All Romance and DRM
From publishing expert Mike Shatzkin:
All Romance is a specialized ebook retailer. To serve the romance reader community more effectively, they’ve built out the BISAC taxonomy for romance, adding more categories. And they’ve added a metadata element called “flames” which basically measure the frequency and explicitness of the sex scenes in any particular book.
The romance world, particularly among the cognescenti in it, is a very anti-DRM environment. And an outfit like All Romance, which has no “device lock-in” working for them — essentially everything they sell gets “side-loaded” somehow, and DRM can often make that more challenging — is right in step with their community sentiment. So the survey contained questions trying to get at the audience attitude about DRM.
There were two relevant stats that I recall. One is that only about 20% of even All Romance’s readers really resist books with DRM. That is to say: 80% don’t. But the factoid that grabbed me is that 96% (that’s not a typo: ninety-six percent) of the ebooks they sell do not have DRM.
All Romance also reports that 91% of the titles they have available are protected by DRM. That makes sense, since all the titles from all the Big Six publishers and all the titles from Harlequin except those from their new digital-first imprint, Carina, have DRM.
What this means is that the nine percent of All Romance’s offerings that do not have DRM are selling 96% of their units overall. And since only 20% of their customers find DRM as a strong deterrent to sales, that means those fledglings are outselling all the majors for other reasons.
This provokes two very important lines of inquiry to me, and neither of them have anything to do with DRM.
The first one would be top of mind to me if I were a major publisher. What are these books that are selling like hotcakes? Why are these books selling like hotcakes? Why can’t we publish these books that are selling like hotcakes?
. . . .
They’ve obviously aggregated an audience that is buying a lot of books that major publishers are missing. Some of this is due to price, undoubtedly, since the All Romance stats also showed robust sales at price points below where the majors are usually most comfortable. Some of it could be attributed to a raunchier title selection being compiled by the smaller upstart title selection (remember All Romance’s “flame” ratings.) Some of it might be loyalty to authors who could be signed up by majors with the right offers.
But if 24 out of every 25 books being sold by a pretty damn big specialist retailer to the biggest ebook genre that I competed in were outside of my immediate competitive set (which, for the Big Six, is basically each other and Harlequin), I’d want to know more about the details of that.
Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files
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The first thing to do here is provide a link to All Romance: http://www.allromanceebooks.com/
Now look down that left hand menu. See those categories and sub-categories? How many of those are being sold by the big 6? Take a peek at their “new release” page and spot how many of them are from small presses, or parnormals from Sourcebooks. Perhaps the question should be “what does All Romance know about readers’ tastes that the Big 6 don’t?”
Good point!
I intend to post my books to All Romance next.
I’ve had slow but steady sales at ARe. They do a lot of things right, obviously. Self-published romance authors should definitely get on board with them.
Not romance? They ALSO have a site called Omnilit where they sell everything else. (ARe titles automatically populate to there, too, so romance authors are one up.)
My husband recently came up with a great analogy about sites and sales. Picture a big tub, waiting to be filled with water. Now, some people put in a single faucet and hope it flows really well (Amazon). BUT every faucet you add to that tub is another few drips in — and every title you make for sale is another possible gusher. I have an acquaintance who had incredible sales at XinXii. Another who’s Kobo sales blow everything else away. Recently I read a blog post where one of an author’s titles at Diesel took off. But even slow, steady drips from multiple sources will fill that tub.
So keep adding those faucets.
At the moment, AllRomance/OmniLit account for about 6 percent of my sales. This means that I sell a copy or two a month there. Not just romance either, some of my non-romance titles also sell there. Like Anthea above said, it’s slow but steady.
They’re very pleasant to work with, too.
They are very pleasant to work with.
I published my books on ARe as an afterthought, months after Amazon and BN and Smashwords, and have been very happy with the results. Sales are sales. One thing ARe offers (in addition to DRM-free) is a range of file formats. So if you like your PDFs, you can find them there (if the author/pub provides it, which I did.)
What Kat said about ARe carrying small press books, particularly small e-primary presses, none of which so far as I know put DRM on their books. The smaller romance presses carry a lot of subgenres the Big Six won’t touch, including M/M romance. New York is still convinced there’s no market for M/M, while a decent chunk of that 96% of non-DRMed books ARe is selling are M/M, or otherwise GLBT.
Angie