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I'll light the fuse

16K views 142 replies 67 participants last post by  David VanDyke 
#1 ·
I predict this thread will blow up soon, so read it and post (respectfully please) while you can.

A certain author made a FB post decrying Dominion Rising selling enough copies to make the NYT list, but the NYT did not put them on the list. That author did not make any inappropriate suggestions, just put out the disappointing (to them) info.

Fair enough.

But then Hugh Howey (public figure, publicly shared) shares the post and adds his suggestion that those authors should put "NYT Bestselling Author" on their covers anyway, because they "earned" it.

At the risk of starting a feud with a great friend and ally among us indies, which is not my intention, I have to vehemently disagree.

You can't claim an Oscar, a Masters win, Super Bowl ring or a Nobel prize if you didn't actually get the award. That's the simple fact. The NYT never promised anyone the award based only on the historical numbers other people needed to reach it.

The NYT list is a curated list. Recently, they have been disallowing these huge multi-author box sets. I have to believe it's because it's obvious to anyone that combining all the sales into one number is like putting 20 tennis players onto the court at Wimbledon. It's a perversion of the process and the principle. That's just a guess and my own opinion, of course, but at the very least, the NYT decided the new world of digital publishing makes it too easy to simply hit a number--20+ books at 99c.

Now we have authors saying and others agreeing they should lie and claim the award anyway. Every kindergartner in the world knows that's wrong. You can say all day you should have won the thing, but lying and claiming you DID is still a lie. Shame on anyone for suggesting this is somehow justified.

Should I claim I won a Hugo or Dragon (instead of merely being a finalist) just because I think I deserved to, because of all my hard work, blah blah? Nope. The process is the process, and unless you can prove that the process is somehow illegal, you can't claim to have won it. You can claim you SHOULD HAVE, sure, but putting "NYT bestselling author" on your books is an outright lie.

Also, how long after doing this will the traditional publishers or the media or any other opponent of independent and self-publishers use it to smear all of us indies as liars and cheats? In fact, I could see Amazon (or the other vendors) pulling accounts for violating TOS for doing so. Not that Amazon has a good track record in consistently enforcing its TOS, but it's certainly possible. I could also see authors being sued by the NYT for fraudulently using the NYT tag.

Even if you disagree with me and are completely onboard with the idea that these authors should get the tag, it's still a really, really bad idea for them individually or collectively, to lie about it or support lying about it.
 
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#28 ·
LMareeApps said:
To be honest, if I were just reading this comment, I'd assume he was being a bit venty, tongue in cheek, while trying to show support for their efforts. You know like when something p*ss es you off and you're all 'I should just do this' or 'I should just do that' etc, and while you're not joking, you also don't literally intend on putting the action in place. (And by 'you', I clearly mean me, because I do this!)
The problem is who he is. There's that saying with great power comes great responsibility. Some authors will take anything he says at face value whether he said it in the heat of the moment or not. No he isn't responsible for what other authors do, but if I were that big I'd try to remember that I have people looking up to me for advice and watch what I say.
 
G
#29 ·
Isn't it a moot point? I thought most of the participants were already USA Today and NYT bestsellers before Dominion Riding, from being in Rebecca Hamilton's boxed sets. So instead of being a multiple NYT bestseller, they've only got the letters once (or however many times the RH sets made the lists). If you've hit a list more than once can you put a tally on your cover after the letters?
 
#30 ·
TwistedTales said:
Making the list any other way than with a genuine fan base for your books will be a short lived victory. It might help you along the path to success, but it alone doesn't represent or create success.
Totally. Actually, even making a list purely on genuine fan base could still turn out the same. There's plenty of one-hit wonders out there. It's a cool notch in a belt, for sure. But really that's about it.
 
#31 ·
I have a general rule of thumb that no matter the stature of an author giving advice, they will always falter.

Hugh has been a Godsend for the indie community, and he's certainly one of the prime people I look up to and respect. I'm prone to take advice from him, but this is downright stupid. It's bad advice. It's unethical. It's appalling.

Stephen King is a damn genius, but even he can be wrong too. In fact, he has been wrong before when he decried First Person Present Tense, "It has no place in the fiction world."
 
#32 ·
Ah, let's not be too hard on Hugh. It looks very much like the kind of FB post I make all the time when drunk :D

And if we're going to start talking about public figures who ought to be prevented from posting on social media when in a fit of pique... well, I think there are more urgent examples in the world than a quite successful novelist ;)
 
#35 ·
Jan Hurst-Nicholson said:
If they do use the tag and it all blows up and makes headlines about fraud or similar, then the resultant publicity would probably get them enough sales to pay any lawyer fees ::) :D
The authors are earning $0.017 each per sale. Considering however much they spent on production and marketing, I doubt this will be a money maker even if Oprah touts it. As to whether it pays off in the long term, I think such sets are debatable. I downloaded it because I've previously read some of the names, but haven't opened it. If I get snowed in for a couple of months in a place without internet, I might get around to it. And if I don't ever read the books, will I go on to buy other books by these authors?
 
#37 ·
INBTL

I agree with David.

It doesn't matter how hard those authors worked, how honest they were (eschewing the underhanded methods of one of the early "consultants" on the set), by claiming something they didn't earn, it's all out the window. They would be painted with the same brush as RH, at whose feet you can lay the blame for box sets not being listed by the NYT. Her and her partner JW, are at fault for all the sleezy, scammy and contract-violating things they used to push box sets on lists where they didn't belong. And now, WSJ and USA Today may end up also denying box sets. Maybe Howey can give them the finger, too.

And it's been no secret that NYT won't consider box sets after the above persons' shenanigans, so why people expected anything different is beyond me. Howey putting his finger in this only makes all indies look bad, because as noted, he's the banner writer people look at when they see "indie". And if he was drunk when he posted, that, he needs intervention, not excuses.

Edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca
 
#38 ·
Colin said:
Ah, so you're offering up the old, 'drunk in charge of a keyboard' defence/defense?

Cheersh to all New York Timesh Besht Shellers...

(real or imaginary)

:D
I wouldn't go as far as call it a defence - but though he clearly did mean it at the time, and he is wrong, his statement seems tongue-in-cheek enough that the emergency pearls could usefully go unclutched... A cheery "Shut up and write another hit, Hugh!" would seem to be the best response.
 
#39 ·
deceptive of the NYT list to claim it truly represents the bestselling books
It's been known for decades that the list can be bought. There have been some pretty big scandals about it in the last few years, where it's come out that publishers often buy up copies of an author's work simply to make the list. They have to be gotten from a reporting store, but it isn't hard for them to come up with the sales.

Readers don't necessarily know this, but writers should. And some readers do care, because they buy few books, think these best seller lists are curated with truly the best books, because lots of people bought them, right? And they trust they're getting "good" books this way.
 
#41 ·
Sapphire said:
There was a time when "letters" on the cover of a book caught my attention and caused me to give the book additional consideration. Since I've learned how the trad-pubs buy thousands of copies and self-pubs come together to game the sales, I no longer pay any attention at all. In fact, I tend to skip past any cover displaying such honors. Too bad...the value of the lists have become truly devalued over the years.
I'd guess that this is why NYT and others are fighting back by introducing new ways to curate their lists.

It would be nice if they were more transparent about it, but it's a similar situation to Amazon bestseller lists (or ads, SEO, etc.)-if the exact algorithm is known, it's easy to game it. As we've seen, it's easy to game even when we're just guessing at the algorithms.

As a reader, I'd expect some curation on the NYT's part. Before I got into all this author stuff, I'd just assume that if an author claims to be a "NYT bestseller" it means they sold more of their own books than other authors during a specific period of time. I'd never even think that maybe the author was just 1 of 20 in a discounted box set. That's sort of (but not exactly) like every movie on Netflix claiming it's a "#1 movie in America" because more people watched Netflix as a whole than anything else.

Hugh probably just made a mistake, as all of us have done. But it is quite clearly a mistake, as made clear by the 100% rate of admonishment in this thread.
 
#44 ·
I'm going to throw on petrol by saying that I never quite understood the phrasing of NYT Best Selling Author.

I would understand the book being labelled a NYT Best Seller, and it should have been with those numbers. But not the authors...

Best selling books, or best selling box set, whichever, it's all the same to me, but isn't it that title that hit the list not any of their other titles. Are all your books of the same quality? I know mine aren't. Some of my early stuff is total pap but if I put NYT Best Selling Author on the front cover then I'm misleading the buyer that this particular book is a best seller. Shrug... That's just always been a bee in my bonnet that I've never mentioned before.

I'm not going to pretend I wouldn't like to be a NYTBS or say that I think it's meaningless. It would be a great accolade to trot out when I talk to schools and libraries. But I never see anyone comment on the point I raised above. Surely it's a best selling book not best selling authors?
 
#45 ·
Evenstar said:
I'm going to throw on petrol by saying that I never quite understood the phrasing of NYT Best Selling Author.

I would understand the book being labelled a NYT Best Seller, and it should have been with those numbers. But not the authors...

Best selling books, or best selling box set, whichever, it's all the same to me, but isn't it that title that hit the list not any of their other titles. Are all your books of the same quality? I know mine aren't. Some of my early stuff is total pap but if I put NYT Best Selling Author on the front cover then I'm misleading the buyer that this particular book is a best seller. Shrug... That's just always been a bee in my bonnet that I've never mentioned before.

I'm not going to pretend I wouldn't like to be a NYTBS or say that I think it's meaningless. It would be a great accolade to trot out when I talk to schools and libraries. But I never see anyone comment on the point I raised above. Surely it's a best selling book not best selling authors?
Yeah, but does anyone actually do this with anything?

I mean, you see people using Award Winning Author all the time, not for a particular book. Same with Amazon best seller.

I understand what you're saying, but I don't think is different than any other title or accolade. I mean, once you've won the Nobel Prize, you're considered a winner, not just a winner with an asterisk next to their name.
 
#46 ·
Evenstar said:
I'm going to throw on petrol by saying that I never quite understood the phrasing of NYT Best Selling Author.

I would understand the book being labelled a NYT Best Seller, and it should have been with those numbers. But not the authors...

Best selling books, or best selling box set, whichever, it's all the same to me, but isn't it that title that hit the list not any of their other titles. Are all your books of the same quality? I know mine aren't. Some of my early stuff is total pap but if I put NYT Best Selling Author on the front cover then I'm misleading the buyer that this particular book is a best seller. Shrug... That's just always been a bee in my bonnet that I've never mentioned before.

I'm not going to pretend I wouldn't like to be a NYTBS or say that I think it's meaningless. It would be a great accolade to trot out when I talk to schools and libraries. But I never see anyone comment on the point I raised above. Surely it's a best selling book not best selling authors?
Agree completely. I would love to be an NYTBS, but even if I were in a box set that got on one of those lists, I wouldn't put it on my individual titles because I wouldn't feel I actually earned the tag.

If it's one of my books that got on the list without the help of a box set? I'd tattoo that tag on every square inch of my body.
 
#47 ·
The only words I would ever take as 'literal' are the ones that from a judge in a court of law. Perhaps Hugh was serious, perhaps he wasn't, but I think his point is simply there is bias in the system and he wants his fans to know about it. If the list doesn't represent bestsellers, as many who are much wiser than I have suggested, perhaps the NYT should think about their own choice of words and consider calling it 'The NYT list of books we like that sold a few copies.'
 
#48 ·
I don't personally have any beef with the 'individual book' v 'box set' thing. Which I know is a bit of a hot topic. People can and should use it however they see fit in my humble opinion.

And it is a great marketing line in certain areas. But I would still always feel that the book was a NYTBS not me and all my books. Shrug... Not an important point. Just one I thought I'd put out there.
 
#49 ·
Working hard doesn't "earn" you an award. A lot of people in this business work very, very hard. It doesn't guarantee a spot on a curated list.

With a 20K minimum subscriber requirement to join and 23 authors, this book had an initial reach of over 460,000. 30K is 6%, which is a pretty decent response. Leveraging a large number of established authors is clever marketing.

Frustration is one thing but advising people to commit fraud over an award is irresponsible. How much ego is tied up in having those letters that you feel like you must have them at any cost? That you are entitled to claim them even if they weren't awarded? Is it really that important?
 
#51 ·
C. Gockel said:
I'm going to believe that Hugh was just joking. No, I don't think they can claim NYT letters. That said, they could claim, "30,000 copies sold."
Yeah. I read the original post and took it as tongue in cheek.
 
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