Just like in other media markets, there are the major players and independent counterparts. In publishing, the Big Six are the entrenched, powerful entities, the “majors” if you will. But independent publishers, when viewed as a group, are a major power unto themselves.

What Constitutes an Independent Publisher?

By definition, an independent publisher is any publishing company that operates on a traditional business model – where the money flows to the author – but is not owned by another company. That is, an independent publisher is not an imprint, nor an arm of another company. Independent publishers function in much the same fashion as an imprint of the Big Six, albeit on smaller scale.

The Indie Stereotype

There are some common qualities associated with independent publishers – they’re open to riskier content, they are willing to take the time to develop an author’s career, they’re specialized. However, these qualities are at best stereotypes, and the sheer number of independent publishers (which account for almost half the books published annually) make any exceptions almost as common as those that prove the rule.

However, the sheer number of independent publishers mean that there are options available to meet many needs. There are publishers that exist for nearly every imaginable genre and sub-genre. As well, there are regional publishers, micro-publishers, and electronic-only publishers. Some are more risk averse, others are only willing to buy sure things. Some have a long and storied history, others are crop up to meet a need and only release one or two books.

The Indie Hope

For an author, independent publishers provide another avenue for publication, with many accepting unsolicited submissions, something that’s virtually unheard of at imprints of the Big Six. They come with upsides and downsides that differ with each publisher, but for an author the more options  the better.

I’d like to assemble a list of stable independent publishers, so if you have a favorite or favorites, let me know.

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Fully unleashed kinetic energy

The Law of Conservation of Energy states, in layman’s terms, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Rather, it can only shift states between potential and kinetic. It’s a law that adds a sort of poetic balance to the universe and has equally contributed to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (E=mC^2) and Moby’s electro-pop song “We Are All Made of Stars”.

Essentially all mass is stored energy, and all energy is mass that has realized its potential. If we view the universe as a closed system, then all the energy and all the mass equal should always equal out to the same theoretical number.

But what, pray tell, does this have to do with fiction writing theory? Well, what is drama, the action of a story, other than a form of driving energy? In fact, if you swap out the word energy for drama in the above law, an interesting theory manifests.

The Theory of Conservation of Drama – drama can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only shift states between potential and kinetic.

Just like the universe, a story is essentially a closed system. Stories themselves can be broken down into further systems – chapters, scenes, paragraphs. And each of these systems is made up two types of drama – the kinetic drama of action, of events, and the potential drama of characters, motivations, and foreshadowing. Potential drama explodes into kinetic drama in numerous ways, and kinetic drama likewise produces new potential drama.

Granted, this is just a theory. I’m not considering any math or asserting that there is a perfect ratio of potential drama to kinetic drama lest this theory turn into a graph to be torn out of text books ala Dead Poet’s Society. But this particular line of thought did get me to some questions:

• In a story, does the potential and kinetic drama exist in harmony, each leading into and out from each other?
• Does a significant kinetic drama event, a plot explosion, require a significant amount of potential drama from foreshadowing?
• Do quieter stories require less potential drama to account for smaller moments of kinetic drama? Or do they require more, to balance it out?

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What exactly is a platform?

The traditional definition of a platform is a position of authority through which a defined community can be reached. This typically revolves around being a subject matter expert, or clearly recognized expert.

Photo by Vicky S

Prior to the social media craze, authors with platforms could be easily recognized by the number of ways that the author directly interacted with his or her personal community. Niche-popular personal websites, heavily subscribed email lists, and keynote speaking positions were all strong indicators of an author with a platform.

For non-fiction writers, the Internet is huge boon for building a platform, allowing writers to tap into, and gain recognition in, the niche the author is hoping to sell to. The community, likewise, is able to test the writer’s credentials through their smaller ideas based on the subject at hand, the passion of the niche.

Fiction writers, however, don’t have it so easy. For us, platform building is a chicken and egg conundrum. Why? Because being recognized as an expert in fiction writing requires a platform built on readers, and building readers requires having written something published. If you need a platform to get published, and you need to be published to build a platform, what’s a storyteller to do?

Think community, not platform

There is a marked difference between a writer with a community and a writer with a platform. With a platform, the vast majority of information flows along a broadcast model – that is, the person with the platform speaks to the community, but information rarely flows in the opposite direction. In contrast, modern communities use the same dynamic as all past communities, they live and die on conversations, equal parts speaking and listening.

Thankfully, we live in an age of fluid, ad hoc communities. That might sound like a lot of marketing speak, but think about it this way – prior to 1994, communities were bound largely by geography. While we each engaged in multiple communities, the commonalities were based on locations – school, work, church, the neighborhood bar – first and interests second.

Digital community are almost always exclusively based on interest, and travels with those involved to the location of the moment, freed from even a single website. This makes a community members harder to track, as they move between locations in both the physical and digital realms, but also makes these communities more powerful, as an idea that really takes root can seem to spring into popularity in a number of places almost simultaneously.

How to build a community

There is only one rule for building a community – be involved. You don’t need to be the center of attention, don’t need to be the most popular, don’t need to be the one always speaking. Instead, focus on becoming a contributing and positive member. Think quality, not quantity.

After all, as a writer, you’ve got a huge advantage in the digital realm. While audio and video might control the lion’s share of the sexy hype, the written word is by far the dominate force. So, go out, write and connect with others based on interest. Focus on quality relationships over quantity. Be a positive contributor and the community will build itself.

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The term “The Big Six” is commonly used on blogs and within publishing circles to talk about the six largest publishers in the industry. Each of the big six publishers has a collection of imprints, or smaller publishing houses, that reside with relative autonomy within the larger publishing umbrella.

Here’s a quick overview of just who the Big Six are where they fit in the modern corporate world.

Hachette Book Group

Formerly Warner Books (of Time Warner), Hachette was acquired by Hachette Livre, itself a subsidiary of the French media conglomerate Lagardère Group. The publisher is known for a few of its larger imprints – Little, Brown & Company and Grand Central.

HarperCollins

Owned by Ruper Murdoch’s News Corp, HarperCollins is the combination of two other publishing companies (William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd and Harper & Row). Both Harper and Collins were founded in the early 19th century. Today, HarperCollins has around fifty imprints, covering just about every imaginable publishing niche from all over the world.

MacMillan Publishers Ltd

Founded in 1843 by Daniel and Alexander MacMillan, the company is now currently owned by the German Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Residing in the New York City’s Flatiron building, the MacMillan imprints run the gamut from commerical fiction (St. Martin’s Press) through speculative fiction (Tor) and strong literary fiction (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Penguin Group

Owned by the British conglomerate Pearson PLC, Penguin is the second largest trade publisher in the world. Penguin got its start producing high quality paperbacks to be sold through Woolworths and other department stores. Even today, Penguin is still known largely for its classic paperbacks.

Random House

Random House is the largest English-language trade publisher in the world and is a full subsidiary of the German conglomerate Bertelsmann. The Random House American Division is divided into several publishing groups including the Random House Publishing Group, the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and the Crown Publishing Group. Each group has their own set of unique and specialized imprints.

Simon & Schuster

Owned by the CBS Corporation, Simon & Schuster can trace its publishing history back to the 1920s and the dawn of the crossword puzzle. Today, Simon & Schuster publishes around two thousand titles each year through dozens of imprints including Pocket, Free Press, and Scribner.

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Looking down the multi-year process of writing another novel, Satran decided to take the success she found in her other online endeavors and tweak the process to tell her latest story online. In a blog.

Author Pam Satran

The idea isn’t exactly new – people have been trying to publish novels via HTML since, well, the dawn of the Internet. The blogging era, noted for lowering the technical knowledge barrier to entry, provided numerous authors with the ability to instantly self-publish.

The allure is certainly there – side-stepping the traditional process, telling your story exactly as you want to, writing fast and loose in a format that evolves to stay at the cutting edge – but as of yet no one has really made the format work. But, we stand at the crossroads of a large shift in publishing, so theoretically, something has to give, right?

That sense of giving is what Satran is bringing to her online storytelling experiment – Ho Springs. I hasten to use the term novel, because what Satran is doing to set her project apart is to alter what authors tend to think of as a novel in terms of story structure and character emphasis. Or, to put it more accurately, Satran is tailoring the story to the format, rather than the format to the story.

What exactly is the difference? Well, instead of following a single protagonist and a collection of supporting characters through a traditional three act arc, Satran describes the structure as being “closer to a television show, it’s episodic and gives characters equal weight.”

The deployment of that theory is a string of blog posts, each around a thousand words in length, that adopt a central character for the duration. The next post then shifts to another character. Readers can tune in for an individual post and leave with a short story, or readers can check out the entire site and follow the disparate pieces as the interweave to form a detailed story encompassing an entire town.

Again, this is not a new concept, Dos Pasos did it masterfully in the USA Trilogy, but it is one that the flexibility of the web adds a considerable amount of power to. For instance, if a reader wish to follow only the exploits of a single character, the wonders of metatags mean that doing so is only a click away. Other items, the kind that would seem out of place in a traditional print book – pictures, songs, scraps of characters’ lives – are also included, living just another click away.

“People don’t want to read, they want to connect,” Satran has noted, and Ho Springs certainly allows for that. As with most blogs, readers can comment directly on posts, allowing for interaction and even a discussion in real time, as the story unfolds. But Satran also allows readers to do more, adding to the story she’s telling as she tells it thanks to the the technology behind Ho Springs. Thanks to the power of Wordpress MU, readers can start their own Ho Springs blogs, and write or post photos along with Satran.

Hearing directly from readers as you write is certainly a new experience for most writers. Even when Dickens was publishing his stories serially, there was still a magazine in between himself and his readers. But, that wall is quickly crumbling as writers modernize. Satran makes no bones about wishing to embrace that sort of change. “I feel that fiction really needs to move into the twenty-first century,” she noted, comparing how television audiences have turned to embrace the Internet to further explore stories. And she’s right, why should books be left behind?

The divergence in storytelling form isn’t life shattering, not even an overly dramatic shift, but it does create a product that is recognizable as both a single story and a collection of stories. By presenting the story in a blog, Satran allows Ho Springs readers to tailor the experience to how they want it.

Whether readers will embrace the new format has yet to be seen, but the Ho Spring experiment is still in its early days, with only a dozen posts up as of this publishing. In that respect, Satran is facing the same uphill battle as everyone else writing today – finding and fostering an audience.

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Let’s start with the good news, the stats.

Fiction Matters is international!

No love from North Korea

In our first year, Fiction Matters has been read in over 140 countries, which on a map leaves very little white space. Our top five countries by readers are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and Australia. I’m pretty proud of seeing Japan in the top five, but that’s just because I’ve always wanted to say “I’m huge in Japan” as anything other than a height pun.

Domestically, readers checked in from all fifty states and the District of Columbia. California lead the way, followed by Virginia (local influence), New York, Texas, and finally Pennsylvania (again, local influence).

Fiction Matters in numbers!

Looking at Fiction Matters form a marketing perspective, we’re still on the “emerging” cusp. The first year brought 28,090 unique visitors for a total of 35,832 visits and 56,526 page views. Google has us rated with a PR4 on the home page, on their exponential scale ranging from 0 to 10. We’ve consistently maintained a sub-million ranking in Alexa, and Quantcast has us pegged as the 752,542th Most Popular Site on the Internet.

Reader Engagement

But, since we don’t sell ads, most of that last bit doesn’t matter. One really interesting number, and one that I left out of the above paragraph, is reader engagement. The Page Views Per Visit, an eye glazing name if I ever saw one, is at 1.58. That number means that out of every three visitors, a hair over two read more than one article.

Our comment count also greatly exceeds our post count with 507 comments on 188 posts. If we assume that I respond to every comment, and cut that number in half (a clear overestimation), comments still exceed posts.

And the bad part

The fact that Fiction Matters only managed to produce 188 posts in a year is a number I’m not happy with. Not because it’s a bad number, but because it is a number arrived at through a haphazard process. I routinely tell my clients that blogging on a regular basis is as important as quality of content. And the annual numbers bare out of the fact. When posts are written and posted on a timely basis, readership numbers and engagement levels are up. The sense of community is up. And that’s what really matters.

Looking Ahead

So, for Fiction Matter’s second year, there’s going to be a shift in the editorial process. First and foremost, we’re adopting an editorial calendar that focuses on posting three times a week, come hell or high water. So, without exception, there will be a new post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Breaking news will be printed as it comes, but for the most part, we’ll be a three-post-a-week blog.

The editorial focus will also be shifting somewhat, tapering back on the rampant future watching and dealing instead fostering an understanding of the entire storytelling concept – from the art of writing through the business of publishing and the skill of marketing. I plan on talking with more writers, and more readers, and trying to bring in a rather broad selection of experience and desires.

You can actually expect the first of these posts, an interview with Pam Satran, on Wednesday.

Another area where I feel I let both you and myself down is the Reference Section. There really isn’t any excuse for that not being finished – especially as I have a loosely curated document already containing all the data. What can I say? That kind of grinding editorial action just isn’t sexy. Which is all the more reason to get it done.

So, year two is off to a rather raw start. I’ve got my work cut out for me, but at least I’ll be eating my dog food.

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The Natural Method

Many, if not most, of us began writing as unabashed pantsers not out of pride, but rather out of youthful ignorance of the rules. The tales weaved as children are the prime example of pantsing, building on an idea until a story develops. These primordial attempts at the craft we now embrace are frequently as honest as they are entertaining. The plots sprawl and meander, the characters are frequently one dimensional, the tension blunt. Judged on their own merits, these stories are typically beyond the pale. But from the viewpoint of the storyteller-child and the child-audience, these stories are excellent simply because they are fun.

As the storyteller-child matures and seeks to further understand the art, those unknown rules become known. Characters must be either fleshed out or serve as obvious foils. The plot should be layered, sub-plots poignant, and the story must move towards the logical conclusion. And tension? Forget the blunt good-guy/bad-guy dichotomy, the tension must be dramatically appropriate.

The deeper the lessons are learned, the closer they become to law. Factor in the attention which must be paid to turn a story into a published book, the further layer of rules espoused by the industrial gatekeepers, and that pure joyful act of childhood storytelling, of naturally creating stories, become laborious. To put it bluntly, professional storytelling becomes a job.

The Romantic Ideal

But that’s not what writing is, the storyteller-child yells. And popular culture backs that understanding up. Writers while openly acknowledged as existing in solitude, are frequently shown cavorting, drunkenly engaging in life, of slipping through existence so that the muses can reward the author with a truth captured but not killed.

Never do these stories show a writer outlining, or crafting back story, or deciding to cut a beloved scene because it interrupts a novels pacing. The mere thought of such actions run contrary to what a writer is, or rather, what a writer is believed to be.

After all, true art is about breaking the rules, about changing minds through enlightenment. And storytelling is one of the oldest arts known to man. Surely neolithic man, recalling the hunt around the fire hadn’t stopped to outline the story beforehand. Why should the modern writer do so merely to appease the gods of commerce?

The Desired Result

Kerouac didn’t either, which is why On The Road is a work so easy to tout in favor of pantsing. Months of drug-fueled insanity captured in three weeks at a typewriter. The story was brought into existence through sheer will and stood as a testament to capturing the untouchable elements of life in a concrete and tactile form.

In order to break the rules, the writer must know them first. After all, the desire isn’t just to tell a story, or even a good story, but to tell a great story. And that caught up with Kerouac. It took nine years to turn Kerouac’s creation-fueled binge into a published book. But the legend that surrounded it? That’s the stuff that writers live for. That’s the fun part.

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This week, I’ll be taking a step back from talking about the greater publishing industry, and instead talking about pantsing. And by pantsing, I do not mean the scourge of middle school gym class, but rather the writing method.

The origin of the term pantsing doesn’t come from a world of writers, but rather the pilots of World War I. Before the advent of proper instrument panels, pilots were forced to rely on skill when flying, an act that was often described as “flying by the seat of your pants.”

Writers who work without the use of outlines or intense plotting sessions similarly describe the act as “writing by the seat of your pants.” Or, in an age when we count characters, simply “pantsing.”

Just as when flying without instruments, being a pantser is no easy task. To pants with precision requires a writer to be a master storyteller, or an even better editor.

I’ll readily admit that I love my outlines, to the point where I’m much more of a plodder than a pantser, but that doesn’t mean pantsing should be avoided.

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The following is a letter from Macmillan CEO, John Sargent regarding the company’s forays into the digital book world. Included are discussions on royalties and Amazon.

I am sorry I have been silent since Saturday. We have been in constant discussions with Amazon since then. Things have moved far enough that hopefully this is the last time I will be writing to you on this subject.

Over the last few years we have been deeply concerned about the pricing of electronic books. That pricing, combined with the traditional business model we were using, was creating a market that we believe was fundamentally unbalanced. In the last three weeks, from a standing start we have moved to a new business model. We will make less money on the sale of e books, but we will have a stable and rational market. To repeat myself from last Sunday’ s letter, we will now have a business model that will ensure our intellectual property will be available digitally through many channels, at a price that is both fair to the consumer and that allows those who create and publish it to be fairly compensated.

We have also started discussions with all our other partners in the digital book world. While there is still lots of work to be done, they have all agreed to move to the agency model.

And now on to royalties. Three or four weeks ago, we began discussions with the Author’ s Guild on their concerns about our new royalty terms. We indicated then that we would be flexible and that we were prepared to move to a higher rate for digital books. In ongoing discussions with our major agents at the beginning of this week, we began informing them of our new terms. The change to an agency model will bring about yet another round of discussion on royalties, and we look forward to solving this next step in the puzzle with you.

A word about Amazon. This has been a very difficult time. Many of you are wondering what has taken so long for Amazon and Macmillan to reach a conclusion. I want to assure you that Amazon has been working very, very hard and always in good faith to find a way forward with us. Though we do not always agree, I remain full of admiration and respect for them. Both of us look forward to being back in business as usual.

And a salute to the bricks and mortar retailers who sell your books in their stores and on their related websites. Their support for you, and us, has been remarkable over the last week. From large chains to small independents, they committed to working harder than ever to help your books find your readers.

Lastly, my deepest thanks to you, our authors and illustrators. Macmillan and Amazon as corporations had our differences that needed to be resolved. You are the ones whose books lost their buy buttons. And yet you have continued to be terrifically supportive of us and of what we are trying to accomplish. It is a great joy to be your publisher.

I cannot tell you when we will resume business as usual with Amazon, and needless to say I can promise nothing on the buy buttons. You can tell by the tone of this letter though that I feel the time is getting near to hand.

All best,
John

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