From Dean Wesley Smith:

For indie writers, print runs are a puzzle because they have never thought in print runs. Indie writers think in sales up to a point. How many sales this week, this month, for this book total? Print run thinking just never comes up.

And for traditional writers and publishers, it’s impossible to not think in print runs, since that made-up number controls everything from author advance to the purchase of the next book to cover copy and art and sales and tours and you name it.

. . . .

Last fall, every bookstore owner I talked to told me about how the major wholesalers such as Baker & Taylor and Ingrams had special codes on the POD books and that the standard discounts were limited to 5% no returns. Not much chance at all an indie publisher could sell a book to a bookstore with those discounts.

. . . .

The major distributors had killed most of the walls between indie published books and traditionally published books.

In other words, if you buy the $10 ISBN that puts your company name on the book in CreateSpace and put it into the extended distribution program, it will appear on the listings of Ingrams, B&T, and other distributors right beside a Simon & Schuster book or a Bantam book.

And the discounts the bookstore will get will range from 5% to 43% plus bonuses for paying quickly. And the discounts are set by the bookstore’s account, credit history, amount of orders, and so on.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith and thanks to William for the tip.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

The sea-change—which is what shifting sands are, after all, a change brought by the sea—means different things for different parts of the [publishing] industry.

. . . .

The change is also great for self-published writers (indie writers) who do a print edition as well as an e-book edition. In fact, the news for those indie writers is fantastic. The news will have no impact at all on indie writers who do e-books only, except that it might convince them to start putting their titles into paper as well.

The change will have a leveling effect on books sold through traditional publishers. They’re probably not even aware that this change has occurred, and they certainly don’t know what it means for them. I only stumbled on this change through an odd set of circumstances that I’ll try to explain over the next few blog posts.

However, for the very big traditionally published writers, like James Patterson and Nora Roberts, this change will show up as a negative in their royalty statements. They will lose market share, and will not know why. In fact, they already are losing market share, and the smart ones are worried about it. That’s one of the reasons Patterson believes the entire industry is in trouble; until four years ago, if Patterson’s sales declined across the board, then industry sales were declining across the board. As I showed in part last week, that is no longer true.

. . . .

Most people in publishing work in a vacuum. Editors don’t know what’s going on in their own publishing house let alone what’s going on with their writers or book distributors or bookstores.

Writers don’t just work in a vacuum. I’m beginning to think that most writers are vacuum-sealed. They seem to believe that watching what other writers are doing is more important than learning anything about business, career management, copyright, or how the publishing industry is changing. (Think of it like this: writers are like cats. They’re more interested in sniffing the butt of the cat standing in front of them on the freeway of life than they are in the truck barreling down on them at sixty miles per hour.)

Actual publishers pay more attention to what’s going on than editors or agents because publishers, theoretically, should understand marketing and sales. They generally understand marketing and sales to chain bookstores, but little else.

Bookstores understand what’s happening in their stores or in their towns. They also know what’s being published (maybe), but they’re as different from each other as possible. And bookstores generally do not share information with each other about important things, like how to handle accounts or deal with distributors.

. . . .

What has changed is this: Bookstores now have access to all published print books, whether they come from Createspace or from a big traditional publisher. Bookstores didn’t have access to all published print books before.

. . . .

Booksellers no longer order ten copies of a book that they think might sell. They order one, and put it face-out on the shelf. When that book sells, they order another which arrives from the distributor within one or two days.

Booksellers are learning how to run a leaner business. This cuts down on big orders (and we’ll discuss the implications of that in future blogs), but it also cuts down on returns. Returns, which had stabilized at 50% or more, were by the end of 2012, down to 27%. That’s huge, people. That’s an amazing shift.

. . . .

It is now not only possible, but likely that an indie book with good word-of-mouth will sell as well or better than a book with the same word of mouth published by traditional publishers. Why? Because indie books won’t go out of print quickly. They don’t have limited press runs (see Dean’s post from last week), and they don’t have useless stock sitting in warehouses.

Indie writers, indie books, indie publishers now have the same access to bookstores that traditional publishers do.

The playing field has just leveled.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From The Salt Lake Tribune:

Patrons who wander into Marissa’s Books inside a strip mall at 5664 S. 900 East often look at owner Cindy Dumas and wonder whether she is crazy to open such a store in the digital era.

“We get numerous comments and thank-yous for opening a bookstore here along with five or six people a day who look at me and say ‘What are you thinking?’ ” said Dumas, whose store opened March 15 after a trial holiday run at a warehouse.

Marissa’s sells new, used, rare and vintage paperback, hard-cover and coffee-table books. Books at the store are not catalogued, but are placed in collections that include fiction, nonfiction, history, children’s, self-help, business, photography, how-to and religious books, including a large number of LDS publications.

. . . .

The idea to open a bookstore came suddenly and almost by accident. Dumas’ son owns a construction company and often searches for equipment at auctions and estate sales. He discovered a warehouse that held close to 40,000 books, many of them new. Dumas purchased the entire stock and, during the 2012 Christmas holiday season, sold books out of a warehouse.

Dumas, who is a senior at the University of Utah, discovered that used books could also be found stored in sheds and homes. Some folks have so many that they take them to the dump for lack of storage space. In addition, a surprising number of self-published authors give titles away, sometimes as a way to promote new books that are the second in a series.

. . . .

“We cater to book lovers in general,” she said. “A lot of people do collect rare books. A bunch of people in Utah, especially in Murray, enjoy an old or vintage book. They just have a smell, look and feel. They are heavier than they are now. We pick up as many of those as we can.”

Link to the rest at The Salt Lake Tribune and thanks to Abel for the tip.

From Forbes:

Barnes & Noble is reportedly considering selling the remaining stake in its tablet business to Microsoft, setting up an interesting couple of questions. What exactly would be left for Barnes & Noble–and wouldn’t it bear an uncomfortable resemblance to deceased Borders?

. . . .

Should Barnes & Noble sell the Nook, it is left with the slow growing, if not decreasing, business of selling books. Barnes & Noble recognizes its difficult position, that the business is mostly about how low Amazon–the industry’s largest player in the industry–can drive prices. To compensate, Barnes & Noble began shrinking its store footprint in 2011, dropping to 691 big-box stores last years from 720 in 2010.

The retail business is still the company’s largest unit. It brought in some $4.85 billion in sales last year. That’s down troublingly in the past three years, from $4.95 billion in 2010. Amazon, meanwhile, expanded sales nearly doubled to $61.09 billion from $34.2 billion.

Link to the rest at Forbes

Link to the rest at Galleycat

From FutureBook:

The recent news that publishing is growing despite the introduction of digital seems to have lifted the spirits of many in the industry. Why is this such a shock? The only thing the introduction of digital has reinforced has been the fact that people love reading and are prepared to take on more convenient ways to do this via eBooks and online shopping. The cold chill that should be sweeping through James Daunt, Alexander Mamut and book shop owners everywhere is ‘if publishing is flourishing, why are bookshops struggling?’.

Go into your local Waterstones on any given day including Saturday and take a look around. Look into the recess of the store where Costa Coffee is rammed with customers, look around the book aisles and see if there are any people browsing and then look at the till point. Chances are there won’t be a queue of people waiting to be served unless they have a coffee and croissant in their hands.

. . . .

Rather than herding people into the back of the store to drink coffee and disassociate with the books why not open this experience out to the store encourage people to break the confines of the ‘coffee shop’ and enter the ‘book shop’. Why not bring in local schools and community groups to engage with books and authors? Why not have in-store events where authors can engage with your customers?

The answer for Waterstones is because Mr. Daunt doesn’t do this in his boutique stores in the ‘select’ areas where Daunt book shops are successful. Well, here’s a newsflash Mr Daunt, Waterstones and Daunt Book Shops are chalk and cheese and what applies to one in no way applies to another. Every week I speak to the frontline troops at many different Waterstones stores and it’s clear that while they know they are engaged in a battle, the communications hitting the front line are confused, open to being misinterpreted, leaving morale at an all time low.

From store managers to shop assistants they wonder what is going to happen next as footfall dwindles and stock remains stubbornly on the shelves.

Link to the rest at FutureBook

From engadget:

Well, this process seems a bit counterintuitive, eh? This morning, Barnes & Noble introduced a new scheme for getting Nook customers to visit the company’s retail stores. The promotion nets you one free e-book when you purchase another, but — and this is where the offer tripped us up a bit — you can only make your electronic purchase with a cashier in a physical store.

Link to the rest at engadget and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

This story made PG wonder if Barnes & Noble cashiers are lonely.

From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

Think about the monks who painstakingly copied by hand the books available before Johannes Gutenberg came up with the printing press in 1450. An era was ending and a new one that would last more than 550 years had begun.

Now we are in a process of change again. The end of the printed book is coming. We are in the midst of a growing new world of e-book and e-publishing. Printed books will be available in libraries for a few more decades and then they will be relics like the old papyrus books copied by the monks more than 500 years ago.

News that Librería Universal, one of the oldest and best Spanish-language bookstores in South Florida, would be closing in June drove home the point that e-books were quickly replacing books printed on paper.

. . . .

When I got married in 1969,[the bookstore's owner] sent my wife a cookbook that taught her how to cook and has been her cooking Bible for the last 43 years.

A few months later, as newlyweds, we got a large box from Miami. In it was a special edition of nine books published by Salvat. I had not ordered the books, and it was not easy to pay for them. But an attached note from Salvat explained things: “Enjoy the books. Pay me when you can.”

. . . .

Salvat has always had a store on SW 8^th St., when it really was the heart of Little Havana. He published books written by exile authors and sold books from prominent authors from all over the world. In those early years he also had a back room, when his closest friends, those of us who believed even some writers still in Cuba were producing good literature, would go in browse and even buy some editions published in Mexico.

. . . .

When Sam Verdeja and I co-edited the book “Cubans: An Epic Journey”, describing the exile history, academicians estimated about 50,000 of those early exiles still remained. The vast majority of those who came in the early 1960s and 70s have died.

That is another reason why the news of the closing of Librería Universal hit me so hard. Many of us are in our late sixties, seventies or eighties. We are going away like the printed book.

Salvat tells me he will now begin to write and still do some publishing – electronically. I have begun to do the same thing. I love writing, but have a passion for the printed word, for the smell of ink and the touch of paper.

I don’t know if a book in my I-Pad will ever feel the same. And I don’t know what I will do with my office-library full of hundreds of printed books.

Link to the rest at Sun-Sentinel and thanks to Abel for the tip.

From Salon:

James Patterson is in no need of a bailout.

. . . .

Despite his success in a strain of genre fiction not often recommended in classrooms, Patterson has become, suddenly, the closest thing the publishing industry has to an ambassador. The multimillion-seller author placed an ad last weekend in the New York Times Book Review and in Publishers Weekly (depicted below) advocating for government intervention — the same sort of bailout Goldman got — in order to save an industry besieged by bookstore closings and consolidation of the few remaining major publishing houses.

. . . .

I do a lot of things to try to raise level of awareness of what’s going on in country right now. This is an unusual and different time for books, the most unusual in the history of this country. E-books are fine and dandy, but it’s all happening so quickly, and I don’t think anyone thought through the consequences of having many fewer bookstores, of libraries being shut down or limited, of publishers going out of business — possibly in the future, many publishers going out of business.

. . . .

I don’t think it’s a question of bailing out, necessarily. In Germany, Italy, and France, they protect bookstores and publishers. It is widely practiced in parts of Europe. I don’t think that’s outlandish. But people have mixed feelings about the government doing anything right now.

I haven’t thought about it but I’m sure there are things that can be done. There might be tax breaks, there might be limitations on the monopolies in the book business. We haven’t gotten into laws that should or shouldn’t be done in terms of the internet. I’m not sure what needs to happen, but right now, nothing’s happening.

The press doesn’t deal with the effects of e-books as a story. Borders closing down is treated as a business story. Where we are in Westchester during the summer, you’d think that’d be a bookstore haven, and there’s nothing. And that’s not unusual. I don’t think we can be the country we’d like to be without literature.

Link to the rest at Salon and thanks to Tom for the tip.

Dude. Amazon. Biggest bookstore in the world. Growing like crazy.

Serious publishers? They’re called authors now. Nobody more serious than an indie author.

Who will publish important books? Indie authors. Who will publish serious books? Indie authors. Don’t need discovering. Don’t need mentoring. Don’t need babysitting. Don’t need pacifiers. Don’t need publishers.

What will happen to our literature? Publishers don’t create literature. Authors do. They’ll keep doing it.

Authors. Readers. Internet. Call it post-industrial publishing.

From publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

Consider this data provided by a friend who owns a pretty substantial bookstore.

Looking at the store’s records for a month, 65% of the units sold were singles: one copy of a title. Only 35% were of books that sold 2 or more. (I didn’t ask the question, but that would suggest that 80-90 percent of the titles that sold any copies sold only one.)

Then, the following month, once again 65% of the units sold were singles. But only 20-30 percent of them were the same books as had sold as singles the prior month. Upwards of 70% of them were different titles. And upwards of 70% of the ones that sold one the prior month didn’t sell at all.

To further underscore how slowly book inventory moves, another report they do shows that more than 80% of the titles in the store do not sell a single copy in any particular month. So it is no surprise that an analysis of books from a major publisher that promotes heavily showed that more than half the new titles they receive from that publisher don’t sell a single copy within a month of their arrival in the store, which would include the promotion around publication date!

. . . .

Partly because of the high cost of buying and a supporting supply chain that a book outlet requires, publishers will see shelf space for books drop faster than retail demand. (The closure of Borders, which wiped out a big portion of the shelf space, is part of what is behind the recent good sales reports from many independents.) At the same time, retailers of all things will be under increased pressure to find more sales as the Internet — often, but not always, Amazon — keeps eating into their market.

Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files

PG was going to say what he thinks this means, but decided to see what others thought instead.