Storytellersunplugged

Storytellers unplugged: the end of an era

On June 6th, Matt Schwartz who runs shocklines.com announced formally that he will be, over the course of the next few months, shutting the doors on what has been, without doubt, one of the most successful online stores ever created for the horror genre.

It’s a sad thing, really, but the reasons he’s shutting it down have less to do with finances—though they are a factor—and more to do with the fact that he’d like to have a life outside of the orders that come in. Matt is one of the good guys, he’s been in the genre for a long time and supported the small presses and the micro presses along the way. There are, I’m certain, more stories that could be told regarding the good he’s done for various authors and publishers than there are stories of the good the current administration has managed to accomplish for these United States.

The news was met with shock, dismay, sadness and more than a few voices starting to cry out that this will be the end of an era. Peppered into the mix were a few people wishing Matt the best with his future plans. You see, Matt has a full time job in addition to running Shocklines, and he still intends to keep up with his passion for the genre in different ways. A lot of people seemed to overlook the latter aspects of his post, focusing on the negative and not seeing the positives.

I am always amazed by the doomsayers.

There is a fear, and an understandable one, that the loss of Shocklines will have an enormous impact on the genre. I think there’s a modicum of truth in that, but only that small element, not the amazing destructive wave that some people are predicting. I might add that Matt is doing everything he can to lessen the impact. You see, Matt’s planning, in his own words, to keep things moving.

From his post:

“Shocklines.com will continue to exist even when the store is gone. For now, when publishers have a new title, I’ll still list it somewhere in the store (not sure yet the way I’ll set it up, but I will) and I’ll link directly to the publisher’s website.”Additionally, my email newsletter will continue, but will gradually become a complete news service just for books in horror and genre, including mainstream book publishers as well. Links will all be to the publishers and to bookstores whom are in good standing with the publishers. This way, this message board and the newsletter will still be a way that everyone can still be sure not to miss out on announcements of new items, including chapbooks or new small presses that may slip by the radar otherwise. I just won’t be selling them anymore.”

That means, literally, that Matt intends to give the exact same sort of boost he’s been giving to the genre all along. He intends to do what he’s been doing since day one, but with a twist. It’s a labor of love, and not a machine that requires ten to twelve hours of every day in the hopes that he can pay his bills.

Hell, I’ll do you one better than that: he’s helping out the smaller presses. All of the people who’ve been panicked by the idea that the micro presses will be destroyed, well, Matt’s actually putting more money in their hands, assuming they’re smart enough to actually take advantage of his generosity.

But, Jim, what do you mean?

Matt’s strength has always been his ability to market the new books that come out. He’s been doing it for a very long time now and he’s made sure that he covered presses that would have probably never been seen without his site. Only, instead of buying the books from the publishers himself, he’s sending readers directly to them. That means they get the entire price of the book to help offset their expenses (which can be very, very steep in a lot of cases) as opposed to 60% of the cover price. Amazon.com and retail stores buy at wholesale prices. On the average, that means they buy with a substantial discount, as high as fifty percent off of the cover price, and then sell them at the full price. That’s how they make their livings. Okay, enough of the advanced economics, I just needed to make a point.

The difference for the publishers that Matt is doing this for is simple: They get more money in their coffers assuming that they don’t then screw it up and either forget to let Matt know about their upcoming titles or fail to deliver the goods to their paying customers within a reasonable time frame. Most of the more experienced presses (among them Necessary Evil Press, Bloodletting Books, Earthling Publications, White Noise Press and Delirium Books) have already made statements on Shocklines.com regarding doing everything in their power to make sure that collectors who’ve been dealing with Shocklines will get matching numbers for their collections, etc.

It’s a simple enough process. The smart ones will actually make more money than they did when Shocklines was still in business. The not-so-smart ones, will screw it up.

But Jim, what about the writers? What happens now, when the number one bookstore for carrying all of the obscure titles goes away?

Simple: the number two and three bookstores will start carrying the extra titles and will, in turn, make money. In the case of Bloodletting Books (bloodlettingbooks.com), not only is the site the home of a publisher, it’s also the home of a bookstore. Larry Roberts of Bloodletting Books has already begun making arrangements with several of the presses that would have suffered a great deal as a result of Shocklines going away. Not just the presses in the US, necessarily, but the ones in Britain and Europe that have seldom seen successful US sales before Shocklines came around. I suspect a few others will also do what they can to fill the void. They may not carry quite as phenomenal a list as Shocklines did, but they’ll do a lot to make up the difference and Shocklines in whatever incarnation it mutates into under Matt’s careful hand will also help.

What does that mean for the authors? The same thing it meant before. If you do your job the right way, you’ll get somewhere in the publishing field. One of the biggest fears is that the micro presses will die a quick and painful death without Shocklines around. That readers and publishers will, in the process, suddenly stop looking at the newer authors without a following (sometimes, frankly, the only authors a small press can afford—and I’ll get to that particular bit of nastiness in a moment*) and the careers that might have existed with Shocklines in the picture will wither and die.

Yeah. Right.

Things will probably change. Let’s be honest about that. While Shocklines is not the end all be all of the horror genre and publishing, it most decidedly had an impact in a lot of cases. It will, if Matt is as good as I believe he is, continue to have an impact. There are likely going to be a few presses that cannot survive in the transition. And you know what? They would have died whether or not Shocklines existed.

Damn, Jim, you’re a cold bastard!

Well, yes, I am. Or at least I can be. That falls within the nature of the beast as it were. It’s called using a little logic instead of following my heart and wishing very, very hard.

The presses that die because Shocklines the bookstore is no longer there weren’t going to survive either way. They’re just going to die a little faster, because, to be perfectly blunt, despite all of the good that Matt has done with Shocklines, if he is the ONLY plan they had in place for selling books, they weren’t trying very hard. Oh, hearts might be in the right place and the “labor of love” that they were planning on doing might have sold an extra fifty copies because of the store, but if they only sell fifty copies, they weren’t working very hard to get where they needed to be.

Putting it bluntly, if Shocklines was all they had, they didn’t think it through. Shocklines worked because Matt busted his ass and had the cash flow to stock the books, store the books, ship the books (and magazines and lots more, really) and keep his customers satisfied. It was a labor of love, but he handled it like a business. From time to time he struggled and now and then he probably had some damned good months, too. But through it all, he treated it like a business.

Writers and publishers need to do the same thing. If you want to be a professional, folks, you have to act the part. I’ve said it before and I probably will again. That means for the small presses that they have the cash flow to get good stories*, edit them and have them bound properly. They make sure that the books they release are as perfect as humanly possible in both the quality of the work and the final product. Editing, re-editing, meticulous layout, high quality products that sell at a reasonable price. And believe me, there are plenty of books out there that cost enough to ensure the books are damned near flawless if the company wants to stay in business.

You get what you pay for in the world, or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to go. Writers get paid to deliver a product. In the process, they have to make sure that the works they deliver are clean, well written, edited and delivered within a reasonable time frame.

Publishers are supposed to make sure of almost the exact same things. The product is clean, well written, edited and delivered within a reasonable amount of time. When it comes to the collector’s market, you can bet that the publisher who produces a fifty dollar hardcover book with pages missing, poor binding or so many typos that the reader can’t enjoy the book is going to have a hard time convincing someone to invest that sort of money a second time. Earthling Publications, Necessary Evil Press, Bloodletting Press, Delirium, Cemetery Dance, Subterranean Press, PS Publications and a handful of others go out of their way to do it the right way. In the case of Cemetery Dance, well, let’s be honest here, the company was going long before Shocklines came around and they’ll likely still be going for as long as the owners have the health to continue, which I hope is for a very long time indeed.

In all cases, they worked out plans, they’ve done their best to implement those plans, and they’re making careful considerations before they move to the next stage of planning. As often as not, the companies are created by people working full time jobs to pay their own bills, who then in fact produce labors of love. The emphasis on “labor.” They took the time to do it the right way. They didn’t expect the writers to work for free and they didn’t expect the printers to give them special discounts because it was their lifelong ambition to become publishers. They paid their bills in a timely manner, edited their books, laid the books out, and then triple checked to see that it was done the right way. They didn’t cut corners, or sacrifice quality anywhere along the path they chose. They worked and damned hard at that, to get where they are and at no point did they decide the only way they could get their business off the ground was to work with one bookstore and never bother with the others.

Shocklines.com the bookstore will be missed, yes, but the loss will not destroy any of the publishers listed above. Nor will the loss cause the destruction of a writer’s career, unless said writer simply isn’t any good. Don’t misunderstand me, I did and do believe that Shocklines helped more than a few careers and that Matt Schwartz did as well. But in the long run, writers have to stand by their work and publishers do too.

Some of the people working in the field may not like that notion, but there it is.

Just to make the transition as painless as possible, here’s a list of a few publishers you might want to visit if you want to see the works of some of the small press authors and get them before they’re jacked in price on eBay.
http://www.aiopublishing.com/index.htm
http://www.apexdigest.com/
http://www.badmoonbooks.com/home.php
http://www.bitingdogpress.com/
http://bloodlettingbooks.com/
http://www.borderlandspress.com/
http://www.bradfordhousepublishing.com/
http://cemeterydance.com/
http://www.coscomentertainment.com/
http://www.cuttingblock.net/
http://www.darkartsbooks.com/news.shtml
http://www.darkdiscoveries.com/
http://www.darkhart.com/index.html
http://deliriumbooks.com/
http://earthlingpub.com/
http://elasticpress.com/
http://www.gravesidetales.com/
http://www.grayfriarpress.com/
http://hippocampuspress.com/
http://www.insidiouspublications.com/
http://khpindustries.com/
http://www.necessaryevilpress.com/
http://www.nightshadebooks.com/
http://www.noctpress.com/
http://www.novellopublishers.com/
http://www.pendragonpress.co.uk/
http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/
http://www.rawdogscreaming.com/
http://home.freeuk.net/sarobpress/
http://www.simianpublishing.com/
http://www.subterraneanpress.com/
http://www.telos.co.uk/
http://www.twobackedbooks.com/catalog.asp
http://whitenoisepress.com/

There are probably a lot more that I’m missing, but that’s a good starting point.

* Remember what I said earlier about small presses and their ability to get good stories? Well, there are several small presses out there that believe they should get their stories for free, because they are creating “labors of love.” Garbage! If you as a writer want to give your stories and novels away, then might I suggest you go about self-publishing? Yes, I said self-publishing in the genres was a crock of doo doo and I still mean it. But how is it better to give your work away to a small press that will then turn around and sell it for a profit? See the companies I mentioned above as examples of presses that actually pay a decent wage for the work you deliver and consider whether you would rather take your chances with them or with a few folks who want to sell your story when they can finally scrape up the cash. Does that sound mercenary? Maybe it is, but that’s part of being a professional writer as opposed to a fan with a dream.