Longtime readers of this blog will know that a core theme here is charting the death of oldpub and trying to envision what comes next.
I predicted oldpub’s demise years ago, not that it takes a prophet to foresee that a business locked into expanding its share of a contracting market isn’t long for this world.
The fact is that no new author has any reason to seek a Big Four book contract. That’s been true for years, but now it’s inarguable. Landing an oldpub deal is all but impossible for normal, sane people. And all it gets you is a $2500 advance you have to pay back 12.5% at a time from sales through a narrowing channel. You are better off getting 70% through KDP, and that’s damning criticism in light of Amazon’s faults.
At the dawn of newpub, most indie authors were sure that the Kindle was the future. Amazon would disrupt and disintermediate the big New York publishers, creating a level playing field where authors could reach their readers directly. Big names of the Wild West days foretold that an A lister would do the math and abandon oldpub to self-publish through KDP. The theory went that the first big domino to fall would start a mass exodus to indie. Most oldpub authors, used to writing a book or two a year, would fall hopelessly behind veteran indies publishing at pulp speed.
As of this writing, the Kindle-dominated future that the indie elders predicted has come and gone. New authors were able to bypass the New York gatekeepers and hit it big on their own. Amazon did grab a majority share of the book market. Name authors did test the newpub waters.
Where the old-timers went wrong was in failing to look beyond the Kindle-led market disruption. It turns out that Amazon wasn’t the savior we were promised after all. Of course, some doomsayers predicted betrayal from the start. But they were right for the wrong reasons. Around 2013, Stockholm syndrome-ridden authors, snobbish acquisitions editors, and thieving agents warned that Amazon would hook naïve writers with that juicy 70%, then slash royalties once it had a monopoly.
The truth proved far stranger, as instead of succumbing to corporatist greed, Amazon fell prey to the same Death Cult that did in oldpub. Endless strata of code no one living understands, bugmannish A.I. worship, and reliance on linear-thinking outsourced wage slaves has made Amazon’s search engine a useless mess. A world-class system that once connected readers with books based on their preferences has degraded into a pay-for-play scheme that requires taking a loss in time and money to make at all functional.
It became clear a few years ago that Amazon wasn’t the ultimate answer. Instead, it was an intermediate step from the decrepit oldpub model to something else.
But what is that something else?
Longtime readers of this blog already know my answer. For a while now, I’ve predicted an even more decentralized system wherein authors would be commissioned to produce books by groups of their staunchest fans. Amazon would still factor into this model, but as a secondary income stream ancillary to money fronted by backers through crowdfunding sites.
I took to calling this hybrid model neopatronage. It’s an update of the Renaissance-era arrangement whereby wealthy patrons would bankroll favored artists. Now, instead of being attached to a certain noble’s court or doing exclusive projects for a particular merchant, artists can earn a living funded by loyal customers who pool their resources to back the entertainment they want.
My own crowdfunding success aside, some remained unconvinced that neopatronage would take hold. Even I thought it would take 2-5 years for the new model to fully emerge.
Earlier this month, King of Epic Fantasy Brandon Sanderson proved me wrong – and right with his all-time #1 Kickstarter campaign.
Right now, Sanderson’s project has raised over $35 million. And he did it with a small team outside the auspices of oldpub.
The indie elders’ prophecy came true. They just got the platform wrong. An A lister didn’t just decapitate oldpub on Amazon. He did it on Kickstarter.
He did it with neopatronage.
Now, in a masterful coup de grace, Sanderson has turned around and given a considerable chunk of his gains to smaller authors. To the tune of backing every publishing campaign on Kickstarter.
Watch him share the wealth:
One artist has become a patron to over 300 others.
Do you see how this works now?
In one fell swoop, Brandon Sanderson has proven the neopatronage concept, destroyed the last of oldpub’s credibility, and cemented newpub as the publishing industry standard.
Am I saying that neopatronage is the permanent answer everybody thought Amazon was?
No. This is a mid-term solution that will solidify into something more stable once wider socioeconomic upheavals run their course. But the Kindle revolution had a good decade-long run, so we should expect neopatronage to stay viable about as long.
Will every author who goes the neopatronage route get rich?
Again, no. There has never been a guarantee that any market will make anyone rich. The collapse of oldpub’s artificial bottleneck has most likely ended the era of the multimillionaire rock star author. Pro artists will go back to their origins in the skilled artisan class with carpenters and plumbers. For the Zoomers’ kids, living next door to a professional rock musician won’t be unusual for the son of an electrician.
The point is, if you can set reasonable expectations and content yourself with being comfortable instead of filthy rich, neopatronage gives you a better chance than oldpub or Amazon did.
The future is here. Come and join your fellow artists in making the most of it.
And patronize artists who want to entertain you:
Sanderson’s Kickstarter success is such a white pill. It’s a great opportunity for talented artists to get support and create for neglected audience. Will they be multimillionaires? Probably not? But there’s nothing wrong with making a modest tradesman-like living.
This is an important development in NewPub! What we need next is some sort of guide for how to create enticing crowdfunds for those new to the system, whether it be Kickstarter or Indiegogo or whatever comes next. Solid ground is being constructed right now, and we need that more than ever while the OldPub McMansion caves in on itself.
Is there such a thing as an Internet writers’ guild? Instead of creating contracts and paying royalties like he would if he ran a publishing house, Brian Niemeier could create a hypothetical website—which we’ll call “Niemeier Skunkworks”—on which each author would be responsible for promoting, selling, and distributing his works, but he would only be allowed to conduct business on the site with approval from the rest of the guild.
After Brian Niemeier turns his name into a brand, his patrons could view the crowdfunds of his guild mates and say, “I like Brian Niemeier, so I might like this author, too.”
A federation (kind of like the old “web ring” concept) of indie writers promoting one another’s works, recommending video channels for interviews, cross promotion with adjacent genres and entertainment products, giving tips on crowdfunding ideas, and general information on self publishing might be a viable concept. Dedicated readers might form a complimentary federation of sites for the promotion of authors and providing reviews of works to join with the first federation. This might be a possible core about which further growth could start, allowing more viewers and readers to get eyes on authors and become readers of new-to-them authors over time. Matrix-driven sites might be a means to make this a reality.
https://matrix.org/
This mass-backing is wonderful news on so many different levels. Blessed event!
I believe there’s another step that’s yet to be realized, but will need to soon. Sanderson was a massive wake-up-and-shake-up, but the issue of discoverability remains a massive hurdle for new writers, and Amazon is actively pouring bullet ants on a gaping wound in that regard.
Trying to discover new books on Amazon is a chore and the recommended books are either a slog of borderline or just outright softcore porn branded as “LitRPGs,” or books outside my desired category. No Mr. Bezos I am NOT looking for “I Level Up as a Jungle Master and Have Ten Thousand Girlfriends,” I am trying to find a new SPACE. OPERA. SERIES. AAARRGGH!
So while neopatronage and Amazon/Kindle as a “shop mule” is a good two first steps, the last remaining piece of the puzzle needs to be put in place, and it’s something I call “pseudopublishers.” Basically, they are websites which collect links to books (amazon/gumroad/etc) catering to a certain genre, provide a newsletter and updates on authors and their works, provide a discord or other social media platform to discuss books and stories, and make it easier to actually find what we want to find. The owner of a site like this could easily profit off it with Amazon affiliate links and with merch licensed out from authors who want to support the platform. I call this approach a “pseudopublisher” because it performs the function publishers used to (besides publishing books, of course). It provides a shared “brand” associated with a certain genre or scope of fiction, much like how Arkham House publishes story about awful nihilistic squggling things, or TOR makes increasingly disappointing and massive fantasy epics made viable only by Chad Sanderson’s inhuman output and talent.
Once finding books you like is less stressful than skimming through Abdul Azhared’s daily journal, oldpub is 110% finished. The fact that it’s as crippled as it is DESPITE how awful finding new indie books is proves SFF a la the con monsters and New Wave graybeards is beyond fixing.
P.S. — I am in no way attacking those of you in newpub who write LitRPG that isn’t garbo, it’s an interesting genre, just one with segments exploited by sleaze merchants at times.
This is a great idea. I think a Youtube figurehead is needed to help promote/review NewPub works. A “pseudo-publisher” with personality. Kind of like what Stan Lee was to Marvel.
Much as I hate using the term — “Influencer” is a better word for any youtubers. And yes, we really do need people posting reviews, making memes, doing all the necessary things when it comes to promoting newpub. Say what you like about CG, they got that down pat.
The Psudopublisher is more like a website or brand imprint that multiple authors share. Its icon would be on their books, much like a publisher. It would have a website listing all the various authors who it features, just like a publisher. It would have a twitter and a youtube featuring its authors as well as guests, have a blog where topics pertaining to its chosen genres are discussed a la Black Gate. Maybe even a dedicated podcast. Who knows. Again, all things a publisher would do.
The only role of a publisher it’s NOT fulfilling is the actual publishing, hence the name. The authors themselves can handle that nowadays. It’s simply providing a layer of curation and promotion to help rise above the cacophonous TV static that’s vanilla KDP publishing. The youtuber CaptainKristian made an excellent video on the impact Toonami had on western perceptions of anime. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Et4vu4lpPI ) The same could be said of Arkham House or Weird Tales or Marvel Comics (and yes, Stan Lee was key!) or MAD Magazine or MTV or any other curated publication. And THAT I feel, is what indie pub lacks the most. A sense of curated identity outside the actual works themselves.
Once we figure that out it’s GG for tradpub, and I really do mean that.
In a discussion of AWS one guy raised the point “Amazon isn’t going to be giving its best machine learning options to its customers. If you really want to see the quality of its algorithms, just look how its own searches and recommendations lead it to success.” At first I wasn’t sure if he was saying this as a defense or attack on machine learning.