Think

Opinion pieces offering commentary on various aspects of book culture, publishing and self-publishing.

Musings On POD Publishers And The Music Business

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I’m heading off on holidays for a week and I will be checking in here on and off. I’ll be some posting some articles I’ve posted over the past year that drew considerable interest and comment. This one – "Musings on POD Publishers & Music Business" was first published as a two-part piece, but here it is in full.
 
About fifteen or more years ago, I set up a music band management and promotions business with a work colleague. It just struck me recently about the similarities between publishing now and what we did then. With the advent of digital Print-on-demand publishing, it seems to be that in the past 8 years, so many more authors are following the trend followed by many musical artists years ago.

 
Let us be clear, POD and subsidy/vanity publishing, whatever you wish to call it, and there is considerable debate about what actually differentiates the terms, effectively means, the author, (read musical artist), contributes in a financial capacity, as well as a marketing capacity, to the production and promotion of their book (read artistic work). While the traditional and Independent publishing world argue the toss over the credibility and acceptability of the artistic output (read product) in the consumer world, time and technology march effortlessly on.
 
So where exactly are we? Why is it acceptable that a recording artist can go into a studio, without a recording contract, invest in a producer/sound engineer, produce a digital format of an album of songs and go to a professional press-production label, without the promise of a "contract" and, yet, be accepted as a legitimate musical artist. While the argument might be that the band/artist is effectively "self-publishing" by printing their own musical performance posters, submitting themselves to radio stations/tv stations, without formal representation, they are still taken seriously by the high street retailer.
 
I have worked in the music promotions business, and I can only speak of Ireland and the uk, where a band/artist can present a finished studio product to a distributor (read book wholesaler) and they will gladly fulfill the product to stores without little question. I can vouch for both retailers and logistical distribution, as I have also worked for many years as a manager in both environments and that this is a natural and practical understanding of the product flow of musical artistic endeavours.
 
My company took bands from a launching point and did everything from booking studio time, looking after the production and presentation of a demo for radio/tv stations, or record labels, gig bookings, as well as general consultation for artists. Our brief and task was to take a band or artist to a stage where they were presented professionally.
 
When I compare the publishing world and the music world, it seems there is at least a 10 to 15 year development gap between the two. In POD publishing, its the small unknown writer who is challenging and doing things differently, looking for independence, and prepared to financially invest at risk of failure. This is the way it was musically 15 years ago. So if we can look at music and see a direct thread as to where the future is going, it looks pretty interesting.
 
Forget about the small guy in music, Radiohead, and other so-called stadium rock bands are now releasing download only albums. The biggest selling single last year 2006-7 was Gnarls Barkley, Crazy, originally released as a download only single. More and more musical artist are being only signed up by big record labels, sometimes long after they have come to widespread prominence by their own promotional endeavours. The reality is that most musical artists have a huge personal prominence long before the ever sign to a major musical label. There’s little work for the label to do other than expand across continents and make the letters bigger on the billboards.
 
 
 
So what does the future hold for the writer in the changing publishing world?
 
Let’s first look at the person at the end of this line, from the writer’s first thoughts of putting pen to paper, through the publishing process, whether it be traditional or the POD/Subsidy channel, all the way to the buying reader browsing a bookshop or the Internet on-line sites. It seems, perhaps, it is the reader who is often lost or forgotten in the food chain of the book world. There may be many who would consider the reader at the bottom of the chain, by virtue of consumption, and sheer numbers of people who say they are avid readers. I think this is the nub of the change for the reader and how they are viewed in the vast literary chain. Print-on-Demand, hmm…Demand, the word takes on much more meaning when you look closely at the buying and reading consumer. There was a time when radio, books, but predominantly newspapers, were the forums the general public used. A time, when without the advent of modern technology, literacy was considered an added bonus, not a necessity to actually survive, as it is now. The advent of TV and the Internet has very much changed how people receive the information and stimulation they want. Effectively, the process and format of how people receive information has greatly changed.
 
Demand, let’s look at that word again. It says something about what we as people want in the time we live in. The writer demands the recognition they think their work deserves, and you might also argue, that they deserve. The printers have long dispensed with the age old typesetter, stooped over a printing press with a "y" and a "w" held tightly between thumb and index finger. The modern digital printer demands that the technology they have can turn out at least 20-30000 books per day. (See the link for Calvin Reid’s article on Lightning Source on this site). The logistics manager of your average book wholesalers demands that his product flow and supply chain is efficient and immediate so he can optimise warehouse pallet space. The retailers demand that they have access and availability to every possible book the reading public might want, and of course, at the cheapest prices. I hear you say, "What about the publisher? What do they demand?" Let’s leave them stew for a while and go back to our humble customer and reader, the person who actually keeps this whole damn thing going. Who are they?
 
If we are to believe the saying – there’s a book hiding away in everyone – then the real truth is that the book buying consumer is both the reader and writer rolled in to one. No writer is born a writer, we all go through our personal form of reading apprenticeship. We know what we like and we read what we like, some choose to ultimately replicate, and if they have a gift, to finally originate their craft. This is the magic of the written word. We writers demand that our voice be heard. The journey of the reader is no different than any human instinct, to survive, to identify, and most enjoyably, to explore and share the experience.
 
Now, let’s go back to the publishers who seem to be stewing along nicely. What do they demand? The writer would say that they demand a mass popular book with a global market for every submission to them. The reality is different. With the massive surge and flooding of the information market, publishers demand trends so they can fulfill them with books. Publishers demand fads and whims because they are now owned by the daily news media groups, and like baying seals at the aquatic waterworld at feeding time, they just want their food thrown to them. They demand that the "Traditional Publishing Empire" be held in the elite esteem that it was a hundred years ago. A time, when most ordinary gentle folk couldn’t even write their own names. While the elite perception might remain the same in tradition publishing, the reality has vastly changed. Some 15 years ago, with the rise of the newsprint media groups founded by the Murdocks and Maxwells of this world, the publishing playing field has been reduced to 5 or 6 key players, following the consumption of many medium sized publishers. Thought the publishing world has an even louder and more controlling voice, its message has greatly weakened by these changes.
 
The arrival of digital print-on-demand technology has shifted things quite a bit. The rise of POD/Subsidy presses has given more writers a voice and a new, more accessible avenue of publication. Traditional publishers have had to reluctantly embrace this technology, for out-of-print back catalogue titles which they are not prepared to do large off-set print runs of. But this is only happening because the quality and cost of the two print methods are coming closer and closer together. It’s also interesting that some POD publishers who have a very successful title on their list are actually starting to use off-set print for their bigger titles. This demonstrates that the future lies with a combination of both print methods. We have already seen the lines of description blurred between POD/Self-Publishing/Vanity publishing. I’ve been through all the arguments, the definitions, the blogs, the forums, the bias, but the reality is that we are in an publishing industry were no-one quite knows where the lines of definition begin and end. I think the lines are so blurred now that it is no longer about who pays for what, where the money flows, what terms are in what contract, or who is producing the best quality and best choice for the buying reader. The bottom line is another book is born and the reader, as always, should be the person who decides what is bought and read.
 
I will finish by touching on technology again. Espresso! No, it’s not a cappachino or coffee. It’s a 5 foot by 5 foot machine which is a mobile POD machine. There are five operating in the US at the moment in book chains. The customer goes in to the store, orders from a database, and in a few minutes, the book is printed and bound there in front of them. Think about it, any book, anywhere, any publisher, once it’s downloaded to the database. The stores, like the suddenly defunct book wholesalers, would need no shelf space, only a digital inventory. I suppose they would operate like a kind of Internet cafe. Hey, maybe I was wrong about the cappachino! By the way, Espresso (EBM – Espresso Book Machine) – the company are currently negotiating to have a machine installed in a store in the uk this year. Be afraid…be very afraid, the only jobs left might be for the author to download directly to the database linked to the machine, and the humble buyer to read it! Sounds pretty efficient to me!

 

This is a reprint from Mick Rooney‘s The Independent Publishing Magazine.

Playing Jazz With Words

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This post, by JD Sawyer, originally appeared on his Literary Abominations site on 7/15/11.

You hear a lot of talk of “discovery writers” and “outliners” in the writing world. The “pantsers” and the “plotters,” respectively. It’s true that there are a lot of people that fall into both categories–including many of my friends–and human nature loves dichotomies, but I’ve never fit comfortably either, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Last night, I had occasion to have a long conversation with a new writer who’s vexed and confused by the options before him when it comes to writing process, and saying “you have to find your own way” only left him more despondent. I know that look–I’ve been there many times when faced with a new field of endeavor with so many options that at once feel constraining and non-specific. So, in the hope of letting those new writers who don’t comfortably fit a category know that they’re not alone, I’m going to describe my method.

But first, the reasons why the two popular methods don’t work for me.

Pulling Down My Pants

“Pantsers” are folks that write by the seat of their pants. They trust their subconscious and just fly on from word one, muddling through as they go–and often, they’re brilliant. Many of my favorite short story writers (including Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Dean Wesley Smith) write like this, and they are quite often bloody brilliant.

I’ve done this with short stories–sometimes, I’ve done it really well. But for every short story I’ve finished with this method, I have five that started, sputtered, and stopped. Some I’ve gone back and done in a way more suited to my workflow–others I’ve abandoned and think of fondly, like childhood friends I’m unlikely ever to see again.

Why do they sputter? Frankly, it’s because I often write from a milieu, and only infrequently is a milieu sufficient to sustain a whole story. My process often relies on the collision of two dissimilar ideas in my own head, and without those two ideas, the story won’t spin.

With novels, it’s the same problem, only worse. Unless the story itself is a discovery process with a very constrained point of view, there isn’t a lot I can get a foothold on. Even then, I only get so far before I have to resort to other methods.

Which brings us to outlining.

Sketchy Thinking


Read the rest of the post on JD Sawyer‘s Literary Abominations.

Can The Subscription Model Work For Trade Publishers?

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I recently read a Slate article about how the film industry is repeating the DRM and business model mistakes of the music industry, and of course saw many parallels with, and implications for, trade publishing in it. But unlike the film and music industries, Big Pub has plenty more market and cultural shifts to contend with these days than just the rising popularity and availability of digital media.

The once-mighty Borders has failed, proving once and for all that brick and mortar is no longer the ace in the hole it once seemed for trade publishers. Authors, established and aspiring alike, are seeing fewer and fewer reasons to partner with trade publishers now that it’s become clear they can get their work to a readership more quickly, keep control of their intellectual property rights, and earn higher royalties to boot by going indie. As if to add insult to injury, Amazon seems poised to eat whatever’s left of Big Publishing’s lunch after everyone else has had a go at the trough. But it occurred to me that there may yet be some unexplored and promising territory for Big Pub, if they’re willing to entertain an unorthodox idea: a subscription model of ebook content delivery.

Much like Gamefly and O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online, major publishers could offer a monthly, flat-fee subscription service for
book-at-a-time access to all their ebook titles in various ereader formats. Note that I said access, not ownership. It would be a rental-type paradigm, and like Gamefly and Netflix could be offered at various pricing tiers according to how many titles the consumer is allowed to have checked out at any given time. Such a plan would enable publishers to maintain steady, ongoing revenue streams in addition to their existing sales channels, and would allow publishers to do an end-run around Amazon, B&N’s Nook store, and Apple’s iBookstore, too.

Perhaps just as importantly, it would allow publishers to gracefully exit the ebook pricing, DRM and staged release debacles of the past, and finally be seen as offering a valuable service to consumers instead of being the big, greedy bad guys.

Gamefly charges the equivalent of the cost of one new game at retail prices for its basic subscription; trade publishers could do the same. At $10 – $15 per month I think plenty of avid ebook readers would be willing to sign up, because they’re probably already buying at least one ebook at retail prices each month.

There are only 5 major players left in trade publishing, so even if you had to ‘subscribe’ to all 5 of them individually (since it’s not likely they’d form some kind of collective service), you’re still only talking approximately the same monthly fee as what plenty of people are already paying for their Gamefly accounts.

While publishers would lose money on accounts signed to voracious readers who currently buy numerous ebooks every month at retail prices, those folks are outliers. Most people I know don’t buy ebooks at that rate, and most people I know don’t read more than one book a month, either. Also, there would surely be a large contingent of people who sign up fully intending to wring their money’s worth out of the subscription fee, but ultimately end up ‘checking out’ a book only every second or third month. Once you know the books are there for the taking any time, there’s no urgency.

If you subscribe to Netflix, Gamefly or even a health club, you’re probably personally acquainted with this phenomenon. I say this while gazing ruefully at the Netflix DVD I’ve had checked out for nearly four months now. Yep, I’ve paid the monthly fee for that movie three times over, and in fact could’ve bought the DVD for less than I’ve paid for this rental by now. But I still have no intention of cancelling my Netflix subscription because it’s a convenience I’m willing to pay for. And maybe someday I really will end up checking out a new movie every few days, like I imagined I’d be doing when I first signed up.

Yes, there are technological hurdles to be overcome. And yes, there will be some considerable startup effort and investment. But those things are true of any new business model trade publishers might try to adopt. And heaven knows, the model they’ve currently got is no longer working so they’re going to have to try something.  

 

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

The Author As Publisher

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This post, by Mary W. Walters, originally appeared on her The Militant Writer blog on 5/30/11.

(2nd in a series of articles about the new realities for writers and readers)

It seems inevitable to me now that unless they take up the sideline manufacture of weaponry or bath salts to subsidize themselves, the major publishing houses are going down. There will certainly be a role for niche publishers in future (literary presses that focus on poetry or esoteric fiction among them, teetering on the brink of expiration as they always have, and non-fiction houses that specialize in such limited areas as the flora and fauna of Paraguay or the battles of World War II), but for the majority of mainstream fiction and non-fiction book writers, independent publishing will soon become the norm.

In this post, I examine the “services” publishers have traditionally provided to writers and their books (and therefore to readers, I suppose), and then I look at how I believe these same functions can be managed—often in a more effective manner—by the authors themselves when they publish their own books. The post examines five specific areas:

  • manuscript selection
     
  • editing
     
  • production
     
  • promotion/sales
     
  • distribution

There are other areas that publishers have traditionally managed for writers, often with the help of agents. Most of them relate to subsidiary rights—e.g., translation rights,  dramatic rights, merchandizing rights, and so on. Publishers have traditionally taken a chunk of the money that accrues when a book has been translated or made into a movie. They have argued (with good reason) that after a manuscript has been accepted by a publisher and turned into an attractive book, it becomes more appealing to rights purchasers. Publishers have at times facilitated the process by presenting their books to prospective foreign publishers at the London and Frankfurt book fairs, for example, but for the most part they have simply secured some portion of the subsidiary rights without actually doing much to encourage an income flow for either themselves or the author from such sources.

So, on to the “services” they have offered and fulfilled.


Read the rest of the post on The Militant Writer for more in-depth analysis of the five specific publisher "services" in the context of the past, present and future, and also see the first post in the series.

Is Butt Glue Necessary When Writing?

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When you want to be a career author you can’t just write when the muse is singing. Sometimes you do need a little butt glue to keep you from wandering around doing everything but writing. That’s true… except when it isn’t.

Is butt glue always necessary?

Today I learned a very interesting thing about my writing needs. I’ve recently begun putting Larry Brooks‘ instructions on Story Engineering to good use re-plotting my novel Apprentice Cat, which has been floundering for some time now.

I’ve done everything from conceptualizing to character worksheets. Today was the first full day I’ve been able to spend creating the story structure and it was a revelation in how I develop plot.

According to Larry, there are only 60 to 90 scenes in any given novel, which are broken into four parts. I decided to put together an excel worksheet with the four major plot points and divide the rest of the necessary scenes between them. That worked fine until I began having problems coming up with scene ideas.

I tried applying butt glue, but it only made me itch.

My poor brain seemed to freeze. Every character had something he or she needed me to write at that very moment. It was like being in a room full of screaming pre-schoolers all wanting my attention at once. All I could think of was how I knew I needed to be creating these scenes, but they weren’t materializing.

That’s when I realized I needed to do something un-writerly, something physical like cleaning up the mess my toddler had made of my living room or doing dishes or anything. Butt glue was the last thing I needed.

I followed my instincts to a better story.

As soon as I stopped thinking about how much I needed to write and the self-imposed deadline I was on for finishing my plot outline, the scenes started appearing. I was hearing snippets of conversation and seeing my characters doing things I hadn’t even considered.

When a scene popped into my head, I quickly went back to my laptop and slotted it into the worksheet. If nothing else came to mind within a couple of minutes, I went back to doing whatever I was doing before. Worked great and I’m now 2/3 done with the outline. Yeah!

Butt glue is great when we’re just procrastinating, but it can get in the way of the creative process if our creative selves become paralyzed and overwhelmed by the blank page.

I’m curious to know, have any of you had the same thing happen? When do you find you need to apply butt glue? When has it hampered your creative flow?

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road To Writing.

ThrillerCast Episode 18 – Getting Noticed As A Writer

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Episode18 of the podcast I host with David Wood is now up. In this episode we talk about what it takes to get noticed as a writer. We discuss short fiction as a means of promotion as well as a means of creativity in itself.

 

ThrillerCast Podcast

 

We talk about the difference between having a large body of work and a large online presence. Whether one or the other is better and so on. Go and have a listen, share it with your friends and anyone else you think might like it and feel free to comment or email.

All the details here.

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter’s The Word.

Word Counts

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Writers who do so for a living have been focused on word counts over the years. During the hey days of pulp fiction and pop magazines, writers used to be paid by the word. This sometimes led to excessively wordy books and articles. Today, with the internet’s space and attention constraints, writing tends to be much more tightly structured. This has led to articles for a set fee within certain word-count boundaries.

Today’s book recompense is basically focused around a percentage of a book’s retail or net price, depending on the terms of the publishing contract. Various genres tend to have different standards based upon what the reading public is accustomed to. Generically speaking, if a book is less than 50,000 to 60,000 words, it’s creeping into the novella region. Most publishers (and therefore agents) have submission requirements, which are based on the pragmatic realities of the bottom line.

An unknown, first-time author should try to stay within the 60,000 to 75,000 word range. Why? To keep the publishers’ pre-production and printing costs down. They are taking a major risk on an unknown entity–a gamble that the book will at least break even. I once had an editing client, who at the ripe old age of 20, had written a 3,000 page tour de force military thriller. Mechanically, he was a good client. He learned from his mistakes and caught them in future self-edits. His stories were gripping and accurate. He would never be able to sell such a book until he had established a major reputation and fan platform. The book would be way too huge to  risk its initial costs.

First-time-authored books often become self-fulfilling failures. Since the publishers are unwilling to take on the risks of production and marketing, everything is cut back or eliminated. This results in a low-cost cover that won’t attract anybody’s attention. few will get the word because the ad campaign just isn’t there. The bottom line is, there is no bottom line–no profit. Constraints on the word count also contribute to a dismal prediction.

What To Do

So what can you do word count wise to improve the chances your work will make it through the agent/publisher submission process?

  • Know your genre of interest in regard to writing styles (tight? not so tight?)
  • Know your genre agent/publishers’ submission requirements in regard to word counts
  • Pre-plan your word counts and be flexible about what goes into your story

Let me expand a little on this last point. Sometimes, especially if you don’t have much experience) you will write your story and suddenly discover it’s not long enough. Oh oh, what now? Go back through the story. Look for places where scenes that create more tension or more emotional quandaries might be added without creating a sense of padding. This approach is one of the best ones I know to expand a story while adding to its interest.

Of course, if you can plan for this ahead of time, it will make your life a lot simpler. Let’s say you’ve created scenes, chapters, and acts or sections. You’ve arranged them into a logical outline and you suddenly realize, “Hey, all this ain’t long enough!” I faced this while outlining my new fantasy. I’m accustomed to writing snappy little mysteries of 50,000 to 65,000 words in about 42 short chapters. My new fantasy only had maybe 25 or so chapters, which definitely won’t cut it these days. What could I do to lengthen the work while increasing its tension?

I made two lists. The first was all the dangerous animals my questors might confront and what might happen if they did. I then did the same with a list of all the natural and man-made catastrophes they might encounter while traveling on their quest. I then when through the outline seeking logical places where items such as these might be placed in order to increase tension and make the reader think, “My gosh, what next?” You want to give the reader encouragements to keep on reading, even if it takes all night.All this hails back to when I was a lonely little boy on my grandparents’ farm without playmates. I would tell stories out loud to myself for hours on end. The most common phrase you might have overheard from me was: “..and then…, …and then….”

Another way you can pump up the word count is through the use of additional or expanded subplots and characters. I have used these to good effect in the past. I have found one of the easiest methods of doing this is to add a scene. One way to identify or mark these places is with a break symbol of three asterisks centered or with a new chapter designation

There you have: the importance of word counts and how the plus them up if need be..

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

On "Being Indie": Lorena Bathey

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This post, by Lorena Bathey, originally appeared on TNBBC’s The Next Best Book Blog on 4/13/11.

On "Being Indie" is a new monthly feature that will be hosted …on TNBBC. We will meet a wide variety of independent authors, publishers, and booksellers as they discuss what being indie means to them.

 
 

Meet Lorena Bathey. In 2005, she self-published her first book Happy Beginnings: How I Became My Own Fairy Godmother. Unwilling to buckle under the pressures agented/published authors were having, she went on to develop her own publishing company and calls it Lorena B Books. In celebration of her new novel Beatrice Munson, Lorena shares what being indie means to her.

 
 
 
 
 
 
What is an Indie Author?

 

I = Independent: Is a nice way to say self published or balking the conventional publisher/agent route to do everything yourself. I like the moniker Indie author because it fits the definition more than simply self-published. As an Indie author you must be writer, editor, printer, sales, marketing, publicity, and promoter all rolled into one. A tough but satisfying job.

N= Nervous: Being an Indie author can be nerve wracking. Success is happening for Indie authors, especially with eReaders, but it’s still a gamble. Being an Indie gives you control over the things that make you nervous like publicity and promotion. You then can get more involved with wonder.

D = Dedication: To win in the Indie genre you have to be dedicated. You must know your work, the promotion, and the Indie publishing industry. But mostly you must dedicate yourself to writing. Wearing all the hats means dedicating time for all aspects that aid your success as an Indie author. Stay the course; don’t give up if you don’t make a million dollars with your first book. You need to build a platform of fans.

 

Read the rest of the post on TNBBC’s The Next Best Book Blog.

Grandma publisher

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All right, I’ll admit it, I’m really a grandmother who is trying to publish some books for my son.  Long story short, he’s in prison for a crime he did not commit (really long story about a vindictive ex-wife who made false accusations in order to gain custody of their children).  In order to keep his sanity while going through the extremely long process of appeals, he has turned to writing, and along the way has discovered he has some talent and enjoys what he’s doing.  He’s written several books, but I’ve only gotten one ready for publication (check out the website at jcallenbooks.weebly.com).  I have to confess that I’m really out of my element when it comes to web design and promotion.  So far I’ve used my social network to get the word out, but that doesn’t seem to be working very well.  And with a grand total of nine books sold so far, there’s not really any money to spend for professional help.  Any practical suggestions?

Getting recognition

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All right, I’ll admit it, I’m really a grandmother who is trying to publish some books for my son.  Long story short, he’s in prison for a crime he did not commit (really long story about a vindictive ex-wife who made false accusations in order to gain custody of their children).  In order to keep his sanity while going through the extremely long process of appeals, he has turned to writing, and along the way has discovered he has some talent and enjoys what he’s doing.  He’s written several books, but I’ve only gotten one ready for publication (check out the website at jcallenbooks.weebly.com).  I have to confess that I’m really out of my element when it comes to web design and promotion.  So far I’ve used my social network to get the word out, but that doesn’t seem to be working very well.  And with a grand total of nine books sold so far, there’s not really any money to spend for professional help.  Any practical suggestions?

Library Ebooks & The Indie Author Conundrum, Part 1

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This post, by William Van Winkle, originally appeared on his Behind the Lines blog on 3/28/11.

"Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let’s love turbulence and use it for change."
–Ramsay Clark

In case I haven’t mentioned it in the last three or four minutes, I have a new book out, and like every independent, fledgling author, I’m trying to come up with different ways to find an audience — no small trick when your book is digital-only and digital still comprises less than 15% of the total book market.

I’m an avid library patron, and, as an audiobook nut, I’ve dabbled with OverDrive’s Library2Go service over the years. Library2Go (L2G) is my home state’s chosen conduit for making electronic media available to library patrons over the Internet. Most people to whom I mention the service have no idea that it even exists…perhaps for good reason. Historically, I’ve found L2G fairly underwhelming. I had trouble finding enough audiobooks that were in MP3 format, not DRM-constrained WMA, and the titles that interested me were few and far between. I went a year, perhaps two, without looking at the site 

And then something amazing happened. Library2Go hit puberty. We often forget that most librarians, like teachers, have the public’s welfare in their minds and hearts, and they work every day trying to help make the world better. I can only assume that it was librarians (and, behind them, a fleet of impatient patrons) responsible for not only a significant rise in the number of quality audiobooks available but also the recent appearance of ebooks.

The last time I touched OverDrive, I was listening to audiobooks on a 5G iPod. Today, all of my listening filters through a Motorola Droid. (For would-be audiobook listeners, I found my 2007/2008 BlackBerry and other "legacy" cell phones inferior to the iPod for this task. This is no longer the case. Media player apps have matured to the point that they’re at least as convenient for book enjoyment as traditional music devices.) OverDrive’s player app, called Media Console, is available for Windows, Mac, Android, BlackBerry, iPhone/iPad, and Windows Mobile.

Read the rest of the post on Behind the Lines, and also see Part 2.

Platform Evolution

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Here’s a graph from my Twitter Quitter post:

A basic premise of independent authorship is that authors should establish their own platform in order to reach out to readers and potential customers. I believe in that premise. What constitutes a platform, however, remains undefined.

Implicit in the idea of an author’s platform is the creation of an online presence. Because the internet has become commonplace it’s easy to forget that an independent platform for individual artists would be impossible without it. (Prior to the internet an artist’s platform was limited by geography. Bands were limited not by their music but by their touring range.) While the advantages and opportunities provided by the internet are astounding relative to the pre-internet age, the internet is still a communications medium devised by human beings, with inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Understanding how the internet works in a business context is an ongoing process. Two days ago the New York Times put up a paywall, attempting for the second time to derive revenue from its own online platform. (The first attempt failed.) That one of the most prominent newspapers in the world is still struggling to monetize content despite almost unparalleled visibility and economic muscle is a reminder to everyone that the platform question has not been answered.

Depending on your perspective, the tendency of the human mind to cherry pick information can be seen as either a bug or a feature. In the context of online platforms, it’s easy to see successes like iTunes as indicative of potential and promise when it’s actually the result of a unique set of circumstances. Finding gold in a stream may spark a gold rush, but only a few people will stake claims that literally pan out. The internet is no different. As I noted in a post about the future of publishing:

In return for making distribution almost effortless and almost free, the internet promises nothing. No revenue. No readers. Nothing.

Possibilities are not promises. Possibilities are chances, which is why I always say that writing for profit is gambling — and gambling against terrible odds. Determining what your online platform should be, and how much time you should devote to that platform, is an important part of nudging the odds in your favor.  

Lowering the Bar
Platform-services consultants, like marketing consultants, will always tell you that you can never do enough. Because the time you can devote to your platform is limited, but the time you should devote is infinite, these people will offer to bridge that gap on your behalf, for a fee. Because the internet is driven by technology, and because anything less than a cutting-edge platform means you’re falling short, platform consultants will also offer to sell you myriad apps and solutions, all of which they will teach you about, maintain and upgrade for a fee. (The New York Times was convinced by these same people to spend $40 million dollars on a paywall that can be easily circumvented.)

Approaching your platform as a vehicle of infinite possibility constrained only by your own feeble lack of determination is a recipe for failure. You do not have an infinite amount of time and resources to devote to your platform. Even if you did, there’s no guarantee that such a commitment would equal success. From part IV of my marketing and sales series:

In the real world, if you really did grab a pick and shovel and head out into your backyard to strike it rich, your friends and family would rightly think you a loon, no matter how deeply felt your convictions were. Why? Because it’s common knowledge that gold isn’t plentiful everywhere. Rather, it’s concentrated in veins of rock or in waterways that hold gold from eroded veins of rock.

If you try to dig in the wrong place it doesn’t matter how much time or money you spend, or how cutting-edge your tools are. You’re not going to get any gold even if you have infinite resources. Because the internet obviates geographical limits it seem to negate all limits, but as the NYT’s second attempt at a paywall makes clear that’s not the case. The internet is not an infinite vein of gold waiting to be exploited if only you’re smart enough to pick the right mix of apps, site functionality and marketing techniques.

(This false premise echoes the happiness industry’s determination to blame everyone for their own failings. If you’re not a happy person it’s your own fault: stop whining and try harder. If your platform isn’t racking up clicks and sales it’s your own fault: stop whining and try harder.)

Platform Motivation
I think the right question to ask is how each independent author’s platform can most effectively dovetail with that author’s individual goals. If you’re the kind of writer who wants to write a lot of books, slaving yourself to a complex or time-consuming platform is going to keep you from reaching that goal. (I’ll elaborate on that in a moment.) If your writing goals are more modest or limited — and if the work you’re producing is itself part of a larger goal — then creating a more complex platform might make sense. For example, if you’re a public speaker or have a primary profession, authoring a book might help you further those pursuits even if the work itself never becomes a bestseller.

I think it’s also important to be conscious of the motivations behind the voices championing the idea of a platform. As a writer I think you should have a platform in order to make yourself visible. Making yourself available online allows people to find you and your work, and it allows you to have information or products waiting for them whenever they choose to arrive. Without a presence on the web you are invisible and mute, no matter how many pages you crank out.

Publishers, agents and editors want you to have a platform, but for slightly different reasons. To them your platform provides a metric by which they can measure your popularity in an uncertain marketplace crowded with aspiring writers. The measure of dedication you show to your platform also indicates how interested you might be in doing the things those people would want you to do in order to maximize sales. Given that they only make money if you make money it’s understandable that they would have these interests, but those interests do not put writing first.

In my case, for example, the decision to quit Facebook and Twitter was made after considerable deliberation about what was best for me as a writer, including assessment of the workloads involved. I’m fairly confident most publishers, agents and editors would see my choices as a mistake, if only because I’ve made it harder for them to assess my platform relative to other authors. Staying active on those sites would please them, but it would make my writing life more difficult without any demonstrable payoff. (If I write a runaway hit I can always join those sites again in order to capitalize on that success.)

Platform Criteria
So: how to juggle all of the available platform options? Well, after testing some of the options I’ve changed my own platform weighting as follows:

  • Creating and publishing new work is more important than any platform activity by at least an order of magnitude. If there’s a choice between writing and working on my platform, I’m going to write. Doing so emphasizes the proper ratio of time I should spend on my platform.

    As I said above, writers who crank out books probably need less of a platform relative to other writers. Why? Because after you establish even on an online toehold, your growing body of work becomes the greatest expression of, and attraction to, your platform.

  • Becoming a better writer is more important than bettering my platform by at least an order of magnitude. Because I’m never going to be able to drive sales with my celebrity I need to make sure I can compete with my content. Here’s how I put it in the conclusion to my series on marketing and sales:

    Writing is a qualitative act. It matters whether you suck or not. As such I believe mastery of craft is the most reliable predictor of critical or commercial success for the great majority of writers. There will always be people who succeed despite a lack of authorial gifts and there will always be good writers who are overlooked in the marketplace. But if you’re determined to play the percentages and protect your own authorial vision, nothing pays off like focusing on being the best writer you can be.

  • Both Twitter and Facebook demonstrate the same inescapable truth: if you have celebrity you’ll have more success at exploiting those sites; if you don’t, the road to cultural currency (to say nothing of sales) becomes much, much more difficult. The written word is the root of any storyteller’s celebrity. It is the engine of an author’s success in every way, including platform success. I agree that authors should launch their platforms before they launch their books, but the success of that platform will be defined largely by the success of those books, not the other way around.

  • All platforms are not the same. Some authors focus on issues, some authors focus on readers, some focus on both. (Zoe Winters wrestles with these choices here and here.) I’m at the point where I want to write and self-publish more fiction, and engage more readers. Again, however, my success at doing so will come from spending more time writing things for people to read, not more time working on my platform.

  • After a year and a half I can say with conviction that an author can have no better platform than their own website and blog. If you want to extend that locus through other sites like Facebook and Twitter, that’s fine. But you should have your own home base and you should own it. It doesn’t have to be a complex site, and probably shouldn’t be if you want to protect your writing time. And you should always protect your writing time.

Everything I’ve learned over the past year or two says that an author’s platform should be smaller rather than larger. Everything I’ve learned also says that authors should concentrate on writing rather than augmenting their platform. You do need to have a presence. You don’t need to obsess over it.

The Platform in Context
Launching an online platform is like staking a claim. You hope you pick a good spot but you also know you have to compete with everybody else working the same territory. However much time and money you decide to devote to your platform, some of your competitors will have more money, some will work harder, and some will have trained professionals helping them.

Treating your platform like a competition with others is tempting but it’s a big mistake. I’m convinced that the people who visit my site and read my words are less concerned with how my platforms stacks up against other sites than they are with how well I deliver on my promises to them. I certainly don’t want my site to look amateurish, but beyond that low bar my focus needs to be wholly on my readers.

Because the internet potentially allows an author to connect with everyone on the planet it’s tempting to try to drive readers to your platform. I’ve come to believe that doing so is a waste of time. You should approach your platform and presence as something long-term and make it easy for readers to find you when they’re interested. The best of all possible worlds is one where readers promote you and your work by word of mouth, and apart from celebrity-driven successes I can’t find any examples to the contrary. Bottom line: it takes time, so plan accordingly, including emotionally.

One of the most oft-quoted remarks about the obstacles facing independent artists comes from Tim O’Reilly:

Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

This idea has also been heavily promoted by anti-DRM advocate Cory Doctorow:

That’s because my biggest threat as an author isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. The majority of ideal readers who fail to buy my book will do so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free electronic copy.

The problem with this claim isn’t that it’s false, it’s that it’s meaningless. Obscurity is also a far greater threat to authors than smallpox, grapefruit and linoleum. If nobody knows who you are, yes, that’s a big problem. But ignoring the costs of piracy doesn’t solve any author’s obscurity problem. In fact, based on my Twitter experience, I don’t think anything can solve the obscurity problem because it’s baked into the online cake.

The internet made information available 24/7. It also made it possible for anyone to distribute digital content. Now, with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, it’s effortlessly easy for people to express every stray thought in their heads. As a result, the wall of noise that any content provider must compete against has grown exponentially. We’re at a point where every single person on the face of the earth is a direct competitor. There is no longer any distinction between the people who make content and the people who consume it.

The fact that everyone seems so deeply invested in expressing their own thoughts means fewer and fewer people are listening. Attention has become a commodity as critical to the lifeblood of a writer as obscurity is daunting:

Many of the filters earlier generations took for granted, the ones imposed by the absence of real-time communications and efficient transmission and storage, have now been eradicated by the advent of internet and digital media.

The only possible solution to the obscurity/attention quandary is not to play. No matter how great your celebrity or big your platform, there are limits. Just ask Roger Ebert. (There are also good reasons to believe that Facebook and Twitter are overvalued financially and culturally. Just ask Warren Buffett and Vincent Eaton.)

Picturing Your Platform
When I first thought about my own platform I imagined it as a kind of soap box. It was my spot in the public square of ideas. Later, I also came to think of my platform as a retail space. It was my shop and display.

Now, however, I’ve come to see my platform as a launching pad. It’s how I try to put stories and ideas and conversations into virtual orbit. Some of the things I launch may blow up on the pad, some may go to the moon, and the fate of some launches may be unknown for a long time. And nothing I do to my platform will change that.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

Getting Started With Barnes & Noble's PubIt!: A Mini Tutorial

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Although Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader is the dominant force in the e-book world at the moment, Barnes & Noble, the business based on a huge network of brick-and-mortar book superstores, is also growing.

With the launch of the Nook Color last year, Barnes & Noble has gone the Kindle one better, and people who have tried the Nook seem to like it quite a bit. Barnes & Noble also allows Nook owners to bring them into a store and read any book for free for an hour at a time, from the collection of over 2 million titles.

Like Kindle, Nook has apps that allow you to purchase and read your Nook books on your iPad, your smartphone and your PC as well as on the readers themselves.

I’ve seen estimates that over 3 million Nook Color e-readers have been sold, and that Nook now accounts for 25% of the e-book market. That’s a lot of potential customers. To make it easy for indie authors to sell their books for the Nook and the Nook Color, Barnes & Noble has installed a simple and easy to use interface. They call their publishing program Pubit!

Even Easier Than Kindle?

I went over to the Pubit! site to check it out and upload the ePub files of A Self-Publisher’s Companion. These were prepared for me by Joshua Tallent at ebookarchitects.com.

You’ll have to go through the usual Account Setup, and I won’t bore you with that. Even though you’re a seller, you’ll have to give up a credit card, too.

But that only takes a minute, and then you get to the main dashboard and data entry area.

Pubit! has cooked the whole e-book submission process down to one screen, and it’s a pleasure to use. Here’s a look:

Barnes & Noble Pubit!

In 5 easy-to-follow steps, you’re lead through all the information needed to get your book into the Barnes & Noble system. This is publishing at its simplest and most streamlined. Here’s what you can expect.

  • Product listing, including the book title, price, author, publication date and publisher name.
  • Upload Your eBook provides a browse and upload utility. It’s highly recommended that you have your book converted to ePub files first, although you should know that you can upload a Word file and Pubit! will convert it for you, you just don’t know what you’ll get.
  • Upload Your Cover Image gives you another browse and upload utility for a 5KB to 2MB JPG of your cover.
  • Help Readers Find Your eBook asks for ISBN, for a related print edition, the age group of your target market, the language in which the book is written, the geographic rights you’re able to assign, and whether you want your e-book protected with DRM (Digital Rights Management) which may or may not prevent a buyer from making illegal copies of your files.
  • Tell Us More About Your eBook is the crucial section for your marketing efforts. Obviously you want to get all the numbers right in the first sections, but here you’ll be able to pick five subject categories (Kindle only allows you two), create an author bio (about 400-500 words) and enter reviews you’ve received. The other two areas here are keywords (you get 100 characters—use them wisely) and a Description field that will allow about 800 words (5000 characters). This is a huge opportunity to put your best, benefit-oriented, keyword rich copy to work. Really work on this book description because it will become the basic sales copy in the Nook store.

After your upload, you’ll get a chance to look at your e-book in a Nook emulator. Here’s what it looks like:

Nook emulator

Click to enlarge

 

Here’s the handy category picker:
PubitCategories

Making Money With Pubit!

The pricing policy is clearly spelled out in the excellent and space-efficient help section. Pubit! tries to get you to price your e-book between $.99 and $9.99. It tries hard. In this range you will earn a 65% royalty, so a sale of a $9.99 book will yield you $6.49. However, go outside those bounds and your royalty drops drastically to 40%. This means that you will earn more with a book priced at $9.99 than you will with one priced at $15.00 ($6.00 royalty). So you can see they mean business. The maximum price allowed is $199.99.

As with Kindle, you have to keep the price of your e-book consistent across retailers.

About As Easy As It Gets

Having published many print books, it’s almost eerie how easy it is to publish e-books, whether on Kindle or Pubit! The whole Pubit! experience is well designed. The dashboard has four tabs that give you access to sales reports, payments, help topics, your books, and your account info.

If you have all your copy ready before you log on—and you should have this copy written out in advance for the many places you’ll need it—the whole process takes less than 15 minutes.

Now if we could only get these companies to agree on one, flexible, sophisticated and user-friendly file format, e-books would really take off.

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

A Writer Muses On Marketing And Sales, Part II

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There’s no right answer to whether you should view writing as a business or not. It’s a personal choice dependent on myriad factors. Knowing the answer, however, allows you to effectively navigate choices you’ll face in marketing and/or selling your work. While you should always control your costs, there’s a big difference between the expense of a print-on-demand book intended for friends and family and the effort you may need to embrace in order to take a work to the competitive retail market.

Inextricably Bound
In the previous post I said that marketing and sales were two ends of the same spectrum. The desire to resolve uncertainties about potential consumer interest is the glue by which marketing and sales are inextricably bound.

Exploring market uncertainties may involve advertising or promotional events or other common marketing and sales strategies. The results of those tests will be measured in pageviews, conversions, purchases or other metrics. As a writer, I think you should constantly remind yourself that marketing and sales are most useful when they are used to answer questions relevant to your personal objectives. Treating marketing and sales as gauges rather than goads means you will be less likely to sink cash into marketing and sales ‘solutions’ that are, at best, speculative, or be led astray by people who will gladly take your money in exchange for promises they can’t possibly keep. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. SEO Evangelist.)  

The Ends of the Spectrum
Imagine you’ve created something purely, unapologetically artistic. You’ve allowed no thought into your mind other than what the final form and expression of your creation should be. You don’t care what anybody else thinks of it and you don’t care if anybody else wants it.

Now imagine putting a sign on your creation that says “For Sale” or “Free”, then tossing it out a window. You don’t look to see where it lands, you don’t look to see if the sign is visible, or if anyone has taken notice of your creation’s arrival in the world.

That’s sales in its purest form. The product has been made available and the intent has been communicated, but only in the most minimal way. If someone does not literally stumble across the item there will be no chance of a transaction taking place.

Now rewind that scenario past even the act of creation. Imagine that you want to create something — anything — that will be readily, eagerly received. Maybe it’s something you want to sell, maybe it’s something you intend to give away, but the one thing you know even before you decide what to make is that you want it to be desired by as many people as possible.

That’s marketing in its purest form. In order to accomplish your goal, at least in theory, note that you will need to have perfect knowledge of what people want, as well as the means to notify every person on the face of the earth. This is the exact opposite of the pure sales example described above. In the sales example you gave no thought to what people wanted and you did nothing to communicate the product’s availability to anyone. In the marketing example all you’re thinking about is what people want and how you can make sure everybody knows it exists.

Admittedly these are the absurd theoretical ends of the marketing-sales continuum. It should also be obvious from these extreme examples that marketing and selling any product involves both intentions in some measure. Starting at the sales end, any effort to meet the needs of the customer involves marketing. Starting at the marketing end, any aspect of a product that will not shaped by consumer interests is something that must be sold.

How authors, and in particular storytellers, can find the right balance between the need to market and the desire to sell will be the focus of the remainder of the posts in this series.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett’s Ditchwalk.

The Seven Book Marketing Mistakes That Authors Make (Part 1 of 8)

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This post, by Vikram Narayan, originally appeared on the BookBuzzr blog on 1/16/10.

With over 400 books being published everyday, authors have a particularly big challenge when it comes to promoting a book online. As author Gayle Kelley states “The publisher’s job is to get the word out about my book…which they are doing at what I call from “35,000 feet.” That certainly is not close enough to notice the finer details of intense promotion and selling.” This problem is further compounded by the fact that the time taken to consume a book is much greater than many other forms of entertainment and leisure (see the matrix below.)

 

The BookBuzzr Cost-Consumption Quadrant
If you are sent a link to a YouTube video from a friend, you will probably click on it without thinking too much about it. But if you are sent the PDF of a book from your friend, you may not be as eager to open the book. This is because the time required to read a book is too great. Just because you get a free book does not mean that you will read it. But you may glance through a blog article or spend a few minutes on a stand-alone television show such as the Oscar Awards show. As an author of a book you are competing for the time and sustained attention of your reader with all of these other potential activities (along with other books.) Your reader can either choose to read a book or play a video game. Readers are thus forced to be judicious when it comes to choosing the books that they will read.
Given these dynamics, book marketing and book promotion is one of the most crucial activities that an author needs to master. My team and I at BookBuzzr.com, have had the opportunity to review over 3,000 books that have been uploaded on our site. Some of these books leap out at you and grab you. They tempt you to peek behind the cover. Unfortunately, many books simply fail at making a connection with a potential reader. So we spent some time researching and thinking about the biggest mistakes that authors make when it comes to marketing and promoting their books.
The top 7 mistakes that authors make are:

 

  1. No tag line (one line description that is unique to your book) for the book or author (Posted on Jan 19th, 2010).
     
  2. Being a salesperson (that’s right … the more you try to sell, the less you will sell!) (Posted on Jan 21st, 2010).
     
  3. Not promoting the person and the story behind the book (Posted on Jan 26th, 2010).
     
  4. Being stingy with information about your book (Posted on Jan 28th, 2010).
     
  5. Not creating enough repeat mentions about you or your book (Posted on February 1st, 2010).
     
  6. Not creating the perception of demand exceeding supply ( Posted on Feb 4th 2010)
     
  7. Not enough recommendations from mavens for the book ( Posted on Feb 6th 2010)

The next seven posts will elaborate on each of these mistakes.

(Next: Book Marketing Mistake Number 1 – No Tag Line for Book or Author)

(NOTE: The author wishes to thank Chetan Dhruve, Freya and other members of the BookBuzzr team for their inputs into this series of articles.)