Ebooks

Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.

Plan a Book Launch Party for an Ebook

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Recently an author asked me "How do you stage an in-person book launch with a novel that’s published as an ebook? How do you autograph a computer screen?"

Here are some suggestions for doing a live book launch event for an ebook:

Plan the event much like you would any other book launch party, except you will probably need to find a venue other than a bookstore. Try to use a venue that has some kind of tie-in with the book, and offer refreshments and perhaps some form of entertainment. See this article by Tolly Moseley for creative ideas on planning a book launch party.

Do a presentation based on the book’s content, not just a signing where you sit at a table. Nonfiction authors can speak on their book’s topic or plan an interactive activity based on the topic. Novelists can do a presentation based on some aspect of the book’s story or do a short reading. Children’s authors can read the book aloud, speak on the topic of the book, and plan fun activities for kids. All authors can talk about writing and publishing and take questions from the audience. Be creative and plan something interesting!

Print lots of bookmarks and handout several to all of the attendees so they can share with others. If you print your bookmarks with uncoated paper on the back side, you can sign the back of the bookmarks. See this article to learn more about using bookmarks for book promotion.

Encourage attendees to bring their ebook reading device to the event. They can download the ebook on the spot.  You could even provide a laptop computer where people can order the book if they don’t have their ebook reader with them, but you’ll need to make certain that each person logs out of their Amazon or other ebookstore account after using it.

You can "autograph" Kindle ebooks by using KindleGraph to send personalized inscriptions and signatures to the customer’s Kindle ebook reader.

If your ebook is available on the Nook store, you may be able to arrange an event at a Barnes & Noble store. Last year B&N announced that they were going to offer autographing services for Nook Color devices, but it’s hard to find any details on how to do it. Your local store event manager may have information on autographing.

Remember that you’ll need to promote your event heavily. Suggested promotions include press releases to local media, emails or evites to your friends and local contacts, announcements on your blog and social media accounts, and postcard invitations. Ask others to help spread the word.

Do you have any suggestions on how to do a live launch for an ebook? Please share in the comments section [on the source article’s page].

 

This is a reprint from Savvy Book Marketer Dana Lynn Smith‘s blog.

How Do Daily Ebooks Sold Figure into Amazon and Barnes and Noble Sales Rankings? Theresa Ragan Has The Scoop!

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This post, by D.D. Scott and Theresa Ragan originally appeared on The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing on 5/14/12.

Happy Monday, WG2E-Land!!!

Gosh, I sooo wish I’d come across this superfab scoop when I’d first started out in Indie Epublishing, but since I came across it this past week, I just had to share it with y’all!!!

A huge shout-out and thank you to Bestselling Amazon Author…and now Amazon Thomas and Mercer Author too

Theresa Ragan

for this beyond valuable info!!!

We featured Theresa in a fabulous Reader2Author Interview on yesterday’s RG2E, so check it out here:

http://bit.ly/JqxSxV

And while I was getting that post ready to go, I browsed Theresa’s website and found that she had some terrific Real Numbers on how Daily Ebook Sales figure into Amazon Sales Rankings.

Here’s what she has on her Sales Ranking Chart Page:

The numbers below are based on MY experiences… I’m sure you can find other authors whose numbers are different from these…but the following s/b pretty darn close. The whole idea is to give you an approximate number of books you would need to hit the OVERALL Kindle List only.

The rankings are interesting to look at if you have a book out there and you are hoping to, for example as of January 2012, get on the Top 100 Romantic Suspense Bestsellers List on Amazon. If I look at the Romantic Suspense Kindle Ebook List and click on the book title of #99 or #100 and that book has a Bestsellers Rank of 3,865 (#99) and 3,875 (#100), then I know I need a 3,875 or better to get on that list. As of 1/7/12 Finding Kate Huntley is #18 with an overall ranking of 446 and selling over 125 books a day. ABDUCTED is #40 with an overall ranking of 1,087 and selling over 80 books a day. And Dead Weight is #69 with an overall ranking of 2,182 and selling about 65 books a day.

Amazon Bestsellers Rank is the number you find beneath the Product Description. Every book on Amazon has an Amazon Bestsellers Rank. Click on any title and then scroll down until you see it.

January 2012 update: rankings have changed substantially in the past few months and I’ve made changes to reflect rankings and sales according to MY books.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing.

Amazon's Ever-Changing Algorithms: Oops, They Did It Again

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This post, by Edward W. Robinson, originally appeared on his Failure Ahoy! Adventures In Digital Publishing site on 5/4/12.

So not 12 hours after my post about how Amazon’s algorithms work, Amazon changed their algorithms again. This is a big enough deal they apparently just caused me to quote Britney Spears.

Fortunately, the latest changes weren’t a complete revolution. By all accounts, there is once again a single list seen by all customers. I’m not sure exactly how this new list works–the Avengers are still working on it–but it seems to hew very closely to one of the lists we already understood. And if you are a Select author who leans on free giveaways for sales, here is my current advice to you:

Sorry, couldn’t resist. I actually don’t think we should flee the battlements just yet, for reasons I’ll get into lower down, but this is bad news for Select authors. Phoenix Sullivan has alluded to this, and will surely have more to say herself, so keep watching. Anyway, cause for panic: the new list looks an awful lot like List B. As a refresher, here are the main mechanics (that I am aware of) for how List B works:
 

  • Ranks are determined by the last 30 days of sales, with no extra weight given to the most recent sales

  • Free book downloads are discounted heavily–maybe as little as 10% the value of paid sales

  • Borrows don’t count as sales

I’m not sure about whether borrows count or not on this new list. Won’t have the data on that front for a while. I am positive free books are counted, and that they’re counted at a discounted rate–feels like 10-15% of a sale. (In other words, for every 10 freebies given away, you’re credited with 1 sale for the purposes of pop list rank.) You can see this for yourself by trolling the popularity lists. You’ll see a few titles that are permanently free scattered across the first few pages. If freebies didn’t count, you wouldn’t be seeing them on the lists at all, and if they did count, you’d see a lot more permafree titles and Select titles higher up on the lists.

 

Read the rest of the post on Failure Ahoy, and also see this follow-up post on the same site.

AAR (Association of Authors Representatives) Fail

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This post, by JA Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing on 5/10/12.

I just read the letter the Association of Authors Representatives sent to the DOJ yesterday. 

Then I threw up in my mouth. Ack. 

The letter in plain text, my comments in bold. 

My comments will not be kind. 


May 8, 2012
John R. Read

Chief, Litigation III Section United States Department of Justice 450 5th St NW Suite 4000 Washington DC 20530

Dear Mr. Read,
I write to you as the President of the AAR, the largest organization of literary and dramatic agents in the United States, and on behalf of the unanimous AAR Board of Directors. Our more than four hundred seventy-five members represent writers who number in the tens of thousands. We want you to know in the strongest terms possible that we firmly oppose the proposed settlement between the Justice Department and three publishers with respect to e-book pricing.

Translation: We’re about to put our collective foot in our mouth. Stay tuned!

Joe sez: I count thirteen names on this letter. I don’t see the names of the other 462 AAR members, nor the names of the tens of thousands of authors they seem to be insinuating they speak for.

They DO NOT speak for me. And I hope the majority of the AAR who didn’t sign their name to this nonsense show some guts and leave an organization that erroneously claims to speak for them. Or at least fire the board members that sent this without getting a majority vote.

Readers, writers and the general public benefit when there is a healthy competitive literary marketplace. Two and a half years ago Amazon, with its proprietary Kindle devices and its willingness to discount e-book “bestsellers” to a level at which it sustained a significant loss on each copy sold, threatened the entire marketplace for books. 

Translation: Amazon invented a device that consumers wanted. That’s BAD. Readers were getting cheap ebooks. That’s BAD. It may not seem bad on the surface, and we don’t back-up our claim with any actual evidence, but boy oh boy trust us it really is because we say so.

Amazon’s practice of targeting the very titles that drive profitability of our entire industry and pricing them several dollars below cost was clearly leading to the demise of the independent bookstore, hastened the loss of Borders, and threatened the existence of Barnes & Noble, the one remaining large chain store that sells books. 

Translation: Customers were changing how and where they shopped because Amazon gave them a clearly better alternative; ebooks delivered instantly for less.

Joe sez: Apparently the AAR doesn’t remember that under the previous model, their authors were making more damn money.

Doesn’t AAR stand for Association of AUTHORS Representatives? Why are they suddenly spokesmen for Barnes and Noble?

And Borders? Weren’t they on the verge of bankruptcy (or at least in serious trouble) before Amazon even introduced the Kindle? Blaming Amazon for Borders’ woes is bullshit correlation. Or as a friend of mine calls it: causality magical thinking.

This was not healthy for competition or for authors or indeed for consumers in the long-term. 

Translation: Trying to outsell your competition, or attract customers with lower prices and better service, is bad.

And it’s bad when authors get paid more for each copy sold and sell more copies because of lower prices. 

And lower prices are bad for consumers, because maybe one day Amazon will again raise prices, possibly even up to the lofty heights publishers have them raised to now under the current Agency Model.

Retailers shouldn’t be allowed to set their own prices. That’s bad. It’s much better for the wholesaler to set both the wholesale and the retail price, because THAT and THAT ALONE encourages healthy competition. ESPECIALLY when there are several wholesalers in lockstep. 

Nothing is better for consumers than a group of companies who set wholesale and retail. And even though they set the SAME prices, it really still is competition! Really!

The steep discounting from Amazon was a practice of selling our clients’ work at a loss in order to make it impossible for other businesses to enter the e-book marketplace in a way that made financial sense for them.    

Translation: This predatory pricing is driving competitors out of business, like it did with… um… what’s that famous case where a company lowered prices, destroyed competition, and then became a monopoly and raised prices?

It must happen all the time, right?

Or if it doesn’t, it’s because the government steps in and stops it. Like in the case of… um…

Joe sez: Like in the case of the DOJ stepping in because 5 of the Big 6 were colluding to raise ebook prices?

 

Read the rest of the post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

E-book Nation: An Infographic About Ebooks And The People Who Read Them

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The following infographic, from Online Universities, is reprinted here with that site’s permission.

[infographic after the jump]

 

 

E-book Nation
Brought to you by: OnlineUniversities.com

Why E-Books Will Soon Be Obsolete (And No, It’s Not Just Because Of DRM)

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This post, by Jani Patokallio,originally appeared on Gyrovague on 4/30/12.

E-books will be obsolete within five years.  Crippled by territorial license restrictions, digital rights management, and single-purpose devices and file formats that are simultaneously immature and already obsolescent, they are at a hopeless competitive disadvantage compared to full-fledged websites and even the humble PDF.

 

Last year, I bought a laptop in Singapore, and brought it with me to Australia.  It worked fine for reading the Economist online and what passes for journalism in Singapore, but one day I searched for the Sydney Morning Herald, and there were no hits: it’s as if it didn’t exist.  A little poking around revealed that to be able to view Australian sites, I had to register my browser to be in Australia, which also requires a credit card with a billing address there.  What’s more, switching countries like this would delete all my bookmarks, terminate my paid subscription to the Economist and stop me from being able to read even single issue of the Singaporean Straits Jacket.  And needless to say, the laptop is locked to prevent me from installing another browser that would allow me to get around these limits.

Does this sound ridiculous, a perverse fantasy of some balkanized Web of the dystopian future?  Nope: it’s all true, except that my “laptop” is actually an iPad and my “browser” is iTunes/iBooks.  Since my iTunes account has a Singaporean billing address, the Kindle application does not show up in my search results.  If I switch countries, I will lose access to everything I’ve previously downloaded.  And if I do bite the bullet and switch to Australia, a good chunk of apps, music and more on offer will no longer be available on iTunes, iBooks or Amazon, and I’ll pay around 50% extra on what remains.  But I chose not to, and thus didn’t buy 3 or 4 books I wanted to, because their publishers would not sell them to me.

Why?  Because publishers insist on selling e-books the way they sell printed books, and customers simply don’t figure in the equation.

Now, breathtaking stupidity like this is commonly attributed to digital rights management (DRM), and Lord knows there’s plenty of idiocy involved in there as well.  Fortunately, Charlie Stross has already eviscerated that particular sacred cow of the publishing industry (see here and here), so I’ll focus on what’s actually causing my problem: publishing rights.

On the Web, the very idea that the right to read a website would vary from country to country seems patently absurd.  Cyberspace is flat, after all, just computers talking to computers.  You, the reader, do not need to concern yourself with where these electrons on your screen are coming from, and neither do I, their publisher, need to care where they are going.  And when somebody attempts to artificially block those electrons — say, China and its Great Firewall — it’s the kind of the thing that the US Congress and the World Trade Organization get worked up about.

 

Read the rest of the post on Gyrovague.

Harlequin Fail

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This post, by Ann Voss Peterson, originally appeared on J.A. Konrath‘s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 5/8/12.

This is a guest post by my friend Ann Voss Peterson. But it’s more than that. It’s a call to arms, a cautionary tale, and a scathing exposé.

Don’t believe it can be all those things? Read on…

Ann: In this world, there are a lot of things I can’t afford to do. A trip around the world, for instance, although it would be amazing. Remodeling my kitchen. And until recently, sadly, braces for my son.
There’s one more thing that I find valuable and enjoyable that I can no longer afford to do, and that is write for Harlequin.

 
I published my first novel with Harlequin’s Intrigue line in August of 2000. My twenty-fifth was released in November, 2011. I had a lot of fun writing those books–taut, page-turning, action-packed romantic suspense staring a myriad of different heroes and heroines and a boatload of delicious villains. I had four editors during that time, and all of them were great to work with. The senior editor has a strong vision for the line, and that vision appeals to readers all over the world. My books were in bookstores and Target and WalMart, and my office overflows with foreign copies from countries I’ve never visited. I have around three million books in print, and Harlequin throws the best parties in all of publishing, hands down.
 
But as lovely as all that is, I can’t afford to write for them anymore.
Why?
 
If you do a (very) little digging into publishing companies, you’ll discover that while the industry standard royalty rate for mass market paperback sales is 8% for US retail, Harlequin pays its series authors only 6%.
 
The royalty goes down from there.
 
All Harlequin series authors know that US retail royalties are going to be lower than industry standard going in. We also know that Harlequin pays rather low advances. My largest and most current advance was only $6,500 per book, but here’s the kicker; the books are widely distributedand sell a lot of copies. I have NEVER failed to earn out in my first royalty statement. That’s right, ALL of my books have earned out and then some.
 
So why can’t I afford to write for them any longer?
 
Let me share with you the numbers of a book I wrote that was first published in January, 2002, still one of my favorites. My life-to-date statement says this book has sold 179,057 copies so far, and it has earned $20,375.22. (bold text by Joe) That means the average I’ve earned is a whopping 11 cents per copy. If you use the cover price to calculate (the number used in the contract), which was $4.50 at the time of release, I’ve earned an AVERAGE of 2.4 % per copy.
 
Why is this?
 
irst, while most of my books are sold in the US, many are sold under lower royalty rates in other countries. In this particular contract, some foreign rights and -ALL ebook royalties- are figured in a way that artificially reduces net by licensing the book to a "related licensee," in other words, a company owned by Harlequin itself.
 
Harlequin uses the Wholesale Model (not the Agency Model) with retailers, including Amazon. So the money Harlequin receives is determined by the list price, and retailers can set any price for the consumer that they want. This is how the numbers break down when Retailer X lists the ebook for $4.00 (doesn’t matter what they sell it for).
 
Retailer – $2.00 (any discounts are taken from this amount)
Harlequin’s related licensee – $1.88
Harlequin – $.06
Author – $.06
 
So Harlequin makes a total of 1.94, and I make .06.
 

Read the rest of the post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

Ciao Publishers. Ciao Agents. Ciao Slavery.

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This post, by Suzanne White, originally appeared on The Passive Voice on 5/7/12.

From the comments to Kris’s Post – Spread the Word, a classic letter to The Author Guild from 70-year-old author Suzanne White:

It’s unfortunate that an entity which professes to be an “Authors Guild” doesn’t work for authors. It works instead for the publishing industry. It works to try to protect what is obsolete.

 

Authors today can go to Amazon with books they have written, post them on Kindle or develop paperbacks with Createspace or seek to actually be published by Amazon… and get a 70% royalty on their sales. Do you encourage them? Do you help them to understand how they can gain their freedom? Do you applaud those courageous authors who self publish, sell on Kindle and make a living? No you do not. Instead, you warble on, lamenting the fact Bezos is taking over the crusty publishing industry. DUH!

Shame.

Where in the traditional publishing industry can an author command 70%? Where can an author have utter dominion over cover art? Formatting? Content? Illustrations? Impact? Marketing? The answer is Amazon. And a little bit Pubit and sometimes Smashwords or Apple as well. Where in the standard publishing industry can an author revive a book that he or she wrote in 1982, sold to a publisher who printed it, didn’t sell very many and took it right off the market? Amazon, that’s where. Author gets rights back, re-formats the book, slams it up for sale on Kindle and in six months is making money with that book.

Where? Tell me. Where can an author do better?

Why does a Guild for Authors rail on about monopolies and decry the demise of old-fashioned publishing as we knew it? Dinosaurs still prowling the streets of Manhattan want their good old boy industry back. Give it up already.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Passive Voice.

Is There a New Type of eBook Piracy?

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This post, by Sam Cheever, originally appeared on ‘Tween You And Me on 5/4/12.

Over the last week I’ve noticed something that has me really concerned. My titles are selling. And then they’re being returned. I’ve been indie publishing for about 2 years now. I can count on three fingers the number of returns I’ve had of my ebooks over that period of time.

Over the last 2 days I’ve had 8.

Okay, I know that’s not a lot in the overall scheme, but I think it’s a pattern. Amazon has been nice enough in responding to my concerns, though I imagine they think I’m a total loon at this point. The problem isn’t very big yet. However, to a hard working author who counts every penny she earns dearly, 8 lost sales is a smack in the face. Here’s what I think… I believe someone is scamming the system. I think they’re buying the books, reading or copying them, and then returning them.

Paranoid? Maybe. But there’s that pattern to worry about again. I’m not imagining the 300% increase in returns in an extremely condensed timeline. It’s not so farfetched when you think about how many pirate sites authors have to monitor and report in a given year. There are lots of unscrupulous people who apparently only care about getting what they want for themselves and the hell with the author/artist/whatever.

It’s disheartening. I hope I’m wrong. But I really think I’m discovering the leading edge of a new type (or at least growing if not new) of piracy.

 

Read the rest of the post (and be sure to check out the comments, too) on ‘Tween You And Me.

E-Ink Devices – The Fastest Invention In History To Become Old-Fashioned

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I’ve been noticing that more and more people are reading e-books from tablets and fewer people are buying e-ink devices like the original Kindle. When I straw-polled this perception on Twitter, it seemed that I was right. While we are seeing more Kindles and Kobos than ever, the number of iPads and other tablet devices seem to far outstrip the e-ink growth.

Further chatting and some links supplied by friendly tweeters backed this up. When I tweeted: “I predict that e-ink devices could be the fastest invention in history to become old-fashioned”, futurist Mark Pesce replied:

@mpesce: They’re already charmingly quaint.

From a shiny new technology to obsolete and replaced in very short order. Already, the Kindle is “charmingly quaint”, like a gramophone player or a phone with a cord and dial. I’m a bit disappointed about this, because I love my Kindle. The thing I like most, apart from the very easy on the eyes e-ink screen, is that it’s a dedicated reading device. No distractions. It holds books and other documents that I need to read and that’s all. There are enough interruptions everywhere else – I don’t need them in a book too. Plus, the battery lasts literally weeks.

But I do have a slight issue in that I love my comics. I’ve read comic books forever and still buy several titles a month. I’d be happy to move to reading those digitally, but for the colour and graphic delivery I’d need a tablet like an iPad. I’ve yet to be able to justify the expense of an iPad purely for reading comics. But if it was for all my e-reading… And that doesn’t even begin to address the multi-media reading experience, with linked footnotes, video content and so much more that tablets make so easy.

But here’s where another problem presents itself. Reading novels (or other straight, unadorned text) from a tablet is problematic at the moment. It’s hard to see outside in the sunshine. The tablet has a terrible battery life, compared to the weeks and weeks I get from my Kindle. The backlit display is more tiring for the eyes. And herein lies the reason tablets are taking over – all those things are being addressed and improved at a furious rate. The tablet is starting to achieve all the positives of a dedicated e-ink reader, along with all the other things it does, making the strengths of e-ink irrelevant.

It’ll be a while before the tablet screen, ink, battery life and so on are as good as, say, a Kindle, but not that long a while. It will happen.

What this boils down to is actually something bigger. The device itself is becoming irrelevant. The beauty of the tablet is that it is a convergent device. You carry one thing and it does everything you need – reading, writing, web surfing, social networking, etc. This leads to a paradigm shift in content creation and delivery. As Eoin Purcell said on Twitter during last night’s conversation:

Things will be sold, but selling will take different forms. Subscriptions, memberships, ads, events, readings etc.

His point being that the content will be in the cloud, the creators and publishers will earn through the things he mentions in the quote above and that content will be consumed on a variety of devices. The device itself becomes irrelevant – all it needs is access to the cloud and a comfortable reading experience. That’s the tablet with the battery life, screen resolution and daylight clarity I talked about above. The implication here is that not only does the device itself become irrelevant – as long as you have one, any one will do – but the concept of an ebook is also irrelevant. You don’t buy a book. You subscribe to a publisher and access their content, whenever, wherever. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this…

So the dedicated e-reader, like the Kindle or Kobo, is already dead. It just hasn’t stopped kicking yet. Amazon know this, so they’ve released the Fire, which is a tablet device. Others are following suit. For those of us who prefer a dedicated e-ink device, we should make the most of it now. Before long we’ll be the hipsters of the digital reading world, congregating like those people in record stores who still buy vinyl and talk about what stylus they prefer. I wonder if half the people reading this even know what a stylus is.

(For further reading, I’d recommend this article on the subject by Eoin Purcell. Interestingly, this article is already more than two years old.)

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter’s The Word.

All Changed, Changed Utterly…

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This post, by Lawrence Block, originally appeared on his site on 4/22/12.

All these things happened in the space of a week or so:

1. My friend Pat reported that the POD paperback of the book he’d co-authored with my friend Dick had gone on sale quietly at Amazon, with a score of copies sold in the first several days. (The eBook has already been selling for a month or so.)

The book is Bitter Medicine: What I’ve Learned and Teach about Malpractice Lawsuits (And How to Avoid Them), and I’ve been peripherally involved with it since Dick showed me some chapters he’d written several years ago. Dick is Richard Kessler, a retired surgeon and professor of medicine, with extensive service as an expert witness in malpractice lawsuits. Pat is Patrick Trese, also retired after a distinguished career as an Emmy-winning writer and producer at NBC News; in the course of it he’d also written and published a couple of books. I’ve known them both for thirty years or so, and they’ve known each other for about as long, and the partnership turned out to be a good fit. They put in a lot of hours over a couple of years, and wound up with a solid professional manuscript that told important stories in an accessible manner.

But nobody was interested. A couple of agents agreed to look at the manuscript, kept it forever, and then returned it. A publisher, in an uncharacteristic moment of candor, said essentially that every retired doctor wants to write a book, and many of them do, and nobody cares.

And then Pat had a revelation. Neither of the book’s authors was in it for wealth or glory. Dick had had a very important and useful tale to tell, and Pat had found a way to tell it clearly and forcefully, and what they both wanted was for it to be read. And Pat knew a couple of people who’d embraced the revolution of eBooks and self-publishing, and figured why not?

Pat’s work on Bitter Medicine is done, but he’s keeping busy. His first book, Penguins Have Square Eyes, grew out of his experiences as a TV reporter in Antarctica; it came out in 1962, and now fifty years later he’s tweaking it for self-publication. And he’s hard at work on the revision of a big thriller he’s had in the works for as long as I’ve known him. Some agents have seen versions of it over the years, and encouraged him, but this this time he plans to publish it himself.

2. My agent told me about a new client he’d just signed, a romance writer. She’d published several books with a commercial publisher, and then they dropped her. So she started publishing herself in eBooks, and in a little over a year she was making eight or ten times what she’d been earning in the past. She’d tried handling her own foreign rights, but it took too much time and she didn’t really know what she was doing, so she needed someone to represent her overseas, and negotiate other sub rights.

Now that she was doing so well, she said, publishers had come around, telling her how much they could do for her. “I tell them I already know what they can do for me,” she said. “They already did it.”

 

Read the rest of the post on Lawrence Block’s site.

Are the E-Reader’s Days Numbered?

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This article, by Quentin Fottrell, originally appeared on SmartMoney.

By pumping $300 million into the Nook, Microsoft may actually be betting against Barnes and Noble’s e-reader.

The software giant plans to include the Nook app in its new Windows 8 operating system, which experts say suggests the two companies think the future of digital books is on computers, cellphones, and tablets – not just traditional e-readers. “Barnes & Noble will likely become more device agnostic,” says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, one of the world’s largest distributor of self-published e-books. “Consumers will be able to read Barnes & Noble e-books on a wide range of devices.”

 

As it is, only 41% of people read e-books on the Nook or Kindle, according to a study released this month by Pew Research. Some 29% read them on cell phones, 23% on tablets and 42% on computers. Since most people have their phone with them at all times, it’s not surprising that phones and work computers would be used for reading in addition separate e-readers, analysts say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read the rest of the article on SmartMoney.

 

What Goes Into a Book: Case Study: The Catalyst

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I was talking to a reader on my Facebook page and had mentioned a small part of the process for The Catalyst. Her reply was:

I knew that releasing a book was a complicated process, but ‘Wow’. As a reader it’s interesting to learn everything involved in order to get a book out, so that we can enjoy it. If more people understood everything that it takes to get a book out into the world, there would be alot less bitching about having to spend anything over 99 cents for one.

Since I think this understanding is so important, rather than JUST reply directly to her, I decided to make a blog post about it to take you through what goes into a typical Zoe Winters series book:

 

It’s not just writing a book and throwing it out there. In an indie situation all time and money costs are the author’s. There are promotional costs as well as the costs of putting out a truly professional product that can compete with mainstream published work on quality. On the one hand people expect indie books to be “cheap” but on the other, they complain about lower quality. In order to GET higher quality it takes a level of work (and often monetary costs) that require it to not be “cheap”. For example… if I charged 99 cents (making only 35 cents per copy sold), I would feel highly resentful, given what all goes into this both time and money wise.

Here’s what goes into the standard Zoe series book:

Rough Draft (usually I try to get this done in a month or less. Most people can’t do more than 2-3 hours of actual writing in a day because it’s pretty draining. Creative work is not digging ditches, but it can still be exhausting.)

Then I do a read through and edit and send it to the beta readers. (while it’s with the betas I’ll generally work on something else. That’s also when I start getting stuff together for the book trailer and the cover art and start the process for that. I consult on cover art but I’m more involved with the book trailer. I pick music, video clips, images, and write the text and give a basic storyboard idea of how I want it to go. But generally I’m also working on another phase of another project while my book is with betas or with the copyeditor. Like when Catalyst goes to the copyeditor I’ll be writing Lifecycle.)

When it gets back from the betas, I do another round of edits, based on feedback. Then I send it to the copyeditor. (while it’s with the copyeditor, I’m doing other things on other projects, or getting the book tour/promo set up and ready to go, or whatever.)

When it gets back from the copyeditor, I input the copyedits, do a final proofread, format for ebook, register copyright, then publish and run my promo and send review copies out to reviewers.

Then I format for print, send it to LSI and wait for my proof copy. When I get my proof copy, I proofread the print, then approve it for distribution. During all this I get things set up with my narrator and audio production people for the audio book. I consult back and forth on things such as the particular voices each main character will have and answer any questions on word pronunciations that aren’t clear.

As recording comes back for the book, I listen to it and note any audio errors that the editor might not have caught. A mispronunciation here… a part that’s hard to understand… etc. I send notes back and re-listen to the fixed parts, then approve for distribution.

As print and audiobook become available, I promote those with a newsletter, blog post, twitter, and facebook.

Things I spend money on… like for the Catalyst:

Cover art, including audiobook cover.
Copyediting
Book Tour (Blog tour)
Book Trailer and elements for the trailer (music, video clips, images)
Kindle Nation Daily ad
Audio narration
Free signed copies as part of previous promos.

Total costs involved for this book come to about $5,000 (a big chunk of that of course is audiobook narration and production, but I think the costs are worth it to be in audio.)

In the end analysis, writing, editing, promoting, and releasing a book takes me hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars of my own personal money. This is why I charge $4.95 for full-length books in the digital format. Digital is my main bread and butter. Audio and print are small sidestreams of income, though Audio will likely grow over time because the market itself is growing.

 

This is a reprint from The Weblog of Zoe Winters.

My Journey As An Indie Author

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This post, by Julie Ortolon, originally appeared on her Julie’s Journal Online site on 4/27/12.

It was a year ago this month that my world changed forever thanks to the ebook revolution. April 2011 was when my sales exploded. I have been reeling – in a good way – ever since.

This journey, however, started long before that. It started in the fall of 2009. Back then, I had one goal: to somehow get back some semblance of a writing career. To me, at the time, that meant land another contract with a traditional print publisher.

Boy has that goal changed! But let’s look at how I got from there to here.

The First Step Down a New Path

In the summer of 2009, I was basically unpublishable in the eyes of New York. I hadn’t had a book out since Unforgettable came out in 2007. I’d gone from rocketing onto the publishing scene by hitting the USA Today list with my first title to sales numbers that were so bad (thanks to the implosion of the publishing industry) it was heartbreaking. I was also so emotional beat up after eight years of the publishing process, I needed a break. I stepped back for two years by going to the mountains of New Mexico to paint aspen trees and contemplate clouds.

That was fabulous for awhile, but after two years my muse started to stir. I wanted back in the game. So, I landed a new agent with a proposal for a new series. One of the first things I realized, though, was that a lot had changed in the two years I’d been away. Suddenly, it wasn’t just the proposal and an author’s sales numbers that publishers looked at before offering a contract, it was the author’s Website and overall Web presence, i.e. their number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Yikes! My Website was two years out of date, and I didn’t know a tweet from a twerp.

Fate Intervenes

As karma, chance, the universe would have it, I bumped into an Internet marketing coach at a wine bar one afternoon and I hired her to overhaul my Website. Instead, she overhauled my entire life by opening my eyes. I already knew the publishing industry doesn’t make sense to any rational business person. Yet, in talking to this very savvy businesswoman, trying to explain why I couldn’t implement her marketing strategies because “that’s not how things work in publishing” I started to see just how ridiculous the publishing industry is. Even so, the first time she suggested I ditch New York and self publish, I drew up with indignation and said, “I would never self-publish!”

Long story short, part of the strategy this marketing guru proposed to help me land another print contract was for me to start this blog. Julie’s Journal Online was meant to accomplish two things: 1) help me learn social networking by teaching others; and 2) seriously up my overall Web presence. In order to write my blog posts, I had to do a lot of research. That led to me reading things like Konrath’s blog the Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. Which led to me reconsidering epubbing my out-of-print backlist. Lord, what a hair-pulling experience epubbing was back in the early days before we had a sufficient number of cover designers and formatters to hire.

 

 

Read the rest of the post on Julie’s Journal Online.

Price Wars and Book Industry Illegal Activities

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This has been a huge issue lately. To better understand it, let me describe a couple of different pricing models or customs which are at the heart of this controversy.

Wholesale Model: The publisher establishes a book’s recommended price and sells it to the booksellers for a percentage off that price. The bookseller can then sell the book for whatever price (sometimes higher) that he wants to.

Agency Model: The publisher sets a price for the book and then discounts it 30% to the reseller, who must agree to sell the book at the price the publisher establishes and cannot discount. The result has been for the publishers to push up the prices of their books because they can.

Impact on E-books: This has pushed up the price of E-books and has resulted in a major conflict between some of the major publishers and Amazon, who wants to keep the prices low for their Kindle market. In their efforts to control the situation in their favor, the major publishers began allegedly sneaking around in a variety of price-fixing activities. Ooops, they got caught at those and the following cover-up attempts. This brought the Federal Department of Justice into the fray with an anti-trust suit against five publishers and Apple. In the meanwhile, E-book distributor Mark Coker of SmashWords has come on record that he prefers the Agency Model because it allows the authors and the publishers to control the prices. This levels the playing field for smaller book retailers and preventing large retailers from loss-leadering their small competitors to death.

All these recent activities are pushing down E-book prices and tying the hands of the major publishers, which may hasten their demise.

Bottom Line: The forces of greed and control battles point to the obvious solution of self-publishing. Once a pariah in the book industry, self-publishing is becoming acceptable, as long as the author does a professional job of publishing his books. The legal fight has an indirect impact on self-publishers in terms of common price ranges. It all points to a much different business model.

 

 

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.