And the book industry goes kablooie...or not

So Macmillan is moving from a "retail model"* (with a 50/50 revenue split) to an agency model (with a publisher-70/bookseller-30 split) in its relations with booksellers (and other publishers are quickly following suit), and the entire book-blogging community is flipping out. "This will mean higher ebook prices across the board," bemoans Jane of Dear Author. "But authors will earn less if their books are listed at $14 than if they're listed at $25.99 and discounted to a sawbuck by Amazon!" wail others. And dozens upon dozens of readers insist that "Macmillan just lost themselves a customer!"

*For those of you wondering, I employed quotation marks because since the 1930s, bookselling has been a gruesome marriage of retail and consignment. In a true retail model, retailers own the merchandise they buy from manufacturers and set the sale price at whatever they think the market will bear. If the merchandise doesn't sell, the retailer is stuck with it, and either shifts it to a liquidator or puts it on clearance--often for less than wholesale--because recovering some of their investment is better than nothing. In a consignment model, the providor of goods sets the consumer sale price, and if the item doesn't sell it either sits there unsold forever, or the consignment broker simply returns it to the owner, no harm no foul.

In bookselling, retailers are not stuck with unsold books. Those books are either returned to the publisher for full credit (in which case the publisher can remainder them to recover some of their losses), or stripped and pulped and the covers returned to the publisher for full credit (in which case, the publisher swallows a total loss on them). So for the retailer, bookselling embodies all the benefits of retail and none of the risks, and for the publisher, all the risks of consignment--and more, in the case of mass market paperbacks--and none of the benefits. Sweet deal for bookstores, no?

Like income tax--which was brought in to help compensate for economic stressors that were temporary--this hybrid consignment/retail model was created as an interim measure to help bookstores stay afloat in the Great Depression. And like income tax, we're still stuck with it, long after the initial conditions demanding its creation have passed. Frankly, this is not a situation that could have continued indefinitely. If publishers were to survive in an increasingly tight market, something had to give.

Like most industries undergoing a paradigm shift, there are some who will claim the sky is falling. And maybe it is.

But me? I'm not that worried. Certainly this news would dismay me more if I were a Macmillan author, but as an ebook reader and an ebook author, I'm pretty sanguine about the whole debacle. Here's why.

None of this is going to affect the way I purchase books, or negatively impact the publishers to whom I'm willing to submit my work.

With one glaring exception, I've never paid more than $8 for an ebook, and have never, ever bought an ebook that was priced higher than it's lowest-priced print version, so this move isn't going to affect my options as a reader one bit. To my knowledge, I have never bought a Macmillan ebook--if I have, it was priced under $7. The $9.99 ebook has never been an option for me, nor will it ever be one. So I couldn't care less if Macmillan books sell for $9.99 or $109.99, they weren't getting my money before, and they ain't getting it now unless the price comes down.

The publishers who got my money before will still get my money (a bigger share of it, in fact, if they also embrace the agency model with a 70/30 split), and the publishers who didn't won't unless they lower prices. And despite my strict personal policies on ebook purchases, there are plenty of ebooks available to me (and about 35 of them are sitting on my Sony right now, waiting for me to get to them). This is because no matter how bugfuck, baffled and blind most traditional publishers are about ebooks, there are a few out there (like Baen and HQN) who mostly know what they're doing and are cashing in on that knowledge.

As an ebook author published with a house that understands the market and the consumers who drive it, this shift in the marketplace is a net gain for me. The traditional publishers (like Baen and HQN) who understand their readers, will thrive. Those who don't and continue to refuse to learn, will falter. If, as Jane insists, ebooks from trad-pubs will only go up in price, well, the more $15 ebooks there are out there, the more attractive my own publisher's books will be to readers. I certainly can't see publishers like Samhain suddenly raising cover prices to $15. Just because Macmillan jumps off a bridge doesn't mean publishers with brains will join them.

Amazon's insane discounting of insanely priced ebooks from insanely clueless publishers has only subsidized their insanity and cluelessness and allowed it to perpetuate. It helped publishers like Macmillan with their ludicrous $25.99 ebooks to compete effectively in a market filled to brimming with smaller, smarter publishers who actually know what the fuck they're doing. Those smaller, smarter publishers have suffered because Amazon's deep discounting was making the biggies' products more attractive to consumers than they should have been. By discounting those Macmillan ebooks, Amazon was both subsidizing their stupidity, and making it harder for the good guys to get the attention they deserve.

Without Amazon absorbing losses that should have been borne by publishers and their dumb-assed pricing strategies, the products of publishers like Baen, HQN, Loose Id, Samhain, and others will have a better chance to shine, and idiots like Macmillan will either wise up or their ebooks will fail.

This system will benefit the publishers who get it right, and penalize those who willfully continue to get it all wrong.

And me, I'm just sitting back and smiling at the thought of walnut-brained, traditional publishing dinosaurs either evolving or going extinct, while the small, agile mammals of the epublishing age flourish. And I'm thanking my lucky stars I'm with a publisher who has eyes to see and a brain to think with when it comes to the digital market.

I don't have to boycott Macmillan. No one does. Just keep on keeping on, insisting on value before you hand over your money, and it will all come out in the wash.

Wait for it...wait for it....um...a little longer...

...and there it is. Delux_vivens says:

is it just me, or are these women complaining almost exclusively about not getting recognition for their m/m writing, and not talking about any f/f writing

Finally. Someone other than me, in this whole insane shitstorm that is the Lambda rule-change imbroglio, noticed. Granted, it's way down the line of comments, but it's there.



Disclaimer: You'll have to forgive any incoherence, clumsy sarcasm and incomprehensible logic on my part--I've got a miserable cold at the moment and am a little...buzzed on T-1s, Sleepytime tea and nasal spray--and also my ranty tone. I'm peeved. And I'm not sure why.



I posed this question at Dear Author last week during the big freaky Lambda Award comment debacle:

Would we be having this debate if the Lambdas had been inundated with a buttload of f/f (not calling it lesbian, because IMO not all f/f IS lesbian even when it’s written by women, TYVM) written by straight men and that’s why they were changing their rules? Would anyone here think angry straight guy writers had a leg to stand on?

...and I've been thinking about privilege, fetishism, the concept of allies and my own largely self-serving advocacy for bi-female slanted romance. Something in the OP--and lord knows I don't always agree with what Jane has to say about stuff--really got me:

With m/m romance written by women for women, you have ostensibly one power group writing for the, as someone else put it, “consumption and excitement” of the power group but not for the benefit of the oppressed group. I.e., I think I would be offended if white women were writing about African American romance but for white women and making money off of it. This is not to say that white women can’t write about characters of other races but that when you write your work to the exclusion of the minorities, it seems exploitative.

Um, yes it sometimes does. I think in many ways, the only thing that makes the LGBT community okay with m/m slash written by and for women is the relatively equal footing straight women and gay men share. Gay men have male privilege, but they're gay. Straight women have straight privilege, but they're women. Hence the age-old camaraderie between these two groups.



And I'll say I'm much more comfortable with female fetishism of Greek billionaires ("Harelquin HQ says we need more rich Greek dudes with punishing kisses! Get writing, stat! We have books to move!") or vampires (super-strong, live forever, and well hung? How much more privileged can you get?) or cowboys (dudes, they have guns. If they've got a problem with our fetish, they'll let us know), than their fetishism of gay men.



And however uncomfortable I am with the issues of appropriation and fetishism as pertains to m/m, I'm an order of magnitude more uncomfortable with the way f/f is treated by straight men--because there is no equal footing. Straight guys, almost to a man, don't care about getting it right (or even getting it human) because they don't have to--lesbians and bi-women are dually marginalized. They ain't men, and they ain't straight. If lesbo porn gets everything wrong wrong wrong, and is populated by blow-up dolls with three-inch swords growing out of their fingertips who care more about getting naked than getting to know one another, and more about camera angles than eating pussy with skill, well, the men like it fine, and that's all that matters, right?



And when I read The Comment by delux_vivens--whom I don't know from Adam (or Eve)--something in my head went all kablooie. And I'm only now--after boring (or infuriating) you all with this drug-induced post--figuring out why. I had a reply all written out, but then I realized I had no idea who delux_vivens was, or who any of the folks commenting were, or what the hell I was even DOING in LJ, since that place is like a bizarre quasi-steampunk alternate universe only without all the nifty scrollwork and cool clothes, so I C&Ped it and I'm putting it here:



F/F writing? In a discussion of LGBTQ fiction? Surely you can't be serious.


If lesbian lit is that social misfit, unpopular kid you had to invite to the party because her mom is friends with your mom, who gets a condescending pat on the head and exclamations of "Oh, you're writing one of *those* stories? Isn't that nice dear," then f/f with a bi slant is the girl who gets freaking snubbed the moment she walks in the room, followed by whispers of "OMG, I can't believe SHE showed up! No one even pretends to like her! Slut."


I've heard plenty of people say they haven't seen homophobia among the m/m community. Maybe they haven't been hanging out in discussions filled with readers advocating for mainstreaming m/m romance, but "OMG, f/f? No no no no. I mean, what if I accidentally *bought* one? ::shudder:: If I came across an f/f scene in a romance, I'd rip out the pages! ::gag::"


Readers like that aren't allies--they're fetishists. They're no different from the most rednecky, ramrod straight guy who votes against same-sex marriage because "all those queers are going straight to hell", then goes home to watch all-girl mudwrestling.



Yeah. I'm irritated. I'm starting to understand where my umbrage is coming from. It's coming from the fact that there are a buttload more straight men out there producing f/f than there are women.



Gay and bi-male erotic/romantic fiction has a long history of being written by gay and bi-male men. It's only now that the number of women m/m authors is being perceived as a threat (or hordes upon hordes of competition) by the arbiters of the LGBT lit community.



Lesbian and bi-female erotic/romantic fiction has a long history of being written by...whom? Half the lesbian and bi-female writers I know of write m/m and m/m/f, often to the exclusion of anything else.



If you totalled up all the f/f and f/f/m written by women, straight and not so straight, if you stacked those books one on top of the other, it wouldn't even cast a shadow on the mountain of lesbo porn DVDs and girl-on-girl erotica and voyeuristic mainstream media crap produced by and for men. F/F and f/f/m has become so...colored by the straight guy brush that some lesbian and bi-female authors I know have told me they won't write it because it's like standing in a room full of two-way mirrors and stripping down until even your soul is on the outside--and not knowing if the people on the other side of the glass are women like you who see and understand and appreciate everything about you, or a bunch of guys wondering "Dude, why isn't she playing with her tits? I want her to play with her tits. Is there a microphone in here?"



And so many female authors (even ones who don't gag at the thought of two girls kissing) still won't touch f/f (or even m/f sometimes) because they don't want to deal with feminist/women's issues (a fallacy--if you can create a SFF universe where everyone's OK-homo, you can create one where women are equals--or superior!). They prefer the male as a character template, because he's not bogged down with "gender politics". Or he's strong and honorable and dynamic, and of course, women can't be any of those things. Or maybe they don't find a woman interesting enough, except as she relates to a man (or two, heh).



From kaigou on that DA comment thread:

Tangentially, I’ve always found it more than a bit problematic that the LGTQ community, like its cousin the het community, figures that a woman attracted to other woman who’s currently with a man is really just ‘hot for chicks to turn on [her] boyfriend’ — as though a woman’s sexuality, and her exploration of it, exists only within scope of her boyfriend’s interests. I mean, obviously, if my spouse didn’t dig two chicks together, then I wouldn’t find women attractive! Because my sexuality exists only to please him.

I guess it really is a man's world, right?



I don't know what I'm trying to say here, except that I'm disappointed that yet again, a discussion of LGBT fiction has been all about the guys. And I don't know if any of this long-ass, wandering, tangentially-challenged post makes any sense, because it hardly makes sense to me. I mean, if the LLF is trying to keep m/m for women from turning into f/f for men--well, they can stand there with their figurative finger in the...ah, dike, but the tsunami is coming. And I'd guess, considering the traditional straight woman/gay man camaraderie, it will be a kinder, gentler tsunami than the one that washed over f/f at the dawn of time and left a mess of mud-covered strap-ons, broken acrylic nails and empty bottles of lube on the beach.



And part of me--the really mean, snarky, NyQuil-impaired part--is ready to say the hell with it. What do I care if gay men are being fetishized? Hell, sauce for the goose, you know. If you can't beat 'em, beat their less privileged brethren instead.



So that's it. I give up. All the straight guys want to see chicks doing each other. All the gay men and all the straight women and half the queer ones want to see guys doing each other. I can't change the world. Why bother toiling away in obscurity writing stuff only a handful of freaks like me want to read--stories about actual really-and-for-true women who have conversations and feelings and souls and who also like to get it on with other women?



So if you all want me, I'll be standing in a dark room behind a two way mirror, looking in on two guys and saying "Dudes, they're still talking! Why aren't they fucking yet? Is there a microphone in here?"