From The Guardian:

British bookshops are pleading with the government to stand up for them against Amazon after France pledged €9m (£7.7m) of funding to help its booksellers fight back against the “destroyer of bookshops”.

Tim Godfray, chief executive of the Booksellers Association, said Britain’s bookshops, closing down at a rate of more than one a week, consider Amazon “the main threat to their business”. He warned that if Amazon continues its “relentless expansion” even more bookshops will be driven out of business, and publishers and agents will also be forced to shut up shop, he said.

. . . .

France has fixed book prices, dating back to a 1981 law, which means readers pay the same whether they buy from an online retailer high-street shop or small bookseller. The law allows for a maximum discount on books of 5%. In discounting books by 5%, Amazon is not breaking the law. But small booksellers argue they can’t compete because Amazon also provides free postage and free fast delivery deals on top of the 5% discount.

. . . .

Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, said the government should look seriously at the French initiatives and “wake up” to the damage Amazon is causing to the book trade and the retail sector in general. “The publishing industry has been trying to tell the government that this isn’t benign growth,” he said. “[They need to look more proactively to protect the whole high street.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to Catherine for the tip.

PG finds it interesting that no one seems to be speaking for British and French citizens who prefer to shop at Amazon for whatever reason.

If French booksellers can’t compete with Amazon in an environment that essentially forces all retailers to sell books for the same price, there’s something more than nasty American price-cutting that’s attracting customers.

From Digital Book World:

Little of consequence is happening in the next two weeks in the publishing world compared with the ebook price-fixing trial that recently started in lower Manhattan. Nonetheless, books keep coming out, getting sold and turning into best-sellers.

Given the price-fixing trial, perhaps it’s best to take a look at the list today versus the first week we started tracking ebook best-sellers, way back in August. A few weeks after we started tracking best-sellers, the first of the agency contracts (HarperCollins) was replaced with new deals at the retailers and the discounting began immediately.

. . . .

It’s hard to say what the overall affect has been on the larger ebook market but on the top best-sellers, the effect has been obvious and significant:

– The average price of an ebook best-seller this week is $6.95 (virtually unchanged from last week when it was $6.94), just over half of what it was last summer before the discounting began.

. . . .

The $10 and above price range used to be the most popular for best-selling books. There are only six books in that price range on the list this week.

Undoubtedly, for the books that many readers are buying, the Department of Justice’s action have made them cheaper.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

From Digital Book World:

The global average ebook price has dropped 8% year-over-year in the first quarter, according to Kobo ebook sales data presented by chief content officer Michael Tamblyn at the IDPF conference in New York.

Worldwide, ebook prices have been fluctuating between $7.00 and $9.00 dollars, with an average selling price lingering at $7.50, according to Kobo’s data.

. . . .

Self-publishing is having a substantive effect on the average price of an ebook, not only because those titles tend to be low priced but also because of the large and growing volume of self-published ebooks on the market, said Tamblyn.

Since the launch of Kobo’s self-publishing service Writing Life, those authors comprise 10% of the company’s unit sales. Adding in self-published authors using other services that Kobo distributes, Tamblyn said that number jumps to 20% of unit sales.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

From The New York Times:

One Sunday this month, the crime thriller “Gone, Baby, Gone,” by Dennis Lehane, sold 23 e-book copies, a typically tiny number for a book that was originally published in 1998 but has faded into obscurity.

The next day, boom: it sold 13,071 copies.

“Gone, Baby, Gone” had been designated as a Kindle Daily Deal on Amazon, and hundreds of thousands of readers had received an e-mail notifying them of a 24-hour price cut, to $1.99 from $6.99. The instant bargain lit a fire under a dormant title.

. . . .

“It’s the Groupon of books,” said Dominique Raccah, the publisher of Sourcebooks. “For the consumer, it’s new, it’s interesting. It’s a deal and there isn’t much risk. And it works.”

Finding a book used to mean scouring the shelves at a bookstore, asking a bookseller for guidance or relying on recommendations from friends.

But bookstores are dwindling, leaving publishers with a deep worry about the future of the business: with fewer brick-and-mortar options, how will readers discover books?

One-day discounts are part of the answer.

. . . .

“It makes it almost irresistible,” said Liz Perl, Simon & Schuster’s senior vice president for marketing. “We’re lowering the bar for you to sample somebody new.”

E-books are especially ripe for price experimentation. Without the list price stamped on the flap like their print counterparts, e-books have freed publishers to mix up prices and change them frequently. Some newly released e-books cost $14.99, others $9.99 and still others $1.99.

Consumers are flocking to flash sales, said Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president for Kindle content, because the deals whittle down the vast number of choices for reading and other forms of entertainment.

“In a world of abundance and lots of choice, how do we help people cut through?” Mr. Grandinetti said. “People are looking for ways to offer their authors a megaphone, and we’re looking to build more megaphones.”

Link to the rest at The New York Times and thanks to Alyssa for the tip.

From Digital Book World:

A high-priced, new-release is again atop the ebook best-seller list. Dan Brown’s Inferno (Random House), a new release from the best-selling author of The Da Vinci Code, is selling more ebooks than any other title at $14.99, competing with $0.99 self-published ebooks and $4.99 classics.

While the No. 1 ebook on the best-seller list fits a familiar narrative when it comes to how book sales have been until very recently, the rest of the list follows a new paradigm. Five titles out of the top-25 are self-published. An American classic is at No. 2 at $4.99, coinciding with a movie release. And, perhaps most astounding of all, the average price of a best-selling ebook this week is $7.04, down slightly from last week’s average of $7.23, and up slightly from the all-time low of $6.58 from a few weeks ago.

The $7.00 price tag for a best-selling ebook doesn’t seem all that out of place these days but it’s just over half of what the average price for a best-selling ebook was a year ago.

. . . .

More important than the why for publishers is what does it mean for their businesses. One problem that low ebook prices present for publishers is that they create an unfavorable comparison with hardcover prices.

Link to the rest, including the ebook bestseller list, at Digital Book World

Passive Guy will note that, while Amazon has many bestseller lists, it does not release sales figures for ebooks. While the Digital Book World ebook bestseller information is useful and interesting, it lacks direct access to Amazon data.

From Good Ereader:

The New York Times started to include ebooks in print and online editions back in 2011. The company announced today that it is suspending the inclusion of ebook titles in the newspaper and only posting them on the website. The prices of the ebooks will also not be included going forward, due to the shifting economic landscape of online sellers.

Pamela Paul is the current editor of the Book Review section of the New York Times, a post she only attained in April. She said in a statement, “The ebook list has migrated online, the digital world being its natural habitat. Given the fluid variety of pricing in today’s marketplace, we have also stopped including cover prices on the lists.”

Link to the rest at Good Ereader

There’s a new term for 99-cent ebooks — fluidly-priced. Remove them from the Sunday paper and those nasty indie ebooks will surely go away. Take the print readers on a pleasant journey back to an earlier time before the economic landscape of publishing began to shift. Why remind the New York literati about Amazon over their coffee and croissants?

The new editor knows how to make Big Publishing cheer. But can she can make them buy more advertising?

From author Russell Blake on KBoards:

I’ve gotten a number of PMs from authors asking for counsel on one matter or another, so I thought I would take the time to lay out my thoughts so that the info is available to everyone. This doesn’t represent the only way to do things, but it’s my way, and is the synthesis of everything I’ve learned over the last 23 months of self-publishing.

By way of background, I write conspiracy-based action/adventure novels. I published my first novel on Amazon June, 2011. I published my 20th novel in April, 2013. My first month I sold about 7 books. In 2013, from the start of the year to today, May 7, I have sold just shy of 100K books, and look good to exceed 200K for the year by a decent margin. I do not sell books at .99, or $2.99, or $3.99. The vast majority of my titles are $5-$6.

. . . .

1) Pick one genre that’s popular and with which you are extremely familiar, and then write in that genre. Stick to it. Don’t hop around. It confuses your potential readers and muddies who you are in their minds, and will hurt your sales. If you want to write different genres, use a pseudonym, and if you like, let your readers know that moniker is you. But stick to one name, one genre, because you’re building your brand, and brand building is a function of clarity – clearly communicating what you do, and what your product is.

2) Write a series. Why? Because readers like series, and you want to give readers what they like. Or you won’t sell as much. You can try stand-alone – I have – but my series outsell my stand-alone books 4 to 1. Once you have at least three books in the series, make the first one free. Make your money on the rest, but give readers a whole novel to decide whether they like you or not.

3) Write a lot. By that I mean try to write at least 3 novels a year. Don’t bother with short stories or novellas (40K or under) if you’re writing fiction (non-fiction might do better) unless it’s erotica or your name is Hugh. If fiction, write 60-90K installments in your series, and release them AT MINIMUM every four months. Every three months would be better. Every two, better still. Momentum breeds success, and readers have short memories.

. . . .

7) Stay off the internet when you’re writing. Set aside the writing time, and do only that. Leave placeholders for stuff you need to research later (XXX city is Y distance from ZZZ city, etc.). Stopping your writing to research breaks your momentum. Don’t do it. Checking your e-mail, checking in with your facebook group, reading a tweet – none of these are going to write your book for you, so stop it already.

. . . .

13) Price competitively and intelligently. Look at your genre. Where are most books priced? Are you undervaluing/underpricing your work? Price to sell, but don’t go cheap, no matter what Locke or Hocking did years ago. Use low prices occasionally to move product, as promotional pricing. But price your product consistently with the rest of your peers. Over time, you can increase prices, if your product warrants it and your readership is willing to pay it. My advice here is don’t price too low, or too high. Obviously, if you are racing up the charts at $3.99 and believe that moving to .99 will get you into the winner’s circle, go for it, but that’s rare. Price intelligently, and constantly play around with. By way of example, I tried $2.99 and $3.99, and then $4.99, and my sales were basically the same. So my readers are willing to pay up to $5 with no issues. My new releases are always $5.99. I do that because I want to brand myself as a quality read, and also because that’s still a bargain compared to my trad pub peers. I’m nosebleed level for indies, but I’ve only been pricing there with success this year. All last year, $4.99 was the ceiling.

Link to the rest at KBoards and thanks to Barb for the tip.

From Courtney Milan:

If you think that a publisher’s main job is distribution, and that distribution is a button press on the internet, you’re wrong, and I hope to demonstrate that today with some vague (yet convincing!) handwaving.

I don’t intend this post to be one about the merits of self-publishing versus traditional publishing, but instead to be about the merits of having a digital strategy versus not having a digital strategy.

A little over a month ago, Publisher’s Weekly released  released a list of the bestselling ebooks of 2012.

. . . .

I went through and I pulled out all the numbers for historical romance authors.

. . . .

[T]hese numbers are self-reported by the publishers, so there may be errors or titles that were not included.

. . . .

Here are the historical romances I pulled out, with digital sales numbers attached.

A Night Like This, Julia Quinn (Avon) 66,192
The Ugly Duchess, Eloisa James (Avon) 59,333
The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae, Stephanie Laurens (Avon) 55,093
The Duke is Mine, Eloisa James (Avon) 47,983
Sins of a Wicked Duke, Sophie Jordan (Avon) 46,687
A Week to be Wicked, Tessa Dare (Avon) 44,792
A Rogue by any Other Name, Sarah Maclean (Avon) 44,380
A Kiss at Midnight, Eloisa James (Avon) 42,624
Winning the Wallflower, Eloisa James (Avon Impulse) 40,954
Never Seduce a Scot, Maya Banks (Ballantine) ~38,600
Seduced by a Pirate, Eloisa James (Avon Impulse) 34,516
A Lady Never Surrenders, Sabrina Jeffries (Pocket) 34,290
The Seduction of Sebastian Trantor, Stephanie Laurens (Avon Impulse) 31,027
Never Love a Highlander, Maya Banks (Ballantine) ~30,200
The Lady Risks All, Stephanie Laurens (Avon) 29,100
Seduction of a Highlander, Maya Banks (Ballantine) ~28,400
The Fall of Rogue Gerrard, Stephanie Laurens (Avon Impulse) 26,466
How the Marquess was Won, Julie Anne Long (Avon) 25,980
The Duke and I, Julia Quinn (Avon) 25,640
Devil’s Bride, Stephanie Laurens (Avon) 25,229

I bolded the outliers so you could see the pattern.

Avon has always been a force to be reckoned with in historical romance, so maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but cripes, that’s just embarrassing. Pocket has one book on the list. Ballantine has three, but they’re all from the same author (and she’s a massive force to be reckoned with–her non-historical romances sold even better). And there are imprints that are simply not registering on the historical romance radar–St. Martins, Berkeley, HQN, Mira, Grand Central.

. . . .

[After comparing bestseller lists from 2010] Avon was still doing well in 2010–they have 33% of the historical romances on the list–but two years ago, they weren’t ridiculously dominant. Now, like I said, this is handwaving. So ignore the 33% number–numbers here are vague notions, and highly error prone. Let’s just concentrate on the general trend.

Which is that Avon is kicking everyone’s ass today, and they weren’t two years ago.

. . . .

Not insignificantly, Avon was one of the few major NY houses in 2012 that was publishing historical romance and experimenting with pricing strategy.

Finally, Avon developed a method for getting the word out about changes in pricing strategy–they didn’t just drop the price and expect people to notice.

All of this comes down to one thing: if you think that all publishers do in digital is press a button for distribution… Well, for some books, it certainly looks like you’re right. But a publisher that thinks about publishing as a strategy rather than a button, a publisher that uses an author’s entire output to move books will do much, much better. Dominantly better.

When the rewards are somewhat evenly distributed among publishers in 2010 and are sharply skewed come 2012, it’s not the individual authors that are at fault.

Publishers other than Avon: What the heck are you going to do about this? Because you just got schooled, and that’s embarrassing.

As a note: I suspect that some people at those publishing houses, if they saw this, would say, “We have a digital strategy, but we just choose not to employ it for all our authors–just for the super-duper awesomely important ones, the ones that are major events, and an author who just barely nicks the New York Times List is not on our register.” That may be true, but if it is…why would any of those authors bother with you for their next contract?

Link to the rest at Courtney Milan and thanks to becca for the tip.

From TeleRead:

“Publishers are beginning to do more aggressive e-book price testing,” according to a brief news item that appeared on thePublishers Weekly website yesterday. “Both Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Storey Publishing have recently announced monthly pricing promotions that set prices for a selection of titles at no higher than $2.99.”

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt‘s promotion, which the company is referring to as Take 5, will be getting underway sometime next month. Five thematically similar titles will be grouped together as part of the promo, and those e-books will be offered for $2.99 or less.

. . . .

Storey [Publishing] seems to be discounting a ton of its books; certainly more than five. Each month the publisher chooses some sort of theme (April’s theme is Gardening; March’s theme was Crafts), and then of course e-books fitting that theme are offered for $2.99 or less.

Link to the rest at TeleRead

PG decided to run some numbers for indie vs. traditionally-published authors on $2.99 ebooks from Amazon.

The indie author’s numbers for the sale of a single book are easier to run, so PG will show those first. (Sorry for the clumsy formatting, but that’s what WordPress wants to do.)

Now, let’s look at the numbers for a traditionally-published author on a $2.99 ebook sale on Amazon. These assume the author receives the a royalty of 25% of net ebook proceeds which is standard across all big publishers these days.

In round numbers, the traditionally-published author must sell five times as many ebooks as the indie author sells to come out ahead. The indie author receives $2.04 for the sale of a single ebook. The trad author receives $2.16 total royalties for the sale of five ebooks.

From TechCrunch:

After the U.S. cleared the deal, the European Commission has officially approved the proposed merger between two of the biggest book publishers in the world, Random House and Penguin.

. . . .

As it is seeking “new digital publishing models,” the merger has been widely commented on as a way to counter Amazon’s influence on the ebook market.

. . . .

The so-called agency model partially disappeared with the settlement of Apple and those book publishers. Book publishers now have a very thin margin to negotiate with Amazon to increase ebook pricing. According to publishers, the $9.99 standard created with the introduction of the first Kindle is not enough for newly released bestsellers.

That’s why the Penguin and Random House merger makes sense. The new entity will leverage its size to dictate its own terms.

. . . .

In other words, it could create a publisher-owned Kindle Store competitor, something that is highly needed to end Amazon’s dominance on the ebook market.

Link to the rest at TechCrunch

PG thinks readers ultimately determine what price is acceptable for ebooks. Amazon has done a good job of convincing readers that ebooks shouldn’t cost more than $9.99 and indie authors are convincing them that $2.99 – 4.99 is even a better price.

Artificially elevated prices only work if readers believe there is a limited number of interesting books they haven’t read. The Big Publishing/Barnes & Noble strategy has been to reduce the number of available books in physical bookstores and use the promo tables in the front of the store to focus readers’ attention on a small number of books.

Unfortunately for this strategy (or maybe because of this strategy), readers are not going to Barnes & Noble so much any more. In fact, the company’s announced plan is to close about one-third of its existing bookstores over the next decade. In the history of planned downsizing, businesses usually end up getting smaller much faster than they plan to do so, so PG expects disappearing Barnes & Noble stores to become a more and more common phenomenon.

A world with disappearing physical bookstores is almost an ideal environment for Amazon’s continued expansion. The readers who formerly shopped at their local Barnes & Noble will now go to Amazon where there is no shortage of interesting books readers haven’t read and no shortage of price competition.

If Penguin House is dedicated to the proposition of forcing ebook prices up, it must have one giant blockbuster after another. This means huge advances for the winners, but it also means that non-blockbuster authors will be treated even worse than they have been in recent years. Such treatment will tend to push smart authors toward indie world.

The must-have blockbuster strategy will also result in increased earnings volatility. If a couple of blockbusters fizzle, the year is shot.

If a big Penguin House ebook doesn’t sell at $24.99, the publisher is caught in a bind. Does it reduce the price to $9.99 and teach readers that this is a great price for an ebook or stick with the higher price and blow up the quarter’s earnings?

PG thinks a “strategy” of building a Penguin House ebookstore to compete with Amazon is foolish in the extreme, a path that only executives who know nothing about etailing and dealing with real customers would pursue. Since that profile describes the management of Penguin and Random House, the merged company may well try to take on Amazon with its own estore.

PG will offer a tag line for the Penguin House ebookstore at no charge – “Fewer books, but higher prices!”