Timothy's Thoughts

A lot of importance is placed on an author making a name for himself. How different that is from how television and movies work. You don’t often know much about the person writing a script. You might know something about the actors, but only the stars. You don’t pay much attention to most of the people involved and you may only recognize the actors by the character they play. It may just be wishful thinking, but wouldn’t it be nice if books were that way? Perhaps it’ll get that way. People won’t pay much attention to who wrote the book, just whether it is a good book or not.

B y now you have probably heard that the largest Christian publisher has been bought by Kohlberg & Company. This transaction raises questions about the future of Christian publishing. I don’t know that anyone has the answers, but it’s still worthwhile to look at this transaction to gain a better understanding of how the publishing industry works. One of the first things to look at is the purchasing company. Kohlberg & Company is a private equity firm. In other words, they make money by buying and selling companies. According to their website, they focus on “middle market” companies with values between $100 and $500 million. They make money by implementing changes that increase revenue and cash flow, giving the company more value in the eyes of investors, and selling the company, either to another company or in the form of stock. They aren’t publishing experts by any stretch of the imagination, so it should come as no surprise that Michael Hyatt is still at the helm of Thomas Ne...

I knew there was disparity between men reading fiction and women reading fiction, but I didn’t really see the situation for what it is until I saw a statistic the other day. Publisher’s Weekly was quoted as saying that of all fiction sold, 55% was bought by woman and 45% was bought by men. I really expected the gap to be much wider. Walk into any Christian bookstore and you’ll see a sea of pink. Walk into nearly any bookstore and books for women will get preferential treatment. Look at the faces of most authors and you’ll see a lot of makeup. Talk to most men and you’ll hear them say, “I read more non-fiction than I do fiction.” Put that together and the picture you’ll get is that fiction is primarily a woman thing. We’re going all out to sell fiction to woman and still men buy 45% of the fiction sold. On top of that, many men don’t buy fiction because they read whatever their wives have around the house. Consider that there are millions of book buyers in America. Now, if we take ...

I wasn’t going to write about this, but it keeps coming up. Actually, I wrote about it once, changed my mind and deleted what I wrote, but if you haven’t heard, Harlequin continues to get blacklisted by writers’ associations. The board of the Romance Writers Association (RWA) blacklisted them several days ago and in response Harlequin change the name of their vanity press to DellArte. I’m not sure if that appeased Michelle Monkou and company over at RWA, but it didn’t appease Lee Child and company on the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) board of directors. They voted to bar Harlequin from consideration for their Edgar award. I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this thing. The publishers are supposed to be the publishing experts and yet, last year more books were published by POD companies than by traditional publishers. It’s no wonder that publishers are beginning to try to move into that market. But what is it that these association boards hope to gain by blacklisting publishe...

F ear often accompanies change, so it should be no surprise that many people fear some of the changes in the publishing industry. Self-publishing appears to be the wave of the future. In fact, more books were self-published last year than were published through traditional publication. Big publishers are moving to provide self-publishing avenues. Many people fear that the market will now be flooded with self-published books. Some people are afraid that books won’t have to go through the vetting process and readers will have to sort through a bunch of junk that looks like a slush pile. Some people talk about how there will be fewer big successes in publishing. All of this fear comes from not knowing what the future holds. A lot of people’s worries are because they don’t really understand where this change is coming from. The current changes we are seeing are driving completely by technology, but people don’t understand the technology, what the technology can do and what it can’t. The cu...

F irst, let me say that I’ve got nothing against Thomas Nelson. I have several of their books in my library and if they were to offer me a publishing contract, I would certainly consider it, but recently there has been some discussion about big name publishers like Thomas Nelson and Harlequin venturing off into the self-publishing business because that appears to be the wave of the future. The question came up about what the world would be like if we didn’t have publishers like Thomas Nelson and all authors self-published. It’s a very good question, so as of today, I’m announcing that Thomas Nelson is closed. I’m locking the doors and all of its employees have been laid off, permanently. All of you authors who have manuscripts ready to submit—don’t bother. The age of self-publishing has begun. In this new age of self-publishing, everybody gets published. No more rejection letters and you can do it for as little as $0. No, that’s not a misprint. You may have to get some sof...

F irst Thomas Nelson and now Harlequin. A short time ago, Thomas Nelson announced that they are venturing into the self-publishing market. Now, Harlequin has announced that they will do the same. What’s the difference? Thomas Nelson will be putting out Christian books and Harlequin will be putting out Romance books. To tell you the truth, this whole thing is confusing me. In both cases the companies are duplicating services that are already available from other companies. The only real advantage I can see with publishing a book through the self-publishing wing of Thomas Nelson or Harlequin over publishing the book through Amazon’s CreateSpace (which will soon encompass BookSurge) is that Thomas Nelson can focus their marketing efforts toward a Christian market and Harlequin can focus there efforts toward romance readers. I imagine that Harlequin is better equipped for that than Thomas Nelson, but we still have to wonder how willing they are going to be to push books that they rejected...

F iction is different from non-fiction. A non-fiction book that can provide an answer to solve a problem faced by readers will practically sell itself. Take the For Dummies books for example. While they may not be the books of choice for a college textbook, they’re designed to provide answers about how to do very specific things. The topic each book covers is on the front and many people who need answers related to that topic purchase the book. What makes fiction different is that most readers aren’t looking for the book. Imagine that, with non-fiction, the reader is wondering around confused, looking for some solution. When we stick a book out there and wave a flag to say, “the solution’s over here.” The reader then makes a beeline for the book. Compare that to the fiction reader, who isn’t confused. He’s just looking for a good story, but rather than one flag waving author to serve as a beacon of hope, there are thousands. All else being equal, the reader need only pick up the fi...

Yesterday, Michael Hyatt blogged about The Bestselling Christian Books of 2008 . It sort of relates to what I’ve been talking about this week, so I thought I’d go ahead and mention a couple of thoughts I had when I saw his list, as sort of a bonus post. The Disconnect Between Christian Fiction and Non-fiction In looking at the list, 15 Christian non-fiction books made the list and 1 novel. If you factor in the paperbacks, you can count four more novels. A 5:15 ratio is still a dismal showing for Christian fiction. There are many possible reasons for this, but one thing that I noticed is that the doomsday stuff is missing, with on exception. The books on the non-fiction list appear to be uplifting, as do the five successes in the novels. Now, scan the list of books from yesterday. Many of those books aren’t uplifting at all. Many of them are down right depressing—at least they are when you read the product descriptions. Is there a link? Non-Fiction is Easier to Sell Non-fiction is easie...