Review: Entertaining, Thought Provoking
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 30, 2012
If you're an indie author, you likely know about Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath.Eisler is famous (in the publishing world, anyway) for having turned down a half-million-dollar contract with St. Martin's in  favor of self-publishing. Konrath is the granddaddy of self-publishing. Reading his blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, from Day 1 to the present is highly recommended for anyone thinking of going indie. For such folks, hearing Eisler and Konrath chew the fat is not to be missed. And the book doesn't disappoint, so long as you go into it expecting it to be what it claims to be -- a "conversation," not a carefully structure, thesis-driven argument.The book is a compilation of three conversations Eisler and Konrath carried on electronically using Google Docs. Each conversation covers wide ground. In general, the first treats the traditional-publishing vs. self-publishing issue broadly; the second takes on various counterarguments generated by the first; and the third focuses largely on Eisler's decision to publish a book with Thomas & Mercer, Amazon's thriller/mystery imprint.Each conversation is interesting and enjoyable in its own right. Rather than trying to cover everything, I'll just mention a couple items I found particularly arresting.The authors explain that although traditional publishers' contracts commonly offer authors a 25% royalty on ebooks, what the author actually gets is 14.9% of the retail price, after Amazon and the author's agent take their cut. In contrast, the publisher gets 52.5% after Amazon's cut. Why, Eisler and Konrath wonder, should the publisher get such a big cut when the cost of producing, shipping, and storing ebooks is so much lower? (Kindle Loc 155) In the end, it's not an attractive model for authors. "As bookstores close and digital readers proliferate," Eisler remarks later, "more and more authors will decide that what legacy publishers take from them in digital sales isn't worth what legacy publishers earn for them in paper sales" (Kindle Loc 712). (Incidentally, the term "legacy publisher" is Eisler's coinage, and Be the Monkey explains what it means [Kindle Loc 1585].)Eisler and Konrath do a lot this sort of thing in the book -- rebutting counterarguments and tracking down fallacies. They're terrific at finding the problems in others' reasoning. For instance, a $500K advance sounds like a lot, but digital is forever, whereas many print books only get a few years on the shelves, then fall out of print. What if your ebook sells well for thirty years, and you make a 70% royalty on every sale? Does $500K sound like so much, in comparison? And why is it that the New York Times bestseller list doesn't include indie books? And why do people think that piracy cuts into sales so much, as though every person who pirated a book would buy that same book if she weren't able to pirate it, rather than just stealing something else? Basically, the pro-traditional-publishing crowd puts a lot of waist-high fastballs over the center of the plate, and Eisler and Konrath have a great time stepping up for BP.I'll mention one other point: Eisler and Konrath devote some time to the idea of agents becoming "estributors" (Kindle location 1880). There's a market, they point out, for someone who will charge a smallish percentage of a book's profits -- say, 15% -- in order to take care of editing, formatting, cover design, uploading, and so forth. And fielding those offers for film rights, right? For what it's worth, I think they're right, and I bet their prediction of how agents' roles will change is on target. Unlike the big publishing houses, agents aren't weighed down with the vast apparatus of paper-book production. Those who are flexible and far-sighted can adapt to an increasingly indie publishing world.I have just one bone to pick with Eisler and Konrath. The two of them clearly have a great rapport, and they're really funny. But the book's title, Be the Monkey, actually strikes me as misleading.The title's drawn from a series of YouTube videos that show monkeys knowing frogs in the biblical sense, which Eisler and Konrath find hilarious. Now, my sense of humor is, I believe, every bit as sophomoric as these guys', so I don't object to the frog-molestation jokes on moral grounds. But Eisler and Konrath's point (if someone has to be the frog and someone has to be the monkey, make damn sure you're the monkey) doesn't get at the genius of the indie-publishing movement, which is that no one has to be the frog, and no one has to be the monkey. Indie publishing is a win-win for readers and authors: readers pay less while authors make more and have greater control.Admittedly, it's not a win for the big publishing houses, but as Eisler and Konrath point out, those companies are actively monkeying it up by overpricing ebooks to support the flagging paper market. That means they probably don't deserve to win.This unsolicited review has been cross-posted, in edited form, from The Active Voice. I did not receive a free copy of this book.