Hello, writers. Since my first paperback came out last year, I have now been stripped. It's painful. It's embarrassing. And it's not friendly to mommy earth.
Tonight's diary, in honor of DKos Greenroots week, will be about environmental issues in writing, but, as usual, you are free to talk about whatever you want and I hope you will.
Most of these issues have to do with paper.
Starting Point: The Paper We Write On
I use ten reams of paper a year. The weight ratio for turning wood into paper is 2.56:1, teh Google tells me. A ream of paper that comes directly from wood, with no recycled content, contains about 7.68 lb of wood. That means if I buy unrecycled paper I'm consuming 76.8 lbs. of wood a year-- a small tree.
Most of the paper labeled "recycled" at office supply stores is actually 30-50% recycled, cutting it down to half a small tree (or all of a much smaller tree. They don't come in standard sizes). Missing from this calculation is the fuel burned in cutting and transporting the trees, making the paper, and transporting the finished product.
I actually know a writer who avoids printing out drafts in order to save trees. Her writing suffers from it and I think she's less successful than she would be if she printed the drafts. White 100% recycled paper can be hard to find-- one brand is Aspen 100 made by Boise Cascade. The Echo Paper Company also specializes in 100% recycled paper. Office Depot offers 100% recycled EnviroCopy.
Update: RLMiller reports that Staples also carries 100% recycled paper.
To save paper when printing drafts, you can:
* "select all" and change everything to single space or, if that's too hard to read, 1.5 space
* in the "print" box, under "zoom", "pages per sheet", select 2 pages. This gives you the visual effect of a paperback novel. The problem is the print may be too small for some people to read. If you increase it to 14 pt. it's easier to read.
* always re-use! After you've marked up your draft, and made the changes in your mss., return it to the printer. Print your next draft on the other side.
When the mss. is finished, I email it to my editor, who prints it out double-sided. I print one copy which goes into a loose leaf binder (I always keep a stack on hand, purchased at garage sales for 25 cents each) and gets handed around to such first readers as live locally. My brother out in California reads the mss on his Kindle.
The Publishers' Big Risk: It's All About Paper
Publishers run a risk if your book doesn't sell. They spend thousands of dollars on the print run. Free copies shipped to reviewers don't net anything, except, hopefully, some good reviews. Then the books themselves have to be shipped out to bookstores where, if they don't sell, they'll be returned. In addition, publishers have to pay taxes on the inventory (books) kept in stock, which by the way is an incentive for your book to go out of print sooner rather than later.
Are you sensing a trend here? Yup. The risk the publishers run is overwhelmingly increased by the fact that books are printed on paper. Heavy, expensive, paper.
(A cheer here to Random House for using 30% recycled paper. Do any other publishers have a similar commitment, does anyone know?)
The paper itself is only part of the story. The weight and bulk of the paper increases the environmental impact of shipping of books to and fro by trucks that get 4 to 7 mpg of deisel and belch out greenhouse gases. (Not to mention occasionally hastening a few fellow motorists to their final destination.)
(By the way, if that had been ten people killed in a public transit accident, of course that brief article would've been expanded to a week of nationwide media saturation, because it would feed the SCLM's narrative that public transit is dangerous, not just because it doesn't buy any advertising minutes on tv but because you are much better off in your own vehicle, with your safety in your own hands-- and the hands of whatever other drivers you may encounter, with their varying levels of exhaustion, sobriety, visual acuity, aggression... but I digress.)
Have You Been Stripped?
The publishers get bookstores to stock their books by accepting returns-- what doesn't sell can be shipped back to the manufacturer, ie the publisher, for a refund. (I don't know of any other retail field where this is true.) The publisher then resells these books at a knock-down price to places like BookCloseouts. Your royalty is adjusted accordingly.
That's what happens to the hardcovers. She said portentously.
As for the paperbacks, David Morrell, in his book Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing, tells it much better than I can:
...The immense warehouse... was toasty warm despite a snowstorm outside. We walked past towering row after row of boxes of books until we reached the back of the warehouse, where flames flickered and a roar grew louder. We had come to the source of the warehouse's toasty warmth-- a massive, open-doored furnace. ...What happens to the books whose covers have been torn off? That's what I was looking at, pile after pile of coverless paperbacks being thrown into the furnace to heat the warehouse.
"This is where your books'll end up someday too," the manager told me.
On the bright side, they're heating with non-fossil fuels... and surely just returning the covers of the stripped books, instead of the books themselves, saves fuel in shipping, right? Not exactly, because according to blogger Bookseller Chick, the books being stripped may be in boxes that were shipped to the bookstore never even opened. Not just the individual books but the actual titles may never have made it to the sales floor. In other words, these are books that were shipped that were never wanted in the first place.
Each box holds approximately 48 books, so around 432 books were stripped that morning. The rampage continued through this week as more product arrived.
Those were 432 books that never saw the sales floor. --Bookseller Chick
So, to sum up: Trees are harvested, shipped, converted to paper, which is shipped, books are printed, bound, warehoused, shipped, warehoused, shipped, stripped. One of the commenters on the blog linked above calls this a "necessary evil". It's not, of course. If publishers didn't permit stripping in lieu of returns, far fewer unwanted paperbacks would be ordered and shipped in the first place. Looking at my own royalty statement, I can see that the number of paperback "returns" far, er, outstrips the number of hardcover returns. So does the rate of returns. But no one publisher wants to disallow stripping when all the other publishers allow it.
By the way, those 432 books? If each paperback weighed 6 ounces (a figure taken from a randomly selected amazon shipping weight), that's 162 pounds of paper-- or 414.72 pounds of wood discarded by one bookstore in one day. (Roughly 5 1/2 times my annual paper consumption.)
Stripping also drives up the cover price of paperbacks, and is one reason they now cost $7.99 instead of the $3.50 they cost a few years ago.
A Greener Future for Writing and Reading
If you take a look at the science fiction and fantasy pro markets at ralan.com, you'll notice an interesting trend. The big SF magazines that we dreamed of selling to when we were kids have become dinosaurs. They're the only ones that still require writers to submit on paper, with the expense of postage and SASEs. Not only do the other mags take e-submissions (usually exclusively), but they also publish online-- no dead trees. (And, by the way, they pay more than the dinosaurs big mags.) That's the future.
POD (print on demand) is greener than traditional publishing. It eliminates all of the problems inherent to paper-- storage, shipping, returns, inventory. POD-only publishers should, and sometimes do, pay higher royalties than traditional publishers because of the reduced financial risk to the publisher.
E-books are, of course, greenest of all-- especially if readers are actually reading on-screen and not printing the books out. E-reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle increase the likelihood of paperless reading. At present the Kindle costs $359-- too much for the average reader, who reads 5 or 6 books a year, to consider it worthwhile-- but the cost may go down, Amazon's protests to the contrary notwithstanding.
(As with POD, the reduced costs to the publisher ought to be reflected in your royalties. Most of the traditional publishers haven't quite cottoned to this. A 25% royalty until the advance earns out, and a 15% royalty thereafter, seems to be standard. Publishers with a larger e-book focus offer more-- Samhain offers 40%, for example, and some companies go as high as 60%.)
The Espresso Book Machine, a print-on-demand device that may eventually enable bookstores to offer millions of titles, has the potential to eliminate the shipping and returns problems. Bookstores could keep copies of books on display for browsing, but they wouldn't need much actual stock. But from this article about a Vermont bookstore that has an Espresso, it seems what it's mostly being used for, so far, is self-publishing.
Write On! will be a regular Thursday feature (8 pm ET) until it isn't. Be sure to check out other great lit'ry diaries like:
sarahnity's books by kossacks on Tuesday nights
plf515's What Are You Reading? on Wednesday mornings.
cfk's bookflurries
on Wednesday nights.
If you are interested in environmental issues, please join DK GreenRoots, a new environmental advocacy group created by Meteor Blades and Patriot Daily. DK GreenRoots comprises bloggers at Daily Kos and eco-advocates from other sites. We focus on a broad range of issues and are always open to new ones.
Over the coming weeks and months, DK Greenroots will initiate a variety of environmental projects, some political and some having nothing directly to do with politics at all.
Some projects may involve the creation of eco working groups that can be used for a variety of actions, including implementing political action or drafting proposed legislation. We are in exciting times now because for the first time in decades, significant environmental legislation will be passed by Congress. It is far easier to achieve real change if our proposal is on the table rather than fighting rearguard actions.
We alert each other to important eco-stories in the mainstream media and on the Internet, promote bloggers at one site to readers at other sites, connect bloggers of similar interests to each other and discuss crucial eco-issues.
Come help us put these projects together. Bring ideas of your own. There is no limit on what we can accomplish together. |