Monthly Archives: August 2014

From author Laura Drake via Writers in the Storm:

If you’ve read this blog for long, you know a bit of my publishing story:

• 15 years
• 413 rejections
• 3 books written before I got an agent and sold.

Last Saturday, I received Romance Writers of America® highest award – A RITA®for my first published book, The Sweet Spot. I don’t even have words to describe that experience, but for me it was the pinnacle.

. . . .

Suddenly, I saw my paths clearly. I could stay and die, or leave and live. I guess I needed to hit bottom, because it gave me something to push off of. I decided to live.

. . . .

Over the years, I’ve come to cherish the lessons I learned in that cabin. I’ve kept the vow to never again let things ‘just happen’ to me. The experience showed me that no matter how many mistakes I made, I knew how to pick myself up and start over. That time in the cabin taught me to meet life, head on.

Five, ten, even fifteen years isn’t so long to wait for something you want. If it’s something you really want – don’t let the walls get in your way.

Link to the rest at Writers in the Storm

Here’s a link to Laura Drake’s books

The great thing is to be always reading but not to get bored – treat it not like work, more as a vice! Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.

C.S. Lewis

From Publisher Weekly:

Amazon, Amazon, Amazon. I’m tired of hearing about Amazon, aren’t you? I know—I’m not helping. The word “Amazon” is sprinkled liberally throughout this article. And I’m one of Amazon’s best customers. I can’t bring myself to bash it. Its customer service is second to none, as are its prices and selection. I love Prime. But in light of recent events, I am of the opinion that it is time for the world to rise up and form a Rebel Book-Lover’s Alliance, to storm the Amazon Death Star, to use collective force to take back the e-book galaxy.

So, over two days last week, I convened a meeting in New York of some of the brightest minds in publishing to tackle the topic of creating the “perfect” e-book store. The premise was simple: if we—as readers, writers, publishers, agents, librarians, and booksellers—were given unlimited time and resources to build our own vision of e-book nirvana, what features would it have that are either lacking at Amazon or that exist only in bits and pieces across a disconnected e-book ecosystem?

. . . .

 As it turns out, my team’s scheme for a site resembled the Kindle Cloud Reader. Our store would offer zero-click reading; integrated purchasing/library checkouts; buy-once, read-anywhere openness; a direct reader-author-publisher community built in; and an API through which anyone could create an embeddable e-book store widget with just a few clicks.

. . . .

 Then a strange thing happened: we pulled back. We second-guessed. We found ourselves in a dark wood. How can we compete with the Amazons of the world? The challenge seemed insurmountable.

. . . .

Someone quipped that we needed a hook, a jazzy one-sentence summation of our clever idea, like, “Uber, where everyone’s a taxicab”; or “Airbnb, where everyone’s a microhotel”; or “Square, where everyone’s a cash register.” Our dream e-book store thingy needed to turn everyone into… something. But what? A bookstore?

We set out with a desire to design and build something that could compete with Amazon’s massive scale. But, ultimately, we found that perhaps the best way to get traction against a dominant player like Amazon is not to build something equally titanic, but to build something wee, something human. Grassroots. Peer-to-peer. Something simple. Distributed. Democratic. Something that will turn the focus back to art and away from commerce and shareholders. Connection. Emotion. Humanity. Maybe each one of us should be a bookstore?

. . . .

 Maybe I’m a little naïve, but I choose to dream grandly. And I’m glad I’m not alone.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly and thanks to Patricia for the tip.

The brightest minds in publishing?

From Yahoo Finance:

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.

. . . .

Her first ebook, “Love Me”, went live in the spring of 2010 for $3.99. Within a month, she had earned $20,000 — four times as much as any book contract she had ever signed. Just a few months later, her second original ebook became the first self-published title to hit Amazon’s top-25 best sellers list. She was hooked.

Today, like many independent romance authors, Andre has become a one-woman publishing house. She’s churned out more than 30 titles and sold 3.5 million books around the world, the majority in ebook format. Revenue for Oak Press LLC, the indie publishing house she created in 2011, has been in the “eight figures,” she says.

. . . .

Nearly 40% of new romance books in the first quarter of 2014 were purchased as ebooks, compared to 32% bought in paperback form, according to a recent report by Nielsen. In contrast, ebooks accounted for less than one-quarter of total new book sales during the same time period.

Say what you will about romance novels (bodice-rippers, Fabio covers and all), it’s hard to deny that some of the most exciting entrepreneurs in the U.S. today aren’t hoodie-wearing app developers — they’re women writing books for women and making millions in the process.

. . . .

As a genre, romance lends itself exceptionally well to digital publishing for a few notable reasons. Romance readers — 84% of whom are female — are a voracious bunch. Two-thirds of romance readers plow through at least two books a month, according to the RWA — twice as many as the typical American adult, Pew researchers found.

“I think ebook sales have definitely aided the romance genre,” says Erin Fry, editor and publications manager at the RWA. “And romance writers have always been at the forefront of the digital revolution. Authors can make real careers out of being self-published or combining print and digital.”

. . . .

Like Andre, Freethy got her start in print before going independent in 2011. Since then, she’s sold nearly 5 million ebook versions of her self-published titles and more than tripled the revenue she made with traditional publishers. She pockets 70% of her Amazon ebook sales, versus the 25% cut she would get from a traditional publisher, which she would then have to split with her agent.

“It’s a lot more work than it was when I just wrote the books, but the reward is so much greater,” Freethy says. “I’m basically running my own multimillion-dollar business.”

. . . .

“I have an economics background and I’ve always been entrepreneurial,” Andre says. “This is the perfect sweet spot for me, someone who understands how to run a business, really enjoys building a brand and marketing but also has a deep creative strain.”

Link to the rest at Yahoo Finance and thanks to Mike for the tip.

From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

[Amazon]: A key objective is lower e-book prices. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out-of-stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market — e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can be and should be less expensive.

[MS] “Unjustifiably high” is an opinion, not a fact. Everyone is welcome to their opinion, but everyone is welcome to not share it as well. Publishers pay money for the right to exploit copyrights andtheir “opinion” on pricing should be at least as important as anybody else’s. Agency publishers had a lot of experience with higher ebook prices that couldn’t be discounted before the DoJ stepped in and they apparently disagree.

[Amazon] It’s also important to understand that e-books are highly price-elastic. This means that when the price goes up, customers buy much less. We’ve quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000.

[MS] This elasticity measurement considers only sales of ebooks at Amazon. What is the impact on print book sales when the ebook price goes up and ebook sales go down? What is the impact on the bookstore distribution network when ebook prices go up and ebook sales go down? It would be commercially irresponsible of publishers not to consider those effects as well.

. . . .

[Amazon] So, at $9.99, the total pie is bigger – how does Amazon propose to share that revenue pie? We believe 35% should go to the author, 35% to the publisher and 30% to Amazon. Is 30% reasonable? Yes. In fact, the 30% share of total revenue is what Hachette forced us to take in 2010 when they illegally colluded with their competitors to raise e-book prices. We had no problem with the 30% — we did have a big problem with the price increases.

[MS] It is good to hear that Amazon accepts a 30% share for retailers as reasonable. Will they now extend terms reflecting that to all the non Big-Five publishers who are trapped in “hybrid” terms, giving 50% or more in wholesale discounts to Amazon for ebooks? Of all the points raised by Amazon in this document, this is the most consequential in terms of commercial impact.

Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files and thanks to Toby for the tip.

Once again, it’s all about keeping ebook prices high to preserve print sales through traditional bookstores – the one place those nasty self-published authors can’t go.

This is typical of the short-term thinking that characterizes industries being rendered noncompetitive via technology disruption.

The formerly dominant players in the legacy business believe they have the power to hold back the new technology and its consequences. That never works and has the perverse effect of impairing such organizations’ chances of successfully evolving with the new technology.

Amazon justifiably receives credit for making indie publishing possible and profitable via KDP. However, Big Publishing has also made a significant contribution to the growth of indieworld.

By setting high prices for ebooks in order to prop up physical bookstores and defending quarterly revenues and profits for the media coglomerates that own them, Big Publishing has left the fastest-growing portion of the market – ebooks selling for $4.99 and below – wide open for indie authors to exploit.

Big Publishing simply will not compete against indies with pricing and has the hubris to believe that it can shape consumer preferences for high-priced ebooks.

Where does this all end?

Smart money won’t invest in traditional publishing’s present model nor will anyone with financial sense come to the rescue of Barnes & Noble or other bricks-and-mortar bookstores.

PG suggests that smart money will start acquiring struggling publishers exclusively for their backlists – built on life-of-copyright publishing contracts.

The first thing the new owners of publishers will do is to fire everyone other than a tiny accounting staff, sell off physical inventory and sublease expensive office space. If you’re not going to publish new money-losing books, you don’t need most of the people in a legacy publisher.

The second action of the new owners of the publishers will be to lower the price of all ebooks to directly compete against indies.

Thereafter, the owners will collect payments from Amazon, iBooks, etc., and (possibly) remit a portion of that money to the authors who wrote the books in the first place.

In PG’s supernally humble opinion, that’s the only way to make money from a traditional publisher for more than a few years – treat the backlist as a wasting asset.

This would be a great world to dance in if we didn’t have to pay the fiddler.

Will Rogers

From agent Scott Eagan:

“Struggles with marketing and sales.” It didn’t matter who I spoke with and the approach they took with publishing, I think we are all feeling it. This is a tough market now and honestly, no one has the right answer. This is a business of needing readers to survive. This is also a business of needing a place for those books to be available to readers. The difficulties in sales is not due to a battle between self-publishing and traditional publishing. This is simply an issue of the buying population isn’t buying.

. . . .

We have to remember the entire world has not gone digital. There are still a ton of people out there who are not going to go “online” to buy a print book and then wait for it to show up. This same population is also not going to go online and “download” a book.

And it isn’t just the sales. I heard it over and over again of writers, agents, and editors struggling to find the right approach to getting the news out about their books.

. . . .

I think the one thing I walked away with was the idea that we simply cannot place the blame on struggles with marketing and sales on one thing.

. . . .

 “So tell me why I need an agent.” I heard this one a lot and not just from writers but other agents who had the same question asked of them. What was interesting is that several of those agents voice what I think was going on in all of our heads. “Why do we have to defend ourselves?” I had one author ask me just that question so I told her all of the things we do for the author. For her, she then launched into how she was really loving doing everything self-published, and then followed that with the same question that started the conversation, “So why do I need an agent?” My answer was simple. “It sounds like you don’t want an agent.”

. . . .

 Agents on the outside This wasn’t really a single comment but feelings and thoughts that came from several agents I heard and spoke to. There was this sense that agents were not really needed at the conference. For some, it was the heavy emphasis of workshops, presentations and guest speakers proclaiming things such as “Agents are far from necessary” to one comment by an author, “Fire your agent!” I do understand that RWA needs to present a range of workshops and sessions for the authors based on the current needs and desires, but we have to remember that, like I said earlier, there are a range of approaches to publishing. There are those authors out there that wanted the traditional approach and they too felt as if they were missing something. I spoke to one group of authors at a meal and they said they were frustrated that many of the workshops they went to on craft or the industry only pushed for the self-publishing model.

Link to the rest at Babbles from Scott Eagan and thanks to Sharyn for the tip.

From Business Standard:

It took Jeff Bezos, Amazon Inc’s 50-year-old founder & chief executive, only one day to respond to Flipkart’s $1-billion fundraising announcement. A day after its Indian e-commerce rival disclosed it had raised $1 billion to further its business, Amazon issued a statement on Wednesday to say it would invest an additional $2 billion in the country.

Amazon’s India investment will not only be double the amount Flipkart has raised in the latest round but is more than the $1.76 billion total funding it has got since its launch in 2007. Besides, this is going to be the largest investment so far by an e-commerce company in India. It is the first time since it entered India in June last year that the Seattle-headquartered internet major has gone public to disclose its financial numbers specifically for this market.

“We see a huge potential in the Indian economy and for the growth of e-commerce in the country. With this additional investment of $2 billion, our team can continue to think big, innovate, and raise the bar for customers in India,” Bezos said in the statement. “At the current scale and growth rates, India is on track to be our fastest country ever to a billion dollars in gross sales.”

. . . .

Amazon currently has over 17 million products across several categories. 

Link to the rest at Business Standard

It appears that Jeff isn’t spending all his time obsessing over the Hachette negotiations.

From The New Yorker:

In May, the publishing company Hachette revealed that the online retailer Amazon had been delaying shipment of physical books published by Hachette while the companies argued over how e-books should be sold on Amazon. Since then, the public-relations war between the companies has resembled an altercation between siblings who accuse each other of bad behavior while tacitly agreeing not to reveal what started all the hair-grabbing in the first place. But on Tuesday, Amazon broke the code of silence that both companies, despite their disagreements, had adhered to for nearly three months.

In a short Web post, Amazon named its objective (to lower most e-book prices to $9.99 apiece), disclosed what it was willing to offer to Hachette (Amazon would keep a thirty-per-cent share of the revenue from e-book sales, which is lower than it typically takes), and offered some arithmetic to support its position (by one calculation, cheaper e-books sell so many more copies that publishers—and, by extension, authors—can expect higher revenue). “This is good for all the parties involved,” Amazon’s representatives wrote.

. . . .

The facts, as presented in Amazon’s letter, seem persuasive at first glance. Many e-books are priced at $14.99; some reach $19.99. These prices are “unjustifiably high,” Amazon’s letter argues, because e-books don’t come with the expenses—printing, warehousing, transportation—that are required to get physical books into readers’ hands. Moreover, the company claims, e-books are “highly price-elastic”—that is, if the price of an e-book goes up, fewer people are willing to buy it.

. . . .

The upshot is a revenue increase of sixteen per cent for this hypothetical e-book—more money for the retailer, the publisher, and the author. Even authors who care less about money than about audience should be happy, because the number of books sold rises by seventy-four per cent.

Along with its proposal to take a thirty-per-cent cut of e-book sales—a lower percentage than people had believed it was seeking—Amazon suggested that Hachette give authors a thirty-five-per-cent share and keep thirty-five per cent for itself. This, too, looks good for authors: their share of e-book sales varies depending on several factors, but they traditionally get no more than twenty-five per cent of the amount left after the retailer has taken its share.

Given all this, it might seem surprising that authors have been generally unimpressed by Amazon’s announcement. On Wednesday, I called Brian DeFiore, a literary agent who has criticized publishers for giving authors relatively little money for each e-book sold; I thought he might find something to like in Amazon’s proposal. But he was not persuaded, and he explained why.

For one thing, he said, Amazon doesn’t actually get to decide what share of revenue publishers pay authors, a fact that the company is aware of. Its call for a thirty-five-per-cent share sounds nice, DeFiore said, but it means little.

. . . .

DeFiore also pointed out that Amazon doesn’t quantify what lower e-book prices would mean for sales of physical copies of the same books. Authors who work with traditional publishers like Hachette tend to make more, per copy, from hardcover sales than from e-books. If cheaper e-books draw people away from hardcovers, that could hurt these authors financially.

. . . .

Jeff Bezos, the C.E.O. and founder of Amazon, used to work at a hedge fund, and he has a mind for numbers.

. . . .

Amazon’s effort to win over authors might be doomed. But if Bezos and company want to try, they might do better to emphasize the idea that lowering prices will increase the audience for books—a minor point in Tuesday’s post. “The assumption from Amazon seems to be that authors are primarily motivated financially, but that’s crazy,” Preston told me. “No one becomes an author to make money—not even James Patterson became an author to make money, and I certainly didn’t.” While Preston was wary of Amazon’s financial argument, he was guardedly compelled by the notion that lower e-book prices could bring his books to a wider audience.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker and thanks to Bill for the tip.

When you’re in business (say as an author) and select business associates, PG suggests choosing associates who understand numbers.

The thesis of the article - that Amazon’s proposal to double royalties paid to authors for ebook sales has been rejected by authors because the New Yorker writer doesn’t know any authors who like the proposal – reminded PG of a famous statement made by New York Times film critic Pauline Kael many years ago following the 1972 Presidential election in which Richard Nixon won one of the most lopsided victories in US history:

I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.

Manhattan can be just as provincial as any other place. In PG’s experience Manhattanites tend to be less aware of this possibility than people who live elsewhere (excluding Paris).

From Andrew Knighton Writes:

I used to work in business improvement, trying to help employees save themselves time and effort, trying to help clients get a better experience. I was constantly faced with people who would prevaricate or refuse to act on evidence clearly showing that changes would benefit everyone. They didn’t want to take the risk of changing, and it drove me insane.

That’s how it must look from the other side of the indie/traditional dispute – that of innovators like Amazon or hybrid author Hugh Howie. Their lives and identities are built around the value of moving forwards, trying new things. They find this incredibly exciting. They can see the benefits it will bring. They have the evidence. They have the logic. And yet still people dig in their heels against them.

. . . .

So what does this mean in the end? Right now it means that no-one’s going to ‘win’ this debate. Publishing will change, and in the long run I believe the innovators will win out, not through better arguments but by providing better access to books in the way that readers want. The Amazon/Hachette dispute – which despite all this rhetoric is really just a contract negotiation – will be decided by power and profits, not who’s right about the future of publishing.

Link to the rest at Andrew Knighton Writes and thanks to Russell for the tip.

Here’s a link to Andrew Knighton’s books