Noah's ARC, or, reviews and readers, two by two.: seanan

I am in the fascinating position right now of having two books in the ARC stage—A Local Habitation (Toby two) and Feed (Newsflesh one)—at the same time. This means there are ARCs all over my house, making people feel that I have an extravagent number of the things. My care and caution with giving them away is hence viewed as channeling my inner Scrooge, rather than conserving limited natural resources. (This makes me think of ARCs as some sort of rare bird. The migratory North American ARC, majestic in flight, aerodynamic like a brick.) The cats view them as natural enemies which Mommy Likes Better, and stalk them with ears flat and whiskers in full threat position. My mother attempts to steal them. And, occasionally, reviewers request them or contest entries win them. Right now, they're worth their weight in kittens, and as the window of their usefulness is narrow, I'm enjoying them while I can. Reviews of A Local Habitation are starting to appear, and various bloggers are starting to announce that they've received their copies of Feed, which means reviews of that should start appearing right about when I get my equilibrium back. Fun!

People periodically ask me* how ARCs get out into the wild. Well, there are three main ways, not counting contests. Namely...

1) You are already on a list, which is in the possession of my publisher, and they will send you one automatically. Most large review outlets are in this category. Feed is being sent to Fangoria Magazine, which is sort of like saying "Seanan, we're going to dip you in chocolate, roll you in selected pages from the script of Night of the Living Dead, and deliver you to James Gunn with a gift tag."

2) You contact my publisher and request an ARC. You probably need to prove that you have a review site or an affiliation with a legitimate review outlet. Your Livejournal is unlikely to count, I'm afraid. I'm sure there are exceptions, but you'll need a readership the size of like, Ohio.

3) You contact me through my website and request an ARC. I go through a lot of the same vetting steps as my publisher—I'll go read your blog, I'll look up the magazine you say you're affiliated with, I'll ask the magical moon ponies whether they've really seen you dancing naked at midnight in the middle of Mare Imbrium—before I decide one way or another.

Be aware that any time you elect for an option that includes the word "ask," you may get told "I'm sorry, no." ARCs are an extremely limited commodity, and just to make things more fun, the number printed tends to decline with each book. It's reasonable math. Your first book, you want to spread it as widely as possible. So you give more copies away, trying to create as much early excitement as possible. Your second book, well, some of that buzz already exists, right? So you don't need quite as many free copies out there, circulating and being read before the actual release date. As the number of people asking for ARCs goes up, the number of ARCs to be had goes down. This isn't the author being mean, or the publisher being dumb. This is using your promotional dollars as sensibly as possible.

What do ARCs have to do with promotional budgets? A lot. Page for page, making an ARC costs more than printing a hardcover. The print runs are small enough that they never tip over into bulk pricing, and since ARCs have no resale value (people selling them on eBay and earning my eternal annoyance aside), there's no way to recover the cost, beyond praying that sending the ARCs out into the world will result in positive reviews and higher sales. So as the "spread the word" value of the individual ARC goes down, the number of overall ARCs printed will also decline, putting those dollars back into the promo budget. I've been very lucky, and have received a decent number of ARCs for all three books to date. The definition of "decent" will continue to shift as days go by.

As a secondary note, if you ask me for an ARC, and I say "yeah, okay," and the ARC then shows up on eBay, I'm afraid I won't be sending you any further books. I can't afford the copies or the postage.

Hope this helps.

(*For values of "me" that mean "the Internet at large, only they use my name, so my Google spiders pick up the post and bring it back to me.")

silvertwi

January 27 2010, 23:00:50 UTC 7 years ago

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I've recently become more interested in how industries like book publishing work, and this ties in nicely. (Next part way off-topic, sorry.)

I have a question, if you don't mind answering in as much detail as you wish: I know you're a filk artist. To what extent do you deal with the music industry--for instance, you have CDs out; that requires the use of a recording studio, but are you affiliated with the music industry's equivalent of a publisher or agent? What kinds of similarities have you noticed between the music and book publishing industries?

I'm curious because I just started a class called "History of Rock and R&B" and among other things, we're covering how the music industry works. I'm a lot more familiar with publishing in the context of writing, but I don't know it well enough to be able to pick out what kind of things apply to both and which apply to only one. Copyrights, marketing, agents, that sort of thing. If you'd care to help my curiosity out, I'd appreciate it. :)

seanan_mcguire

January 28 2010, 05:10:58 UTC 7 years ago

I'm totally outside the music industry, as are almost all filk artists. We don't actually make money on music; if we're lucky, we eventually recoup the cost of recording. I do pay an engineer, because I like quality, but he's a member of the filk community. My CDs are printed in single runs through one of those "print a CD" companies—the musical equivalent of "print on demand" books—and I do all my own distribution.

No agent, no real marketing outside of word of mouth. :)

January 28 2010, 05:42:11 UTC 7 years ago

Thank you! It's interesting to know, and useful.

As for word-of-mouth, I will see what I can do to help with that. ;)

keristor

January 28 2010, 09:42:21 UTC 7 years ago

It strikes me that filk CD production is very similar to 'self-publishing' in the literary world. Knowing that many pro authors are very down on self-publishing, I wonder whether the same is true in music. I haven't seen it, but then I haven't dealt with the distribution side of filk CDs except at filkcons. Are places like CD Baby as disparaged as Lulu?

February 1 2010, 21:55:01 UTC 7 years ago

I think that because folk music has always been largely small press/self-published, it's just viewed as a normal part of the musical ecosystem. The music industry is structured very differently than the publishing industry, in a lot of ways.

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