A White Space in the Book Market

At a company meeting I heard an executive talking about the need to “got after every white space in the market”. After mocking this turn of phrase, I later thought of one such white space – in the book market. There has been a wave of independent authors, buoyed by the technological trends in smartphones and e-readers. At the same time there has been a decline in the business of supersized bookstores. The chains are not doing well, and smaller independent bookstores have an opportunity to stake out new territories, and may find some success if they are well-situated and innovative enough. One such junction might be the marketing of independently published books. Many of these are breaking through the e-bestseller lists, so they are proven to be desirable commodities. How to get these books into bookstores is a different matter.

On the one hand, there have been independent distributors in the past, companies that aggregated small press books and had some salesforce and warehousing to funnel these through to independent bookstores. Such distributors found it difficult enough to survive, especially during the rise of the superstores, but right now there may be an opportunity to build on that model with independently published books as well as small presses. It may be only viable, in the beginning, for very localized success, in such markets as New , the Boston Area, Northern California, etc … but some enterprising entrepeneur could take it on. They could work with Smashwords, perhaps, to identify and contact those bestselling – and other worthy – independent writers, and with Lulu, even with Amazon’s CreateSpace to find their way in (bookstores apparently loathe CreateSpace so this part might not fly). It would take some legwork and effort, but they could possibly convince the independent bookstores to set aside a special section for local, independent authors. The problem here is profitability (and tangled issues like returns and many individual relationships)

Another idea combines the advantages of bookstores and web publishing. One of the great things about bookstores is browsing. One of the great things about online offerings is free excerpts. Why not put them together? Print-on-demand machines could produce pamphlet-like versions of books – front and back covers and the first 5-10 pages. Bookstores could display this in racks the way that maps are displayed, or like travel brochures in hotels and rental agencies. The cost up front is low (indie authors may need to contribute a small amount to that, to help defray the cost and also perhaps serve a barrier to entry that would serve to thin the herd, so to speak).

This is the kind of thing that independent bookstores can excel at, and it could work to bridge the gulf between e-publishing and p-publishing, There is no inherent contradiction. Many people prefer paperbacks to e-readers. The same books can find their way to everyone. It would take a group effort – on both sides. Independent bookseller organizations could be working together with independent self-publishers for mutual benefit

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A Self-Publishing Book Review Sob Story

This article in Salon.com, while mainly a whiny and self-pitying lament, does shed some light on one aspect of the recent changes in book publishing. Publishing is not what it used to be, and neither is book reviewing. It used to be that a published author stood a decent chance of getting a professional review from a newspaper or magazine book reviewer. Apparently, there ain’t no days like those anymore. The article’s writer – a previously published author with in-crowd connections who was once able to garner such blessed reviews – couldn’t even get responses to his emails once he decided to self-publish his latest awesome novel (which he only resorted to after it failed to get traditionally published). The kicker is when he moans that If this can happen to him, imagine how horrible it must be for the 99 percenters of self-published writers, those of us without his hoary ties to people-in-the-know and his track record of proven, if admittedly minor, success.

What we 99 percenters know, of course, is that when it comes to getting (legitimate) reviews of our self-published fiction, we have always relied on the kindness of strangers.  We quickly exhaust our social network supply of potential reviewers (we exhaust them in every sense) and after that it’s all “word of mouth, baby”. Recently a publicist for free-ebooks.net (one of the many ebook sites with an experimental business model, this one a subscription service) asked me if I knew how to convert downloads into reviews. The only answer I could give was “maybe give them stuff” – not money, but rewards of some kind, benefits in kind, more free books perhaps. Goodreads Giveaways are supposed to work like that. The winners are supposed to submit reviews after they receive and read your books. I have no way of knowing if they actually do that. I’ve done four giveaways so far and am beginning another one this week for “Prisoners of Perfection” but there seems to be no tracking mechanism for the reviews or ratings.

Yes, it’s difficult. For every thousand downloads-to-strangers you might get one written review. That’s just a guess, nothing scientific, but it seems to correlate with my own experience. Star ratings are somewhat easier to come by, but are not the same thing at all. People who take the time to write and post reviews of self-published books are practically mini-gods to self-published authors. We can’t thank them enough, even if they trash our work. At least somebody said something! Otherwise, how can we even know that we exist? Self-publishing used to be called vanity publishing, but all publishing involves a degree of vanity. The Salon article shines a bright light on that little secret as well.

The article’s conclusion is “I can tell you that self-publishing is not fun.” I didn’t feel too sorry for him. If what the author reallt wants is reviews, only that, his best chance is to give away his book for free and to give it away for free in as many places as he can. He probably still wouldn’t get a boatload of reviews, but then the question is, how many are enough? How many reviews would it take to make it all fun for him? How many readers would it take? How is 1000 strangers reading your book better than 999? What difference does the one thousand and first make, in your everyday life? Where do you draw the line between fun and not fun?

A friend of mine once told me her philosophy of gardening, and it’s stuck with me ever since, especially in regards to self-publishing. One tomato is great, she said. Anything more is “abundance”.

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LeanPub – Another Self-Publishing Venture

LeanPub seems to be a little different than some of the other self-publishing enterprises popping up all over the place. It’s similar to some in that you, the author/publisher, sell directly to your readers (they’re not a distributor) and they take a (small) cut for the use of their tools and platform. They offer some interesting variations, such as making it easy to turn your blog into a book, or your book into a blog, and they use Dropbox to sync your simple text files into their ebook generation software.

They also encourage publishing your work-in-progress, which can be interesting. I’ve put up the first two chapters of my current novel-in-writing, Prisoners of Perfection, available for free (of course) in case anyone is interesting in following along, providing feedback, etc … It’s the sequel to “Entropic Quest”, a collaborative venture with my son. We enjoyed the first one so much we had to do another, and this one has a lot of potential (we like to think).

LeanPub offers some promotional tools as well, coupons, tweets, reader email list notification, and such. The quality of the ebooks they format for you seems to be very good. So far I’m enjoying the site.

Some numbers on downloads, ratings and reviews

Zombie Nights is just about to hit 50,000 downloads on Smashwords (3 years in), where it is now the #7 most downloaded ebook from that website, trailing two Smashwords’ user guides, one Islamic baby name book and 3 erotica titles. There have been very few other titles breaking into that top 10 free list over the past two years, which makes me think that fewer and fewer people are following the ‘free’ route towards readership these days, preferring instead to test the cold hard sales waters. That’s all well and good. It’s a thriving new market, or perhaps one that is not all that new at all. A very interesting article on the business of literature provides a lot of history and perspective on bookselling and is well worth reading. Our current era may be more like an earlier time than we realize.

I often come across comments in self-publishing blog posts that numbers are interesting to indie authors, so I thought I might offer some here regarding Zombie NIghts during its 50,000-Smashwords-download-jubilee-day celebration. (Overall downloads for Zombie Nights, including Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, Feedbooks, Obooko, Google Books, Sony, Kobo and Smashwords, are somewhere around 150,000).

On Smashwords.com its overall rating is 3.73 based on 33 reviews – note a mere 33 reviews, only 1 every 1515 downloads.

On Amazon a scant 10 reviews nets it a 2,5 rating, while on Goodreads there have been 107 ratings, including 29 text reviews, for an average of 2.76

As usual, Apple readers are more  generous. 155 ratings on iTunes give it a 3.5 rating, while on Barnes and Noble, 101 ratings give it 3.0 stars. On Sony there’s been only 1 review (5 stars), and on Kobo 3 ratings give it 3 stars overall. On Google Books, 8 reviews give it an average of 4 stars.

I’ve noticed this pattern is typical of most of my books: Smashwords and Apple readers are often a full star more generous than Goodreads and Amazon reviewers. Theories have been offered, but it’s only guesswork. The main thing is, reviews remain sparse as a percentage of downloads. I have not gone out of my way to ask for reviews of this book or done any sort of marketing or advertising for it, other than having it show up on getfreeebooks.com, a site I always recommend to free-ebook-offerers.

Free Ebooks (with Advertising)

It’s an interesting concept, ebook plus, offers free ebooks with embedded advertising. the author gets paid through the advertising and the reader gets the books for free. I’ve nothing against it on principle, and it’s yet another way to get your self-published ebooks in the hands of readers, which is still the first and most important hurdle in any indie author’s endeavor.

The uploading and publishing on the site is very easy. As for their model and their reach, only time will tell us something.

Christmas: bonus-time for free stuff

If it’s not too late for this time around, a word of advice for all self-publishing indie authors. Christmas is a great time to make your ebooks free. Heaps of people are getting tablets and ereaders and the first thing they want to do is load up on free ebooks. My own books are always free (wherever they can be) and each of the past four years I’ve seen the same trend, increasing every year. Christmas day and the few days after, downloads of those free ebooks see a huge increase – as much as tenfold in some cases. For those who want to dangle their books for free as a way to hook readers (like fish), it’s a good time for that particular bait.

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EBook prices

I wanted to read a book and it’s not in the library. I can get it used through Amazon for fifty cents plus postage or on Kindle for twelve dollars. Why twelve dollars? Don’t tell me it’s supply and demand or the cost of production. It’s a text file that costs next to nothing. Grrr. And the author is long since deceased so it’s not for him or even his family, just the corporation that owns the darn text file. Double grrr. I can see a few bucks maybe, but twelve? It makes no sense. It’s not competing with new book sales. It’s an old book. I guess the logic is just because they can, they do.

Libraries are Forever: E-books and Print Books Can Coexist


An interesting article from TeachingDegree.org 
included the graphic below

I completely agree with the assessment that ebooks and print books can not only co-exist but also mutually re-inforce each other. They have different advantages and disadvantages. For me, personally, the greatest advantage of print books is sharing them with friends. The greatest advantage of ebooks is the ease of their availability (anytime, anywhere there’s internet).

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Backlist, and then some

Much of my perspective on the business of writing and publishing comes from my twenty years of working in bookstores. There I observed the ebb and flow, the life cycles of books and especially of authors. Anyone who has worked in a used bookstore has an even more varied perspective than with new books, for in the new bookstores, only the faddest of the fad survive from year to year. There you will find your main guys in the different genres hanging in there over time – a Stephen King or a Danielle Steel, for example. Those deemed classic-worthy are also generally available, a Raymond Chandler or even a Cornell Woolrich. Memories are short and fads are even shorter, and the publishing industry will quickly cut off nearly everyone who doesn’t reach some impossible level of sales. 999 of 1000 authors will not see their books last even a few seasons, and those are the 1 in 100,000 who got their books published and stocked in the first place!

What to expect of the self-published author then in the age of ebooks, now that everyone is published and everyone is stocked? We might think of all of these as pre-used (as used cars are now called pre-owned). They all end up on the dusty stacks of the virtual used bookstore, joining those 999 published authors as relics of a passing season. That anyone still reads those old dime paperback novels is a miracle in itself, a fact of random chance and happenstance. Browsers browse and pick out something for some reason – title or cover or price or whatnot. Many of the used books you come across in those old-timey bookstores are by authors long dead and gone, or merely those whose time is. You can only tell the difference by the publication date.

On Amazon Kindle, I get to see the reports of the downloads of my free ebooks there, and I wonder that it’s even still happening. I am doing near zero promotion (you can’t count this blog which hardly anyone sees) so it’s all a matter of Amazon itself and the way the ebook trend is trending and the free-ness of the titles. To me it’s a slow stream winding down, and I imagine it will turn into a trickle at some point in the fairly near future, and then, like any old pulp pocket book in some backwater bookstore, the occasional reader will accidentally come across one or two and check them out.

This is what to expect.

Why aren’t trad pubs doing right with ebooks?

In an excellent post, Paul Samael makes the case for traditional publishers aggressively going into the ebooks market in an innovative way – sort of halfway between the Smashwords/Amazon approach of taking everything, and their own current way of only e-pubbing their own (relatively small) collections. They could be taking in a lot of submissions, doing a certain amount of filtering (think of how a great blue whale filters for feeding) and in that way claiming a genuine foothold in the new publishing industry. No doubt those they accepted through their filtering would have to go exclusive (or through the pubs into outlets like Amazon).

The plus side for writers would be the good ol’ stamp of trad-pub approval that’s so much craved. The down side is, what? More acceptance, less rejection, better filtering, less of a haystack.

Any other downsides one could see, for the publishers at least? Personally, I’ve got no horse in that race.