Contemporary Nomad
S T E I N H A U E R

Numbers

Just a quick post for some good news–the paperback of The Tourist is selling quite nicely in the US, thank you.

For the week ending January 21, it reached #30 on the IndieBound list of bestselling trade paperbacks at independent bookstores across the US. The next week, ending January 28, it moved up to #24. That’s the kind of movement I like!

And for the week ending January 27, The Tourist reached #31 on the New York Times list…niiiice.

Very pleased.

4 March 2010 ≡ Ourselves, Publishing Business ≡

S T E I N H A U E R

Takeaway

 

In about ten minutes I’m going to get a call from New York, where I’ll be talking live and nationwide on WNYC’s The Takeaway about the collision between the Dubai assassination and spy fiction…

*RING!*

 

Later:

Well, it happened–a 4-minute window that went by in about 40 nanoseconds. Celeste Headlee did a great job, but I finished it agonizing about how stupid I’d sounded. Only after listening to it again did I realize I’d done okay.

You can visit the The Takeaway to listen to that little blip that is me. Or, click below for the mp3…

[The Takeaway, Olen's 4 minutes]

19 February 2010 ≡ Literature, Ourselves, Politics, Publishing Business ≡

S T E I N H A U E R

The Grooviest ABC

Because this sort of thing is about all the TV I ever watch these days.

And just because.

18 February 2010 ≡ Culture, Film/TV, Music ≡

S T E I N H A U E R

Dig It!

Here’s a band called Pepe Mula, fronted by one of my students, Daviel, who’s also a budding director–in fact, he directed the space epic below. I’ll bet you never thought Leipzig looked like this…tres chic! I mean, Toll!

17 February 2010 ≡ Music ≡

S T E I N H A U E R

A lighter, easier-to-carry Tourist

Tomorrow marks the paperback release of The Tourist (Indie, Amazon, B&N), something I’m really looking forward to. The hardback–as I giggled about here–reached #19 on the New York Times list, and Minotaur is putting its best foot forward to try and get us on the paperback list.

What to do? Every writer wonders this when release date approaches, and the truth is that not much can be done. There are avid self-promoters who put their personal publicity machine into overdrive, but I’ve never been like that. Just putting together my little soundtrack, mentioned below, took about all my energy.

The only thing I can think of is to draw your attention to this starred Booklist review from the February 1 issue. It’s the first prepub look at The Nearest Exit, the second book of the trilogy, which will be out in May. Unlike my earlier quintet, these three books are meant to be read in order. They don’t have to be, but it certainly adds to the experience.

So think of it this way: If this Booklist review whets your appetite for The Nearest Exit, then now’s the time to pick up a copy of The Tourist, so that full enjoyment can be yours! Ah, hell–pick up a few for the family, friends, acquaintances and high-school friends you’ve lost track of while you’re at it. The weird guy who lives across the street? Yeah, he needs a few copies too.

And lest I forget: Thank you, Keir Graff:

Since the events of The Tourist (2009), Milo Weaver has served time in prison, worked in administration, and tried to reconnect with his wife and daughter. But talk therapy is hard when you’re trained to keep secrets. When asked to return to the field, he agrees, although, because of his disgust with the Department of Tourism (a black-ops branch of the CIA), he plans to feed information to his father, Yevgeny Primakov, the “secret ear” of the UN. But his handlers don’t trust him, either, giving him a series of vetting assignments that culminates in an impossible loyalty test: the abduction and murder of a 15-year-old girl. Ironically, Weaver is then tasked with finding a security breach that threatens the very existence of Tourism—and the lives of the Tourists. Seeing his own brutal compatriots as humans, he does his best to save the thing he despises, a conundrum that pretty much sums up the shades of gray that paint this modern-day espionage masterpiece. The Tourist was impressive, proving that Steinhauer had the ability to leap from the historical setting of his excellent Eastern European quintet to a vividly imagined contemporary landscape. But this is even better, a dazzling, dizzyingly complex world of clandestine warfare that is complicated further by the affairs of the heart. Steinhauer never forgets the human lives at stake, and that, perhaps, is the now-older Weaver’s flaw: he is too human, too attached, to be the perfect spy. His failure to save the girl he was told to kill threads the whole book like barbed wire.

–Keir Graff

15 February 2010 ≡ Literature, Ourselves, Publishing Business ≡

S T E I N H A U E R

Tourism for the Ears: iMix

As I mentioned before, the paperback of The Tourist (Indie, Amazon, B&N) will be released soon–on Tuesday the 16th, in fact. Back when it came out in hardback, I wondered what kind of extra material I might put up to accompany the book. In this case, an obvious proposition came to me–put together a soundtrack.

Those of you who know the book know that music plays an important part in it, and I used iTunes to put together a choice selection of 12 pretty cool tunes that are either featured in the novel, or acted as some kind of inspiration to me while writing it. I put together an iMix (as Apple likes to call them), but never got around to publishing it. Life, as usual, got in the way. But it’s paperback time now, which is a fine time to get the thing up. If it doesn’t convince you to buy The Tourist, then at least it’ll introduce you to some fine music that, perhaps, you’ve never met before.

Be forewarned: There’s a definite French slant to the mix. It was that kind of year, I suppose.

Hopefully you’ve got iTunes running on your machine, as clicking the picture of France Gall below should open up the program and let you listen to 30 second blocks of each song. (Or, the direct link to the mix is here.) If not, you’ve at least got a list of tunes to check out on your own.

Enjoy!

 

13 February 2010 ≡ Literature, Music, Ourselves, Publishing Business, Writing ≡

S T E I N H A U E R

What’s a story worth?

As I discussed before, I jumped into the whole e-book thing by purchasing a Kindle. It’s been fun owning the thing, and I’ve grown used to the interface, reading along at the same pace I would with a book. It’s particularly useful when reading manuscripts–I’ve got a potential-blurb novel on it now. I’ve bought a few titles from Amazon, but mostly I’ve been filling it with Gutenberg books using the Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-Books, which allows me to simply look at all their titles and click to automatically download it to my device. If you’ve got a wireless e-reader, then this is a must-have; you’ll be astounded by some of the titles they’ve got up there.

Johannes GutenbergOf course, there’s a measure of guilt involved, as I’ve been learning more about how independent bookstores get screwed along the way, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to balance things. Little luck, but at least I’m thinking about it.

Then, I happened to be looking at my titles on Amazon and noticed my Kindle versions had vanished into thin air. I sent an email to my editor at St Martin’s, and she quickly filled me in on the Amazon-MacMillan head-to-head. As we all know, it was a short-lived fight, and Amazon backed down. But to get a larger picture of the conflict I started poking around the web for thoughts. One thing I saw repeated endlessly was the conviction by book buyers that not only was Amazon in the right for pricing their e-books down to $9.99, but that $9.99 was still too much. Some people considered this amount a scandal, saying they would never buy an e-reader until the books came down to a more reasonable price, say $5.00.

I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer–I’ll admit that–and I didn’t want to be a company tool, so I had to wonder about this. Is $9.99 too much? Is $15.00 too much? And how do we define “too much”? People point out (and I’ve pointed it out before) that an e-book costs almost nothing to produce. So isn’t any price put down pure profit?

Well, no, I’ve come to realize. First of all, the negligible cost we reference is for the transfer of a book into an e-book format. What it ignores is everything else that goes into the “making” of a book. The author’s time and labor and talent, for instance. And the writer doesn’t just get paid in royalties; he lives off of advances, which (ideally) allow a novelist to write without having to hold down extra jobs. The advances system is something no author wants to get rid of.

But a book’s not done there. Those who work in “traditional” publishing (that is, not self-publishing) know that a good editor is invaluable. He (or in my case, she) needs to get paid. So do the copyeditors who clean up those innumerable mistakes we all make.

But that’s not enough. As we all know, publishing a book does not equal sales, so marketing departments have to be put into service to make sure that buyers actually learn that a new title exists.

There’s more, of course–any large business requires an infrastructure to keep it chugging along without falling apart. Those in the mailroom need to get paid. Janitors need to get paid. So do the various specialists that raise the level of any sort of company–the designers who make the cover, for instance.

Thinking about all this leads to a bit of a mess. I doubt anyone can add up all those costs and then divide them correctly to tell you how much an individual story is worth. But there’s another way, and I asked my editor, Kelley Ragland, for some help on this.

My basic thesis, which I finally stumbled onto, is that an author (or a publishing company) shouldn’t make less money on a book because someone chooses to buy it in digital format. All the same work went into producing it. I work just as hard on a book that ends up on your screen as one that you buy on printed pages, and so does my publisher. Which leads to a very simple formula: The cost of the “real” book, MINUS the costs connected to printing and shipping that book, PLUS the cost of producing the e-book format should EQUAL the retail value of the e-book.

So I asked Kelley about hard numbers. She looked into her magic ball and came back with some estimates for my forthcoming (in May) novel, The Nearest Exit. Based on a guesstimate 50,000 printing, the costs of paper, printing, binding, and jacket per book is $1.53. To add in shipping, she suggests rounding up to $2.00.

Everything else stays the same. One could argue that the cost of warehouses for storing books could be removed, but MacMillan owns those warehouses, (they’re not printing less paper-based books), so it’s a company expense and not a book-specific cost.

You can see where I’m heading with this. List price, minus $2 = e-book price. In this case, The Nearest Exit’s list price is $26–the e-book price would be $24. Knock it down for a discounted price, like Amazon’s, which is $17.15, and you’re still at $15.15 for the e-book–which is around the price that MacMillan and other large publishers want e-books to be priced at.

Of course, I’m talking about the hardback price here, but that’s because, for a year, the hardback is the only thing available. That first year the story is new; its value is higher (again, this is how it’s always been, and, again, there’s no reason the publisher and author should make less money during this first year). However, if you base it on the paperback price (the list for a paperback of The Tourist, which will be released in 5 days, is $15), the cost of production costs you subtract would be less, and you’d still be above $9.99.

My point, if I have one, is just that before looking at these numbers I had no idea where I stood on the pricing issue. Now I know. To me, e-books should equal the cost of creating a story, with a sufficient profit for all involved. It’s why MacMillan had to play chicken with Amazon–if they didn’t, the idea that a story should only cost $9.99 would continue until all consumers believed it and would refuse to buy anything that actually represents the real price of entertainment, or culture.

__________________________

COINCIDENTALLY, the NYT ran a piece the day after I wrote this, on the same subject. It’s here. Choice excerpt:

Authors have been taken aback by some of the vehemence of the reader protests.

“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”

Amazon commenters attacked Mr. Preston after his publisher delayed the e-book version of his novel by four months to protect hardcover sales. Mr. Preston said he was not sure whether the protests were denting his sales. But, he said, “It gives me pause when I get 50 e-mails saying ‘I’m never buying one of your books ever again. I’m moving on, you greedy, greedy author.”

 

10 February 2010 ≡ Culture, Literature, Publishing Business, Writing ≡

← Previous Entries