The Trouble With E-Publishing…
Thursday, March 27, 2008Posted in: e-book publishers behaving badly?, Epublishers
I had a conversation with Jane last week, where I said that I thought the problem with e-publishing, especially those who publish romance/erotic novels, is that it’s full of screeching women who don’t have the faintest idea about running a business.
She disagreed of course, as any sensible person would, but to be honest, I’m not so sure I’m wrong. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m being somewhat sexist, but so what? I still think there’s a grain of truth in there.
I know that there are exceptions, but that’s just it, they seem to be exceptions, rather than the rule.
If Tina Engler was to start up in today’s current climate, would she be as successful? Maybe, but I’m not so sure.
In the beginning she too was writing most of the books herself. The editing was terrible, and nowhere near as polished as it is now (well, not counting those Carol Lynne books because they were shockingly bad). I hear that she struggled no end in the beginning, and that was with virtually no competition.
I think that Crissy Bashear, great timing, and no competition, were what helped EC make it big.
In today’s e-pub market, minus Crissy Bashear, I do think Engler would really struggle.
Of course men fail in business too, but seeing as so many of them run most of the world, you’re bound to get failures here and there.
No, I’m serious. I do think that if more romance e-pubs had men at the helm, more e-presses would survive (James Lightsey doesn’t count, I’m still not convinced he was a bloke), and I can’t help but think that you wouldn’t have the same level of shrill, hormonally challenged screaming dingbats, that plague the industry now.
How many times do you get the CEO of a print publisher having a total meltdown in public? Come to think of it, how many of those CEOs are women?
Anyway, agree, disagree? Couldn’t give a crap?
Teddypig
March 27
10:43 pm
Is Risky Creek Press run by a guy?
I swear I have heard of guys running some of these Vanity Press writer mills.
DS
March 27
10:55 pm
Nonesense. Success in business has little to do with hormones. It has to do with foresight, intelligence and luck. And by intelligence I mean knowledge/information and knowing where to get reliable knowledge/information not IQ.
At one point I worked with a group of smart people, a number of whom went on to start up businesses–7 in fact. Three women, four men. One man still has his business which I understand is flourishing. Two women have theirs which is also doing very well. The other four are gone– one due to drug use, two due to lack of intelligence, one due to lack of industry.
This is actually a fairly high sucess rate for new start ups. The epresses will eventually shake out the people with personality disorders an inability to organize, which is what I see a lot of in the problem epresses.
Oh, and men experience those problems as much as women.
Also, it seems a lot of epress start ups are done in the “let’s put on a play in the garage and charge all the neighborhood kids a quarter to see it” vein. I can’t remember who was preaching here a while back about having a business plan– I don’t know if they made it or not– but that was the best advice I’ve seen on here.
tf
March 27
11:00 pm
Ahaha!
I know relatively little about epublishing, but that is basically my perception of the epublishing environment.
Bonnie Dee
March 27
11:17 pm
It’s a shame when all epub businesses start being tarred with the same brush when some are well-run, legitimate enterprises (you know the ones I mean) and others are fly-by-night, no business plan, cobbled together messes (you know who those are, too). Unfortunately, scandals make a big noise and drown out the respectable voices in the industry.
Holly
March 27
11:17 pm
I don’t think the success or failure of these e-pubs has anything to do with the sex of the owner, but everything to do with the individual person running the company. You used Tina Engler as an example. I don’t know anything about her personally, but from what I understand she basically started the company with no capital and no experience, right? (please correct me if I’m wrong) Same with several of the other e-pubs that have closed recently. No matter what the business and how much overhead you have or don’t have, your business isn’t likely to succeed if you don’t have capital or experience going into it. So you’re right, she probably only made it because of blind luck and no competition. And in today’s market, where there is competition, she would probably fail. Just like all these others. But if she had the experience she has now going into it? Chances are she’d succeed.
I’ll liken it to the mortgage industry, which is really struggling right now. Companies were popping up overnight several years ago when the market was booming, and 95% of the “professionals” in the business had a year or less of experience in those new companies. And 95% of those companies are now gone. But other companies, ones with experienced business leaders behind them, are still in the game, still flourishing.
I think too many people see it as a “get rich quick” scheme, because it really doesn’t seem that hard. But if a business is going to succeed, you have to do more than open the doors and wait for the money to start pouring in.
veinglory
March 27
11:30 pm
What’s being a screaming dingbat got to do with being female? Your saw the posts from the NCP liaison right?
Most of the current crop of idiot are female because most of the current crop in total are female.
The screaming idiot brokers that crashed the mortgage system here in the US were men. Gender may effect how some screws up, not whether they will.
M
March 28
12:00 am
Teddy,
When I was a part of Whiskey Creek, it was run by a husband wife team.
Ann Bruce
March 28
12:26 am
Male, female…if your business skills suck, you’ll fail (I call this the Darwin effect). Also, remember that most (~80%) small businesses go under within the first 2 years.
As for men who do better than women? Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bear Stearns…all are/were run by men.
katieM
March 28
12:35 am
I don’t think its gender as much as it is poor planning, not enough startup capital, and little to no business sense. Those problems are by no means gender specific. I bet if more of those e-publishers had taken a few business classes, studied accounting/book keeping, and had good editors on staff they might have been successful.
Karen Scott
March 28
12:46 am
Yep, but it was men that built them in the first place, and let’s face it, I could name a lot more huge companies that are run by men that are still successful, so giving me examples of huge conglomerates that were brought down by men is fairly pointless. The successful far outweigh the unsuccesful, the only reason we remember companies like Enron, Barings etc, is because few companies that big, fall so spectacularly.
Microsoft and Apple are still doing pretty good aren’t they? As are KPMG, Deloitte, Accenture, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Shell, and I could go on and on, but like I said, it’s pointless going down that road.
I still think men are naturally more business-minded than women. I’d be happy for anybody to try to prove otherwise to me.
Indida
March 28
1:00 am
I’m all about balance. Whenever there is too much of anything, it will mostly likely turn sour.
On the other hand, I still think there might be more to it than gender. To run a business, you should have business sense, hell, at least common sense.
Recognize your mistakes and learn from them, adapt to the ever-changing market, put on a professional image no matter the circumstance, keep your finances in check, be ethical, respect your employees and consumers, etc.
Add to the list. I have never run a business but these things stand out in my head and they are some of the major problems being ranted about.
Oh, and let’s not forget the crazy cows running things.
It seems like corporate women do become more masculine. They seem cold and harsh, definitely less emotional.
SHayne
March 28
1:30 am
Men are more business-minded. Crazy cows.
*blinks*
Ann Bruce
March 28
1:56 am
Unfortunately, we’re in a society that is dominated by men pretty much since the beginning of time. So, yeah, most companies were started by them and are still run by them.
However, to look at an industry that appeals more to women than to men (let’s face it, more women want to write romance than men and some of these women decided the best way to be published is to start their own company even though they don’t know a balance sheet from an income statement), it’s going to look bad because ~80% of all small businesses go belly up within the first two years and I am sure that number’s higher because e-publishing is still in its infancy and its current market is not big enough to support every venture out there.
veinglory
March 28
2:04 am
I can name 50 successful female-run romance epublishers–how many does it take to suggest being XX doesn’t make you useless. I would suggest that even one would be enough to suggest its about being a fuckwit, not a female.
daywatcher
March 28
2:57 am
I think when women screw up and choose the road of blame instead of shouldering responsibility we are generally louder and more likely to obsessively lash out with verbal abuse. But when men screw up and refuse responsibility they tend to be more visibly vicious or suicidal (I’m thinking of the stock market crash of ’29 and guys like that crook banker in Iowa who killed his wife and children before killing himself).
katieM
March 28
3:28 am
I still think men are naturally more business-minded than women. I’d be happy for anybody to try to prove otherwise to me.
Look at all the household finances run successfully by women.
Maddie
March 28
4:00 am
I thinks it’s a combination of things, and not the fact of a female in charge of the company.
I find myself buying fewer Ebooks as the better writers fly the coop to NYC, when I fisrt encountered EC I would buy so many ebooks a month and from there I would find the authors that I liked and I did that with other Epubs, but I find that as my faves leave the coop I do not buy from EC as much.
Plus I hate to say it but I’ve seen it again and again that when a woman get a little taste of power she becomes drunk on it and forgets that business needs to be taken care of, and how and why she got there.
I worked in retail and lets just say that 8 out of 10 women bosses could be call the bad “B word” and most of them were fired because after they came to power they forgot that they also had a job to do.
Shiloh Walker
March 28
4:09 am
I dunno if it’s a male/female thing so much as a creative versus practical mindset.
Creative types (and folks, bear in mind, I’m a creative type so don’t shoot me~this isn’t an insult, just how I see things) aren’t always best suited for business-type things. Doesn’t mean those with a creative mindset shouldn’t ever run a business~ they can and do so successfully. But in general creative types (me included) are hot-tempered, we don’t always looks past the moment as much as we should, etc, etc.
Practical types do this. They think things through, debate, weigh the ins-and-outs, things that come in very handy for running businesses. Again, a disclaimer~this doesn’t mean ALL practical mindsets do are equipped to run a business. Doesn’t mean there aren’t hot-headed practical types, etc, etc.
What is ideal is when you can have a combination of both, the creative mindset paired with the practical.
Men make poor business choices all the time. Women successfully run businesses all the time. So again, I don’t really think it has so much to do with male/female/hormonal, etc…etc…
Dorothy Mantooth
March 28
8:29 am
I totally agree, Karen. These businesses seem to be started by women who think they’re starting a coffeeklatch or a fun hobby to make money and new friends, rather than businesspeople who see this as a business. I din’t know that I would say it’s strictly gender, but the types of women starting these businesses certainly tend to be that sort rather than the killer-business-instinct type.
Perplexed
March 28
11:46 am
it’s not your hormones; it’s how you work at the business – if you run your epub as a hobby, don’t be surprised when you have pissed off authors and customers because they want their books NOW, not inbetween your divorces and breakups and kids running off to college trips.
one epub I know has pretty well run off the rails with books hopelessly backed up for release and authors unable to do any promotion because the lead men just view it as a hobby to do when they get home from work – so who pays for it? The authors!
ain’t no diff what’s between the legs – anyone can be a bad businessperson!
DS
March 28
1:35 pm
If you lived in the same small town as the epublishers you would probably hear rumors of them getting a bit wobbley, financial woes, family woes– all the signs of a business going to crash and burn.
I was recently reading about an epress called Dreamspinner. They were involved with the case of the woman (Lucia Logan) who retooled her fan fiction based on(as in plaigerized from) Jane Eyre novel with some sex and name changes. Erastes, who I sometimes see posting on romance blogs, published the expose on her site. The book A Hidden Passion, was withdrawn from publication but had been entered in the Eppies- and it finaled! Dear Author commented on this: http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2007/12/15/ . Further, when it was a fanfic it has been published on the web in some small LotR group. There is just so much wrong there. The mind, it boggles.
Dreamspinner is apparently a group of friends epublishing their own work. This was mentioned as well known by a couple of people on the journal I was reading, EXCEPT the author who said she had submitted her work to them– the person to whom it really mattered.
The interwebs are a group of little communities but unless you know where to look for the information you won’t find it.
Dorothy Mantooth
March 28
2:31 pm
Which is why you shouldn’t submit anything to an epublisher you haven’t thoroughly researched.
AztecLady
March 28
2:35 pm
I disagree strenuously that having XX instead of XY chromosomes makes any difference whatsoever on whether a business of any kind succeeds or fails.
While it’s certainly true that we hear more from women epublishers here in romanceblogland, particularly those that are on a crash course with bankruptcy or closing, that is simply a matter of percentages.
It’s been mentioned upthread that usually four out of every five small business fail in the first five years–regardless of business field and/or gender of business owner(s). If most epublishers are started by women, it follows that most of those which fail will be owned/managed by women.
The dangly bits–or lack thereof–has nothing to do with it, IMnotsoHO.
sallahdog
March 28
2:39 pm
Oy, karen, I love you but your killing me here….
One of the biggest growing sectors of business today are women owned, women run businesses.. Women have the ability to run a company well. Women in epublishing ARE doing it well..
There are nuts in every walk of life, and sometimes you have certain…ahem…. personality types that are attracted to having their own business because they didn’t work well with others, totally forgetting that there really is NO business that you don’t have to work with someone else.
I worked in the contruction fields for close to 3 decades working mostly WITH men and FOR men.. Believe me, there are just as many nutball males who shouldn’t be running companies or in charge of anything more than flushing the toilet.
The problem I see is that the way a male businessmen goes nuts is different than a female. A guy just screams and fires people, left and right,or calls people foul names and threatens bodily harm. Women are actually more subtle, using intimations of not being a ‘team player’ or telling people they aren’t being “nice” to harassing people into quiting, rather than the more in your face firing….
Right now, I run my own business(I own rentals, do flips) and have worked with 3 different management companies (I can’t stand listening to tenant complaints)… The one that has my business now is run by a woman with only women working with her. Its an awesome company. I am also working with a woman tile layer now (I like to call myself her bitch, she is teaching me all the ins an out of tile) who is great and has a mile long list of people in line to have her do their work, because she is professional and very customer friendly (she leaves the job looking great and not until the client is satisfied), while the guys she used to work with are struggling right now to keep busy…
Karen, baby, don’t be a hater towards women. Epublishing is mostly run by women, of course the few statistical nutjobs(which every business has) is going to be a woman..
Jody W.
March 28
2:52 pm
Karen, you sound like Charlotte Allen.
sallahdog
March 28
2:55 pm
forgive me, I posted this before but it seemed to have been lost in the ether…
This is no different from when some men get a taste of power either. Power corrupts and men aren’t immune. Heck, you see it everywhere. I have seen bloggers and message board monitors go off the deep end (and don’t even get me started on the PTA nazi Moms in my kids schools)
Robin Bayne
March 28
3:43 pm
I agree with Holly, who compared the e-pub-biz with the get-rich-quick mentality that overran the mortgage biz for so long. I’ve been doing mortgages for 22+ years, never made huge fees, worked for stable companies/banks with business plans that considered all aspects of the economy, and we are still here.
The ones who thought they could make a quick buck did so–but now they are selling used cars.
kirsten saell
March 28
4:18 pm
One reason I think there is such a huge problem with epublisher owner/wingnuts splatterbombing their own authors and running their companies into the ground is because this business is conducted almost entirely online.
It’s easy to put up a front of reason, competence and sanity when building your business if no one you work with ever has to have an actual conversation with you. Then, when the stress is on, it comes as a surprise to everyone that this person is a total nutbar–when it would have been clear on first eye contact if you’d ever been in the same room with them.
bam
March 28
4:46 pm
Word.
Robin
March 28
6:50 pm
My own completely uninformed opinion is that many of these presses are started up by authors who want to do things “better” but who are first and foremost authors and not publishers. Not that authors are incapable of being successful publishers; but I don’t think the transition is automatic or as easy as some might believe.
Karen Scott
March 28
8:40 pm
I’m not a hater towards women at all, I love women. In a strictly non-sexual way obviously.
Listen, I run my own business, so I like to think I know what it takes, but I still think that men are naturally more business-minded than women. That’s not even sexist, that’s just what I’ve witnessed here and in the real world.
shirley
March 28
11:44 pm
ROFL! This is about the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. Men were the only gender allowed to run/own/operate businesses for the majority of history. Hell, women didn’t have the right to own a business, not without some man overseeing her, even into the twentieth century. That doesn’t make men more business minded, it makes them more monopolizing.
If you’d like a clear look at the whole situation, I’d suggest taking a peek at this book: “The Financing of Small Business: A Comparative Study of Male and Female Business Owners” by Lauren Read. It should clear up any misguided notion you have that it’s ‘hormones’ causing all the problems for female entrepreneurs. The clear cut truth is that women have to deal with a slew of problems men do not, not the least of which are nonsupporting and even undercutting spouses/partners and gender discrimination in regards to finance, in order to be successful in business.
Here’s a quote that does a good job explaining the problems with previous studies comparing the two genders:
“Even when male ‘control’ groups have been included, researchers have frequently failed to compare like with like (i.e. male- and female-owned businesses of the same sector, size, age, etc.), even though it is widely acknowledged that the populations of male- and female-owned differ on many structural characteristics and that structural characteristics are an important influence on the financing of small businesses.”
Ms. Read goes on to show that finance is one of the biggest hurdles female business owners have trouble overcoming, which men do not. Her comparative data comes as close as anything I’ve ever seen in truly showing how women run companies vs. how men do. Basically, both sexes run successful businesses, with similar fail rates, but the way women run a business is structurally – significantly at that- different than how men do it.
Gennita Low
March 29
2:30 pm
Well, actually, men get into bitchfights too but they’re more upfront about it. I’ve been running my roofing company for 20 years now and have mostly men working for me and my partner. Through the years, I’ve broken up quite a number of bitchfights between males over the stupidest things, stuff women would never fight over(shrug).
Running a good business has nothing to do with gender. It’s about understanding the concept of making money, of investing and taking risks. The smaller the company, the more challenging, that’s all, because the person in charge needs to wear many different hats to make it work. I know it has nothing to do with being female because I get up on the roof to work; play the tyrant, negotiator, cheerleader, peacekeeper; do the business taxes; call in the orders; etc. The secret is, I have a good and honest business partner who works hard too.
To be fair, in the real world, most men would not listen well to a female boss. There is aggression and sometimes, intimidation. To succeed and become what I am today, I started by being quicker and better at the same job. Fortunately, in my line of work, what I produce (the # of squares I put down) is shown in my paycheck, no matter what sex I am. From my years watching the women in construction, a male-oriented society, most of them who made it worked harder and longer; they paid attention to details.
The hurdles faced by successfully-run female-owned businesses are, as the above post said, cultural, not hormonal. That said, I think the main problem with e-publishing bitchfights isn’t because the business is run by women, but because most of those who start these companies have no previous experience in publishing (except perhaps as an author) and they’re running a company with mostly invisible players. This is its general weakness that contributes to other factors that cause the implosions we read off and on. It’s just “different” in the sense that they are played out on the Internet, which can be assessed by MILLIONS.