While I was off gallivanting in cornfields, a controversy exploded in the online romance community last week. In case you've missed it, the online portion of it started with agent/author Deidre Knight's open letter to RWA (Romance Writers of America), and RWA President Diane Pershing's response. Today, Dear Author has a helpful guide to further reactions around the Internet.

At issue are RWA's positions and policies on digital publishing. Currently, the organization does not recognize any e-publisher as a legitimate publisher (for the purposes of presenting at conference, taking pitches, etc.), because they pay on a no- or low-advance/greater-royalty model, instead of giving advances of $1000 or more for each book. This has resulted in a complete absence of digital publishing education at our upcoming conference. RWA's current policies have also created ambiguity in membership status--members who publish with an e-press or small press are considered "published" in some respects, but not in others, leading to inequities in contest participation, etc.

I love RWA--both National and my local chapter. But I do think the national organization in particular could be doing far more to educate the membership about digital publishing and e-publishers. Today, digital publishing affects every published and aspiring writer of romance--we all need to understand e-rights contract clauses, the Google books settlement, DRM, and more. And I take issue with the president's repeated assertion that e-publishing is not the venue of the "career-focused" author of romance. I've published with an e-press, and it was very much a career-focused decision--one I'd definitely make again.

I've pretty much summed up my thoughts on the issue before, so I won't write them all out again. A few months back, I blogged about why I think digital publishing is good for romance, and then I blogged about why I think it was a good (career-focused!) move for me.

So I'm not going anywhere in RWA. I love being a member. Heck, the national conference is the highlight of my social year! I understand and appreciate the tremendous amount of work RWA officers put in, and I can imagine that wading through these thorny issues is a difficult task, to say the least. But I do intend to use my voice and vote toward the causes of improved education on digital publishing, recognition of proven reputable e-publishers, and acknowledgment that e-publishing is increasingly a valid and viable career option for many (though not necessarily all) authors. In my opinion, those things are necessary to keep RWA relevant in the digital age.

At my Samhain e-novella?

I haven't got a page for it up on my bookshelf page quite yet -- I'm waiting for the cover art. But the blurb and excerpt for my May 12th release went up on the Samhain website. If you read the title and laugh, that's good! It's a comedy. And the story is very loosely linked to Goddess of the Hunt.

Also - I finally have a contest going on this here website! So when you click that Contest link, it gives you something other than a vague promise of "coming soon."

I had plans to blog more today, but I am terribly sick. I did just want to comment briefly on the latest online debate. There's been a lot of discussion in the past week about the Kindle2 and it's TTS (text-to-speech) feature - whether it constitutes a copyright violation, whether Author's Guild was right to protest the feature, and whether Amazon was right to back down. (See here and here, for example.) I really can't pretend to understand all the legal arguments involved, but I tend to agree that clutching our intellectual property tighter to our chests is not the best way to protect our income. And what I can't understand is why an organization devoted to protecting authors' interests would not view protecting readers' interests as paramount to that mission. What are authors without readers? Sure, authors create the words on the page, but any cultural significance of a book is a joint product of the author and the readers. To put it Zen-ly: if a book sits alone, unread, in the middle of a forest, does it make a point?

Maybe it's because I was a public librarian long before I became an author, but I'm all about access. I'd let them read my books aloud over the PA at sports arenas and shopping malls, if anyone cared to do such a thing. I'm pretty sure my royalties would only go up!

What say you?

Okay, I promised this post a few weeks ago now.  I'd been holding off, hoping I could get the blurb of my soon-to-be-epubbed novella together, but it's still in the works.  Darn if that isn't proving to be the hardest book ever to blurb.

Anyhow, I posted a few weeks ago about my belief that e-publishing is good for the romance genre.  And today I'm posting about why I think it's a good move for me.   I have a NY print contract and three books coming out this year.  In terms of royalties and readership, realistically speaking, my e-pub novella is not going to come anywhere close to my print figures.  So what's in it for me?

Read the rest of this entry »

Author Lauren Dane (both e-pubbed and traditionally print-pubbed) has an excellent article on her blog about the differences between the two.  Note: not the superiority of one or the other, just the differences.

I'll be back tomorrow with an actual blog of my own.

Wasn't that a great Super Bowl?

There's a lot of conversation going on right now, on various loops and blogs, about the RWA's new rules for the RITA contest, which require entries to be "mass-produced" and effectively exclude most e-books or books published using POD (print-on-demand) technology.

I don't really want to get into contest rules nitty-gritty--I know those kind of things are by definition arbitrary, and it's impossible to make everyone happy.  I don't envy the (hard-working, volunteer!) rule-makers one bit.  I've heard the RWA leadership has already committed to looking into the issue further, and that's good.  What I do want to blog about is something more general.

As the RWA's current policies are arranged, an author who publishes a work of fiction (over 20K words) with an e-press (even if that press is on the RWA's list of Non-Subsidy, Non-Vanity Publishers) is no longer considered unpublished for the purposes of entering the Golden Heart.  However, neither is she considered "published" and PAN-eligible unless she can prove earnings of greater than $1000 for that book.  And unless her book meets the (vague, undisclosed) definition of "mass-produced in print", she cannot enter it in the RITA.  Basically, an author who chooses to e-publish must do so with the knowledge that she's forfeiting certain valuable RWA benefits without gaining any new ones.  To me, that adds up to an RWA organizational bias against e-publishing.  I'm not saying this was the intention, but it's the de facto effect.  And this general bias bothers me, more than any individual fairness concern.

My pollyanna self just wishes RWA, as one big happy organization, would adopt a basic position that e-publishing is good for romance.  I'm not talking about any particular e-publishers, nor any specific e-books...just the simple existence of e-publishing as a new, groundbreaking means of distribution, whether it's used by large or small publishers. I believe it is a good thing, for all of us, for several reasons.  Here are a few off the top of my head:

1) New markets.  E-books can be purchased anywhere, by anyone with an Internet connection.  They bring romance to new readers around the world, thereby increasing and enhancing the audience for our genre as a whole.  Good thing.

2) Niche markets.  By definition, mass-market publishers just can't (or won't) take chances on books targeted to a small, if loyal readership.  Small presses and e-publishing give them a home, which gives us authors more outlets for our work and greater creative freedom.  Good thing.

3) Innovation.  As a corollary to both 1&2, e-publishers can push the boundaries of the genre in ways traditional publishers can't or won't.  But when these experiments are commercially successful, the NY pubs take note and think twice.  E-publishing can be a kind of laboratory for cutting-edge romance, expanding our print markets.  Good thing.

4) More royalties.  E-publishers typically pay larger royalty percentages (because they don't pay large advances), but that's not all I mean here.  With e-publishing, a book can stay available for public purchase long after it goes out of print--which means an author can keep making money from it, instead of just watching copies exchange hands at used-book stores and getting no further royalties.  Good thing.

5) Oprah.  Come on, if Oprah is talking about e-books, you know the masses will follow.  Why wouldn't we want a piece of that?

Don't get me wrong - I don't want printed books to go away, not at all.  And I doubt they will.  But e-books are only going to increase in market share.  And I think it's wonderful that we as writers have this new way to reach readers, grow our audience, stay fresh, push the boundaries, and make more money.  Whether an individual author chooses to pursue e-publishing or not, the existence of e-publishing is a benefit to the genre as a whole.

At least, I think so.  Sometime in the coming week or so, I'll blog about why I think e-publishing is of benefit to me, as an individual author.