Book Trends

Articles about trends in bookselling and the publishing industry.

Soliloquy on Book Prices (or How I Learned To Love eBooks)

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her site on 5/17/15.

You know how sometimes things you’ve been reading/talking about kind of merge? That happened to me this morning. Somewhere I read about author earnings and the cost of books. Somewhere else I wrote an article about the power of the franchise in writing and that led me to the Thrawn trilogy and mention of a book where Grand Admiral Thrawn is an important, though rarely visible, character and that led me to dig out that very same book. Troy Denning’s Tatooine Ghost, to see if I still thought it was as good as I remembered.

I’ve also been re-reading one of my favourite books, McDevitt’s Slow Lightning. It’s face down on the desk beside me as I write. And the sticker with the price is waving at me.

I bought the book (a 5×8 paperback) in about 2003. It cost AU$19.95 from Readers Feast in Melbourne. Same for Tatooine Ghost.

Wow, I thought, glancing along a row of paperbacks on a shelf (just one row). There’s over $400 worth of books there. At least, that’s what I paid for them. They’re worth squat now. And as for that glass—fronted cabinet behind me, the one full of hardbacks… Then I thought some more and wondered if these prices were from before the Big Row about book prices. I don’t recall the details, but it was all about the excessive cost of books in Australia. So I thought I’d check the current price of some of those books.

 

Read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s site.

 

Want To Win Big Literary Prizes? Make Sure Your Story Is About Men

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This essay by Natalie Haynes originally appeared on The Guardian on 6/1/15.

Books with female subjects are less likely to win literary prizes. But why do men rarely feel confident enough to write about women?

Like anyone else who reads a lot of books, I’m not a bit surprised by the news that book prizes favour narratives with male characters at their centre. In fact, literary prizes tend to favour books by men about men, as novelist Nicola Griffith’s research reveals: the Man Booker, for example, has awarded nine of its past 15 awards to men writing primarily about men, the Pulitzer has awarded eight. The first five years of this century skewed the figures for the Man Booker: True History of the Kelly Gang, Life of Pi, Vernon God Little, The Line of Beauty and The Sea, all by men and primarily about boys or men (and a tiger).

Novels focusing on women or girls are very much less well-regarded, it seems. Griffith finds only two recent Man Bookers have been awarded to such narratives, and none of the Pulitzers. She’s right to point out the obvious: stories about women are stories about half of the world. Fail to reward those stories with recognition and publicity and you’re side-lining half of human experience. Quite aside from anything else, that’s robbing us of some good future books: publishers are often more likely to publish books that they think have a chance at a prize.

 

Read the full essay on The Guardian.

 

10 Things Authors Learn The Hard Way…

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This post by Diane Hall originally appeared on BDAILY on 5/25/15.

Writing workshops and books, professional advice, even Google, won’t answer every question an author may have. Some knowledge can only be gained by personal experience. The following list stems from genuine reports by authors I’ve either spoken to or worked with, across the globe. Individual points are not meant as sweeping statements; there may be a good portion of authors who have different outcomes and opinions. Nevertheless…

No one but you cares as much about your book

Agents, publishers and publicists – and especially readers – don’t have the same emotional investment as the author of a book. They might just as easily prefer another book on the same subject, or easily forget your title altogether; with over 14 million books to choose from, that yours will be the best, most unique book they’ve ever come across is unlikely. Dump the ego, and work on enticing them to look at your book in the first place. Help them to make their buying decision, don’t just assume that once seen, automatically sold.

Traditional publishing is not better than self-publishing

Yes, TP has a lot going for it, but it also has its downsides. Sacrifices to become a TP author may include your book no longer being recognisable to you, little control over the book’s aesthetics, a long, long time to market and vastly reduced royalties. That’s not to say self-publishing doesn’t have any cons; TP and SP are essentially just different ways to publish that should each be thoroughly investigated.
 

Read the full post on BDAILY.

 

Kindle Scout

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This post by Polly Iyer originally appeared on The Blood-Red Pencil on 5/20/15.

My book, Indiscretion, has been on Amazon’s Kindle Scout program for an entire week as of today. It’s been on and off the “Hot and Trending” list, which I guess is natural. This is measured by how many people read the sample and nominate my book during a thirty-day period. I’ve done some promotion, but there’s a fine line between promo and overkill. I try to be cognizant of where that line is. That said, self-promotion has never been an easy fit for me.

So what is Kindle Scout, you ask? This is from the Kindle Scout website:

“Kindle Scout is reader-powered publishing for new, never-before-published books. It’s a place where readers help decide if a book gets published. Selected books will be published by Kindle Press and receive 5-year renewable terms, a $1,500 advance, 50% eBook royalty rate, easy rights reversions and featured Amazon marketing.”

Bloggers have debated the pros and cons of the program. From my point of view, the answer depends on where you are in the publishing world. I’ve self-published seven books with Amazon. The difference with Kindle Scout, besides the nice advance, unheard of for an indie writer, is the strength of Amazon’s marketing that I wouldn’t get otherwise.

 

Read the full post on The Blood-Red Pencil.

 

Whose Game Are You Playing?

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This post by John Pettigrew originally appeared on Future Proofs on 5/4/15.

We hear a lot about Amazon, the new giant in the playground. But Amazon may actually be the least of the industry’s problems, because they at least play by rules we recognise. There are plenty of other giants out there who are playing entirely different games – but who may still stomp all over our playground. The question is, what do we do about them?

The publishing industry feels under threat from a lot of places these days. And the most commonly mentioned cause of this fear is surely Amazon. Starting off as just another book retailer, Amazon has grown hugely and very cleverly to become a true global giant.

Amazon seems to be the kid everyone’s afraid of – bigger, stronger, and not afraid to use its muscle to get what it wants!

Playing by the rules
However, Amazon is still playing in our playground, basically working with the same rules publishing companies are used to – getting books to customers more effectively and more cheaply than ever before. This is a game that publishers understand and play all the time. And we can see this by the way that publishers and Amazon are always talking about this or that, arguing about a particular situation and coming to new agreements.

The problem, it seems to me, is that Amazon isn’t actually what publishers should be most worried about. We fear Amazon, I think, because we understand it pretty well and so can predict clearly what effect its actions are going to have on us.

 

A different game
The true danger may not be Amazon but other giants who are playing entirely different games. Companies like Google and Facebook, who use content (including content from publishers) as part of their business but who don’t really care much about that content because their real business is selling advertising.

 

Read the full post on Future Proofs.

 

How to Price Your Work on Amazon

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This post originally appeared on Writer’s Circle.

So you’ve decided to publish a book on Amazon (and hopefully read our helpful guide for doing so). Before those pages hit the presses – or the Kindles – you’ll need to price your work on Amazon, and we’re here with a bit of advice on finding the right price for your readers.

Think about your motive. This is a great tip from Publishers Weekly, which advises writers to think about the purpose of their book: readership or revenue? Ideally, of course, you could get both, but a lower price will likely earn more readers (e.g. people will be more willing to try a new e-book author when the price tag is only a buck or two) while a higher price could earn you more revenue. The latter is true, of course, especially if you already have an established fan base – but many new authors prefer to price on the lower side to attract new readers.

Consider paperback vs. e-book. E-books should not cost as much as paperback books, for two reasons: Firstly because fewer resources are needed to publish the work, and secondly because research shows that expensive e-books don’t sell well, according to Mill City Press. While paperbacks can easily find success priced above $10, e-books do best when priced between $2.99 and $9.99 – in fact, PBS says $3.99 seems to do really well.

 

Read the full post on Writer’s Circle.

 

BuzzFeed Books Won’t Kill Literary Criticism — But Book Snobbery Might

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This post by Michelle Dean originally appeared on Flavorwire on 11/8/13.

So here’s the thing: yesterday BuzzFeed Books named its new editor, a sometime friend of mine named Isaac Fitzgerald. I knew Isaac as the Managing Editor of a literary site known as The Rumpus, where I was a weekend editor for several months in 2012. 

Yesterday, he gave the following quote to a media reporting site:

BuzzFeed will do book reviews, Fitzgerald said, but he hasn’t figured out yet what form they’ll take. It won’t do negative reviews: “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” Fitzgerald said people in the online books community “understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”

It’s likely that you, dear readers, have not have been following the latest scintillating round of slapfighting in book critic circles about the “state of criticism.” It’s always a subject of dubious interest to the general population, I think, but let me explain briefly anyway, because the debate is crashing into the perennial concern about the declining popularity of books in our culture, and we all care about books here at Flavorwire, so.

 

Read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

Why Hong Kong Is Clamping Down On Creative Writing

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This post by Madeleine Thien originally appeared on The Guardian on 5/18/15.

The decision to close City University’s MFA programme is plainly intended to limit free expression – showing just how vital it is

Last month, City University of Hong Kong abruptly shut down its MFA programme in creative writing. During Occupy Central – the campaign of mass civil disobedience that disrupted Hong Kong universities and brought part of the territory to a standstill for nearly three months last year – a number of our students had published essays in support of the demonstrations.

One of the most prominent was by lawyer Keane Shum, who wrote in Atlantic of his fears for Hong Kong in the face of increasing political interference from China. He said: “I choose words of protest. Others can bet against the march of democracy, but I still go with the better odds. I am a student no longer, but a dreamer, and a Hong Konger, always.”

For many in my generation, the images of class boycotts, calls for face-to-face meetings with senior leaders, and the decision by students to put their bodies in the way of police lines, brought back memories of the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989. For writers, literature is a carrier of history. In Chinese, the word remembrance, jì yì, is a pun that can be heard two ways, 记忆 (to recall, record) and 技艺 (art). In the aftermath of Occupy Central, a chilling effect has taken root in Hong Kong’s academic institutions, most palpably in the territory’s top institution, Hong Kong University, described two weeks ago by media as “a campus on edge”.

 

Read the full post on The Guardian.

 

S&S Tries Geo-Targeting in New Marketing Outreach

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This post by Calvin Reid originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 5/13/15.

In the latest effort to enhance book discovery, Simon & Schuster is partnering with mobile content delivery service Foli to offer customers complimentary access to a selection of full-text e-books in airports, museums and hotels around the country. Beginning May 15, David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers will be a feature selection at the National Air & Space Museum and 50 venues around the country. Another 18 titles will be available though a select group of hotels and airport lounges.

The new service relies on Foli’s location-based wireless technology, which allows the the delivery of a single title, or group of titles, to a specific geographic location. In order to access the e-books in the program, customers can download the Foli app to their iOS or Android device and read a full-text version of any of the books.

The availability of the e-books will last for three days while they are being accessed at the targeted venue.

 

Read the full post on Publishers Weekly.

 

How Keywords, Machine Learning Unlock Book Discovery

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This post by Jim Bryant originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 5/4/15.

Jim Bryant of Trajectory.com argues that advancements natural language machine processing leading to keywords may unlock a revolution in book discovery.

Leading publishing industry analysts started highlighting the increasing urgency of developing better “book discovery” practices more than ten years ago. Several years ago, this issue was highlighted as one of the biggest challenges facing the future of the publishing industry. Today, no one in the publishing world is seriously debating the relevancy of “book discovery.”

The challenge of “book discovery” is highlighted by the well-accepted facts surrounding the notion that never before in history have so many books been available to so many readers.

– Hundreds of thousands of backlist titles are being released by publishers.

– Hundreds of thousands of self-published books are being offered by ebook retailers and self-publishing platforms.

– Hundreds of thousands of titles from foreign publishers are making their way into domestic supply chains.

 

Read the full post, which includes informative charts and graphics, on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Which Authors Do Subscription Services Benefit?

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This post by Dana Beth Weinberg originally appeared on Digital Book World (DBW) on 4/28/15.

Expert publishing blog opinions are solely those of the blogger and not necessarily endorsed by DBW.

Subscriptions services may yet turn out to be a next game-changer in publishing, but for the moment that market is in a state of flux and expansion.

Oyster recently added an ebookstore loaded with Big Five titles, a move that could in turn bolster the subscription model, potentially attracting new readers and making the brand more competitive with Amazon. Scribd is steadily bulking up on audiobooks. Two major publishers added ebooks to new the multimedia subscription platform Playster in recent weeks. Meanwhile, Amazon continues to grow Kindle Unlimited yet continues to pay participating indie authors at rates similar to those that spurred grumblings late last year.

What do these services mean for authors? Since, on the one hand, ebook subscription providers typically pay authors less than an individual book sale, they could ultimately undercut authors’ earnings in a market where so few are “making it.” But on the other, subscription services may encourage readers to take risks on new authors, aiding certain authors’ discoverability over the longer term.

 

Read the full post on DBW.

 

Why Can’t We Read Anymore?

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This post by Hugh McGuire originally appeared on Medium on 4/22/15.

Or, can books save us from what digital does to our brains?

Last year, I read four books.

The reasons for that low number are, I guess, the same as your reasons for reading fewer books than you think you should have read last year: I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs. It just seems such an awful lot of words to concentrate on, on their own, without something else happening. And once you’ve finished one chapter, you have to get through the another one. And usually a whole bunch more, before you can say finished, and get to the next. The next book. The next thing. The next possibility. Next next next.

I am an optimist

Still, I am an optimist. Most nights last year, I got into bed with a book — paper or e — and started. Reading. Read. Ing. One word after the next. A sentence. Two sentences.

Maybe three.

And then … I needed just a little something else. Something to tide me over. Something to scratch that little itch at the back of my mind— just a quick look at email on my iPhone; to write, and erase, a response to a funny Tweet from William Gibson; to find, and follow, a link to a good, really good, article in the New Yorker, or, better, the New York Review of Books (which I might even read most of, if it is that good). Email again, just to be sure.

I’d read another sentence. That’s four sentences.

Smokers who are the most optimistic about their ability to resist temptation are the most likely to relapse four months later, and overoptimistic dieters are the least likely to lose weight. (Kelly McGonigal: The Willpower Instinct)

It takes a long time to read a book at four sentences per day.

And it’s exhausting. I was usually asleep halfway through sentence number five.

 

Read the full post on Medium.

 

Publishing’s Digital Disruption Hasn’t Even Started

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This post by Gareth Cuddy originally appeared on Digital Book World on 4/23/15.

Expert publishing blog opinions are solely those of the blogger and not necessarily endorsed by DBW.

Imperceptible, invisible almost, but it was there at the London Book Fair this year—publishers quietly clapping each other on the back and breathing a collective sigh of relief: Phew, thank goodness that ebook thing is over. Now let’s get back to real publishing.

I’m being a little facetious, of course. But this year’s trade show did see a genuine departure from the maelstrom of anxiety and excitement over the rapidly developing digital market that has dominated the last few fairs.

Most publishers seem to believe the worst is now over, that the industry has survived an inconvenient tsunami warning that turned out to be nothing but an unseasonably high tide.

But is the industry blind to the coming tempest? I certainly believe so.

The music industry thought that disruption was over by 2011 when their sales began to recover somewhat. Despite digital units accounting for 64% of music sales, the consensus was that the market had stabilized and was back to business as usual. Then in 2011 a Swedish start-up called Spotify launched in the U.S. After only four years in the mainstream, it now has over 15 million subscribers  and 60 million active users. The Spotify business model has truly disrupted the music industry, with artists now looking at nontraditional ways of generating sales other than records as their staple income.

Any parallels for authors and books here?

 

Read the full post on Digital Book World.

 

Fighting With Both Hands

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This post by David Gaughran originally appeared on his Let’s Get Digital site on 4/17/15.

This blog has been quieter than usual lately and I thought I should let you know what I’ve been doing.

I’m going to prattle on for quite a while; you might want to get comfortable (or head off to Tumblr).

So…

It’s good to do a bit of soul searching now and then, to look at what you have achieved, where your career is headed, and to decide if you are on the right track.

My goals and dreams have changed a lot since I started self-publishing in 2011. I haven’t been a big success, but I’ve been able to tick off little career milestones along the way. Some months my sales are wonderful, some months they are terrible – generally a function of how long it is since I released or promoted something. Overall, the good months more than outweigh the bad and I’ve been scratching out a living for a while now.

Dream: achieved.

But the sales maw, as all writers know, is insatiable. So I’ve been noodling ways to take my career to the next level.

I feel like I’ve got a good handle on the publishing/marketing side of things, but I’m still serving my apprenticeship as a writer – especially as a writer of fiction. Non-fiction comes naturally to me. I find it quicker and easier and (much) less of a brain-melting puzzle. Whereas, fiction is much more of a challenge – probably why I find it ultimately more satisfying.

My goals tend to focus on aspects of the craft, rather than some notional sales number. There is always something particular I want to achieve (that’s a euphemism for “work on”) with each book, aside from the general desire to make it better than the last one – and I think that’s something most writers do.

But, perhaps partly because of the above, I wasn’t necessarily selecting my projects with my “career” hat on. I gave an interview to Simon Whistler at Rocking Self-Publishing last September, during the launch of Digital 2 (disclosure: he subsequently became my narrator for the audio edition).

Simon asked why I wrote all over the map: short stories, science fiction, literary fiction, historical fiction, non-fiction, and asked if that was something I would recommend to others.

 

Read the full post on Let’s Get Digital.

 

Inside the Podcast Brain: Why Do Audio Stories Captivate?

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This post by Tiffanie Wen originally appeared on The Atlantic on 4/16/15.

The emotional appeal of listening

In my all-time favorite episode of Radiolab, “Finding Emilie,” a young art student named Emilie Gossiaux gets into a terrible accident while riding her bike and, rendered blind and deaf, is unable to communicate with her loved ones until she makes an incredible breakthrough. Listening to it on my drive home only got me to the middle of the episode, so I sat in my parked car staring at the garage until it was over. I was captivated by the voices of Emilie and her family. I’ve been an audio convert ever since.

It’s likely that thousands, if not millions, of others had the same experience last year when they discovered Serial, the This American Life spinoff considered to be the most successful podcast* of all time (5 million downloads and counting) that launched the medium back into the spotlight.

As a New York magazine piece noted last year, the increasing popularity of audio storytelling owes a lot to technology, as smartphones allow people to consume shows on demand anywhere, and cars increasingly come equipped with satellite radio and Internet-friendly dashboards. A recent report by Edison Research estimated that 64 percent of 12- to 24-year-olds and 37 percent of 25- to 54-year-olds in the United States listened to online radio weekly in 2104. The same year, 30 percent of respondents reported that they had listened to a podcast at least once, with 15 percent indicating that they had listened to a podcast within the last month.

*[Publetariat Editor’s note: this content may be behind a paywall]

 

Read the full post on The Atlantic.