From Anne R. Allen’s Blog:
I hear about new publishing scams all the time. Sometimes scammers approach me personally, but more often I hear a sad tale of woe from some newbie who has fallen for the latest con.
This week I realized that almost all the victims of publishing scams have one thing in common: they don’t understand the most important part of the digital self-publishing revolution that started in 2009.
This is the thing you MUST understand in order to be a successful indie author:
Successful Self-Publishers Make Most of Their Money Selling Ebooks.
If you choose self-publishing, you have to give up the fantasy of seeing your book in the window of your favorite bookstore chain.
It might help to forget paper books altogether. I often see newbies obsessing about choosing a POD company and getting bookstore distribution. But they’re worrying needlessly.
That’s because 90% of the successful indie’s profits usually come from ebooks.
Which sell well because they can be priced lower than Big 5 ebooks.
POD “Print on Demand” paperbacks are usually priced higher than offset-printed Big 5 paperbacks. So they don’t have that competitive edge.
. . . .
Bookstores get their books from distributors—mostly Ingram these days—and the books must be returnable. The books you see in a brick-and-mortar bookstore are on consignment from big publishers. They can all be returned for full price if they don’t sell.
But POD books are generally not returnable.
It doesn’t matter if your print books are in Ingram’s catalogue and can be ordered by a bookstore for an individual customer.
They also can be ordered by an individual customer and shipped directly to the customer’s home no matter who your distributor is because…the Internet.
Most stores won’t carry POD books as their regular inventory unless you have a personal agreement with a store owner. (That usually means you’ll pick them up when they’re shopworn and unsold.) So that’s going to have to be in your neighborhood.
But you’re probably not going to make much money selling books only in your neighborhood. In today’s market, you need to sell to the world.
. . . .
The notorious Author Solutions and other publishing scams that fleece newbie authors make money not only from overpriced publishing packages, but from high-priced, old-fashioned marketing plans that only work for print books and ignore online marketing.
They work best if you can find a TARDIS to take you back to 1999.
I’m talking about things like press releases to print media, pricey reviews in print magazines, elaborate book signings, and book fairs.
Especially book fairs. They’re a huge expense with no return on your investment except a little schmoozing. The huge book fairs like BEA, Frankfurt, and London are industry events where the bigshots go to network. People go to find out about the latest technology, trends in global markets, and multimillion dollar Hollywood deals.
Nobody has time for an unknown indie author hawking a first book.
. . . .
Anybody who tries to talk you into spending thousands for a spot in a booth at a trade fair has no idea how self-publishers make money. So they’re not going to be able to help you make money.
The $4000 booth at the trade fair, plus some business cards and maybe some cute bookmarks, your travel and hotel expenses, and the price of shipping those paper books, probably will net 20-40 book sales.
. . . .
Compare that with an online blog tour, which might run you about $150 to get your book in front of 1000s of readers. With a buy button a click away.
. . . .
Recently I got an odd phone call from a woman wanting to talk to me about one of my books. Odd since I don’t give out that landline phone number anywhere in my book publicity.
She launched an extraordinary sales pitch, gushing about my 2002 novel—originally published in the UK by Babash-Ryan—Food of Love. She said it was “beautifully written” and said her “book scouts” wanted to “partner” with me in marketing it.
I admit I told her I kind of know a bit about marketing myownself and had a #1 bestseller on Amazon in March.
She faltered a moment, but soldiered on with her script. Her company, ReadersMagnet, wanted to market my book at an upcoming book expo in Los Angeles.
. . . .
The number one thing a new self-publisher needs to do is stay current with the latest in self-publishing news. Indie publishing has changed radically in the past five years, so don’t rely on outdated information from the early “Kindle Revolution.”
Follow current indie publishing blogs like The Creative Penn and The Book Designer.
You can get great book marketing advice from Penny Sansevieri,Frances Caballo, Bad RedheadMedia, and our own Barb Drozdowich of Bakersview Consulting.
I especially recommend you sign up to get newsletters from TheAlliance for Independent Authors (Alli) and always check with them as well as Writer Beware before you agree to anything.
To be safe, it’s also best to have a legal professional look over any contract before you sign it.
If you still long for an old fashioned paper book on a shelf in Barnes and Noble, look to traditional publishers. Contrary to a lot of old news, most are thriving. Yes, even small presses. (But investigate thoroughly and don’t sign any contracts without a lawyer’s approval.)
Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog
PG endorses Anne’s suggestions and reiterates Physical Book Stores Don’t Matter to Indies.
Beyond that, the physical bookstore business is not looking like a very good long-term prospect.
Barnes & Noble can’t seem to get anyone who is very good to serve as its CEO. And at this time in its existence, it needs a genius CEO and a boatload of luck to survive.
Don’t forget that BN received a very important stay of execution when Borders suddenly went bankrupt eight years ago. At the time, Borders had 650 stores, including about 500 superstores, in the United States. That’s a huge reduction in competition in the bookselling business and BN gained the lion’s share of Borders customers at that time.
Now that bounty has been pretty much consumed.
From a Forbes article published in late 2018:
At a time when retailers across the board have reported positive sales and quarterly earnings, Barnes & Noble’s results fell short — but don’t blame Amazon.
The largest U.S. specialty bookseller said Thursday that sales fell 6.9% to $795 million in the quarter ending July 28, hurt by declines in both its retail and Nook e-reader business. Comparable-store sales dropped 6.1%, extending a five-and-a-half-year streak of declines. In fact, Barnes & Noble’s comparable sales have declined in 20 of the past 23 quarters, in sharp contrast to gains the retail industry has posted each quarter during the same period, according to Retail Metrics data.
Barnes & Noble’s loss last quarter widened to $17 million, from $10.8 million a year earlier. Results didn’t worsen in part because the company has been cutting expenses.
Link to the rest at Forbes (emphasis supplied)
Economist Herb Stein once said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
Can declining sales at Barnes & Noble go on forever?
Nope.
In almost six years, including a bunch of different outside CEO’s, nobody has been able to do anything about the decline.
PG suggests physical bookstores are not the special snowflakes the publishing industry wants them to be. “People will always want to go to real bookstores,” is a hope and a wish, not an accurate prediction.
From Wikipedia:
Sears had the largest domestic revenue of any retailer in the United States until October 1989, when Walmart surpassed it. In 2018, Sears was the 31st-largest retailer in the United States. After several years of declining sales, its parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018.
Link to the rest at Wikipedia
PG says happy talk from large publishers can’t stop the continuing decline of physical stores.
Will physical bookstores ever disappear completely?
PG believes the number of retail bookstores will continue to decline. However, he expects some bookstores will continue to thrive in limited types of markets – upscale locations where price is no object, in university towns where physical books tend to be a means of social signaling, and perhaps elsewhere, but when Barnes & Noble closes its doors, the physical book business will drop out of the mass market category.
Instead of owning thousands of stores or even hundreds of stores, successful booksellers will own, at most a handful. The retail book business will become a collection of small businesses without any single group able to really move the merchandise in a big way.
The boost that book publishing marketers could expect from paying for a position in the front of every Barnes & Noble or Borders store won’t exist. The impact that first day, first week and first month sales can have on a book’s visibility and place in the public mind will substantially diminish.
If large publishers of physical books can’t continue to produce large print runs, their per-book costs will increase and they’ll further cut personnel costs and trim the amount they pay for advances.
PG says people like Michelle Obama, major celebrities with some reasonable claim to intelligent views, will become a larger and larger factor in the survival of traditional publishing and the financial difference between the top 1% and the remaining 99% of traditionally-published authors will gape wider and wider.
But PG could be wrong. Perhaps an invasion by space aliens will drive people back to their local bookstore.
Anybody who tries to talk you into spending thousands for a spot in a booth at a trade fair has no idea how self-publishers make money.
Anybody who tries to talk you into spending thousands for a spot in a booth doesn’t care how or if self-publishers make money. They do know that selling you the booth puts money in their pocket.
“If you choose self-publishing, you have to give up the fantasy of seeing your book in the window of your favorite bookstore chain.”
That has nothing to do with self-publishing – 99.9% of trad-pub books will never end up in a ‘bookstore window’.
If you’re going to offer a con at least try to offer a believable one …
Regardless of who predicts what, who analyzes what, the fact remains that some people will always prefer a print version of a book over an electronic or audio version. Thus the medium will never go fully extinct. Given the trends of our times, however, it’s evident that print will definitely wane, as it no longer satisfies mass numbers of people — but it won’t disappear. It will likely get more expensive and difficult to obtain, but it will never die.
It’s not just a matter of the number of people.
More people still buy their reading material on dead tree pulp. And, no, that’s not going to change soon.
But the kind of people that are transitioning to digital just happen to be heavy buyers and the ones that are sticking to print by and large aren’t. This not only affects the volume of pbook sales but also the timing of those sales. Avid readers tend to buy a lot of books and buy them shortly after release. Which helps create “buzz” about the new releases.
In the old days the buzz from heavy early sales drew in casual and social readers. Nowadays, the buzz is muted because the avid readers are spreading their attentions more broadly: to the perpetual backlist, to the readily-available midlist, to Indie titles. More, avid readers have learned to maximize the bang for their buck by buying used pbooks, waiting for bigger discounts once the book is past the launch window, buying Indie, relying more on libraries, and (not to be underestimated) signing up for Kindle Unlimited.
This affects all of tradpub, even the big name authors who still sell massive numbers…but it takes them longer to reach their full audience.
A person who might buy two or three books a year isn’t going to get much value out of a KU $10 a month subscription but a three book a month reader will. And the three book a week crowd just loves it.
Not all readers are created equal and the tradpub establishment losing the hearts and minds of the most reliable, avid customers is leaving them at the mercy of the much more volatile readers who might show up once or twice a year. It takes a lot to replace even one lost avid reader who used to check out new releases weekly.
This shows up in the constant refrain from B&N of “reduced traffic”.
Hidden behind the digital revolution is the real problem for bookstores: something like 70-80% of print books are sold online. Print is actually selling well, just not through walk-in stores. As of a couple of years ago, Amazon had 50% of all print sales in the US. So B&M stores are only getting 20-30% of the print market, and those numbers are likely still dropping.
After an expensive ad campaign, B&N was crowing about how their Christmas sales numbers were essentially the same as last year. Of course, when the fourth quarter results came out, they’d actually lost money. Again.
Bookstores are just a book delivery device. Once they were the only game in town, and you bought from their limited selection or you didn’t have anything to read. Frankly, I love this brave new world we find ourselves in.
Generalist B&M bookstores face a critical problem they really can’t handle: too many active titles. At first it was the primary reason the big box stores killed the independents by the thousand (the second reason being publisher volume discounts) but once online kicked in the hurdle became increasingly higher.
Online makes it possible for a retailer to offer a catalog of millions of titles versus a couple tens of thousands that a B&M store can stock. That forces them to either specialize or focus on new releases only.
Specialization means going for a specific niche (comics shops, for example) which means a smaller potential audience. Done right it may be possible to capture enough of the niche for repeat business and survival. Cultivating customer loyalty is key. The best outcome there is becoming a “destination store”.
Focusing on new releases means becoming an extension of the publishers and promoting what they offer over what consumers might be looking for. It brings payola money which can help a bit and it makes for the biggest potential audience but it also means going against newsstands, supermarkets, pharmacies and everybody else selling the Everywhere Books.
Either path offers a chance at survival. Its the stores trying to ply the middle ground that face the biggest threat from fallow shelf space.
The problem isn’t really online competition but rather the dilution of consumer attention.
“Small local booksellers should embrace local Indies”
Except they don’t, and they don’t because although they are local, they are not actually independent at all – they are outlets for large publishing companies. They don’t have the time or the business structure to find and support independent authors – they need things to be easily ordered and returnable, and ideally offered to a pre-sold market in quantity just like the chain bookstores only on a smaller scale.
“Independent” bookstores don’t look for good books by independent authors and then order them and promote them. Instead, they order from the PRH catalog. They’re just tools of the man.
And to be fair, a lot of “indie authors” are one or two book authors (versus the 10-20+ book authors), without a lot of bookselling experience. Which, I’m sorry to say, sometimes means they have unrealistic expectations and/or can be difficult to deal with. One or two argumentative/difficult authors is probably enough to turn off a bookstore manager on the rest.
If, on the other hand, the bookstore got lucky and started out with a few people who were pleasant and realistic to work with, the store is probably much more open to the idea.
Maybe someone needs to write a primer for indie authors about how to be a good partner for bookstores? Is there already something like that out there? Sadly, the people who need it the most probably think they don’t need it at all.
KKR and DWS both have talked about ways to get Indie titles into bookstores. The simplest way to go about it is to price the pbook version with a big discount margin baked in and to make the books returnable. Which as the OP points out makes the move risky.
I don’t think it’s something a writer ramping up from scratch should try but it is doable after some success. I imagine that working as an LLC with a decent size catalog it might be possible to seem more like a small press than a self publisher. Writer coops should have an easier time at the latter.
The biggest problem with getting into bookstores is the same problem as selling on Amazon or anywhere else: getting noticed. It’s all about visibility.
As for B&M bookstores, the number is not in decline. Quite the opposite.
Meh. I’d like the name of one opened in the past seven years that is self-supporting, never mind that also supports the owner. Seems to me most of them are owned and run by wealthy retirees as a hobby. What happens in seven or eight years when these retirees are too frail to keep the stores open?
Moreover, Willow Books in Acton, MA, closes and the Silver Unicorn opens down the street from where it used to be. Book Depot in Brooklyn, NY, closes and a much smaller Books are Magic opens around the corner. In both cases what is, is much smaller than what was. Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco needs 300 people each paying $100/year as sponsors to stay in business, I’m sure I could think of more examples given time.
Patrick, as a local Indie author, my books are in the Silver Unicorn, and I help promote the venture. Even if I don’t expect to make much money from there, I still support the idea. Small local booksellers should embrace local Indies, who can send fans there instead of online.
The number of bookstores can easily increase while total shelf space devoted to books decreases.
There is much truth in the OP, but it misses the mark on why bookstores aren’t interested in indie books. It is because bookstores and indie ebooks target different markets.
Here is what Shawn Bythell, the owner of a large bookstore in Scotland wrote on the subject. A self-published author has approached him and requested he stock the author’s book:
“I am frequently presented with this sort of thing, and I take it on sale or return for purely diplomatic reasons. Without exception, one year later I end up returning every single copy.”
Why is this? Because people who consume self-published books are a different crowd from people who frequent bookstores. (This isn’t to say that there isn’t some overlap, of course.) This is not new. The typical indie book is the sort of thing that, a half century ago, people would buy off a rack in a drugstore.
Moving to PG’s commentary, Sears is not a great example of the state of bricks and mortar retail. It was sabotaged from inside. Modern capitalism, in all its glory, includes opportunities for capitalists to extract more money from a company by gutting it than by running it.
As for B&M bookstores, the number is not in decline. Quite the opposite. One can legitimately observe that a typical independent bookstore is not the equivalent of that Barnes & Noble up the road that shut down, but let us keep our facts straight.
Bear in mind that all “bookstores”, as promoted by the ABA aren’t book stores as visualized by authors, publishers, and consumers.
The ABA encourages and counts in its rolls art supply stores, photo shops, gift shops, and even tourist traps. Anybody willing to sign up.
Conversely, a lot of actual book stores don’t bother with the ABA. It isn’t a wash, though.
So take ABA crowing with a pound of salt.
As for indie stores not being one for one replacements for B&N closures they aren’t, not where it comes to shelf space for anything but the Everywhere Books. However, when it comes to actual sales, they might be close. Remember, one of the reasons B&N abandons a location is because it can’t support the size of their store. Too much expensive, fallow floorspace. So, from an author or publisher point of view the reduction in shelf space matters a lot it may not matter at all to a B&M shopper.
Nothing in publishing is pure black and white.
Many news organizations conflate the number of ABA members with the number of independent bookstores. ABA membership goes up, and they print that the number of bookstores has gone up. The actual number of stores remains flat.
And not terribly busy either, as the ABA will tell you – https://www.bookweb.org/news/retail-sales-bookstores-down-march-572666
There is much truth in the OP, but it misses the mark on why bookstores aren’t interested in indie books.
The administrative burden per book is much larger for independent books compared to books from publishers or distributors.
Ah, ah! These are the people who have been bothering me for the last 18 months!
I’d wondered who they were. I never listened very long, because the caller always spent the first 60 seconds gushing about the marvelous service they were going to provide without saying anything substantive, the boiler room sounds going all the while in the background.
It seemed an obvious scam to me. I stayed on the line the first time they called, figuring I’d better at least hear their offer. But having my book present on a table at a book fair, no matter how major, sounded quite useless.
One of the latest calls was an offer to re-publish my book. Why would I want that? They always call about the same book (out of all my 23 titles). And that book is the one with the best cover. Why would I want them to re-publish it with what would undoubtedly be an inferior cover?
My husband is usually the one who answers the phone here at Casa Ney-Grimm. He has learned to recognize these ReadersMagnet people, even though neither he nor I remembered their name. Last time he asked them to put us on their do-not-call list, which prompted them to hang up on him.
I’m tired of them wasting my time.
My wife gets a call from them about once a month. Not sure why they have her phone number and not mine! Maybe I blocked them. They seem to be well versed in promising advertising and promotion, but when you look at the web site and the prices, whoa babe!
BTW, isn’t the single most common mistake most writers make expecting instant success?
Instant hits leading to viable long term careers are black swans. It happens but often enough to bet the farm on it.
Commercial writing is a more of marathon, than a sprint. There are no shortcuts and it is the search for shortcuts that opens the door to the scammers. There are no magic bullets to be found.
Writing is a business and most businesses take time to ramp up.
>“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
Deadwood the movie had a great line that in retrospect applies to B&N as well,
Marshal: “Odds on it ending?”
Doc: “All bleeding stops eventually.”
Even today, B&N could theoretically be saved if they went hyperlocal. Waterstones did that (more or less) in the UK.
Problem is, B&N doesn’t have the local management in place for that; they let go of most of them. Waterstones still had their veteran employees in place so they had the option of letting them control their inventory and store layout, becoming in effect a federation of indie stores with a shared backend structure.
And B&N does have a formidable logistical back end. At least compared to indies who are forced to rely on Ingram or “special order” logistics. It’s the one net positive they still have and why somebody might buy them, albeit dirt cheap.
But B&N doesn’t have the management structure in place to manage and support 600 different stores. Their model is much like a big fast food chain where the stores are meant to be mostly interchangeable with only minor variation. Even now when they are belatedly looking at new store formats, the intent is to find a new mold for their cookie cutter; one format to fit all markets. That’s not going to work. The most likely find a store model that works brilliantly at one of their test locations but fails miserably elsewhere.
They are still working on a central planning blueprint: the puppet masters and their visions change but the one size fits all approach remains. At a minimum they need two different store formats and more realistically a half dozen formats depending on store location, demographics, and accessibility. They should already have the raw data in their inventory management system but not know how to use it. Or, worse, they may not know they have it or worst of all, never collected it because they’ve never cared as much about what consumers wanted as what the big publishers want.
Their Doomsday Clock is still ticking.
And when it hits midnight, the single largest block of pbook shelf space still in place goes away. And with it the single biggest reason left to even consider going tradpub.
Spot-on analysis.
The problem is the format of the book and the format of Amazon’s buy button, not the format of the store.
Yep. B&N is looking sad.
On the other hand, I’ve talked to several small bookstore owners, mostly in smaller tourist destinations, who told me they were doing pretty well supplementing the off-season with selling used books online through Amazon, Abe, Alibris, and the like. The knack for picking profitably saleable items out of the river of used/remaindered/whatever books seems to work for them.
I remember Joe OGara on the South Side of Chicago telling me that he survived on circulating a list of books he picked from estate and bankruptcy sales. That was 40 years ago.
Also, there are a handful of bookstores in my region that seem to do well by dialing in on local tastes with microscopic precision. Of course, this is all anecdotal.
Hyperlocal is all about finding something that works on a small scale and not trying to scale it up to larger scales.
Works for focused markets (say a single genre) or a specific region. Like sports bars or family restaurants. Don’t try to be all things to all people but do try to be useful to enough of the “right” people to survive. Maybe even prosper.