5 Reasons Why I Read Indie Authors, by Wodke Hawkinson at the Find a Good Book to Read Blog:

“I still have my favorite traditionally published authors, the ones with famous names and recognized publishers. But lately, I have been devoting my reading time mainly to indie authors, those of the self-published or small press variety. And here’s why:

“1. Accessibility. Indie authors are usually very friendly and happy to exchange messages online with readers and fans. If you are an author as well as a fan, they are some of the most generous and supportive people you will ever meet, often helping you get the word out about your own books and stories.

“2. Quality. Indie authors get a bad rap about quality. I’m the first to admit there are some poorly edited books out there, but overall I have been very pleased with my purchases of indie books. (Besides, I’ve spotted quite a few typos in traditionally published books. Mistakes are not exclusive to indies.)”

Read the rest here:  Blog – Find a Good Book to Read.

– Julia Barrett

From Publishers Weekly:

Nine independent publishers have combined to file joint comments objecting to the pending settlements of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit with Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster related to e-book pricing. The publishers noted that while they continue to sell e-books under the wholesale model, they have “benefitted significantly”–along with authors, booksellers and consumers,– from the ability of the Big Six publishers to adopt the agency pricing model with Amazon, since those arrangements, “contributed dramatically to increased competition and diversification in the distribution of e-books.”

In their comments, the publishers argue that the ruling would effectively ban the use of agency pricing at the three houses, something that would “harm rather than enhance competition—allowing one large retailer (Amazon) to regain a monopoly or near monopoly position through below-cost pricing.”

…..the publishers — Abrams Books, Chronicle Books, Grove/Atlantic, Inc., Chicago Review Press, Inc., New Directions Publishing Corp., W. W. Norton & Company, Perseus Books Group, The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. and Workman Publishing– pointed to a study they did among six of their members on Amazon’s pricing policies. …..Using the average rule of thumb that the average wholesale discount is 50%, the publishers stated that “where it can (i.e., where there are no agency agreements), Amazon engages in widespread below-cost pricing.” It is the agency model, that by preventing Amazon from using its scale to price e-books below cost, that has allowed other companies to compete for the distribution of e-books “and for the sales of physical books through bricks and mortar retail.”

Read the rest at Indie Publishers Back Agency Model 

~contributed by guest blogger Kat Sheridan

“and that is very bad.”

Over on Write it Forward:

“I have a fundamental problem with the idea of “business as usual”. Not in the sense that we have to run a business and it has to be done on a day-to-day business, but most business today are fluid and if you don’t keep up with the fluidity, well, for those of us living Rochester, NY it’s one word: Kodak. My father worked for Kodak way back in the day as a Regional Sales Rep for the Motion Picture Division and even then he said (mind you this is way back in the late 70’s) that if Kodak didn’t move with the times when it came to cameras they’d be a hurting company… Of course, Kodak was really a “film” company but you know there is this little thing called digital that seems to be turning many businesses upside down and inside out.

“Well, not my business.

“Bob and I have been in business together since December of 2009 (officially). Since then, we have changed or modified our business plan every 6 months. We just did it back in January and we’re doing it again this July (already making notes in Google docs for the Cool Gus Business meeting at Thrillerfest).  It’s exhausting and often times frustrating, but our industry is changing and we have to make adjustments or we’re going to go down with the Titanic (even though we got off a long time ago).

“Business as usual is a form of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. Perhaps making a very slight adjustment like reducing print runs and deciding to remove DRM from eBooks. Well, I guess better late than never. Yes, I know, authors are screaming that I think smaller print runs are a good thing. How about lower advances? I once said that it wasn’t just publishers that had to change the way they think and do business, but that the author had to as well. Funny thing about change, most of us don’t like it. It took Bob a good year to wrap his brain around what we were doing. Not that I got there any sooner, but my perspective was different. I’d never been traditionally published and I read eBooks.”

Read the rest at Write It Forward.

–  Julia Barrett

From Book Promotion.com–

So, what’s going on in publishing this week?   I should correct that to say “What’s going on in publishing that I actually care about this week?”

It is 400 bazillion degrees in New York this week, and as such, everyone is cranky and everything is taking longer. For instance, even this blog post took longer, as this theme decided that it no longer wanted to recognize carriage returns, so I had to go all old-school and hand-write some hard returns so that it wouldn’t be the world’s longest paragraph. Sweet! In the continued saga of “publishing goes digital,” I have the following updates from the trenches, as it were:

1.  This week I had a weird “debate” with a person at a major publishing company about how they simply did not believe that eBooks should be priced below $10.   My reaction to this:   do you have a life-raft ?  You are on the ideological Titanic.  Publishers love to hate Amazon, but they sell a ton of books, and guess what?  They penalize you in the form of lower commission if you sell a book for less than $2.99 or more than $9.99.  To me, this means that Amazon will reward you if you stay in this profit zone.    Why on earth would big publishing not want the millions of dollars’ worth of market research Amazon is conducting every single day, I wonder?   Also, big publishing America, I would like to add that I talked to a New York literary agent this week who told me she just TURNED DOWN a $5,000 advance on a book for one of her authors because she wasn’t confident in the publisher’s digital capabilities.    Oh!  It burns!

2. I read this book, implemented some of this guy’s strategies, and am waiting and testing and recording results.  HOWEVER, I think he is absolutely insane for dismissing blogging and social media as a factor in author success.   I stopped reading his book once when he said “there’s no way Amanda Hocking blogged her way to success,” because I assumed anyone who would say something like that didn’t know the market and I couldn’t learn anything from him.  Well, my bad, he actually does have an interesting method (though, just to warn you, it is MUCH more complicated and time-consuming than it initially seems), but I still think he’s dead wrong about people with active blogs and social media.  Dead wrong.  Amazon will adjust its algorithm just like Google does, your books will rise and fall in Amazon ranking (after the first six months of your first book being out, you will quickly tire of this), and while this method may fall out of favor, you know what will NEVER be impacted be mysterious algorithms or whims?  A mailing list full  of your loyal followers and readers who actually want to buy your books.    I’m all for learning new things (in fact, I do it all the time so you don’t have to!), but it kind of bugs me when someone comes up with one theory, then dismisses all of the others.  This strategy, if you choose to learn it, should be PART of your arsenal of writer tools, not the whole thing.  Always be diversifying and building up that list!

Read the rest here:  Book Promotion .com

– From Julia Barrett

From the Burlington Free Press:

The walls of the windowless back office at Crow Bookshop are covered floor to ceiling with wooden bookshelves. Books are displayed on every surface and unpacked boxes, containing more books, wait to be opened.

Keith Terwillegar, the owner, sits on a chair in from of his computer talking about the store’s recently launched website.

“We’re going to give people a chance to buy books online from the local guy,” Terwillegar said. “I’m very excited about it.

Crow Bookshop is an independent bookstore located on Church Street in Burlington. Although the website is new, the physical store has been around since 1995.

. . . .

“Books are like food,” Terwillegar said. “Sometimes you want ice cream and sometimes you want a big hearty meal.”

In order to feed as many appetites as possible, his store offers a wide variety.

Although a typical day does not exist for Terwillegar, the bookstore owner spends his time at the store ordering books, pricing the books and working on the website.

. . . .

He has been working with books since the mid 1980s. Terwillegar said has watched the industry change as chain bookstores, the Internet and technology has become more popular.

“All of these things present challenges,” he said. “We just try to do our own thing.”

Terwillegar’s goal is to offer an alternative for readers. The Crow Bookshop’s online store provides a different experience than shopping at a large corporate website.

“We are not creating algorithms based upon keystrokes and mouse clicks to hone, narrow and define our customer’s interests,” he said.

Link to the rest at the Burlington Free Press

Here’s a link to Crow Bookshop

From the New York Times Opinionator:

Satan in Seattle, as the walking wounded of the book business describe Amazon.com, continues to expand from the shores of Lake Union here, with nearly a dozen new office buildings housing the global nerve center of earth’s largest online retailer.

By contrast, a few miles away is lovely old Town Hall, a sanctuary for the written word. On any given night, hundreds of people show up to hear a novelist tell a story, a poet turn mush into sublime rhyme, an essayist make narrative sense of messy facts. Town Hall is one reason why the Northwest is known as a touring author’s paradise.

We hear that one culture must destroy the other. It’s inevitable: the books-to-the-barricades defenders of ideas printed on dead trees will lose all that they love to the soulless digital monolith on Lake Union, with its 164 million customers.

. . . .

But surprise: the apocalypse already came and went, and look who’s standing. One technology, the e-book, the biggest new invention in reading since Gutenberg cranked out a Bible with movable type, changed the world — most likely for better. We have more books, more readers, a bigger audience for words, on pixels or paper.

The problem, for those who are purely reactive, is that publishing as we know it will soon die. And so will bookstores that are no more nimble or creative than a socks ’n’ things in the mall.

. . . .

There are two big questions about the future of books and technology. One is: are people reading more and, by implication, buying more books? The answer is yes. In their annual report last August, the Association of American Publishers reported that overall revenues, and number of books sold in all formats, were up sizably in three years since 2008. Without e-books, the numbers would have been flat, or declined.

. . . .

Well then, what about the second question: the fate of the independent bookstores, those imperiled isles of words? The headline from a release by the American Booksellers Association during last year’s holiday buying season was telling: “Indies Defy Conventional Wisdom as Sales and Locations Continue to Increase.” The release quoted Oren Teicher, head of the association, as saying, “An array of factors are fueling the resurgence of independent bookstores.” Among those factors are sales of e-books by indies.

. . . .

If Amazon wasn’t inventing the future, somebody else would. And Bezos makes a good point in his annual shareholder letter when he notes that the Amazon Kindle e-book list is full of self-published authors represented by small presses. Many of those writers would never get their shot, defying publishing’s gatekeepers in New York, without the new format.

One author, A.K. Alexander, who wrote the thriller “Daddy’s Home,” says in Bezos’s note that she made more royalties in a month on her Kindle sales than she did in a year with traditional publishing.

Link to the rest at the New York Times Opinionator and thanks to Cheryl for the tip in her comment.

Passive Guy doesn’t know if he’s quite as optimistic about the future of indie bookstores, although he would like to be.

Another important essay from Kristine Kathryn Rusch provides a framework for understanding the clash between traditional publishing and self-publishers:

Traditional publishing, like network television, is built on scarcity.  In traditional publishing, “airtime” was shelf space. Only so many brick-and-mortar stores that carried books (of any type) existed. Those stores only had room for a certain amount of shelf space. Only a handful of books could fit face-out on those shelves. Several more could fit spine-out, but it’s harder to sell a book based on its spine than it is to sell a book based on the cover.

Because the shelf space is limited, traditional publishers only kept books with a fantastic sales record in print. The other books had a short shelf life before they were taken out of the stores and eventually out of print.

I called this the produce model, because I couldn’t think of any other way to express what was going on. Traditional publishers treated books like produce that would spoil because, in effect, sales do decline if a book has been out for a long time. (Sales don’t evaporate and in some cases, sales increase. But they will eventually plateau.)

. . . .

Amazon had unlimited shelf space—the abundance model, to use Kyncl’s term. If a book existed, that book was probably available on Amazon. Only readers weren’t used to buying over the internet, so they preferred brick-and-mortar stores.

As brick-and-mortar stores became scarce, readers went to Amazon (and Powells.com and Barnes & Noble.com—places that had books on shelves, and with a click of a button, those books were purchased and mailed to the customer). Amazon in particular encouraged this thinking by making its website user friendly, by reducing prices to nearly nothing, and by working very, very, very hard to make the entire experience consumer-friendly.

. . . .

Combining new and  used, like Powell’s and Amazon do, make it possible to order most books, in print or out of print.

Slowly, online book retailers were training the consumer to expect the abundance model.

But the traditional publishers still thought in terms of scarcity.

In fact, their entire business is built on it. The limited shelf space caused other issues. Over the years, traditional publishers had developed an arcane system of selling books. From returns (producing two books to sell one) to the distribution network (not selling directly to bookstores, but selling directly to distributors instead) had created a lot of unnecessary costs. (I explained some of this history in a previous post that you can access here.)

By the middle of the  previous decade, it cost at least $250,000 to publish a mid-list novel with a nice cover and an author advance of $10,000. At least $250,000, and often twice that amount. As in television, the cost of content was prohibitive.

. . . .

It is, in fact, the ultimate clash between scarcity thinking and abundance thinking. In abundance, you can toss anything into the mix, quantify its sales, and pick winners based on sheer numbers. In scarcity, you have to go with the best of what’s available, and hoping (praying) that you don’t lose too much money on everything else.

Everyone currently working in traditional publishing, from the publishers to the editors to the writers, learned the scarcity attitude. Everyone. That includes me. That includes any unpublished writer who tried to break in before 18 months ago. That includes agents. That includes book reviewers, copy editors, book editors, and the publishing executives.

Our attitudes got formed in a model based on limited shelf space and expensive production costs. On “gut” decisions instead of quantifiable decisions.

On the idea that rarity increases value.

Each book becomes precious. Each book needs time to produce. Each book must be perfect, because its debut on the world stage is brief, and its ability to capture an audience limited.

. . . .

In the world I grew up in, no reviewer would ever review a title more than six months old. What was the point? The book would be hard to find, and the reviewer would have wasted a lot of wordage (and column inches) on something that would only make his readers angry because they couldn’t find the book in question.

Now, since so many of us have our backlists up, book bloggers review titles as they find the titles. Just this week, bloggers reviewed books I’d written ten, twelve, and fifteen years ago. Other bloggers reviewed some short stories published in magazines five years ago and now available as e-books. In the past, those stories would have been forgotten. Now they’re being read—not by millions of readers, but by hundreds in the past six months alone.

. . . .

One way that [publishers are] reacting, for example, is attempting to limit writers. By making their writers sign non-compete clauses in contracts, traditional publishers are trying to recreate the scarcity model. Unfortunately, they can’t. They might make one particular writer’s work scarce, but they won’t make other work scarce.

In an abundance model, scarcity looks like a mistake. Consumers who expect everything they want at their virtual fingertips get angry when they can’t get something. We’re seeing that a lot with traditionally published bestsellers. For a while, traditional publishers tried to release the e-books six months after the print books. All that did was anger the consumer, who wanted their e-book now.

Traditional publishers thought scarcity—the lack of an e-book—would drive consumers to the hardcover. Instead, it made the consumers so mad that they actually wrote nasty online reviews of the books in question. Not a nasty review of a book’s content, mind you, but a nasty review of the book’s lack of availability.

Writers raised in traditional publishing make similar mistakes. In the scarcity model, having a publishing contract equals security. Traditional publishing contracts were (are) rare, and were (are) hard to come by, so a writer who had one had achieved something major. Writers who had more than one contract over the years had managed to prove themselves valuable. In a world of limited resources, when a major company spent those resources on a writer, that writer knew she had value.

That’s why writers saw publishing contracts as validation. And, as traditional publishers tossed books out into the produce heap, the writer had to prove her value over and over again. Because every traditional publisher relied on gut instinct as much as numbers (if not more than numbers, since numbers are so unreliable throughout all of traditional publishing), intangibles like a good review in a respected publication (like The New York Times Book Review) added value. Again, a good review in a respected publication was rare, scarce, something that didn’t happen often.

. . . .

All those questions writers ask about how to get noticed in this new world? Those questions come from someone raised in scarcity. Being noticed was important because your moment on that shelf was—by definition—short-lived.

Writers who understand the long tail know that the way to get more readers is to have more available product. Abundance works, even for the single entrepreneur.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From Salon:

Of all the booksellers I’ve met over the years, no doubt the busiest is Mitchell Kaplan. In addition to overseeing Miami’s venerated Books & Books stores, Kaplan is a co-founder of the Miami Book Fair, a former president of the American Booksellers Association, and the most recent recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award. So it was pretty surprising to see Kaplan himself when I read at his flagship store in Coral Gables last month.

Even more striking was the book Kaplan giddily showed me: a new anthology of stories by South Florida writers called “Blue Christmas: Holidays Stories for the Rest of Us.” (As a former Miamian, I’d written a piece for the collection.)

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, gazing at the deep-blue cover.

Kaplan is a guy who gets excited about all sorts of books. The difference, in this case, is that he published “Blue Christmas.” More precisely, his new imprint, B&B Press, released the book. It thus represents a heartening trend in the brave new world of publishing. Rather than trimming their sails, a number of independent booksellers are taking a page from Amazon by producing titles themselves.

. . . .

As publishers, indies enjoy a few distinct advantages over the competition. First, they can emphasize titles of local interest by local writers. Second, they can showcase the books in their shops. Third, because of advances in printing, they can bring books to market more quickly than traditional publishers. Just as important, when an independent bookstore sells a copy of one of their own titles, they collect all the profits, rather than a sliver. Consider it a poor man’s version of vertical integration.

Kaplan told me he hoped other bookstores would take up small-scale publishing. That’s already happening.

. . . .

The leap into publishing by indies can be seen as the literary equivalent of the locavore movement. It not only emphasizes local writers, and local subjects, but also asks residents to support a local business with their dollars.

Teter is under no illusion about the forces arrayed against independent bookstores, not the least of which is the rise of electronic books. But she, along with her compatriots, is cautiously optimistic that small-scale publishing can be part of the answer, by providing an alternative to traditional publishers and Amazon, which are increasingly focused on books they can turn into national bestsellers.

As Kaplan reminded me, the true value of a great independent bookstore resides in its connection to a particular community: “If someone loves our bookstore, has been coming in for years, understands what we’re trying to do, and you can put a great book in their hands that was published by our store, I mean, who’s going to say no to that?”

Link to the rest at Salon

About a month ago, Amazon created Kindle Indie Books which Amazon describes as “a convenient way for readers to explore and browse for top selling, popular and high quality books from independent authors and publishers who publish using KDP. ”

How do you get your book on Kindle Indie?

How can I become a featured author?
Our editorial team selects authors to highlight in this area based on criteria that we believe will best serve the interests of Kindle readers. At this time, we do not accept submissions for this placement.

How can I have my books featured in the Kindle Indie Bookstore?
We use a combination of automated techniques and editorial activities to select books based on criteria that we believe will best serve the interest of Kindle readers. At this time, we do not support any specific requests for placement. The likelihood of appearing within the Kindle Indie Bookstore is higher for highly rated, popular and top selling books.

How often are the top selling books updated?
The top selling independently published books are located on the right side of the Kindle Indie Bookstore page and are updated hourly. Books that are featured in the top KDP genres are updated in real-time.

How many genres are featured in the Kindle Indie Bookstore?
Currently we feature books from 7 popular categories in the Kindle Indie Bookstore.

Why do you only feature a select number of genres in the Kindle Indie Bookstore?
We chose seven categories that our Kindle readers look at frequently. Periodically we will review our top selling categories and add to the Kindle Indie Bookstore so that readers can enjoy more variety of great indie books.

Here’s the FAQ Link

Not exactly a model of clarity, but promoting indie books in a separate location is a beneficial step. The Kindle Indie Books page rotates 4-5 authors, so if you’re featured, visitors may not see you. It also rotates the order in which various genres are shown.

In order to view all the different combinations of authors and genres, hold down your Shift key and click on the Reload button on your browser (the little arrow pointing in a circle) if you have a Windows computer. If you have a Mac, undoubtedly, it’s easier.

The page also has a Kindle Indie Books Bestseller List, Top-Rated Indie Books, New Indie Releases and several other indie promo features.

Perhaps Passive Guy has not been paying attention, but he hasn’t seen much about this. He’s going to figure out where to drop a link to it on The Passive Voice and suggests indie authors may want to do the same thing. The more traffic and sales Amazon sees coming through its indie portal, the more likely the company is to make the portal more prominent.

Passive Guy was interested in the number and variety of ideas that appeared in response to yesterday’s How Do You Find Good, Reasonably-Priced Ebooks? post. One of the comments was from Damon Courtney who pointed to his new Pauper’s Book Club. Damon’s comment generated more discussion, including responses from a couple of people who indicated an interest in doing something similar.

Do you think it’s a good idea for PG to add an Indie Bookstore page here?

PG doesn’t visualize anything fancy – a listing/link to each bookstore and 3-4 lines describing it. The list might be grouped by genre or another reasonable organizing principle. If someone or several someones are already doing something like this, PG is happy to defer this exercise to them or include them in the links page.

The object is to start answering the question, How Do You Find Good, Reasonably-Priced Ebooks? in a better way. Thanks to all of you, this site receives more traffic than many indie/author/book websites and pointing visitors to good places to find and purchase books fits with what PG is trying to accomplish here.

PG has admitted he personally regards places like Kindleboards and Goodreads less than helpful. In his mind’s eye, he visualizes an online equivalent to a good physical indie bookstore where the offering is curated. He has no bias against computer curation if the algorithm works well.

Your thoughts? PG is particularly interested if someone else has already done this in a visible way because he’s not anxiously seeking another project at the moment.