This Crazy Writing Life: In An Ever-Shifting Publishing Landscape, Some Things Never Change
By Steven Womack
At the end of last month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life, I threw a little teaser out there. I’d have an update, I wrote, on a project I’d mentioned in an earlier column. That project was Pearson Place, a novel that New York writer/filmmaker Wayne McDaniel and I wrote almost a decade ago.
In that earlier column, I described the agonies we’d gone through trying to publish this book. The endless queries on QueryTracker.com, most of them ignored. Endless hours researching editors or houses that would consider submissions from unagented writers…
And then the thrill of finding an editor who would read the manuscript even though both Wayne and I have been unagented for years. The even bigger thrill of discovering that she loved the book, wanted to buy it…
And then the heartbreak of discovering that one person on the acquisitions committee was a holdout. The editor who loved our book spent nearly a year trying to get the committee to let her buy it. In the end, she had to let it go.
Wayne and I found ourselves in the unusual situation of feeling worse for the editor than we did for ourselves.
So we decided to serialize the book on Substack. I thought the process of doing that would make good grist for This Crazy Writing Life and, who knows, it might even sell some copies. Pearson Place on Substack would be a revealing case study. We’d have to teach ourselves how to do it, and in doing so, could pay it forward to other indie writers. Then when the book was up, we could track the numbers and explore different marketing strategies. It would be an interesting journey we could all take together.
Then, as so often happens, fate intervened. A very successful writer and friend of mine for nearly forty years read the column. She wrote me an email: Are you sure you want to go the Substack route?
I think that’s the only route we got left, I answered.
Hold off on that… Let me see if my editor will take a look at it.
A few days later, an email landed in my inbox. My friend’s editor would love to see the manuscript. Send it along.
The Pearson Place Substack project was on hold as we waited for this editor’s response. As so often happens in publishing, the wait went on for several weeks. She was off to the London Book Fair, which took a week of preparation before and two weeks of recovery and catch-up afterward. Writers who’ve been in this business longer than a minute soon learn the art and skill of patience, even if they hate to be forced to exercise it.
Finally, the editor reached out to us. Any chance we could have a Zoom meeting next week?
Wayne and I found this greatly encouraging. Editors don’t usually schedule a Zoom meet to tell you your book sucks and they wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.
The appointed Zoom meet day rolled around and the three of us met somewhere out there in the ether. I gotta tell you, folks, it was magic. We instantly took a liking to this editor and she seemed to feel the same way about us. She clearly had read the book, got what we were trying to do, and supported it. It was the first time we had laid eyes on each other and in our very first meeting, she’s talking pub dates, marketing strategies, ad and promotion budgets, even a potential book tour. Wayne and I were thrilled, but finally one of us came back to earth (I think it was Wayne) and asked about any rewrites or editorial revisions.
Oh, she replied, there might be a few little things. Nothing serious…
The Zoom meet went on for about forty minutes and it ended with the editor saying those wonderful words that every writer lives to hear: I’ll have you something next week…
Meaning, we assumed, an offer.
As I write this, that was a month ago.
Now I’ve been in this business long enough to know that waiting a month to hear from an editor is nothing. While I don’t mean to sound cynical, on some level I would’ve been surprised had it all gone as easy as it looked.
I still have faith that we’ll hear something, eventually. I’ve often observed that the publishing industry is in the middle of one of its most turbulent times ever. The ground under our feet shakes and shifts every day.
But some things never change, and one of those is that however traditional publishing evolves and changes over the years, it still grinds along slowly…
I’ll let you know when we hear something.
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Speaking of shaking and shifting, we explored in last month’s column the attempts to slow the word tsunami brought about by generative AI. Kindle has now prohibited indie pubbers from uploading more than three books a day. James Blatch, of Self Publishing Launchpad, caused a ruckus when he suggested Amazon should charge as much as $300.00 to upload a book to KDP.
Now Draft2Digital and Barnes & Noble Press have joined the fracas.
I’ve mentioned Draft2Digital or as it’s more commonly known, D2D, in previous columns. D2D is an aggregator, a company which solves a big problem for indie pubbers. If you’re distributing eBooks through every available outlet—Barnes & Noble, Kobo, BooksAMillion, Apple, Google, etc.—then it’s an enormous PITA to set up an account with each one of those outlets and then manage them.
Instead, indie pubbers set up an account with D2D and then D2D sends them out to the eBook outlets. It then processes the payments from them, shaves off a small percentage for their trouble, and sends you the rest.
Makes life a lot easier…
Historically, D2D hasn’t charged for this, except for the commission they collect on your sales. But with the increase in AI slop in the past few years, D2D (like everyone else) has faced some serious headwinds. James Blatch reported in his Substack blog that a D2D employee told him that on the day Charlie Kirk was shot, they were inundated with instant Charlie Kirk biographies that had been generated by AI from data scraped off the internet.
As the company’s announcement on April 14th read:
Like many platforms, we’ve seen a significant increase in automated and low-quality account creation in recent years. This onslaught from automated content farms threatens reader trust in indie titles and risks indies being associated with low-quality “slop.” A modest activation fee can make a difference and allow our team to stay focused on supporting genuine authors like you.
For the first time in the company’s history, they’re going to charge a modest new account activation fee ($20 USD) and an annual maintenance fee of $12.00 for accounts that don’t earn at least $100.00 annually. If you earn more than that, the fee won’t apply.
Barnes & Noble Press has also made a few changes in their TOS. Starting April 22, 2026, all B&N Press print books must have a minimum retail price of $14.99 If you’ve already got titles up for less than that, you’re either going to have to raise the price or delist them.
Additionally, B&N Press is now setting a limit on how many titles each account can publish. No single account can have more than 100 titles. This may seem a little looney tunes to most writers; how could anybody write more than 100 books? But trust me, I have friends in Novelists, Inc. who are real writers, not AI slop generators, and have published well into three digits. It’s not that unusual, especially in genre fiction. As I mentioned in a column a few months ago, Louis L’Amour published 130 books in his career.
Finally—and this is a big one, I think—Barnes & Noble Press will no longer allow public domain titles to be published on their platform, which is interesting given every Barnes & Noble retail store I’ve ever been in sells classic public domain books in Barnes & Noble editions. But as B&N’s announcement stated:
Barnes & Noble Press was established to publish and promote independent authors, and this change is intended to support this ideal.
Finally, as if we needed any further proof of how tough this business is, the largest book distributor to the library market closed its doors and liquidated earlier this year. Baker & Taylor, which had more than 4,000 institutional customers and was nearly 200 years old, folded in January after a proposed acquisition by ReaderLink fell through. Some 500 employees lost their jobs and lot of publishers with unpaid invoices were left twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.
That’s enough good news for one month. Thanks for playing along. See you next time.
Edgar and Shamus Award-winning author Steven Womack created the groundbreaking Music City Murders series, the first series to put Nashville on the map as a mystery setting. He’s also the author of a number of other novels, including the New York Times Notable Book MURPHY’S FAULT.
