Book Trends

Articles about trends in bookselling and the publishing industry.

These Romance Writers Ditched Their Publishers For Ebooks — And Made Millions

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This article by Mandi Woodruff originally appeared on Yahoo! Finance on 8/1/14.

In early 2010, things weren’t going very well for San Francisco-based romance novelist Bella Andre. Brick-and-mortar bookstores were shutting down in large numbers, and after seven years, eight books and two publishers, she learned she had been axed from her latest contract.

“I was hanging on by my fingernails,” says Andre, 41, who was trying to carve out a niche in contemporary romance. Peers advised her to try a different pen name, to change genres, to write anything but love stories. With a degree in economics from Stanford University and a background in music, she wasn’t short on career options.

Then a friend suggested she look into self-publishing. At the time, Amazon.com’s  (AMZN) direct publishing platform, which allows just about anyone to publish and sell their books online, was beginning to gain traction among professional writers. After years of bending her stories to the will and opinions of publishers, editors and literary agents, Andre found the prospect of having complete autonomy over her material very appealing.

“As an author, I was not high up on the publishing food chain and [my ideas] were rarely ever listened to,” she says. “I took my friend’s advice and I dove right into self-publishing.”

 

Click here to read the full story on Yahoo! Finance.

 

Amazon Speaks: We Want Lower eBook Prices from Hachette

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This post by Nate Hoffelder originally appeared on The Digital Reader on 7/21/14.

Amazon hasn’t said much concerning their ongoing contract dispute with the French media conglomerate Lagardère and its US publishing subsidiary Hachette, and today the retailer broke their silence with what is only their third official statement (not counting the leaked letter).

Like the first two statements, Amazon isn’t saying much. According to a message posted on Amazon’s forums (and copied below), one of the sticking points in the negotiations is the price of ebooks. We of course knew this from the WSJ interview in which Russ Grandinetti said little and avoided defending Amazon, but Amazon expands upon that earlier statement with a call for higher author royalties on ebooks.

The statement below lays out the math Amazon uses to justify their push for lower ebook prices, but it’s worth noting that the statement is somewhat misleading.

Amazon would like you to think that most ebooks can be priced at or below $10, even going so far as to point out that “there will be legitimate reasons for a small number of specialized titles” that will cost more, but what they hope you won’t realize is that they are glossing over whole swathes of nonfiction content, including textbooks, reference manuals, professional books, and works that are much longer and more expensive to create than your average novel.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Digital Reader.

 

Kindle Unlimited – Some Early Results

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This post by Nick Stephenson originally appeared on his blog on 7/23/14.

For anyone still living under a rock, or perhaps a particularly voracious shrub, you’ll probably already know that Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited program launched over the weekend, spurring a veritable explosion of opinion (both optimistic and doom-mongering) across the interwebs. Of course, much of what people are speculating is, well, just that – speculation.

So, in an attempt to add a little objectivity into the mix (God forbid) I figured I’d let you know how the new Kindle Unlimited service has affected me in the few days it’s been live.

But, before I get to that, I promised I’d put a comprehensive post together explaining how I’ve been building up my email list over the last few months. I’m seeing some steady growth – going from just a few hundred subscribers at the beginning of the year to over 4,000 readers as of today. For me, especially in light of potential game-changers like Kindle Unlimited, having my own ready-made list of followers is more important than ever. If you want to find out more about what I’ve been doing to build this up, head on over to indie legend David Gaughran’s Blog – David was kind enough to invite me over for a guest post about email tactics, and I’ve included a full breakdown.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. What exactly is Kindle Unlimited? It’s being touted as “Netflix for Books”, and is essentially a competitor to the already established offerings from Scribd and Oyster. The key points authors need to know are:

 

Click here to read the full post on Nick Stephenson’s blog.

 

Why Writers Are Opening Up About Money (or the Lack Thereof)

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This article by Anna North originally appeared on The New York Times Opinion Pages on 7/21/14.

Writers may always have worried about money, but now seems a particularly fertile time for writing about it. Scratch Magazine, launched last year, takes as its purview “Writing + money + life.” The Billfold routinely runs stories on how freelance writers and other creative types “do money.” The novelist Emily Gould opened up about her financial life in a popular Medium essay and subsequent interviews, and The Guardian’s Alison Flood recently reported on the sorry state of writers’ incomes (which, in turn, inspired some critique from Gawker’s Michelle Dean).

This spate of talk about writing and money has opened up broader conversations about who can afford to enter the profession today, and who gets shut out.

Manjula Martin, the cofounder of Scratch, told Op-Talk that “there has always been this tension for writers around how to make a living and how to make art.” However, she said, growing job insecurity in writing professions and beyond may have led to a new wave of anxiety: “As the economy is changing and as things just feel more precarious in our culture, that bleeds through to the literary culture. And I think a big part of that too is a question of, ‘is literature and are the arts going to continue to be valued in ways that we have perhaps always just assumed they would be?’”

 

Click here to read the full article on The New York Times Opinion Pages.

 

10 Alternatives to Goodreads

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This post by Lysa Grant originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 7/14/14.

This post is an addendum to Author Directory Sites: The Complete List. If you’re just looking for library/catalog sites, here you go. There’s no reason to stop at Goodreads, even if it is the biggest and most used.

Well, let me amend that. There are so many hours in the day, so if you want to concentrate your efforts on a library site, it makes sense to stick with Goodreads. If you’ve got time to spare, putting some time and energy into these sites can only help. And if all you want to do is create a profile and bail, that can’t exactly hurt either.

 

Shelfari

Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers (for now). Shelfari is a gathering place for authors, aspiring authors, publishers, and readers, and has many tools and features to help these groups connect with each other in a fun and engaging way. Our mission is to enhance the experience of reading by connecting readers in meaningful conversations about the published word.

Tips for using Shelfari

 

Library Thing

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth.

A guide to LibraryThing for publishers (from LibraryThing)

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes highlights for 8 additional reader sites, on Self-Publishing Review.

 

Paying Writers What they Deserve

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 7/12/14.

Traditional Publishing is no Longer Fair or Sustainable. This was the sad but accurate headline in The Guardian this week. It followed a report on author income from the ALCS, the results of which led Nicola Solomon, head of the UK’s Society of Authors to declare:

Authors need fair remuneration if they are to keep writing and producing quality work. Publisher profits are holding up and, broadly, so are total book sales if you include ebooks, but authors are receiving less per book and less overall due mainly to the fact that they are only paid a small percentage of publishers’ net receipts on ebooks and because large advances have gone except for a handful of celebrity authors.

This comes right on the heels of The Daily Mail’s piece about Hillary Clinton’s latest book. The memoir has sold well by most measures, moving 161,000 copies in the first three weeks and 86,000 in week one, but the book has dropped in the charts, and it appears Simon & Schuster will take a loss due to the $14,000,000 advance paid to Hillary.

Forteen million dollars.

By publishing math, this advance was warranted. Her previous book sold well enough for the bean counters at S&S to come up with what seemed necessary to both retain Hillary and turn a profit. But this methodology flies in the face of recent rhetoric about the role publishers play in the protection of literature and the nurturing of “the writing life.”

With that sum of money, you could pay 500 writers $28,000 to enjoy a full year of the writing life. Or you could pay 250 writers $56,000 if they don’t understand how to squeak by as a starving artist. Not only that, Hillary Clinton doesn’t need another penny for as long as she lives. She didn’t need to be supported while she wrote the book. So how exactly are publishers the patrons of the literary arts? Nicola Soloman nails the problem with the current blockbuster model of entertainment: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We shovel money at the outliers and drop everyone else.

 

Click here to read the full post on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

Self-Publishing as a Means to My Own Literary Revolution

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This post by Tejas Desai originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 6/26/14.

Much bluster has been made recently in the media regarding the Amazon-Hachette dispute, with multimillionaire authors, agents and self-published writers, among others, weighing in. Most have condemned Amazon for its bullying tactics in negotiations with publishers while self-published authors like Barry Eisler and J. A. Konrath have defended it for democratizing the field. Much of the rhetoric has involved terms like “sales figures” “copies sold” “promotional fees” and “marketing development.” Very little of the conversation has been about the more important issue of the current state of narrative and where literature is headed.

I published both my books, The Brotherhood (2012) and Good Americans (2013), through my own company The New Wei, after being frustrated with the traditional industry and the type of literature it was producing. I found most literary books I read to be bland in content and only passable in style. They often seemed to have some non-fiction market angle that hoped to sell the book and justified the authors getting teaching jobs and never publishing future books. Yet all of these books were acclaimed by major critics, newspapers, magazines, publications and writers, which caused me to question their impartiality, or at least their taste.

As someone who worked at a literary agency for years, I already knew how random publication tended to be and how difficult it was to sell a book. Most books never sold and those that did rarely earned out their advances. The contract terms were absurdly tilted toward the publishers and authors didn’t have much say in presentation or marketing. Most authors never got agents, and it had little to do with quality. Usually, it was just luck. Still I continued to have some faith in the industry even as I left it, became a professional librarian, received a MFA, wrote and rewrote my works. And while I received initial interest from several agents, I never got one. Even the independent publishers rejected it. All their stated reasons were different.

 

Click here to read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Riding a Wave: How ‘Boys in the Boat’ Became a Best-seller

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This article by Mary Ann Gwinn originally appeared on The Seattle Times on 7/13/14.

Here’s a secret that authors and publishers would give a lot to know: What makes a best-seller? Marketing campaigns? Social-media strategies? Media attention? Sales-pushing algorithms?

Redmond author Daniel James Brown has one answer, and it’s none of the above. Here’s the story of the success of one worthy book.

Brown is the author of the best-selling “The Boys in the Boat”(Penguin), the true saga of the University of Washington crew team, winners of an Olympic gold medal in 1936. This team of nine young athletes traveled to the Berlin Olympics, an event staged-managed by Hitler and the Nazis, and vanquished the Germans’ hand-picked crew. The book is in its fifth week as the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction paperback in the country, according to The New York Times. (It’s No. 5 on the best-seller list that covers all forms of nonfiction, both print and e-book.)

Improbably, no Seattle-based author had recognized the potential in the story until Brown, a California transplant, technical writer and author of two nonfiction books, made a visit to the elderly father of a neighbor in Redmond about six years ago. The neighbor, Judy Willman, had been reading one of Brown’s previous books to her dying father, Joe Rantz, and told Brown that it would thrill Joe if he would spend time with her dad.

 

Click here to read the full article on The Seattle Times.

 

Breaking Free – What Happened When I Left KDP Select

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This post by Nick Stephenson originally appeared on his site on 6/6/14.

“KDP Select is evil”. “Free promotions are pointless”. “Nick, you’re an idiot”. These are things I hear on a daily basis, the latter usually being something I say to myself when I’m looking in the mirror. As for the first two, I talk to a lot of authors who have a strong opinion on the relative merits of signing up for 90 days of exclusivity with Amazon, and the words “shackled” and “dungeon” come up a lot. It’s the same for free days – half of authors think they’re a God-send, the other half would rather cut off their own limbs with a rusty spatula than offer their work gratis. And that’s cool, I don’t have anything against people having wildly different opinions – and there are plenty of authors making a decent income without touching free promotions, and there are plenty who swear by them. But I like to look at the cold, hard numbers before coming to a conclusion, as everybody’s mileage seems to vary.

The two main strategies for free books I see most often are:

1. A variety of titles signed up to KDP Select, with rotating free promotions on each book. This is pretty easy to do with the 5 free days you get to play with under the KDP Select contract.

2.Titles NOT in KDP select, and up on other vendors, with the first book in the series permanently free. This is also pretty easy to do.

There are pros and cons for both approaches, but last month was the first time I’d tried option number (2). I’ve had a bunch of emails and comments asking for me to report back on the results, so here’s the skinny:

Income Report: All Books in KDP Select

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes sales graphs and detailed analysis, on Nick Stephenson’s site.

 

Should You Blog Your Novel?

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This post by Nina Amir originally appeared on How To Blog A Book on 7/1/14.

Many novelists feel intrigued by the idea of blogging a book. If they seek a traditional publishing deal, however, they usually have one major concern: If I blog my novel, will a publisher be interested in the manuscript? In fact, nonfiction writers have the same concern.

No matter what type of book you blog, this is a valid concern. For novelists, it’s a larger issue, though.

 

Previously Published Nonfiction Work and Traditional Publishers

Let me discuss nonfiction first. If you blog the first draft of your nonfiction book and then submit to a traditional publisher, that manuscript will be seen as previously published work. However, you will have 25 or 30 percent new content and an edited version to submit (if you follow the plan I propose here on the blog and in How to Blog a Book), so what you present is not identical to what can be found online. That makes the manuscript enticing to a publisher.

Plus, when you submit your work you offer statistics to prove the blog posts you published successfully test marketed your idea and created a platform for yourself, which means you now have a built-in readership for the book.

For these reasons—additional content, the difference in your manuscript, great stats, platform—the majority of publishers—not all—will not be put off by the fact that your manuscript technically is previously published. If your stats are good, they should be happy to publish your nonfiction book.

 

Click here to read the full post on How To Blog A Book.

 

2014 Smashwords Survey Reveals New Opportunities for Indie Authors

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 7/6/14.

Welcome to the 2014 Smashwords Survey, our third annual survey that reveals new opportunities for indie ebook authors to sell more books.

As in prior surveys (view the 2013 Smashwords Survey here and 2012 Smashwords Survey here), we examined aggregated retail and library sales data of Smashwords books and then crunched the numbers based on various quantifiable characteristics of the book.

For this year’s survey, we examined over $25 million in customer purchases  aggregated across Smashwords retailers including Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, the Smashwords.com store, Sony (now closed), Diesel (closed), Oyster, Scribd, Kobo, public libraries and others.

This year, we break new ground with more data, including survey questions that explore preorders and series, two categories of inquiry that weren’t possible in prior years.  These latter two categories were enabled by Smashwords’ introduction of ebook preorder distribution in July, 2013 and our new Smashwords Series Manager feature which allows us to capture, analyze and share the performance of series books.

The goal of the survey is to identify Viral Catalysts.  I first introduced the concept of Viral Catalyst in 2012 with the publication of my free ebook best practices book, The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success.  A Viral Catalyst is anything that makes a book more discoverable and more enjoyable to readers.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Smashwords blog.

 

A 'Wimpy' Plan to Save the Physical Book

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This article by Sona Charaipotra originally appeared on The Atlantic on 6/20/14.

Children’s author Jeff Kinney’s new shop will emphasize reading as a tangible, community experience in a digital, fractured world.

Jeff Kinney, the man behind the astonishingly powerful Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, is leading the revolution.

That’s been the theory behind the bestselling author’s just-announced plans to open up an indie bookstore in tiny Plainville, Massachusetts. It’s been framed as a call-to-arms against Amazon in the wake of its strong-arming tactics in negotiating with the big five publishing houses, starting with (fellow giant) Hachette.

Take back the power, fight the system, and all that, right?

Wrong.

If Kinney’s stoking a counterculture, it’s to harken back to the past. In his Plainville shop, he imagines a cozy, well-worn space with old tomes and tea, frequented by locals and writerly souls. “A physical book has a heft, a permanence that you don’t get digitally,” says Kinney in an interview. “So our hope is that the bookstore will remain a vital, important part of communities across the country and the world.”
 

Click here to read the full article on The Atlantic.

 

They Might Be Giants

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This post by Philip Jones originally appeared on FUTUReBOOK on 6/24/14.

Are we at the beginnings of a backlash against big tech? Last week the New Yorker published a disruption takedown from Jill Lepore in which she castigated the tech community for its “reckless and ruthless” philosophy of disruption. Over the weekend the Observer criticised tech companies for sometimes thinking “they are above good rules”. A few weeks ago the New Statesman ran a series of articles puncturing the Silicon Valley dream, and warning about the “political and social damage that may be done by the future land-grab being pursued by the big internet companies”.

For publishers the context for this are the ongoing negotiations between Amazon and its suppliers over supremacy in the book business. As The Bookseller exclusively reported yesterday, Amazon’s latest terms indicate a direction of travel that would see the online retailer take a sizeable control over both a publisher’s inventory and its marketing. Can’t deliver fast enough to meet Amazon’s super-efficient distribution machine? Amazon would now POD the book. Not sure how best to market a book, or a list? Amazon could do it for you, albeit for a cut of the turnover.

 

Click here to read the full post on FUTUReBOOK.

 

Hybrid Model: Agents’ Changing Roles Add Value to #Indie #Authors

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This post by Toby Neal originally appeared on her blog on 4/4/14.

This week was filled with excitement as I signed with Foreword Literary, a dynamic  literary agency with offices in San Francisco, New York and Chicago. I had the joy of meeting and getting to know one of the agency founders, Laurie McLean, at the Big Sur Writer’s Conference in Monterey. Her enthusiasm and dynamic energy were a match for mine as we brainstormed ideas and exchanged backstories over coffee and dinner. After just a few minutes I knew this was an agent who fully understood the challenges ahead for the publishing industry, both from the indie side and from the legacy side.

“I’m from a tech and marketing background, so I think differently about books,” Laurie told me, her animated face shining with enthusiasm. “I see stories in all their forms, whether they are consumed on paper, via ereaders, in videogames, on the big screen, or on YouTube. We’re pioneering here, and I think the ‘hybrid’ model of selecting the best publishing medium for each project, be it self-publishing or traditional, is the way of the future. In fact, Foreword believes so much in this hybrid model, we predict most authors will become hybrid authors over the next five years. We’re here to show them how to make that transition.”

I couldn’t sign up fast enough! So I’d like to introduce Laurie McLean, “foreword” thinking agent extraordinaire, to all of you. She’s agreed to answer some questions about the hybrid model and other topics!

 

Click here to read the full post on Toby Neal’s blog.

 

Is Amazon Good For Books? and other dumb questions

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This post by Robert Kroese originally appeared on his site on 6/10/14.

I finally got around to reading George Packer’s article in the New Yorker entitled “Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?” yesterday. Spoiler alert, in case you haven’t read the article: Packer doesn’t answer the question. In fact, he doesn’t even really address the question. Most of the article is taken up with head-shaking reminiscences of Amazon’s ruthless business practices, its treatment of books as “widgets” rather than the lovingly birthed children of the tortured souls of artists, and a few anecdotes about poor working conditions in warehouses (another spoiler: warehouses, by and large, are not fun places to work). Finally, in the concluding paragraphs, Packer gets around to the question at hand:

Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years…. These are the kinds of book that particularly benefit from the attention of editors and marketers, and that attract gifted people to publishing, despite the pitiful salaries. Without sufficient advances, many writers will not be able to undertake long, difficult, risky projects.When consumers are overwhelmed with choices, some experts argue, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing….

These trends point toward what the literary agent called “the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer.” A few brand names at the top, a mass of unwashed titles down below, the middle hollowed out: the book business in the age of Amazon mirrors the widening inequality of the broader economy….

 

Click here to read the full post on Robert Kroese’s site.