Into the Fire

If you could change five things (or less) in CBA publishing, what would they (it) be? (Unabridged and Unedited.)

From an Agent (Anonymous):

That all CBA retailers report to the NY Times list. Parable, Mardel, and I believe Family have just begun doing so, which is huge. Hope the other chains and individuals will follow.

That publishers will rethink the royalty rates that they're offering for e-book rights to make them more fair. The "standard" right now is 25% and, frankly, that's ridiculously low.  

Stop discounting front list books – it's killing the publishers (and authors).  You discount something after it’s been out there a while. But to launch a book with deep discounts is having huge repercussions for us all. It's a short term strategy that's having long term effects, and not good ones!

Combined answers from Authors (Anonymous):

Assembly line approach to marketing, wherein most novels receive essentially the same promotional treatment, rather than thinking hard about where to find readers who will be interested in that particular novel, and then devising a creative approach to communicate the essence of that novel to them in an interesting way.

Editors who take months to turn around drafts, then ask authors for changes in weeks.

This is not specific to CBA, but I’d love to see the elimination of returns. It hurts authors.

Publishing novels without a passionate in-house champion. If the     acquisitions editor (who after all presumably convinced a publication board to pay an advance on the story) is not excited enough about a novel to energetically promote it within the publishing house, then the release should be postponed and more work done until such time as that novel makes the editor so excited he or she can’t help telling everyone in the publishing house “You have GOT to read this novel!”

I’d love to see publishers spend less money advertising “sure thing” authors and take a fraction of that to really promote up and coming authors.

Copycat marketing. After The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood hit it big, suddenly we had The Yada Yada Prayer Group. And when Blue Like Jazz was a bestseller, along came Blue Like Play Dough. Usually authors don’t pick titles. This is almost always the publisher’s marketing team’s decision, and it’s shameless for a Christian businessperson to try to piggy-back on someone else’s success this way.

A concerted effort on behalf of book club fiction authors to get those books in the hands of book clubs.

Christian authors who write three or more novels in one year. It’s not possible to produce that many deeply thoughtful and extremely well written words in one year, yet every Christian novel should be deeply thoughtful and extremely well written, since the Bible says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.”

That only 5% of the books get 90% of marketing, sales promotion, and shelf placement so that many titles with outstanding reviews sell under 10,000 just because no one sees them.

Placing fiction in a 70-90,000 word count box with an occasional stretch to 120,000 when the ABA routinely allows books to range from 50,000 to the million-word Tom Clancy, if that is what it takes to write a great book. There is currently no place in CBA for the complex full-length blockbuster novel.

From Author (Anonymous):

My big piece of advice would be for publishers to listen to Seth Godin, especially his comments on tribes.

To be continued . . .