Throughout history speculative bubbles have whipped people into such a state of euphoria that they lose all prudence and set themselves up for the collapse of their dreams and fortunes. It happened with investment as disparate as tulips in Holland, England’s South Sea Company, dotcom madness and American mortgage derivatives.

Ewan Morrison, describing the self-publishing craze in The Guardian, thinks this phenomenon perfectly fits the classic signposts of an incipient bubble.  He even suggests it smacks of a Ponzi scheme. “There is now,” he writes, “a boom industry in ‘How to get rich writing ebooks’ manuals, as well as a multitude of blogs offering tips and services, and a new breed of specialists who’ll charge you anything from $37 to $149 to get your ebook into shape. This all seems like a repeat of the boom in get-rich-quick manuals and ‘specialists’ that appeared around blogs and etrading.”

Drawing on the economic theorizing by twentieth century economist Hyman Minsky, Morrison develops parallels between such bubbles as the US stock market of the 1920s and the one shaping up in self-publishing. The following are direct quotations from Morrison’s article The self-epublishing bubble

Stage One – Disturbance.  Every financial bubble begins with a disturbance. The creation of Kindle led to a new generation of ereaders which, with Apple, launched an economic boom in a previously non-existent market.

Stage Two – Expansion/Prices Start to Increase. The ebook explosion is coupled with the rise of the e-reader… A brand new market of consumers for these products has appeared from nowhere. The change to cheap ebooks and self-published ebooks is a “change in underlying fundamentals”.

Stage Three – Euphoria/Easy Credit. Every financial bubble needs fuel; cheap and easy credit is that fuel. Without it, there can be no speculation… “Easy credit” in this case relates to the plummeting costs of digital content… The whole point of self-epublishing is that the market “brings in people who would not normally be there”. Like the promise that we can all have an affordable home with a cheap mortgage, we are being told constantly by digital businesses and the media that we can all be writers and even be successful as writers.

Stage Four – Over-trading/Prices Reach a Peak. As the effects of cheap and easy credit dig deeper, the market begins to accelerate. Overtrading lifts up volumes and spot shortages emerge. Prices start to zoom, and easy profits are made. This brings in more outsiders, and prices run out of control.  This is the point that amateurs – the foolish, the greedy, and the desperate – enter the market.”

Blogs now give advice to start-up writers, telling them to give their work away for free to gain audience share and get reviews, and only then attempt to raise their prices. The zooming prices here refers to the zooming down of prices. For example self-epublishers are now giving books away for free – see the Kindle Top 100 Free books. Furthermore, in this ecstatic push to self-epublish, there are hundreds of thousands of new ebooks for which there are almost no readers at all because they have zero visibility.

Stage Five – Market Reversal/Insider Profit Taking. Warnings sound that the boom will turn to bust; that the models on which success is based are unrealistic and overblown…The models of Doctorow or Hocking are misleading to say the least. For the hundreds of thousands of newcomers to self-epublishing to believe that they can become as successful as [Doctorow and Hocking] is a dangerous delusion, and one capitalised on by companies who have an interest in maximizing internet traffic and selling e-readers and internet advertising.

Stage Six – Financial Crisis. Just as the euphoria consumes the outsiders, the insiders see the warning signs, lose their faith and begin to sneak out the exit. Whether the outsiders see the insiders leave or not, insider profit-taking signals the beginning of the end. Already the stars of self-epublishing are leaving the system that launched them. Hocking signed a deal with Macmillan that gave her a $500,000 advance on four separate books in a series – a total reversal from the way self publishing is done (with zero advances being paid and all work being done on “spec”)… And then comes the collapse – if you work for free and have to slash your costs to be competitive – to, say, undercut the vast 99-cent market…, then your chances of ever seeing a return on all the free labor you’ve put in diminish accordingly. Add to this the fact that hundreds of thousands of others are competing with you in this pricing race to the bottom and the possibility of any newcomers making any money from self-epublishing vanishes. The bubble bursts.

Stage seven – Revulsion/Lender of Last Resort. Panic starts and euphoria is replaced with revulsion. Outsiders start to sell, but there are no buyers. Panic sets in, prices start to tumble downwards, credit dries up, and losses start to accumulate. After a long year of trying to sell self-epublished books, attempting to self-promote on all available networking sites, and realising that they have been in competition with hundreds of thousands of newcomers just like them, the vast majority of the newly self-epublished authors discover that they have sold less than 100 books each… They come to see self-epublishing as a kind of Ponzi scheme – one created by digital companies to prey on the desires of an expanding mass of consumers who also wanted to be believe they could be “creative”. The “Lender in the Last Resort” cannot really step in to save the “investors”, as these are the hundreds of thousands of hopeful and now-disappointed first-time epublishers.

Richard Curtis

“No man ever steps in the same river twice,” said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Today he might say “No man ever writes the same text twice.” Nicholas Carr, writing in the Wall Street Journal, contends that digital word processing “is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse…Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen.”

For better:  “It makes it easy for writers to correct errors and update facts. Guidebooks will no longer send travelers to restaurants that have closed or to once charming inns that have turned into fleabags. The instructions in manuals will always be accurate. Reference books need never go out of date.

Even literary authors will be tempted to keep their works fresh. Historians and biographers will be able to revise their narratives to account for recent events or newly discovered documents. Polemicists will be able to bolster their arguments with new evidence. Novelists will be able to scrub away the little anachronisms that can make even a recently published story feel dated.”

For worse: “The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They’ll be able to edit textbooks that don’t fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits can ripple backward. Because e-readers connect to the Internet, the works they contain can be revised remotely, just as software programs are updated today.”

It was not long ago that when we thought of books we thought of immutability, fixity, indelibility.  Now we’re going to have think about them another way.

Books That Are Never Done Being Written

Richard Curtis

In a much-anticipated press event, Apple today introduced a textbook app it calls iBooks2. The company described it as an educational tool and, given how quickly and completely kids take to the iPad, it may well crack open the e-textbook market in a way that all prior efforts failed to. (See Surprise: Students Prefer Print Textbooks.)

One significant feature of iBooks2 is that it enables students to create their own books, enhance them with pictures, music, movies, videos, and texts from other sources and publish them, thus “inspiring kids to want to discover and want to learn,” as the Apple executive put it.

All well and good.  But isn’t it likely that the pictures, music, movies, videos, and texts from other sources published in these books will belong to somebody else?

These books will be published, uploaded into the iBooks store and sold there.  Unless the authors clear the rights to that content, such sales may be infringements of someone’s copyrights and Apple will be faced with the same kind of spamming that Kindle is combating.

Apple has the obligation to review the content it posts on the iPad and make sure that it does not infringe on the copyrights of others.  Will Apple have the time and manpower to police countless books and vooks, texts and theses? Not likely.  But surely they will not risk incurring liability for selling stolen goods.

If kids want to discover and learn, then the most important educational tool Apple could offer, as an adjunct to its iBooks2, is a primer on copyright. If Apple doesn’t instruct users on that fundamental legal principle, it will need to create an app for defending itself and its authors against copyright infringement lawsuits.

Richard Curtis

Seldom a week goes by without an announcement that a literary agency has launched an e-book venture. The schemes vary from agency to agency but in essence these firms have undertaken to publish or distribute e-book editions of their clients’ original works and reprints.

This development has created some tensions among their clients and unease in the author community in general.  How should authors regard it?

Seller vs. Buyer

The traditional role of literary agents is that of advocates for the authors they represent. Their clients are the sellers engaged in arms length – and sometimes adversarial – relationships with publishers – the buyers.  Agents have a legal, ethical, and fiduciary obligation to promote, protect and manage their clients’ interests, and authors rely on their agents’ unalloyed partisanship.

At least that is the theory. In actuality agents’ allegiance is rarely unalloyed, and they often find it strained or even conflicted. Friendships with editors, for instance, may compromise an agent’s impartiality. Or an agent may have to favor one client over another when awarding a coveted project.

These tensions are unavoidable, and though they may occasionally tax an agent’s relationship with an author they are rarely so flagrant as to violate the Association of Authors’ Representatives’ Canon of Ethics, whose first principle states: “The members pledge themselves to loyal service to their clients’ business and artistic needs, and will allow no conflicts of interest that would interfere with such service.”

It was owing to this injunction – which I helped to forge as a member and then president of the AAR – that I felt it best to leave the organization ten years ago when I founded E-Reads, the e-book publishing company that hosts this essay. I ask you to keep that fact in mind as you read these observations, and to discount them to whatever degree you may judge appropriate.

The AAR’s stern precept prevailed until the arrival of the digital age. As in so many other fields of endeavor, the digitization of books has had a profoundly destabilizing effect on relationships that had remained fixed for more than a century. The new technology has disintermediated all agencies – not just literary – that once stood staunchly between sellers and buyers. Now authors can – and increasingly do – sell to publishers without the intervention of an agent.

Squeezed out of their customary role, literary agents have been forced to reinvent themselves and seek new ways to be relevant to authors – and make a living at it. As I mentioned in a recent series of articles, many have developed management services such as creation of websites for clients, assistance with social networking, and marketing and public relations. (See Middlemen in Search of a Middle Part 1, Part 2)

These offices sit well within the ethical boundary defined by the AAR, the principal guild for literary agencies in the United States.

Assuming the role of publisher, however, pushes agents much closer to that boundary. And some authors believe the line has been crossed. For that reason the AAR recently reaffirmed, in no uncertain terms, its commitment to the fundamental principle that in all cases, member agents “may receive compensation only from the client for the member’s services; the member may not separately engage in any business from which the member receives separate profit/compensation with respect to the exploitation of the client’s work in any medium, including e-publication.”

Where’s the Conflict?

The obvious source of conflict is that an agent’s advocacy for the author may be tinged if not tainted by the agent’s self-interest as a buyer.  In determining the disposition of a client’s property, the agent must now promote his own publishing company as a valid candidate for publication. Is the agent’s e-book company better than Random House, HarperCollins or Simon & Schuster?  It may actually be, but the agent has disqualified himself from objectively advising his client one way or another. This puts the author in a quandary: whom can he or she now turn to for an unbiased evaluation?

Obviously the answer depends on the agent’s integrity. But it stands to reason that authors in that position should be offered the opportunity to engage a disinterested third party – a lawyer or another agent or the Authors Guild – to objectively evaluate his or her options.

As we said previously, as the publishing industry rebuilds itself from the ground up, every denizen of the ecosystem must not just adapt but reconstitute. Agents are no exception, and it is entirely possible that a decade from now their role will have only the faintest resemblance to that of hustling for commissions today.

Richard Curtis

Hello again, Comic Book Artist.

Remember last summer I warned you? “Before you take the job with that comic book company,” I said, “I want to make it absolutely clear that if you accept it you will NEVER, EVER own the rights to your work. Your employer will be free to create $100 million movies with ten sequels. Your precious creations will be works for hire and your only compensation will be the salary they pay you.”

My case in point was Jack Kirby, one of the co-creators of such immortal comic book characters as The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man and X-Men. “These characters have generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue over the last five decades from everything from comic books to movies to toys and collectibles,” the New York Times reported. But because Kirby produced them as a writer for hire, he had no copyright claim on them After he died his estate tried to recover the rights under a provision of the US copyright law entitling next of kin to terminate contracts signed by the deceased artist, But the claim was rejected by a court because – again – Kirby had given up his rights as an employee of Marvel on a for-hire basis.

In case that decision didn’t sink in, my Comic Book Writer friend (and your brother the novelist for hire), in December Gary Friedrich, claiming to be creator of another Marvel blockbuster, Ghost Writer, met the same fate beneath the gavel of a federal judge. It seems Friedrich didn’t read, or take seriously enough, the fine print on the Marvel paychecks he endorsed, according to an Associated Press story.

“US District Judge Katherine Forrest tossed out 4-year-old claims brought by Gary Friedrich, who said he created the motorcycle-driving Ghost Rider with the skeletal head that sometimes had fire blazing from it. A Ghost Rider of the 1950s and ’60s was a Western character who rode a horse. The judge said Friedrich gave up all ownership rights when he signed checks containing language relinquishing all rights to the predecessor companies of Marvel Entertainment LLC.” (See ‘Ghost Rider’ comics creator loses rights lawsuit)

So – has the lesson sunk in? As we said when we wrote up the Kirby case, Abandon All Hope, Ye Comic Book Artists.

Richard Curtis

Digital Book World‘s Executive Editor Jeremy Greenfield recently released a document circulated inside the Hachette Book Group that was purportedly not intended to be seen by outsiders.  The report rebuts the commonly sounded criticism that legacy publishers are no longer relevant.

Subsequently J. A. Konrath, popularly acclaimed as the voice of independent publishers and legacy publishing’ s most articulate critic, issued a confutation on the DBW website.  Both debaters scored points. What are we to believe?

Right off the bat one thing I’m not sure I believe is that HBG’s internal memo was not meant to be seen by the public.  Nothing about it is confidential, nor is anything in it surprising. Though the arguments presented in their white paper are cogently assembled, there is nothing in it that we haven’t heard promulgated for the last decade. It isn’t as if a highly placed executive leaked a plot for HBG to launch a hostile takeover of Amazon.  The report looks like it was intended to be leaked.

Deliberate or not we’re glad it was leaked, for it forcefully reminds us of everything that Old Publishing has done for books, authors and literary culture for which we ought to be grateful (and many of us are).

Let’s hear the salient points of Hachette’s paper, then hear what Konrath had to say about it, then try to make some sense of both positions:

*******************

Publishing [says the HBG paper] requires a complex series of engagements, both behind the scenes and public facing. Digital distribution (which is what most people mean when they say self-publishing) is just one of the components of bringing a book to market and helping the public take notice of it.

1. We find and nurture talent:

• We identify authors and books that are going to stand out in the marketplace. HBG discovers new voices, and separates the remarkable from the rest.

• We act as content collaborator, focused on nurturing writing talent, fostering rich relationships with our authors, providing them with expert editorial advice on their writing, and tackling a huge variety of issues on their behalf.

2. Venture Capitalist: We fund the author’s writing process:

• At HBG we invest in ideas. In the form of advances, we allow authors the time and resources to research and write. In addition we invest continuously in infrastructure, tools, and partnerships that make HBG a great publisher partner.

3. Sales and Distribution Specialist: We ensure widest possible audience:

• We get our books to the right place, in the right numbers, and at the right time (this applies equally to print and digital editions). We work with retailers and distribution partners to ensure that every book has the opportunity to reach the widest possible readership.

• We ensure broad distribution and master supply chain complexity, in both digital and physical formats.

• We function as a new market pioneer, exploring and experimenting with new ideas in every area of our business and investing in those new ideas – even if, in some cases, a positive outcome is not guaranteed (as with apps and enhanced ebooks).

• We act as a price and promotion specialist (coordinating 250+ monthly, weekly and daily deals on ebooks at all accounts).

4. Brand Builder and Copyright Watchdog: We build author brands and protect their intellectual property:

• Publishers generate and spread excitement, always looking for new ways make our authors and their books stand out. We’re able to connect books with readers in a meaningful way.

• We offer marketing and publicity expertise, presenting a book to the marketplace in exactly the right way, and ensuring that intelligence, creativity, and business acumen inform our strategy.

• We protect authors’ intellectual property through strict anti-piracy measures and territorial controls.

*****************

J.A. Konrath argues:

Publishers should stop trying to convince themselves and others that they’re relevant, and start actually being relevant. Here’s how:

1. Offer much better royalties to authors.

2. Release titles faster. It can take 18 months after a book is turned in to be published. I can do it myself in a week.

3. Use up-to-date accounting methods that are trackable by the author, and pay royalties monthly.

4. Lower e-book prices.

5. Stop futilely fighting piracy.

6. Start marketing effectively. Ads and catalogue copy aren’t enough. Neither is your imprint’s Twitter feed.

*****************************

If I were refereeing this bout I’d award a draw.

• Gatekeeping. Legacy publishers unquestionably offer invaluable gatekeeper judgment and curatorial support to authors in countless ways.  But they also need to recognize the emerging populist culture that elects its own stars and superstars through a viral networking system that is alien to Old Publishing culture.
• Royalties. The traditional book industry offers half the royalty paid by independent e-book publishers, and about one third of that paid by Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  But traditional publishers have far higher overhead, and it goes to support the personnel, infrastructure, risk capital and a multitude of other services that self-published authors cannot easily find. The greater the investment the more return the investor is entitled to.
• Fast Release of Books. True, self-published authors can get their books out in a week, but seldom can they get those books into bookstores, or keep them there, because they lack the kind of sales, marketing, promotional and publicity resources that enable legacy publishers to “make” bestselling books and authors and create exciting events that are worth waiting twelve or eighteen months.
• Monthly Royalty Statements. Traditional publishers cannot issue royalty statements month or even quarterly but I’m not sure they need to.  Most authors are perfectly content to receive semi-annual statements as long as they are clearly and fairly accounted.  The fact that they often are not, and publishers continue to rely on a preposterously archaic returns-driven business model, is the tragedy of the book industry and one for which they have paid dearly. 
• High E-book Prices. Because they are afraid that cheap e-book sales will cannibalize print-book sales, legacy publishers must artificially keep e-book prices high. This paradox is inextricably ingrained in the book industry’s culture and there is not much to be done about it.  On the other hand, self-published authors who elect to issue their books in paperback via print on demand have discovered that the price of their books is twice that of books done via print runs by traditional publishers. 
  
• Piracy. Piracy remains the Number One threat to the future of book publishing both traditional and alternative, and must be countered by every author and publisher that values the right of creators to their own creations.

Perhaps the future of book publishing will draw on an amalgam of the best that the old industry and new one have to offer.  There is room for both models, but both models also have room to improve and thrive.

The original Hachette memo may be read here.  Hachette Explains Why Publishers Are Relevant

J. A. Konrath’s rebuttal may be read here. Konrath Responds to Hachette Document

Richard Curtis

Anthony, E-Reads' Technical Director, conducted the greatest migration since the Ice Age

My phone console has a number of speed-dial buttons. There is RC Phone Home, of course. There’s one for our foreign sub-agent with whom I talk daily, and there are those for frequently called clients. There are intercom buttons for buzzing staff. And then there’s the Anthony Button. Anthony is E-Reads’ technical director. The button for his station is bright red. On a Friday morning in December I hit the Anthony Button. Hard.

As that day dawned I noticed that I had not received emails for eight hours. Refreshing and other tried-and-true techniques for goosing the get-mail function availed nothing. Then I clicked on the E-Reads home page. Some of it came in, but where the banner should have been was an error message.

I leaned all my weight on the hot button: ANTHONY! PICK UP!

Anthony had already seen the outage and analyzed it.  “Our cloud server is running on fumes.  We’ve loaded so many files recently that it’s maxed out.  We have to migrate our files to a larger server.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this was happening?” I asked, logically.

“I did,” he reminded me.

And he had.  But a move from the 60 gigabyte capacity of our current server to the 300 gig one we needed was a jump of four or five times the cost and I had dragged my heels.  To make room for more uploads Anthony had trimmed a bunch of junk files but it was hard to tell exactly how close the meter was hovering over Empty.

Once the system went down he didn’t wait around to determine if I was being penny wise and pound foolish (that was now a given). He immediately committed us to the larger server. But the changeover is not implemented with the snap of one’s fingers. Hundreds of thousands of files great and small, text files and jpegs, excel spreadsheets and metadata folders plus backups had to be migrated from computer A to computer B. But even with supercomputers running at peak speed, the transfer would take a minimum of 72 hours. In fact it took 96. Down so long it looked like up to me.

Meanwhile, though our resourceful technical director managed to rescue enough gigabytes to enable us to use our email, our website had to be taken offline.

If you’re looking for a definition of helplessness, try gazing at a “Sorry” message on one’s own website for 24, 48, 72, 96 hours. Though I was assured we had triple backup redundancy, excluding the portable hard drives I ferry once a week between home and office, the paranoid terror of a permanent failure haunted my dreams for four consecutive nights.

On the fifth day it came back, and it was good. Thank you, Anthony.

Wretched though this incident was, the bright side is that it was the result of a company that is growing – growing at a rate of of about 40 gigabytes a year.

Watch this space for the announcement that we’ve topped one terabyte.

Richard Curtis

Not THAT kind of flap, you idiot!

Daniel Menaker, Editor of Grin and Tonic, has codified the rules for writing foolproof flap copy.  Writing in the Barnes & Noble Review, he offers such recommendations as:

# Always use “stunning,” except when the book is about the history of the stun gun.
#Always use “deeply.”
#Use items in a series as often as possible. “In this stunning, deeply passionate, and thrilling tale of guns, gangs, and gambling…”
# In addition to “stunning,” use at least three of the following adjectives for every flap: “Enthralling,” “gritty,” “original,” “remarkable,” “magical,” “ground-breaking,” “arresting,” “dazzling,” “heartbreaking,” “compelling,” “devastating,” “captivating.”
#Find a way to work in “best-selling,” even if it has to take the form of something like “Often compared to the stunning best-selling novelist _________…”
#Try to end the flap with the word “resolve” or “resolution.” (“Stunning” should always be placed near the beginning.)
#Forget “subtly.”

Flap Rules by Daniel Menaker

As all frequenters of online bookstores know, read-inside-the-book features entitle e-tailers to publish a certain percentage of your book at no charge to encourage readers to sample the goods.

Content providers are given a choice ranging from a minimum of 20% to a maximum of 100%.  It’s a good policy, as it helps readers to browse.  In one case, however, readers were inadvertently given a window to get an author’s book free.

You probably don’t pore over the terms of your agreement with Kindle Direct Publishing, but if you did you would learn that one of KDP’s policies is that they have the right to lower the price of your e-book to match that of its competitors. This is an age-old marketing retail practice and far from extraordinary. However, the activation of this policy in the case of author James Crawford caused him serious inconvenience and potential losses in the thousands of dollars.

The problem occurred when KDP, believing that rival Barnes & Noble had dropped the price of Crawford’s book to free, changed its own price to zero as well. In point of fact, writes the author, B&N had not gone to zero.  It had merely offered the first three chapters at no charge as a come-on to customers.

Before he could straighten it out with Amazon he had lost revenues on more than 5100 copies given away at 100% discount.  We say “straighten out” but now that his book Blood Soaked and Contagious has been restored at his requested list price, Amazon has informed him it will not not refund revenues lost.  “We’re sorry, we’re unable to pay royalties for your sales when your title was listed at $0 on our website,” he was told in writing.  In writing because, as KDP users have discovered, “KDP does not have telephone contact with the outside world,” laments Crawford.

The complete cautionary tale may be read here. Two things you need to see for the following saga to make sense

Richard Curtis

In July of 2010 Science Fiction Writers of America, responding to member complaints against Night Shade Books, put the publisher on probation. At that time John Scalzi, the organization’s president, wrote the following:

This week, we became aware of three recent instances of Night Shade Books acting against the contractual and legal interest of authors, specifically by not reporting royalties when contractually specified or reporting them inaccurately and/or distributing books in a medium for which it had not legally secured rights. (Details here)

Since that time Night Shade has made an earnest effort to get back into the graces of SFWA and its members and today was rewarded with full restoration of its former good standing.  The text of SFWA’s announcement follows:

**************************

Dear SFWA members:

As many of you are aware, on July 8, 2010 the SFWA board of directors voted unanimously to place Night Shade Books on probation for a period of one year, following concerns about contractual issues with their authors.

SFWA asked Night Shade to meet a series of benchmarks as a measure of a good faith effort to return to a solid standing. After a review of Night Shade Books and after requesting information from our members about the publisher’s activities during the period of probation, based upon the information currently available, the board believes that Night Shade has met the following conditions for it to remain on the qualifying list after its probation period:

* a. That it examined its catalogue to ensure it is no longer offering fiction in formats for which it has no rights, and makes whole those authors whose rights it has violated;
* b. That it instituted procedures and hired sufficient staff to ensure accurate record keeping for contracts and payments, both for previously published and future authors;
* c. That there are no instances of contractual violations on the part of Night Shade Books against authors signed to publishing deals after the start of the probationary period.
* d. Night Shade Books fulfills its contractual and financial obligations to the authors it has already published, including full and accurate accounting of royalties per contract, with payment of any royalties outstanding.

Therefore, the term of probation for Night Shade is lifted. Fiction contracted during that term is acceptable for qualification for SFWA membership. It may remain on the list so long as it continues to fulfill its contractual obligations to its authors and meets SFWA’s qualifying market standards. SFWA remains interested in the health of Night Shade books and will act at any time to deal with a member complaint against Night Shade.

We look forward to working with them and are glad that SFWA is able to retain Night Shade Books as a SFWA qualifying market.