Literary vs Genre, Defining the Debate

 A debate I often see on various websites is the value/worthiness of genre novels in comparison to literary fiction. Usually, it’s genre writers fighting back at what they perceive as a slight against what they write.  Unfortunately, most don’t have a clue about the difference between popular genre and literary fiction so their arguments make little sense.  I thought I’d rectify that problem.  

The simplest comparison between literary fiction and popular/genre fiction is that literary fiction is about the telling of the story, popular fiction is about the story itself. 

In literary fiction, the author is always evident through the flashy style and the use of complex structure.  Plot isn’t important. A common technique found in literary fiction is the frame story where someone in the present is looking into the past, or the end of the novel is revealed at the beginning.  In other words, time in most stories isn't linear, and the reader doesn't read primarily to know what happens next and how it turns out in the end.  This technique emphasizes character over plot.

In genre fiction, the writer should be invisible, and the reader should be part of the story and not really aware of the writer and the way he's putting the story together.  Anything that breaks this "dream state" is a failure on the writer's part.  

In literary fiction, the opposite is true.  The language draws attention to itself, and the reader pauses to think, "My, what an excellent use of metaphor and language!  I think I'll reread that again."  This is what the literary writer aims for.

In recent years, since the big publishers now demand decent sales from literary writers, authors have been using genre techniques in literary fiction or vice versa in order to widen their audiences. 

The Authors Guild versus the Amazon Kindle 2

Last week, Amazon announced the new Kindle 2, the second version of their extremely popular ebook reader. One of the new features is the ability to read the books aloud with a computer voice.

Immediately, the Authors Guild expressed its unhappiness with this feature and demanded that Amazon disable it. Amazon laughed in response, and the Authors Guild threatened a lawsuit. The Authors Guild has also told its members to hold off assigning ebook rights in their contracts until this matter is settled.

During the last week, no trade blog, press article, or the Authors Guild has clarified this situation or has really defined what this means to writers and readers so I've put this article together to do so.

First, some definitions.

TEXT-TO-SPEECH, TTS, OR VOICE-TO-SPEECH: A computer program that reads text aloud with a computerized voice, or the audio version of that reading. TTS programs are on all computers these days and on many PDAs, cell phones, etc.

AUDIOBOOK: A human verbal performance of a book that is recorded digitally. This performance may be by an individual or a group of actors. Audiobooks are created by companies who contract the audio rights of the book from the author or publisher.

COPYRIGHT: The legal protection of the ownership of intellectual property including writing. For a simple definition, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright For a more complex discussion of copyright, particularly publishing and copyright, check out this site by publishing lawyer, Ivan Hoffman. http://www.ivanhoffman.com

RIGHTS: In publishing, rights refer to the different types of format sales for a written work. Some of the rights that can be contracted from an author are the right to publish a paperback version, a hardcover version, an ebook version, and an audio version of a work.

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The major legal problem with TTS is that it has never been clearly defined through a lawsuit or some other legal means. Right now, no one can say with legal certainty that TTS is a right on its own, a part of the audio rights, or part of the ebook rights.

Amazon's stance is that TTS is part of the ebook rights so the Kindle can use TTS on all ebooks.

The Authors Guild's stance is that TTS is part of the audio rights so Amazon can't use TTS without a contract for audio rights.

Some authors are saying that TTS is a right by itself, and that, unless publishers have contracted that right, neither they nor Amazon have any right to use TTS with an ebook.

Many of the major publishers are taking no stance because the issue is so unclear, and they use DRM (digital rights management) to prevent the ebook from being read with TTS because they don't know if they have that right.

Some audiobook publishers are so leery of the unclear legal status of TTS that they refuse to contract a book that allows TTS in ebook format.

With all these problems, it's easy to see why authors and the Authors Guild are so upset by Amazon's grab for TTS rights on books. If Amazon succeeds, many authors may lose their lucrative audio rights without payment. If TTS is a right on its own, then Amazon will be taking an author's right they haven't paid for.

Also, TTS has improved dramatically in the last years, and in the near future, TTS programs should improve their quality until they are almost equal to a human reading. If authors don't fight to retain TTS rights now, they may lose a valuable right in the future.

Where does this leave everyone? In a serious mess.

The best thing that can happen for all the parties involved is that TTS rights will be finally defined legally.

VARIOUS POINTS ABOUT THIS ISSUE ELSEWHERE.

A remarkable amount of nonsense and grandstanding has appeared over the web on this subject, and I'd like to clarify some of these points.

* This will make reading to your kids illegal.

No, it won't. Reading aloud to your children or privately to someone else will never be illegal. What is illegal is reading someone else's work for profit without permission. In other words, you can read A CAT IN THE HAT to your kids or a group of kids, but if you do that and charge admission without the permission of the Dr. Seuss' estate or publisher, it is illegal. It is also illegal to sell a copy of your reading if you do so without permission.

* Publishers and authors are just being greedy.

Asking for payment for work done isn't greedy. Authors, with just a few exceptions, don't make much money, and publishing has a very low margin of profit so the industry needs fair profit just to stay afloat.

* This is will hurt those with visual disabilities.

The publishing industry, both authors and publishers, allowed free audiocopies of books and large print copies of books aimed at the visually impaired long before various disabilities acts were passed, and it has remained friendly and accessible to the visually impaired.

Right now, many ebooks have TTS cut off because of the confusion about TTS rights so a legal clarification will make more books available for TTS through the rightful contractor of those rights.

* I bought this ebook. I can do what I damn well please with it.

No, you can't. An ebook is intellectual property. When you buy a copy, you are allowed to read it, but you don't have the right to copy it and give it or sell it to others.

Authors or publishers, however, will not chase you down and brutalize you if you read that book with TTS or print out a copy for your own personal use.

This current controversy is about Amazon's grab for rights most publishers and authors don't believe they've contracted. It's not about individuals using TTS.

ABOUT MARILYNN: I am not a lawyer, nor am I member of the Authors Guild. I am, however, a published author who has been interested in electronic rights for over ten years, and I have researched the subject of text-to-speech over the last several years.

RESOURCES, BLOGS, AND ARTICLES ON THIS SUBJECT

"Cory Doctorow on the Amazon Kindle controversy." Doctorow does his usual "free books are good" spiel with little regard for the complexities of this issue. http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/cory_doctorow_criticizes_authors_guild_108386.asp?success&disqus_reply=6187558%23comment-6187558

"Legal ruckus over the Kindle." A fairly reasonable statement of the general facts of the case. http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/121556

"Amazon Releases the New Kindle 2." Includes some legal issues. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123419309890963869.html

"Book publishers object to Kindle's text-to-voice feature." Covers some of the legal issues involved. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10161104-93.html

"E-Book Rights Alert: Amazon's Kindle 2 Adds 'Text to Speech' Function." Authors Guild statement. http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/e-book-rights-alert-amazons-kindle-2.html

Copyright lawyer, Ben Sheffner, blogs on the controversy. http://copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com/2009/02/authors-guild-explains-stance-on-new.html

"Kindle Text-to-speech is a lot of talk." One of the better overviews of the legal questions involved. It also includes two versions, one by a TTS program and one by a human, of some text to compare the two methods. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/021109-kindle-text-to-speech-issue-is-a.html?page=1

"Know Your Rights: Does the Kindle 2's text-to-speech infringe authors' copyrights?" Ex-copyright attorney talks about the issues involved. The best overview I've seen. http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/11/know-your-rights-does-the-kindle-2s-text-to-speech-infringe-au/

"DRM White Paper AAP/ALA White Paper: What Consumers Want in Digital Rights Management," Discusses the problems of TTS for publishers and audiobook companies because it isn't adequately defined in a legal sense. No longer available online.

Part Eight of Eight

The Current State of Publishing and Bookselling, Part 8

THE NEAR AND FAR FUTURE OF PUBLISHING

Here's my forecast on the future of publishing.

Essentially, most publishing professionals are worried about the wrong things and not paying attention to the real dangers as the publishing world changes.

It's not about too many titles, it's not about the change from paper to ebook, it's not about what bookstores are doing.

It's about the fight for the conduits of media, both paper and digital, to the consumer, and it's a fight that may already be lost to Amazon.

Amazon is doing everything right. They are bleeding publishing through used books and pricing control while doing almost everything better than brick and mortar stores, and now they are making a dramatic move to take over a major chunk of the digital arena with the Kindle.

Big publishing, meanwhile, is looking the other way as small publishers are fighting Amazon about POD and even greater price controls because the big guys don't think Amazon will go after them next.

Paper, ink, and bookstores are still here and will be here for some time, but they can't survive long term because digital books are simply too dang efficient in every sense.

The bookstores will go first because people are more stressed for time than for money, and online is easier. Before the bookstores go, they will effectively kill what is left of midlist fiction in their ongoing effort to stock bestsellers and list leaders to the exclusion of midlist.

Meanwhile, the used book industry will suck away even more of the profit from paper publishing until it collapses in a sea of red ink.

Books will move into digital format, but new books and new writers will continue to be buried under a sea of backlist moving into digital format.

Platforms will continue to be the means of success for most authors, and other authors will be relegated to niche markets and scrambling for readers.

A long story short. Sell all your stock in bookstores and publishers, and buy Amazon stock. It's probably the only way any of us will make much money in the coming climate of change.

THE FUTURE FOR WRITERS?

It's been many years since most authors have supported themselves through their words, and this will not improve.

Publishing in its usual heedless manner will use the authors' profits as a means to bolster its own bottom line as the distributors suck the publisher dry.

As history has proven, most readers will be more concerned with their own time and money than the future of writers and publishing so they will continue to frequent Amazon, one stop online digital providers, and the box stores for their reading.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

Write if it's a joy, work hard toward whatever goal you have for success in your writing career, educate yourself on the business, and plan for your future as if you won't see much income coming from that writing.

Don't trade your life for writing dreams. It will be a bitter and uneven trade even if you succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

And do dream. It's what makes you the unique writer and person you are.

Part Five

The Current State of Publishing and Bookselling, Part 5

WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?

For authors, in the short term, all the news is bad unless you are already a "name" author. Midlist paper books are disappearing in bookstores and box stores.

According to my writing friends, a novel at Walmart accounted for almost thirty percent of all their books sold. Now, their books aren't available there. Their publishers are also losing out on those extra sales.

With bookstores also taking fewer titles in a publisher's line each month, some titles are available nowhere but a few independent booksellers and online.

If already established bestselling authors are the only ones sold at the major venues, where and how can an author build an audience big enough to join this exclusive club?

With most of the time and expense of promotion falling on the author's shoulders, how will the author manage financially? How will the author be able to produce the number of books needed yearly to grow their audience?

For publishers, if they can't find many places to sell that month's entire line of books, what can they do?

Do they drop most of their authors and only print "names?"

Where do they grow their talent to add to that list of names?

Do they start a farm system similar to major league baseball where new authors rise up through the ranks via ebooks?

Do they only recruit authors already building a name with small publishers?

I imagine we'll see a number of different "solutions" to these questions as authors and publishers try to survive this new hostile environment to selling books.

WHITHER READERS?

Any solution to this problem depends on what the readers will do.

Will readers be willing to only buy the name authors they see at Walmart and other places where they usually shop, or will they start depending on physical bookstores?

Will they be willing to buy online?

If they can't get paper books, will they move to ebooks?

If history is any indication, a majority will stop buying paper books. When science fiction disappeared from those dimestore racks years ago, the market plummeted, and the market has been rebuilding ever since.

On the other hand, when readers discovered erotica which was almost exclusively available as ebooks, the market expanded to the point that publishers like Ellora's Cave became multimillion dollar companies, and authors made money envied by their paper-published contemporaries.

Readers of erotica and romance are voracious readers, though, and smaller markets like science fiction haven't had the same online success even proportional to the number of readers of paper books.

Those of us who love to read and write can hope others will follow us online and into digital format, and I imagine some will, but will the numbers be enough to support the publishers and the authors?

No one can guess.

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In Part Six of this series, I'll discuss the role of epublishing in publishing.

Part Three

The Current State of Publishing and Bookselling, Part 3

Continuing my overview of what has happened in recent months.

EBOOKS

Ebooks are as much a part of the publishing scene these days as paper books. Most genre publishers offer the ebook version at the same time as the paper book, and backlist is being converted to ebooks at an incredible rate.

Ebooks continue to be the primary route of distribution for smaller publishers.

Most of the major book distributors have their own ebook distribution system, and Amazon is using its ebook reader, the Kindle, to make it as much a leader in ebook distribution as paper book distribution.

Ebooks are the primary growth area right now for most publishers, but the so-called "tipping point" in their popularity hasn't been reached according to most pundits.

USED BOOKS

Used book sales are a profit hemorrhage in the publishing industry.

The publisher and the author make nothing on used books so the industry is being starved by used book sales. This is a particular hardship for authors who don't have as diversified a number of titles as the publisher does.

This means that the author makes little money, the publisher loses sales on that author, and the author is less likely to sell another book to that publisher.

In other words, the big publisher and name authors with lots of backlist like Nora Roberts are hurt by used book sales, but the smaller authors and small publishers can be killed because they lose more than they gain.

Publishing is like investing, the more diversified you are, the better the chance for survival and profit.

The Internet has made used books an even greater problem because so many books can be found used.

The old belief that a buyer will choose new after discovering a new author through a used book is less true because it is so easy to find a used book within hours or less of the book hitting the physical shelves. Some books, courtesy of book clubs and advanced review copies, can be found used weeks or months before they hit the shelves.
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Tomorrow, I'll continue my overview by talking about Amazon's less than stellar behavior toward authors and publishers.

The Current State of Publishing and Bookselling, Part 2

Continuing my overview of what has happened in recent months.

ONLINE MARKETS

Amazon remains the Godzilla of online book sales in both new and used books while Barnes & Noble online, etc., eat the crumbs.

Amazon gives readers an incredible selection of books not found in brick and mortar stores so they are the place to go for serious readers. A month's entire line of books by most publishers is available at Amazon, and their search functions as well as their Listmania and "if you like this book, you'll like that book" features, and reader blogs help readers find books and authors they won't find elsewhere.

Used book sites like Alibris are a major force in book buying as readers search for bargains, and Amazon displays the used book right beside the new book in their search results.


PRINT ON DEMAND BOOKS

Most major publishers do large print runs of their titles and store the books to sell through bookstores, etc.

A large print run requires a large expense up front in the printing followed by the cost of storing and moving inventory. For massmarket (standard-sized paperbacks), books not sold at the bookstore have their cover ripped off and returned while the book itself goes into the landfill. The publisher pays for the shipping in both directions.

Obviously, this is a serious waste of money and resources, but the bookstores and publishers seem addicted to this model.

In recent years, print on demand books (POD) are becoming an important part of the paper book process.

POD books are printed, one at a time, to order and shipped to the store or the buyer. Large publishers use POD for backlist, and small publishers and individuals who can't afford large print runs also use it.

Recently, a major publisher used POD to catch up on unexpectedly high demand of a nonfiction title.

Most of the major book distributors have their own POD company as does Amazon.

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Tomorrow, I'll continue my overview by discussing ebooks and used books.

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The Current State of Publishing and Bookselling, Part 1

Today, I'm starting a short series of blogs on the state of publishing and bookselling and how that affects writers and readers. I'm focusing on genre novels.

Sources for the information I'm using include "Publishers Weekly," "Shelf Awareness," "Publisher's Lunch," and various professional trade blogs.

My credentials: I'm a publishing news junkie of over thirty years, and a published author of over ten years.

First, an overview of what's happening in the business.

THE ECONOMY

Not surprisingly, the problems with the economy are hurting the sale of books. If it's a choice between food and gas or books, books are almost always the loser.

Even romance, which has always been considered an economy-proof genre, has struggled recently although it remains healthy with steady growth.

Readers are borrowing books at the library and buying used books. Neither venue is good for the author bottom line.

If a reader has a choice between a "name" favorite author and another author for a new book purchase, she will buy the name author. New authors' books tend to be bought used.

THE BOOKSTORES, CHAINS, AND BIG BOX STORES

The current trends in bookstores and other physical locations is more books by just a few authors.

Target and Walmart which sell large numbers of books have cut down the amount of books by around fifty percent in the last few years. The books added to the shelves each month are almost always that month's list leader -- the publisher's lead title for that month, and it's usually a name author.

They believe they make money by having more space taken up by more books by a few bestsellers than with a wider range of authors and books.

Meanwhile, the chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders are putting out more authors and titles, but they, too, no longer carry most of that month's books by the major publishers.

Borders has started a series of concept stores which display books cover forward. So far, they've seen an increase in sales although they have cut the number of titles displayed by thirty percent.

Independent stores are dying at an alarming rate, and those which remain often keep themselves afloat by selling used books.

Still, a vast majority of all books sold are in brick and mortar stores.

In the next days, I'll cover online markets, print on demand, ebooks, and the problems with Amazon, then I'll discuss options for authors as well as the near and far future as publishing changes.