"Holly Lisle - Mugging The Muse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

those of you who live someplace where there are no bookstores.

But, honestly, while I hope youтАЩll buy my books, I would actually be happier if you
didnтАЩt buy them from me.

I can feel the eyebrows lifting. But this is something so important to every author
that I feel it deserves space here at the front of the book. If you like the work an
author does, the kindest thing you can do for him and his career (and the possibility
that he will be able to afford to keep writing the books you like) is to buy his books
from your local bookstore. Even if they arenтАЩt on the shelves there when you go in to
look for them.

ESPECIALLY if you donтАЩt find them on the shelves there.

Every author you read, every author you like, is struggling to sell his work against an
increasingly hostile computer ordering system that routinely decreases the size of
book orders until it has decreased the author right off of the shelves. This system,
called ordering to the net, is wiping out the midlist faster than you can blink, and with
it, thousands of writers whose work you have read and loved for years. If you make
it into print with a professional publisher, you too will be fighting against this
pervasive evil.


HOLLY LISLE
 8
MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY

It works like this. The chains put in an order for 10 books per store. (ThatтАЩs pretty
high, incidentally, but IтАЩm ever the optimist.) Of those, seven sell, one is read to
death in-store and has to be scrapped, and two are still sitting on the shelves. This is
a 70% sell-through, which will have your agent and you and your editor and your
publisher dancing in the aisles. Nobody ever sells through at a hundred percent. 50%
is considered acceptable, a 70% sell-through is considered terrific, 80% or better and
you might as well be walking on water where you publisher and editor are concerned.
IтАЩve had a number of books sell through at 70% or better . . . a couple way better.
The sounds of jubilation are spectacular. While they last.

Because then the chains reorder. Logically, if you have a book that sells through at
70%, you will order twice or even three times as many of that authorтАЩs next book,
because sell-through remains constant. If you sell 70% of ten books, you will sell
70% of twenty books. Independent booksellers know this, and follow it. Chain
stores do not. Chain stores order to the net тАУ that is, they let the computer
automatically reorder only the number of books that sold before. Therefore, they will
not order twenty copies of your next book. They will not even order ten. They will
order . . . seven. Why? Because they sold seven.

And because sell-through remains constant, they will sell roughly five copies of your
next book. (70% of seven is four-point-nine, or about five.) And because they only
sell five copies of your second title, they will order . . . you guessed it . . . five of your
third title.