", in case you were wondering. Not many people break that one and prosper.)

In CMAP #3 I dissected a book contract for the sale of US and North American English language rights. As you probably guessed from the words in front of "rights", other stuff gets sold separately by authors who have any choice in the matter.

As a sidebar to my current publishing shtick, The New York Times runs an article discussing the costs of ebook publication:

In the emerging world of e-books, many consumers assume it is only logical that publishers are saving vast amounts by not having to print or distribute paper books, leaving room to pass along those savings to their customers. ... But publishers also say consumers exaggerate the savings and have developed unrealistic expectations about how low the prices of e-books can go. Yes, they say, printing costs may vanish, but a raft of expenses that apply to all books, like overhead, marketing and royalties, are still in effect. All of which raises the question: Just how much does it actually cost to produce a printed book versus a digital one?

Lots of stuff here, including a few too many over-simplifications for my taste — but as I earn my living from this stuff (books) it's a topic rather closer to my heart than it probably is to yours.

However, here (for my money) is the most screamingly important bit:

"If you want bookstores to stay alive, then you want to slow down this movement to e-books," said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, a consultant to publishers. "The simplest way to slow down e-books is not to make them too cheap."

What Mr Shatzkin doesn't mention is that this strategy will fail. Keeping the existing distribution chain alive may be desirable, but not at the cost of growing the e-book distribution chain: if it results in e-book prices being kept artificially high, all it will achieve is to encourage e-book users to download unauthorized (pirated) copies. And as the music and film industry have demonstrated, DRM annoys the hell out of honest customers while not impeding dishonest ones — thus making the pirate download more attractive and useful as a product than the legal one.

It's a hideous dilemma for the publishers. What to do? Risk pissing off your existing distribution channel (the booksellers) before the e-book channel is big enough to be commercially viable, or convince your end-customers that you're as evil as the music and film industry?

I'd like to tackle two common misconceptions about publishing in this piece. Firstly, a lot of people who should know better — business journalists covering the publishing industry, for example — seem to think that authors sell the copyright on their books to their publishers. And secondly, a lot of readers think that if a book is available in print in the English language in, say, the United States, they ought to be able to buy it anywhere in the world. This might be true in a practical sense, but in a legal context it's anything but — and with more and more ebook readers trying to buy titles internationally and running slap-bang into software-enforced geographical blockades, it's time to explain why.

Unfortunately I'm not a lawyer. I'm going to invite a couple of folks with law degrees who specialise in intellectual property law to kick the tyres on this post, but it may still contain inaccuracies — if you're selling a book of your own you must not rely on me for legal advice because I'm not qualified to give it. Also? It's incomplete, and merely represents a worm's eye view of book contracts from the perspective of an author of commercially published genre fiction.

(And it's so damn long that I didn't want to clog the front page of my blog up with it. So to continue reading it click the link below ...)

It is a common misconception — to paraphrase a commenter in the previous post on common misconceptions about publishing, that "the only two people that matter are the author and the reader (one puts creativity in, the other money: the rest add cost)".

This is a bit like saying that in commercial air travel, "the only two people that matter are the pilot and the passenger (the rest add cost)". To which I would say: what about the air traffic controllers (who stop the plane flying into other aircraft)? What about the maintenance engineers who keep it airworthy? The cabin crew, whose job is to evacuate the plane and save the passengers in event of an emergency (and keep them fed and irrigated in flight)? The airline's back-office technical support staff who're available by radio 24x7 to troubleshoot problems the pilots can't diagnose? The meteorology folks who provide weather forecasts and advise flight planners where to route their flights? The fuel tanker drivers who are responsible for making sure that the airliner has the right amount of the right type of fuel to reach its destination, and that it's clean and uncontaminated? The designers and engineers at Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, or the other manufacturers who build the bloody things in the first place ...?

I hope you can see the point I'm trying to make. To be direct: a manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels.

Note the phrase "series of manuscripts". Small outfits like Golden Gryphon Press (who published the first two of my Laundry novels in hardcover) work on a handful of individual titles (in GG's case, 1-3) in any given year; each book gets special attention and is handled as a separate job. Larger publishers — be they recently-graduated-from-small-press outfits like Subterranean Press or operations like Tor operate on a production line basis. Tor publish 250-300 books a year. Each incoming manuscript goes through a series of production stages, and if there's a hold-up they lose their slot in the publication queue (unless the book is very, very special, for major-bestseller values of special).

What is the production workflow for a book by a professional author working under contract with a publisher?

1. The author writes a manuscript. Note: a manuscript is not a book. It's a bundle of pages of written text (or a text file on a computer: most big publishers these days insist, for no sane reason, on receiving a Microsoft Word 2003 .doc file — probably because it's the commonest format people use with support for italics, underlining, boldface, and headings). The author may suggest a title (the publisher doesn't have to accept their suggestion). The manuscript has been worked over and polished by the author to the best of their ability, but will inevitably contain typos, grammatical infelicities, continuity errors, factual errors, internal inconsistencies, and muddy bits where the author was typing on autopilot. (And these are the good, publishable manuscripts from authors with a track record. For some insight into how bad the bad stuff can get, read this and weep.)
2. The author or their agent send the commissioned manuscript to their editor. (I'll write about agents and acquisitions in a future entry.) Note: outsiders often have some strange ideas about what editors do. These days, an editor is a middle manager. Their job is, in conjunction with a marketing manager, to determine what titles to acquire for their list; to negotiate deliverables and deadlines with authors: to provide high-level guidance and feedback to authors: and to ride herd on the production pipeline so that Sales and Marketing receive each quarterly or triannual batch of new titles on schedule. Editors not infrequently enjoy editing, but there's a lot more to the job than that. Here's one editor's perspective on how you wind up in the job.)
3. The editor reads the MS. If it's in need of more work, they tell the author what they want doing. ("It needs a purple singing dinosaur and a surprise ending. Oh, and get rid of the DEATH guy, he's a downer.") But more often than not, they accept the manuscript. This notifies Accounting to pay the author (or their agent) the second tranche of the book advance (I'll talk about royalties, advances, and how authors make money in a future posting), the Delivery and Acquisition money. They then work out where to slot the MS into their production queue.
4. Marketing. In general, the marketing spend on a book is around 5% of the dollar value of the books the publisher expects to ship. It may be more if the publisher is trying to build this particular author's sales. An editor talks about marketing, including where the money goes. Note: this activity starts when the book is delivered, before it is published — but the budget is based on expected revenue which won't be known until the orders are in. So to some extent the degree of marketing push depends on the editor's (or marketing director's) best guess as to how well the book will do.
5. Scheduling. This is hammered out in the rough before the contract commissioning the book is even signed. Generally, large publishers like authors to deliver one MS per twelve months, like clockwork, because their production line is geared to turn manuscripts into published books in twelve months. However, the clock only begins ticking when the MS is accepted by the editor: so the editor looks at the calendar about 12 months ahead, works out where there's room to slot the book in — ideally in a month preceding the summer or pre-Christmas sales peak (if the book's likely to sell well) — then works backward to sort out when the various steps in the process must take place. Note that it doesn't take 12 months to produce every book — but 12 months is ample time to process the slowest book in the queue, by the recluse who doesn't use email, writes with a quill pen, and is always late reviewing the page proofs.
6. Copy editing. The MS is sent to an external copy editor (usually a freelance editor specializing in the genre in question). The copy editor's job is to keep the author from embarrassing themselves in public. To this end they need to regularize spelling and typography and nomenclature, spot inconsistencies and obvious errors, fix spelling mistakes, and telepathically read the author's mind to ensure that the manuscript reflects the author's pure and original intent rather than looking as if a barrelful of monkeys had a fight for ownership of the keyboard. Traditionally, copy editors work on a paper MS using red pencils to indicate their changes; larger publishers are now switching to all-electronic workflow, hence Word change tracking and notes. The result, a Copy-Edited Manuscript or CEM, is returned to the editor within 2-4 weeks.
7. The author reviews the CEM. (For some reason my publishers' editorial assistants seem to love to send me CEMs for review the week before Christmas, with a due-back deadline of January 4th. It's especially fun when two publishers pull this stunt simultaneously. Perhaps they think nobody loves me and I welcome the distraction ...?) Alas, copy editors are not, in fact, telepathic. Sometimes they get stuff wrong — rarely, they get lots of stuff wrong. So when the editor receives the CEM they bounce it to the author for review. The author can override the copy editor's changes and, if necessary, add corrections of their own. There are usually multiple changes per page — ranging from trivial stuff (serial comma policy at $PUBLISHER differs from author's usual style) to "you've referred to your hero as Joe sixteen times and Jim fourteen times in the MS — which is right?" The author typically has up to four weeks to review the CEM and return it to editorial. If it's on paper, the author must use a different colour of crayon from the copy editor, otherwise whackiness ensues. Electronic workflow involves change tracking and lots more irate marginalia, followed by hoping that Word or OpenOffice don't corrupt the file.
8. Advance Reading Copies. If the book is going to be promoted heavily, the editor arranges a production run of ARCs. These are trade-paperback-sized print-outs of the manuscript, sometimes with rudimentary typesetting, and a non-glossy cardboard cover. They go to reviewers (the lead time for a book review in Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, or another news outlet is several months), other authors (if a cover quote is being solicited), and sometimes to bookstore buyers to promote a title that's expected to sell well. Note that despite its crude appearance, an ARC costs a lot more to produce than a finished hardback — it's laser-printed and hand-bound, in small numbers, so not all books get ARCs. Someone — typically the office intern or editorial assistant — has to mail the ARCs out.
9. Book design, cover design, front and back flap copy, and cover artwork. The editor pulls together a description of the book and/or the original manuscript. These are used to brief the art director, who if necessary commissions an artist to produce a painting. (Cover paintings may not be necessary if the fashion is currently for abstract/design-driven covers in marketing.) The art director also works out a suitable cover design for the book. A marketing/blurb writing person/editor also writes the flap copy (the text on the back of the book that makes you want to read it). The goal of book design is to motivate shoppers unfamiliar with the author to pick the book up. Nothing more and nothing less. (Retail psychology tells us that shoppers who handle a product are more likely to buy it. Existing loyal fans will buy it anyway. So the book design is aimed at appealing to new readers.)
10. CEM delivered to Typesetting. Publishers these days own neither internal typesetting departments nor printing presses. What happens at this point is that the copy edited manuscript is sent to an external typesetting bureau, where a typesetter with a workstation running either Quark Publishing System or (increasingly, these days) Adobe InDesign sets up a Book project, imports the styles specified by the publisher's standard book design, and imports and reflows the CEM — making sure that all the changes are incorporated into the DTP file. If the book is still being produced with paper-on-pencil workflow, at this point the poor bloody typesetter has to go through it page by page entering manual corrections (and undoubtedly injecting new and creative errors of their own).
11. Marketing copy. The editor develops a pitch for the book that will motivate their marketing and sales force. At a company like Tor, internal meetings are held between editorial and sales several times a year, at which the editors present their new and forthcoming titles and explain their selling points, target audience, and special angles. The sales team then go forth and push the book at store buyers (who choose which titles to stock in retail store chains) and wholesale buyers (ditto for wholesale channels). The picture at other publishers may be different; for example Ace (part of Berkley publishing group, part of Penguin, turtles, recursion, etc.) have a smaller number of higher level marketers who liaise directly with the buyers for the big chains (Barnes and Noble, Borders). This stage is critically important, because the retail and wholesale buyers place their orders before the size of the print run is finalized.
12. Review page proofs. The typeset file is used to generate a PDF image of the book, as it will appear on paper. This is sent to editorial, who send a copy to the author and, hopefully, one or more proofreaders. At this point, the job of the author (and the proofreaders) is to correct errors introduced during the typesetting process, and possibly typos they didn't spot earlier — but not to make substantive changes. Again, around one month is allowed for reviewing page proofs and returning the marked-up chunk of dead trees (or an annotated PDF file, or a list of page/line number/error tuples) to editorial, who pass it back to the typesetters for fixing. (Parenthetical note: there is no such thing as a clean page proof. Authors are blind to their own persistent spelling idiosyncracies, typesetters get stuff wrong, and so on. But in general, the more eyeballs — and more proofreading passes — a set of proofs receive, the fewer errors will be left in the finished book.)
13. Collate advance orders and order the print run. The sales folks have spoken to the big chain buyers and wholesalers, who guess at how many books they can sell and place orders. If these are trade books they are sold typically on 90- or 120-days net credit, sale or return. (That is: if the bookseller orders a carton of 24 books, they must either return unsold stock or pay up the agreed wholesale price when invoiced after 90 or 120 days. So they're running on credit from the publisher.) If they are mass market books they are sold on net credit, but instead of being returned for credit, the wholesaler/retailer returns the stripped covers and pulps the book block. (Which means that MMPBs unsold after 90 or 120 days are treated like spoiled grocery stock. The mass market pipeline is absolutely insane, but it mirrors how magazines are sold; it was brought in during the 1930s/1940s to sell cheap paperbacks and arguably kept the publishing industry from collapsing, but today ... let's just say I haven't met anybody who's in favour of it. Note that although mass market paperbacks are all C-format in size, not all C-format paperbacks are "mass market" books; in the UK, the sale-or-strip channel died in the late 80s/early 90s, and today — as far as I know — all British C-format paperbacks are sold on sale-or-return terms.) On the basis of these advance orders, and experience which tells them how many extra copies to print for late orders/specialist stores, the publisher orders a print run from a print shop.
14. The print run: this is the moment of truth. (If the editor has coughed up a $100,000 advance against a 10% royalty on cover price, they need to ship $1M of books (cover price); if the advance orders add up to 2500 hardbacks, senior management are going to start asking difficult questions.) Some rough figures: a typical first SF/fantasy novel in hardback from a major US publisher will ship 3500-5000 copies. Anything over 10,000 is nudging towards the bestseller list; a fiction book that shifts 25,000 in its first month in hardcover is going to be in the New York Times top 20. Mass market paperback runs are much larger — 15,000-30,000 — but 25-50% will be pulped and the profit margin on them is vanishingly narrow compared to those juicy hardbacks. Oh, and the long tail applies: the top 3 on the New York Times bestseller list easily outsell the next 30 combined, and #4 to #30 combined probably outsell the next three million.
15. The printing process may include multiple stages: ordering of paper (different grades of paper have different properties and costs), then printing of book blocks (containing the pages of the books), trimming, printing of colour cover flats, folding and binding, or printing of signatures, stitching and trimming, binding, printing of dust jackets, and folding (depending on whether paperback or hardback, with variations depending on whether the hardbacks are saddle-stitched — as is still common in the US market — or perfect (glue) bound — as is the case for most British hardbacks). At least the old process of cutting photographic plates is obsolete; most commercial printers these days have machines that take in a properly imposed postscript or PDF image and act (from the user's point of view) like a gigantic Postscript printer (fed by barrels of ink and giant rolls of paper). It takes 2-4 weeks from ordering the print run to the shipping pallet of finished books to appear on the publisher's warehouse loading bay, depending on how busy the print shop and how complex the manufacturing process are.
16. Shipping. Someone in a warehouse has to ship out several hundred or thousand cartons of books to stores, and a smaller number of larger palletloads to wholesalers.
17. Invoicing and accounting. I'm going to tip-toe past this particular pit of festering insanity. Let's just say that if you're shipping to dozens of wholesalers, a handful of large bookstore chains, and literally hundreds of small bookshops, it gets hairy fast. (Multiply by 300 titles a year with an average in-print life of 5 years if you're someone like Tor.) Note also that the contracts the publisher signs with their authors dictate that the authors will be paid a royalty (percentage share of the proceeds) based on the number of books sold and the sales channel through which they are sold. The authors almost certainly have a contractual right to order a third-party audit if they think you're screwing with their figures. And if the figures are out, you (the publisher) pay for their audit, in addition to the money you owe then.

After I hand in an MS, I expect to do another 3-6 weeks' solid work on the book before it is published — mostly in the CEM-checking and page proof-checking stages. After I hand in the MS, I expect my publisher to put in ... well, Tor produce 300 books a year with 60 staff, so it's about ten person-weeks per book in house, but this doesn't include the external copy editor, proofreader, typesetter, printer, and other outsourced tasks, which probably double it again. Overall, the process of turning a manuscript into a book is estimated to cost $7000-$20,000 — an amount comparable to the author's likely earnings from the book. In fact, the actual division of labour on a book is split roughly 50/50 between the author and the publisher.

In summary, while it's true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I'd only be able to write half as many novels.

I'm back home, I'm over the jet lag (for now), and I'm looking for something to write about.

It struck me, reading the comments on my various postings about the Amazon v. Macmillan spat in January, that many people don't have the first clue about how the publishing business works — or even what it is. Publishing is a recondite, bizarre, and downright strange industry which is utterly unlike anything a rational person would design to achieve the same purpose (which I will loosely define for now as "put authors books into the hands of readers while making a profit, to the satisfaction of all concerned"). So over the next few blog entries I'm going to make some notes about what's going on ...

Misconception #1: The publishing industry makes sense.

Most discussions of publishing take it as axiomatic that there is a thing called the publishing industry and that the entities within it look similar and work pretty much the same way. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As an author of commercial science fiction and fantasy novels, which is a highly restrictive category I mostly deal with a very specific type of publisher: a mass-market commercial fiction publisher — as opposed to, for example, a University press, a small press, or a vanity press. (NB: the word "press" is often used to mean "publisher", even in this day and age when almost all publishers have outsourced the inky job of running a printer to someone else.) Here's how the mass-market commercial fiction publishers are structured:

At the top of the food chain, there are the big publishing conglomerates; companies like Holtzbrinck, Hachette Livre (itself the publishing arm of Lagardère Group), or News Corporation. You (as a reader) do not buy books from these people, and I (as a writer) do not sell books to these people. Rather, we interact with the publishing groups that they own. They're colossal multinationals, and during the 1980s they went on a buying spree, acquiring smaller (often family-owned or private) publishing companies in a giant game of publishing pokemon. Now they operate as an umbrella, setting goals and corporate policy. If you've wondered where the idiot push for DRM on ebooks comes from, it's from the top down — from the board level of companies that own film studios, communication satellites, newspapers, and a huge chunk of EADS — from executives who know next to nothing about the business of publishing commercial fiction (because it's usually below their radar).

At the level below the multinationals, we see the individual publishing houses owned by the dinosaurs; outfits like Little, Brown (owned by Hachette) or Penguin Group (owned by Pearson PLC). These are still large multinational organizations, but at least they're in the business of publishing books — fiction and non-fiction. Policies originating at this level usually make sense, from the point of view of a publishing industry executive who has risen to boardroom level through the industry during the 1970s to 2000s.

At the level below the multinational publishing houses, we see the individual imprints. Imprints are the vestigial remains of formerly-independent publishing companies, often family-owned or private, which were eaten by the big publishing houses during the takeover wave of the 1980s. Today they maintain a twilight residual existence within the cubicle farms and office suites of the publishing houses, because they're brand names recognized by the reading public. Ace Books, whose logo appears on the spine of my SF novels in the USA, is such an entity. Founded by Aaron A. Wyn in 1952, Ace published until his death in 1967; it continued with financial troubles for another five years before being sold several times, ultimately ending up as part of Berkley Publishing Group. If you turn to the bibliographic information page in one of my Ace novels, you'll see their name; they're another, somewhat larger imprint, existing within Penguin Group. These days, "Ace" is a brand name BPG stamps on their SF novels; "Roc" is the corresponding brand name they stick on Fantasy; "Berkley" goes on non-genre fiction (such as William Gibson's latest novels), and so on. Policies originating at this level come from editors and marketers who interact directly with customers and suppliers (authors), and usually make sense (when not overriden from higher up the pyramid).

So: for my American SF titles, I deal with the editor in charge of the Ace imprint, within the Berkley publishing group (division) within Penguin Group, which is owned by Pearson PLC (who also run educational software companies and publish The Financial Times). It's turtles all the way down!

But this is not how the publishing industry is structured. I've been lying to you, by over-simplifying. The truth is a lot more complicated. What I've outlined above is merely the hierarchical structure of the major commercial trade publishing houses.

In tomorrow's thrilling installment, I'm going to outline the alternatives to the big media conglomerates. And once I've got that out of the way, I can start describing just what it is that I do to earn a living — which, you might be surprised to know, is nothing to do with writing.