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Interview with Scott Doornbosch

I first met Scott Doornbosch in 2003.

I was at the Magna Cum Murder conference in Muncie, Indiana, waiting for the elevator with my buddy Robert W. Walker, ready to head up to my room for some Jack Daniels because the hotel bar was too expensive. Scott was standing there in the lobby, looking out of place, so I asked him if he wanted to join us for a shot of whiskey. He agreed, and has been following me from writing convention to writing convention ever since.

Whenever I ran into Scott, I hounded him to finish the book he was working on. I did this for eight years.

I'm happy to say that Scott's first novel, Basic Black, is now live for Kindle and Nook at $2.99, and in print via Createspace for $13.95.

Joe: Let's get the maudlin stuff out of the way first. You were recently diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma. What's the prognosis?

Scott: I started chemo in February but in April they told me it wasn't working. I just started a new treatment that was just approved by the FDA. My doctor has high hopes for this new drug. If anyone else out there is dealing with this same issue and needs to talk, they can always e-mail me at scottdoornbosch(at)aol.com

Joe: Where did you come up with the idea for this book?

Scott: This was actually supposed to be the third in the series, but after completing the first two I went with this one for the first book. I don't really know why for sure. I guess I just liked this story line the best for the debut novel.

Joe: How long did it take you to write Basic Black?

Scott: This book took 5 years to write and it's all your fault. After meeting you and partying at the conventions I let the writing slip. I was having so much fun and meeting so many wonderful people and so many personal obligations got in the way that I let the writing fall by the wayside. About a year ago I couldn't justify spending the money to keep going to all these conventions just to party. I decided it was time to either do it or give the whole thing up. At that point I really only had about 20,000 words. In less than two months I had added another 60,000 and was finished.

Joe: What is your feeling about self-publishing?

Scott: I am thrilled about self-publishing. I know many people might not consider me a real writer for going this route, but I'm very excited about the whole project. I had never given it much thought in the past, but after attending the last writing convention I thought about it more seriously and decided it was the way to go. Mainly because the publishers that were represented at the convention weren't for me. Not one of them were giving advances for the books, some of them weren't even interested in putting up a version on Kindle and there were so many other restrictions and limitations put on the writer that I didn't even bother to pitch my book to any of them at that convention. Then the more I heard about this route the more I was convinced. You of course were one of the first to convince me, but I also found many other authors I know doing the same thing now. I was amazed when I found out how many of them were turning down huge advances to publish their next books themselves.

Joe: Are you working on a sequel?

Scott: There is a sequel in the works called BLACK TIE AND TALES, but it still has a long way to go. Even though it was one of the first ones I wrote, I joined a writers group and found out that I had a lot to learn. So I am in the process of re-working it. That brings me to a bit of advice which was not part of the question but I feel I have to say it. Newbie writers have all heard this, but you really need to find a writers group. You will be amazed to find out how much you don't know. And yes, you need a writers group even though your mother told you your book is wonderful. If it wasn't for joining a writing group, BASIC BLACK would never have been in any shape to be published. Joe, you of all people know how bad that first draft was, and I thank you for not destroying my ego after reading it.

Joe sez: In the interest of full disclosure, I have a personal interest in this situation. When I heard about Scott's cancer, I knew there was a potential time issue involved. Holding your first book in your hands is one of the true joys of being a writer, but if Scott had pursued the legacy route, he might not have had that opportunity. Since he's getting creamed with medical bills, and had no knowledge of how to self-publish, I covered the cost of this and did everything for him, hiring a proof reader, formatter, cover artist, and layout artist. I did this without Scott asking me to, and he makes all the money from it.

I'm not admitting this to show the world what a generous guy I am. Scott simply needed someone to step-up and help.

You can help, too, by buying his book. Kindle and Nook for $2.99. Print for $13.95 via Amazon. Feel free to spread the word.

Scott's a dear friend, and not doing so well. Please keep the comments upbeat.

Published in Style Yourself !






Ça fait plus d'un an et demi que j'ai dû répondre à cette interview. Sinon voilà, lololol comme dirait la blonde.
À part ça, je ne suis pas obligée de vendre le bouquin, mais j'ai été surprise qu'il soit aussi bien ! Tous les vêtements sont listés, un peu comme une encyclopédie de la fringue, tout ça rythmé par des interviews de tête plutôt connues (même très) (me demande ce que je fous là avec un look pareil, d'ailleurs).
Vous pouvez le commander sur Amazon, et dans des librairies américaines, si vous êtes là bas.


Je vous laisse avec ma chanson de l'été, et je pars en vacances, mais les posts ne s'arrêtent pas, vive le wifi et le post à retardement.


Attack of the Self-Publishing Memes! - A Guest Post by Barry Eisler

Barry Eisler has posted a number of smart comments on this topic here and on a few other blogs, too, and I asked him if he'd mind pulling them together in a single post. It was either that or another online conversation, and since we can't seem to do those in under 10,000 words and both have books to finish, this seemed the better bet.

Here's Barry:

Thanks, Joe, for the opportunity to pull together some of my thinking on literary agents helping authors self-publish. I see two primary false memes that have emerged in response to agents offering their clients new services. These are: (i) such agents are now publishers; and (ii) the new model creates a conflict of interest with the old. Let me address these in turn.

1. Are agents who assist their self-published clients now really publishers?

The problem here is that many people are conflating two business models: those in which literary agencies are trying to acquire rights in authors' works, as publishers always have; and those that acquire no rights, and instead simply facilitate their clients' self-publishing efforts.

We're still in the early days of digital publishing, and it's natural that there's some confusion about what makes a "publisher." Most of what people associate with a publisher -- editing, marketing, distribution -- are the artifacts, not the essence. The essence of publishing is control of rights.

For the reasons Joe and I discussed in Part 3 of our online conversation Be The Monkey, Amazon's Thomas & Mercer is no legacy publisher. But there's no question that T&M is, in fact, a publisher, because the company is buying the rights to the books it sells. By contrast, no matter who she chooses to hire to assist her in getting her works to readers, an author who retains rights to her works is self-published. And the company she hires to help her is not a publisher.

There's been some silliness along the lines of, "But if the agent uploads your book, she has to have rights to it, and if she has rights to it, she is a publisher, QED!" As David Gaughran has ably pointed out, if this is true, then Smashwords is a publisher. They're not: they're a distributor with a limited right to upload and to collect and distribute the author's earnings. They acquire no rights to a book beyond these and an author can pull his book from Smashwords at any time. For that matter, Amazon and B&N acquire certain rights in the books they distribute, too. So far, I haven't heard anyone make the claim that by ceding those rights, self-published authors have turned Amazon and B&N into their publishers.

http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/major-us-agency-moves-into-publishing-or-do-they/

As the copyright holder, an author can transfer all sorts of rights. It's important to keep them straight in one's mind, and to remember that rights to upload files and to collect money, especially when revocable at the author's discretion, are not the same as publishing rights. For more, see Joe's post on J.K. Rowling's decision to self-publish her ebooks (and the comments to that post).

(Joe sez: Also, we can rightly assume that Amazon has worked with literary agents in various deals. A lit agent could upload ebooks to Amazon for a writer without the writer relinquishing rights.)

2. Are agents who assist their self-published clients faced with a conflict of interest?

Let's start with a definition. According to Wikipedia, "A conflict of interest occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest

It's hard to see how this applies to an agent who in neither the legacy nor the self-published model acquires rights, and who in both instances earns the same percentage. As long as the agent makes the same 15% whether brokering a sale to a legacy publisher or assisting the author publish the work herself, the agent is incentivized to recommend the route that looks most likely to make the author the most money. So no multiple interests, or at least no more so than has been the case with traditional agenting. Or, to get back to the precise definition of the term, no "multiple interests" in the additional model, nor any way in which one aspect of the business "could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other."

Full disclosure, so that people can judge for themselves whether I have my own conflict here: Laura Rennert of the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, which is also assisting its clients who want to self-publish with a 15%, no-rights-acquisition model, is my wife.

Here's a thought experiment I hope will lead to some more clarity on this issue. Imagine you're an author, and you have offers of representation from two literary agencies that are identical in all respects save one: one will assist its clients in reaching readers only by attempting to sell its clients' works to legacy publishers; the other will assist its clients in reaching readers by attempting to sell its clients' works to legacy publishers *and* will also help clients self-publish their works if their clients so desire.

Which offer do you accept?

Unless you're sure that: (i) you will never self-publish anything; or (ii) that even if you do, you will handle it all yourself, I think it's pretty clear that you'd go with the agency that offered you the more complete set of services.

Or, to put it another way: which of the two hypothetical agencies I describe above would a writer want for representation as legacy publishing contracts? The one that says, "Sorry, we can't sell your manuscript because there are so few buyers?" Or the one that says, "We can't sell your manuscript because there are so few buyers, but we can help you another way?"

I have a hard time imagining agents nefariously trying to steer their clients to a new model whereby the agent's percentage is the same, but where there is no advance, where the agent has to invest significant additional time and her own money, and where there is no certainty of a return on the investment except perhaps in the very long term. So if anything, I think people might argue that agents who offer both models might be tempted to steer their clients toward a traditional deal because it represents a relatively quick and easy payday. But would this be a conflict of interest? An interesting question, because it ignores the fact that this is what agents have always done simply by default. Still, self-published authors, beware! Your agents might be trying to steer you toward legacy deals.

Actually, I'd go even further (and for this point I'm indebted to Livia Blackburne, who shared this thought at Writer Beware). The real conflict of interest arises when an agent with a single, legacy model has to advise a client who is considering self-publishing. Where do writers think they're likely to get the most disinterested advice: from an agent who can only make money if she sells the writer's manuscript to a legacy publisher and who stands to make nothing if the writer self-publishes it? Or from an agent that stands to make 15% either way?

http://tinyurl.com/3dmckyq

So upon further consideration, I do think that today there is a potential conflict of interest in agenting. It exists among those agencies who can only make money by directing their clients toward legacy deals.

Part of the basis for the conflict of interest misunderstanding is a misunderstanding about the nature of the agent's role. As Victoria Strauss has argued at Writer Beware, "[T]he author-agent relationship... is founded on the premise that the agent's job is to sell the client's work for the best possible advance to the best possible publisher."

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2011/06/agencies-becoming-publishers-trend-and.html

I would argue that this is defining the author/agent relationship premise too narrowly. Most fundamentally, the purpose -- the end -- of the agent is to help authors get their books to the greatest number of readers and achieve the greatest possible commercial and literary success. The means by which this end has traditionally been achieved is a sale to a legacy publisher. Because the "sale to a publisher" route has until quite recently been the only means to the "getting the book to the greatest number of readers and achieve the greatest possible commercial and literary success" end, it's easy to conflate the two. But just as railroads were not in the railroad business, but rather were in the transportation business, agents are not in the "selling to publishers" business, but rather are in the "helping their authors reach the greatest number of readers and achieve the greatest possible commercial and literary success" business. Agents who miss this fundamental distinction are making the same mistake the railroad companies made, and will achieve similar results.

The saddest thing about these false memes is that they distract from the real and important questions writers need to grapple with: exactly what are agencies going to provide in their new models, and will those services be worth 15%? Whether 15% is worth it is something authors and agencies will have to decide for themselves (I think David Gaughran is asking excellent questions in this regard, and Joe and I talk about it much more in Be The Monkey). But whether a service is worth providing or worth retaining at a given price is a question for the market to decide. It has nothing to do with conflicts of interest, or with the inherent value of agencies finding news ways to assist their clients reach the greatest number of readers and achieve the greatest possible commercial and literary success.

http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/major-us-agency-moves-into-publishing-or-do-they/

There's more to say, but I gotta get back to The Detachment (out September 15, BTW ;) ). But just one last observation. It strikes me that the "If you hire someone to help you run your business, you're no longer self-publishing" meme is the mirror image of the "If you don't go with a legacy publisher, you're uploading unedited schlock" meme. Each is driven less by thought and evidence than by ideology and a weird form of narcissism. Which might be a common reaction in all revolutions, not just in the one we're witnessing in publishing.

http://tinyurl.com/3vntzj6

Joe sez: As I said in the comments of my last blog post on this topic, it's good to be skeptical. But it's also good to keep an open mind until all the facts come it. In other words, don't knock it until you (or someone you trust) has tried it.

I'm trying it. My agent will manage one of my self-pubbed properties. I'll report on how it goes, good or bad.

Until then, let's try to reserve judgement. Anything else is specious.

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Shutter Love Tuesdays | Just for Kids

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This picture was taken by my oldest daughter. You may have seen these pics in a previous post about fun with dirt. All of those pics were taken by her. They were so proud of all of their creations. Every time they made a new one, they asked for my camera (cell phone camera, lol) They actually told me I needed to share this on my blog. So cute! And I have to say, for the very first photo she took, this was cool. Unedited, this angle is great! Good job baby!
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Estributors Redux

About 18 months ago, I was looking at the rapidly evolving ebook climate, and realized the need for a new type of service for authors. A facilitator who could be a buffer between the author and the business end of self-publishing.

I called this position an estributor.

The more I began to self-publish, the more I realized what a time suck it was to take care of all the non-writing parts of the job. When you go indie, you essentially become a small business, and take on all the responsibilities for running that business. That cuts into writing time. Doing quick and dirty assessment of my time management and my productivity, I concluded that I could make more money if I gave an estributor 15% to take care of the business side for me, because my increased writing output would more than make up for that cost. Plus, I'd be happier, because I'd much rather write for a living than run a business.

So it pleased me to learn that my agents, Dystel & Goderich, have begun to assume this position. Here's their latest blog entry:

Word gets around the publishing industry pretty quickly (which is not surprising since we’re in the communications business). So, we wanted you to hear our news from us first rather than pick it up through inaccurate scuttlebutt in seedy back rooms on the web.

As those of you who’ve been reading this blog for the last few years know, we have been following developments in e-publishing with great interest. As an agency that has prided itself on being a bit of a maverick among the stodgy old guard, we have always been more intrigued than scared about this new world of e-books. The consensus among us, even after listening to the doomsayers, has been that e-publishing will re-energize our business and create more readers. That’s right, instead of bemoaning the death of publishing as we know it, DGLMers have always felt that e-books and electronic media offer a tremendous opportunity to expand our reach and that of our authors.

That said, we have been very clear all along that we are literary agents. We are proud of the job we do, the services we provide, and the help we’ve given to countless authors over the years in fulfilling their dreams of publishing their work. We are also more cognizant than most of the superb work traditional publishers have done and continue to do in producing beautiful, lasting, quality books.

Over the past months and years we’ve come to the realization that e-publishing is yet another area in which we can be of service to our clients as literary agents. From authors who want to have their work available once the physical edition has gone out of print and the rights have reverted, to those whose books we believe in and feel passionately about but couldn’t sell—oftentimes, after approaching 20 or more houses—we realized that part of our job as agents in this new publishing milieu is to facilitate these works being made available as e-books and through POD and other editions.

Right now, you’re thinking, oh, DGLM is going to be another of those agencies that has decided to become an e-publisher and charge clients whose books they can’t sell 50% of their income for the privilege of uploading their work. Some of you may be mumbling, “Uh…that’s a conflict of interest.” We get it and we understand how that can be the perception. However, we have no intention of becoming e-publishers. As we said above, we have too much respect for the work that publishers do and too much respect for the work we ourselves do to muddy the waters in such a way.

Again, what we are going to do is to facilitate e-publishing for those of our clients who decide that they want to go this route, after consultation and strategizing about whether they should try traditional publishing first or perhaps simply set aside the current book and move on to the next. We will charge a 15% commission for our services in helping them project manage everything from choosing a cover artist to working with a copyeditor to uploading their work. We will continue to negotiate all agreements that may ensue as a result of e-publishing, try to place subsidiary rights where applicable, collect monies and review statements to make sure the author is being paid. In short, we will continue to be agents and do the myriad things that agents do.

Our intention is to keep on trying to find books we think we can sell to traditional publishing houses, to negotiate the best deal (always), and to give our authors as many options as we can. Because we will continue to be commission-based, we will not be automatically pushing authors into e-publishing. Again, we want to give our authors options and empower them to do what they set out to do all along: have their work read by the largest possible audience.

We are excited about this new part of our business and hope you will be as well. We welcome your thoughts, comments, and concerns.

Joe sez: I'm going to be working with my agents on my upcoming novel, Timecaster Supersymmetry. My goal is to finish the book, then let someone else handle all the heavy lifting.

Some people think it's a bad idea to give away any percentage of income, and that paying a flat fee is smarter. Perhaps. But my hope is that working with D&G will provide me with ongoing support, rather than a one-time service. If I were to pay a fulltime employee for ongoing support, I don't see any difference between that and paying an estributor a royalty percentage. In both cases, I'm paying for a lifelong service. And, as I'd already established, if this allows me to write more, it will be worth the money to me.

Naturally, I'll keep my blog readers posted on how this arrangement is working out. I also invited D&G to visit this blog and answer any questions anyone might have.

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