From Publishers Weekly:
As 2017 begins, indie authors and publishers are having to navigate a fast-growing industry filled with new opportunities, but one that also presents challenges related to that expansion. To find continued success in self-publishing, it has become more important to expand the definition of “self-published author” to encompass new roles and new formats.
. . . .
“We can expect 2017 is going to continue to be a challenging market for all authors and publishers,” says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords. He attributes this to the flood of titles that have entered the e-book space.
The growing supply is creating one set of difficulties for authors who are trying to get their titles discovered, and Coker says Amazon has not made anything easier for indie authors’ bottom lines with KDP Select, which requires participating authors to publish e-books exclusively with Amazon and allows titles to be eligible for Kindle Unlimited—a program that provides unlimited books for readers who pay a monthly subscription fee. He is critical of the online retail giant’s shift from compensating authors per books sold to a system based on the number of pages read.
Robin Cutler, director of IngramSpark, says that as a result of this drop in revenue from e-book content, indie authors who had previously focused on digital are looking to publish in print and other formats. “Getting their titles into brick-and-mortar bookstores as well as into libraries continues as a goal for many indie authors this year and into next year,” says Cutler.
Joel Friedlander, book designer and publishing consultant, seconds that, emphasizing that while getting print books into stores is not always easy, successful indie authors will be those who think outside traditional formats. “Authors are starting to understand that the world of book publishing is much bigger than e-books and print on demand,” he says.
. . . .
Just as 2017 will likely see self-publishing expand into different formats, it may also be a time when authors have to find ways to expand their own roles. They are adding such words as consultant, publisher, and marketer to their business cards and passing on lessons for success to other authors.
“They typically begin publishing their own work and through that experience learn how to establish a publishing business or service to help other authors,” says IngramSpark’s Cutler.
Friedlander predicts that more indie authors will become indie publishers by assisting other writers in bringing their books to market in 2017. “They figure out book publishing on a small scale with their own books, and then they say, ‘I could help Jane out with her books,’ and it’s a natural evolution,” he says.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
What will they say when they realize the main market for print (all us old farts) are dying off, and that ebooks are the future? Mass hysteria!
Print isn’t dead, but it’s dying, and will only linger as a boutique item. “Look what I got, Ma! They call it a book. Isn’t that quaint?”
I think either penned author existence failure or lack of physical outlets will become a problem for the big publishing houses before a significant die-off of print readers. Readers will read what’s available.
Joel Friedlander: “Authors are starting to understand that the world of book publishing is much bigger than e-books and print on demand.”
Self published authors always knew this.
The funny part is, unless you happen to write children’s books or academic books, the latest industry figures show that e-books and online print via POD can already reach 75% of all US book purchasers of both adult fiction and adult nonfiction.
But, for folks trying to separate gullible indies from their money by selling them “professional book design” services, that’s a mighty inconvenient little fact…
NO! You’re wrong! You needs them!
Who will do the editing — editors don’t grow on trees you know. What do you mean online? For a modest fee or with the help of beta readers? Hearsay!
Covers! Being able to write doesn’t mean you can draw or photoshop a cover would a dang! What do you mean online? For a modest fee? Or there are covers out there that you can pick for free or hardly nothing? Easy to use art programs? You’re a heretic! Burnin’s too good for ya!
Fine, even if you can get them edited and covered you can’t sell them without us! What do you mean online? You’re bluffing! What – you’ve sold HOW MANY? But-but you neeeeeds them.
(Or not. 😛 )
Some people can really do it all themselves.
A friend of mine does both writing and covers.
She is both a great writer (currently selfpubbing YA ghost stories in ebook and print) and a great commercial artist with fantasy prints for sale.
Online, too.
She does her own covers, which means no recycled stock images or mismatched pictures. Basically she buys professional covers from herself. Out one pocket and into the other.
(She also did the layout for the print edition herself. Very clean and readable.)
She’s just starting both businesses so she also works full time as a technical writer. Not sure when or if she sleeps.
It’s work, and you have to learn a great deal.
But indies aren’t afraid of hard work – and it’s all learnable. There are books and courses and blogs to teach you.
The advantages include knowing how to deal with a professional in the future, because you know how much work something is – or isn’t.
That was my main reason; I never planned to do everything – that part just happened. But now I see it as a real plus.
Thank you for the laugh, Allen F!
😉
Me had to, being the nut-job listening to my beta readers and using DAZ for the cover. http://www.daz3d.com/home
So, according to them, if I don’t get into bookstores, I’m settling for just 91% of the scifi market like a looser?
I’m sure it’s worth all that effort to get access to the part of that remaining 9% that’s not through Amazon…
But if you go through them you won’t be getting 9% of the profit — and even less with them overpricing your ebook — if (very big IF here) you can even get in in the first place.
Actually, 14% of all Science Fiction sales were bookstore sales. The 9% you mention are the ones buying print SciFi books online.
So you’d be missing out on at most 14% of Sci Fi purchasers by not being in bookstores.
Yeah, I know, it’s not like that 5% difference affects the point you’re making… but I can’t resist being pedantic, eh?
Go ahead and float that boat, SDA. We’re all ending up at the same dock, here.
Blah, blah, blah.
Is this article a reprint from 2012?
The article, no.
The thoughts? Pretty much.
You nailed it there.
My predictions for 2017:
1) Print will shrink from the current 30% of adult fiction sales to less than a quarter.
2) Brick-and-mortar print sales of adult books will shrink from the current 25% of all book sales to less than a fifth.
3) Amazon’s share of sales of all book formats will continue to grow.
4) Print distributors like Ingram and “book designers” like Friedlander will continue to exaggerate the importance of print, in a desperate effort to try to make money off indies.
5) The rapid exodus of Smashwords authors will continue to accelerate.
6) Mark Coker will continue to publicly whine like a little b**** about how Amazon stole his lunch money.
Did I miss any? 😀
0 – Amazon tries yet another unexpected way to promote/sell books, recklessly going where none have gone before. 80% chance it pays off, too.
(Hint: If I were BookBub I’d be looking over my shoulder.)
Good point — and a safe prediction. That one’s a near-certainty.
KU paid indie authors something like $180 million for page reads last year, while even at its peak, Coker’s Smashwords never topped $15 million a year — and 95% of that was pass-thru payments from iBooks and Nook.
Bookbub’s fairly safe right now; they’ve “diversified” their customer base to mostly traditional publishers — at least for their non-free slots. And traditional publishers will limit their concentration of ad dollars doing to Amazon, even if that approach doesn’t maximize ROI.
I wouldn’t be so sure.
How’s GroupOn doing these days?
Last I heard they were dropping out of half the countries they used to service.
Bookbub serving as primarily a feeder for the BPHs strikes me as a good way to send a lot of subscribers looking elsewhere.
They aren’t primarily a BPH feeder, though, are they? A lot of non-BPH trad publishers in there, too — including ebook-savvy ones like Open Road Media, who seems to have quite a bulk-ad deal going with Bookbub.
But your point is well taken — if subscribers get bored seeing the same limit set of publishers and authors from BookBub, they’ll bail out.
I’ve been doing a months (oh gosh it’s taking forever) long BBub research thingie on 12 popular genre they have high listings for.
I will say, it is shifting tradpub and small press. ORM does have a larger share than normal.
For us, what’s the most interesting thing found so far? Rates and such are often super dreadful for the books they are just accepting from publishers on a spreadsheet. It isn’t just non-curation, it’s anti-curation. They’re going to burn themselves. Right now, they are still tops because of numbers, but eventually, people will stop buying because they’re being offered crap that tradpub can’t sell any other way.
Also, repeat authors every single 31 days, but only from TradPub or SP. And some of them are consistently for books rated 3.8, 3.7, 3.6, etc…yet they run another badly reviewed book for that author in 31 days, like clockwork.
Again, their large numbers hide the slide, but the slide in effectiveness is happening because the slots are for sale rather than curated.
And countless discussions, flame wars, panic attacks, and ‘death to Amazon’ screeds will erupt on writerly discussion forums everywhere.
Just like last year and the years before … yup.
Mr. Coker doesn’t seem to understand KU at all. Doesn’t the shift from books read to pages read benefit longer form books rather than short stories? So some writers do worse and some do better. It seems more fair this way.
Also how entertaining the book is. Long or short, you only get what the readers bothered to read. And the writer that turns their 1000 page ‘book’ into 10 100 page ‘chapters’ gets paid the same as the one that left theirs as a 1000 page book. (Never mind the one that thought it such a great idea to make 100 10 page ‘books’ where opening the first ‘page’ got them to 10% and ‘paid’ for a ‘read’.)
No doubt there will be a KU3 that will remove more loopholes — and we’ll hear even more whining about it! 😉
“Mr. Coker doesn’t seem to understand KU at all.”
While I greatly respect Mark Coker for his early and valuable (and continuing) contribution to self-publishing by creating Smashwords, I will note that he has a profit motive to pretend not to understand his competitor KU.
He could try to emulate it, at least.
He isn’t alone in not understanding that it is intended to be a marketing assist for the Kindle and not a replacement for it. If he started with that as a premise and looked for alternate ways to provide similar visibility aides he might actually being something to the discussion other than whine. And make some money along the way.
But I’m starting to think few people with any kind of history with the manhattan mafia are capable of looking at today’s publishing reality and see opportunity.
Amazon is actually the only e-book distributor who makes it easy to find indie books and treats them the same as they treat Big Five books. Like many indies writing adult audiences, my print sales give me an extra 5% of income on top of my ebook sales. (That’s gross income. The cost of wraparound covers and interior formatting means it takes almost six months for a paper book to show a profit.) Most bookstores will still not shelf indie books, and that’s unlikely to magically change in 2017. I’m not sure what box beyond print, audio, and e- there is to “think beyond.” Or rather, I can think beyond it all day long (smoke signals, implanted neural chips, performance art), but I have a business to run and need to stay here in the real world, where ebook income at Amazon pays my rent.
My prediction for 2017: scammers will keep lying. I’ll keep avoiding them.
“…Most bookstores will still not shelf indie books, and that’s unlikely to magically change in 2017.”
The insolvable problem of finite shelf space coupled with the near-universal policy of shrinking shelf space means no magical change EVER.
I’ll take a neural chip!
Options could include heads up display overlay of text on what you are seeing (direct to the optic nerve?) and audio.
Could be confusing when it goes wrong though…
“He is critical of the online retail giant’s shift from compensating authors per books sold to a system based on the number of pages read.”
—–
Only one problem with Mr Coker’s assertion about Amazon’s “shift”. It doesn’t exist.
Kindle Unlimited books aren’t sales. The reader gets no proprietary rights in the transaction. A sale allows the reader to reread the book at will with no further expense whereas with KU the reader only has access as long as the subscription is active.
Besides, KU is a supplement to the Kindle store, not a replacement. Publishers still have a choice not to partake of KU or to make only limited use of it. The channel for actual sales is still there. So, no; no shift.
I’ve been saying this to authors for two years. Mostly it makes them angry if they don’t agree.
I totally understand where lending may or may not make sense. But less money for less rights always seemed equitable to me. Now some of the KU changes being less lucrative strikes me as far more reasonable things to object to, but that’s why KU’s 90-day duration is so great. Compared to must other agreements, it’s no time at all.