Publetariat

Book Publishers Need To Wake Up And Smell The Disruption

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This post, by Mathew Ingram, originally appeared on Gigaom on 3/1/11.

The writing has been on the wall for some time in the book publishing business: platforms like Amazon’s Kindle and the iPad have caused an explosion of e-book publishing that’s continuing to disrupt the industry on a whole series of levels and reshape the future of the book, as Om has written about in the past. And evidence continues to accumulate that e-books aren’t just something established authors with an existing brand can make use of, but are also becoming a real alternative to traditional book contracts for emerging authors as well — all of which should serve as a massive wake-up call for publishers.

The latest piece of evidence is the story of independent author Amanda Hocking, a 26-year-old who lives in Minnesota and writes fantasy-themed fiction for younger readers. Unlike some established authors such as J.A. Konrath, who have done well with traditional publishing deals before moving into self-publishing their own e-books, Hocking has never had a traditional publishing deal — and yet, she has sold almost one million copies of the nine e-books she has written in less than a year, and her latest book appears to be selling at the rate of about 100,000 copies a month.

It’s true that the prices Hocking charges for these books are small — in some cases only 99 cents, depending on the book — but the key part of the deal is that she (and any other author who works with Amazon or Apple) gets to keep 70 percent of the revenue from those sales. That’s a dramatic contrast to traditional book-publishing deals, in which the publisher keeps the majority of the money and the author typically gets 20 percent or even less. If you sell a million copies of your books and you keep 70 percent of that revenue, that is still significant, even if each book sells for 99 cents.

Read the rest of the post on Gigaom.

A Writer Muses On Marketing And Sales, Part I

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What exactly is the difference between marketing and sales?

That’s a question I asked myself recently, and after studying the subject a bit I think I have a useful answer. This post and the posts that follow represent everything I think I now know about marketing and sales, but I claim no mastery in the matter. I simply have a better understanding of how each relates to my aims as an author, and I offer these posts in that spirit.

If the average person has a general conception of marketing and sales it’s that they are aspects of business that drive customer purchases — at times by any means necessary. While true, I think this consumer-driven perspective misplaces the emphasis for authors who would like to profit from marketing and sales. Why? Because it’s hard to imagine an author who would like to have fewer readers, which in turn implies that all marketing and sales efforts are inherently useful for every author. They’re not.

In the great majority of cases, marketing and sales are not a means by which otherwise disinterested consumers can be compelled to spend. All the marketing and sales efforts in the world are generally not going to encourage someone to buy a new stove if their stove is working just fine. Treating marketing and sales as weapons of war may be what amped-up marketing weasels do in caffeinated team-spirit huddles, but I don’t think that’s a useful point of view for authors to adopt. And not just because the opportunity to sell books in a predatory fashion is minimal at best.  

Intent
A better approach for authors is to understand marketing and sales as tools, to understand what those tools can and cannot do, and to understand when they should and should not be employed in the service of an author’s objectives. Unfortunately there is as much conflicting advice about marketing and sales as there are people professing to clarify confusion about the two terms.

Given that they do not naturally differentiate themselves, it’s understandable that definitions of marketing and sales tend to emphasize how the concepts are distinct. But I think it’s a mistake to start with the premise that marketing and sales are different things. From everything I’ve read (and for artistic reasons I’ll get into later) I believe it’s more useful to see marketing and sales as two ends of the same continuum. And that continuum is defined not by the properties of a product, but by the intent of the product’s creator.

If you make something for yourself, or for a specific person, you don’t need to think about selling or marketing that work. Whatever sales is, whatever marketing is, and however the two might or might not relate to each other, none of that matters in instances where a product is going to be conveyed to a specific person. And that’s true without regard to compensation. If you know who you’re delivering a product to it doesn’t matter whether the product is a gift or the fulfillment of a contract: there is nothing you need to know about marketing or sales in order to see your intention through. (Understanding marketing and sales may help leverage a present opportunity for future gain, but that’s not the issue here.)

While these observations may seem absurdly obvious, the implications are important. First, marketing and sales are not inextricably bound to the act of creation or production. Second, marketing and sales are not inextricably bound to financial transactions between two parties. And both conclusions hold whether the product we’re talking about is a simple item, a complex gadget or a creative work.

Reality Check
Marketing and sales matter in instances where either or both of the following is true:

  • The people who are interested in your product are not all known or aware of the product’s availability.
  • The price people will pay for your product has not been agreed to by both parties.

The problem, again, is that these criteria seemingly apply to every product. Worse, if you’re like most writers, the rationality of your entrepreneurial thought process is probably something like this. “I personally know two people who will read my work if I ask them, but I also know there are more than six billion people on the planet. Plus, there are a lot of planets we don’t know about yet, so there are probably at least a trillion potential readers out there I could market to. I also know that most books sell for X dollars, but because my book is special it will easily sell for X + Y dollars, and that’s before the movie comes out. So, conservatively, I’m probably looking at a potential profit of $74 million in the first year, give or take current exchange rates and how interested I am in doing a book tour.”

No matter who you are and no matter what you write, it’s a given that there will always be people who don’t know about your work, and people who aren’t willing to spend what you’re asking even if they think you’re the best writer in the business. That’s as true for you as it is for Stephen King or any other writer. Marketing and sales will never negate those truths no matter how much time, effort and money you throw at them.

Decision Time
What marketing and sales can do — as tools — is increase the likelihood that you will be able to reach more readers. That may or may not also translate into an increase in profits, depending on whether you charge for your work and how much money you spend on marketing and sales.

The effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts also correlates with the clarity you have about your specific authorial aims. For that reason, nothing is more important than having an honest discussion with yourself about your personal goals as a writer, including whether you see writing as a business. What else could it be?

Well, any of the following:

  • A hobby.
  • A dream.
  • An escape.
  • An emotional release.
  • An obsession.
  • A secret obsession.
  • A double-secret obsession.

Being a professional writer is a tough gig to get and a hard one to keep. Then again, so is running a successful restaurant. If you are famous among a small group of friends and family for a few tasty dishes, you may be tempted or encouraged to open your own catering business — or even your own eatery. But you would probably think twice about doing so given the increased risk, responsibilities and complexities of the undertaking. Because writing is a solitary craft it’s a little harder to draw direct parallels, but that only means you should think about the question that much more. (Note: I’m not talking about the definition of a business that the IRS uses, although that’s something else you should probably familiarize yourself with.)

If you aspire to write professionally, or even to turn a profit with your writing, it’s never too early to commit to writing as a business. It costs you nothing to do so, at least up front, and will definitely save you time, money and stress down the road. On the other hand, if you have no plan to turn your writing into a career, then that’s something you should acknowledge as early as possible. It’s going to make your writing life a whole lot easier, if not also more enjoyable.

Admitting that you’re not trying to write professionally does not mean you have to give up fantasies about success finding you, or that you’re freed from the eternal obligation to produce the best work you possibly can for your intended readers. Nobody can predict what will happen once a work is written, and that’s part of the fun of writing. But by the same token you’d have to be loony to bet on a lightning strike. And most if not all of the marketing and sales playbook involves placing bets.

Anything you do to market or sell your writing is going to take time, money or emotional capital. And if you’re like most writers I know you probably have a limited supply of each. So take a few deep breaths, then consider the following question:

Are you in business?

From the point of view of marketing and sales there are only two possible answers: yes or no. To truly understand the difference between marketing and sales, and how those tools relate to your objectives, you need to pick one of those answers. You can change your answer at any time, but you should always know what your answer is.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett’s Ditchwalk.

Publishing, Dead or Alive?

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This podcast, featuring Ron Hogan, originally appeared on the Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond The Book site on 2/27/11 and is provided here in its entirety with the permission of that site.

Attend enough conferences on the future of publishing, and pretty soon, you start to wonder if the future of publishing is conferences about the future of publishing. The small talk and the big presentations alike often portray an industry that is diplomatically referred to as “in transition,” which can reliably be taken to mean, “on its back.” Ask Ron Hogan, who’s been watching the business and working in it since the birth of digital media, for his two cents, and you get a real bargain-priced basket of feisty, no-nonsense views.

“I’m tired of hearing about the death of publishing. If these companies die, it’s because they were dedicated to a dying model,” Hogan says. “I also don’t believe that the book is going to die out; the digital economy is not going to completely overwhelm the existing print market for books anytime soon.

“People like to give each other real books, especially pretty books,” Hogan explains to CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “Art books are going to be a category where print is going to continue to matter for some time. There are going to be very cool things that you can do in digital books and e-book apps, but at the same time there are some things that you can really only present effectively and most attractively in paper.”

 Publishing, Dead or Alive? [15:20m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

 

The Borders And A&R Collapse

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Everyone is blogging about the collapse of REDgroup, the company that owns the bookshop chains of Borders and Angus & Robertson (and Whitcoulls in New Zealand). I was going to write a big long ranty post all about it, but the truth is it’s all been done. A quick web search will yield more opinions than you can fit on a ballot sheet. But I will add, very briefly, my perception of the whole thing. (Which probably means I’m about to write a big long ranty post!)

Lots of people are trying to establish exactly what this collapse is and what caused it. I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not the great ebook revolution; it’s not shitty management by REDgroup; it’s not the global financial crisis; it’s not the rising cost of physical shop rents; it’s not the massive surge in online shopping and stores like Amazon stealing business. At least, it’s not any one of these things. It’s all of these things.

It’s the progress of industry. Sure, the management of the whole group was blindly stupid and greedy, but without the other factors they’d probably have survived. Sure, Amazon, Book Depository and stores like them are having a massive impact on brick and mortar bookstores, but without the other factors they’d probably have survived. When you combine all the factors at once, this stuff is inevitable. Pretty much every major bookstore chain will suffer. The nature of the industry is changing. It’s a terrible shame for all those people that are going to lose their jobs, but that’s a part of life. It’s like the shipbuilders on the Tyne, the coalminers in the Welsh hills, the dudes that used to run photo processing shops specialising in dark room development. The world moves on, things change, technology develops and old methods and jobs slowly disappear. But new ones also emerge. The smart and the rich are the ones that stay ahead of the curve.

Putting shitty American coffee chains in shitty American book store chains wasn’t going to suddenly make Borders a going business concern. Turning Angus & Robertson into cheap remainder bins with plate glass windows was never going to ensure their survival. High street and mall book stores, just like paper books, are going to be disappearing. There will still be paper books (I’ve talked about this a lot before) but they’ll be specialty books, or Print On Demand books from online stores. Just the same, there will still be book shops, but they’ll be specialty stores, catering to a particular niche of collectors or genre and they’ll have to diversify – comic books, trading cards, games, collectibles – all the stuff that fits the niche.

Whether we like it or not, the world is constantly changing. With change comes death and rebirth. Some things crumble to dust while others are born from the ashes of their predecessor’s demise. There were once people that were skilled at many things that no longer have a place in the world. You can’t blame any one thing except progress. The same is true of the recent book store collapse. There are many mitigating factors that contributed to the stores going under at this particular time, but that’s the small stuff. The changing face of publishing, reading and book selling is going to keep changing.

Within the next decade, I predict, we’ll see very few, if any, big chain book stores. Mass market stuff will be in all the department stores and K-Marts and places like that, but mainly online. Eventually you’ll only get your mass market release in hard copy at a POD booth or ordered that way online. There’ll be specialist stores dealing with specialist buyers and collectible books, while pretty much everyone else buys their stuff online. And the vast majority of it will be ebooks, with a small chunk held by POD releases. There’ll be a rise in collectible, beautiful, probably limited edition hardback releases. Kids starting school now will look at print books the same way we look at vinyl and tape cassettes. If you compare books to albums, you can look at the ebook as the CD and the print book as the vinyl release. The ratios will be pretty similar soon enough, I expect. And before long the CD and will disappear unless you order one, POD style. There’ll be a rise in small press releases with short print runs, and more small press will utilise online bookstores and ebooks for their distribution. Eventually the small press print run will be a thing of the past.

It’s all going to happen, so trying to find a particular reason for the demise of Borders is like trying to look for a particular reason for the demise of the Victorian era. It didn’t die because Victoria did – it ended because we all moved on, in a slow and incremental way with all kinds of contributing factors. That’s life.

Told you I wasn’t going to write a big long ranty post.
 

 

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

Authors As Salespeople

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A question from my ex-publisher stimulated me think about the pay structure in traditional publishing. The question she asked was: Why couldn’t you sell all those books when you were still under contract? Many factors came into play at the same time to quickly boost my e-book sales. Pricing strategy, volume of books, and massive effort all played a part. But one of the biggest issues was motivation, aka incentive.

In the business world, salespeople work for a small base pay and most of their income is in the form of incentive pay and bonuses. The more they sell, they more money they make. To some extent, this is true in traditional publishing, except that after the initial advance, writers (aka salespeople) only get paid every six months. If other businesses functioned that way, they’d have a hard time hiring and keeping salespeople. It’s hard to stay motivated when you wait half a year for a paycheck… then realize your publisher has kept most of it.

The other factor is information. Most salespeople get constant feedback on their performance. They know at any point exactly how their sales numbers are adding up. They can use that information to tailor their techniques and improve their sales. In traditional publishing, sales information comes too late to be effective and is often hard to decipher.

When you self-publish on Amazon, through both the Digital Text Platform and Create Space, after the initial six-week wait, you get paid every month. You also have access to hourly, daily, and monthly sales data. This information is direct feedback that you can use to figure out what promotional techniques work best. It can also function as incentive. When you see the sales bump up, it’s exciting and motivating.

Together, the steady income and the sales data provide a great incentive to spend time everyday blogging, tweeting, posting comments, and writing press releases. Wouldn’t it be interesting if traditional publishing houses followed Amazon’s lead and incentivized their writers to be diligent salespeople as well?

Publishers will say: It’s not possible. It’s too much bookkeeping. We’ve always done it this way. But Amazon knows what it’s doing, and it’s kicking ass in the publishing world.

What do you think? Would you work harder if your publisher gave you more sales data and paid you more often?

L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, Passions of the Dead, and Dying for Justice.

 

This is a reprint from LJ Sellers‘ blog.

Promote Your Books in the Publications Section on LinkedIn

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In a recent post, I gave instructions for promoting your books on your LinkedIn profile by using the Reading List by Amazon application to post a book cover image and a link to your book’s Amazon sales page.

Another way to get visibility for your books on LinkedIn is to use the new Publications section on the profile. The great thing about this Publications area is that you can list any type of publication, regardless of whether it is available on Amazon. You can even list free ebooks or newsletters.

Just follow these four easy steps to promote your books and other publications on LinkedIn:

1. Click on “Profile” and make sure you are on the “Edit Profile” tab.

2. Go to the “Are You Published” area and click on “Add Sections.”

LinkedIn3

Note: If you don’t see the “Are You Published” box on your profile, look for a similar box that says “Add sections to reflect achievements and experiences on your profile.”

3. On the next screen, click the “Publications” button on the left and then click the “Add to Profile” button.

LinkedIn4

4. Complete the publication description on the next screen, then click the “Add Publication” button.  Remember to include important keywords in your publication descriptions, to help people find your profile and your publications when they search by keyword.

Here is what the finished product looks like on my profile:

LinkedIn6

The book title is hyperlinked to the book sales page on my website. On my LinkedIn profile, the “Publications” section appeared below the “Experience” section, but you can move some of the sections around by dragging and dropping them.

To add additional books, go back into "Edit Profile" mode, scroll down to the "Publications" area, and click on "Add a Publication."

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

The Numbers Game

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This post, from JA Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 2/18/11.

So I just got off the phone with an acquaintance of mine. She’s a writer whom I met last year at a conference, and she called me asking for advice.

First some background. She’s hit the extended NYT list several times in both hardcover and mass market, and has a backlist of ten books. She was just offered a contract from one of the Big 6 for $200k a book, for a two book deal.

The royalties offered are industry standard 25% for ebooks on net.

She’s thinking about releasing the book herself, and needed some help crunching the numbers. She’s had several previous contracts for $200k a book, but so far none of her books have earned out their advance, even six years later. (This is common, by the way, even though she’s had multiple printings. If I’d been paid $200k for Whiskey Sour or Afraid, I wouldn’t have earned out either.)

Here’s what I told her:

The 25% the publisher is offering is actually based on net. So you’re getting 17.5% of the list price. (Amazon gets 30%, they get 52.5%–which is obscene)

When your agent gets her cut, you’re earning 14.9% of list price on ebooks.

For a $9.99 ebook, that’s $1.49 in your pocket for each one sold.

If ebook prices go down (and they will) it would be 75 cents for you on a $4.99 ebook

If you release a $4.99 ebook on your own, at 70%, you’d earn $3.50 an ebook.

Let’s say you sell a modest 1000 ebooks per month at $4.99.

That’s $9000 a year you’d make on ebooks through your publisher vs. $42,000 a year on your own.
 

Read the rest of the post on JA Konrath‘s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

Authors as Salespeople

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A question from my ex-publisher stimulated me think about the pay structure in traditional publishing. The question she asked was: Why couldn’t you sell all those books when you were still under contract? Many factors came into play at the same time to quickly boost my e-book sales. Pricing strategy, volume of books, and massive effort all played a part. But one of the biggest issues was motivation, aka incentive.

In the business world, salespeople work for a small base pay and most of their income is in the form of incentive pay and bonuses. The more they sell, they more money they make. To some extent, this is true in traditional publishing, except that after the initial advance, writers (aka salespeople) only get paid every six months. If other businesses functioned that way, they’d have a hard time hiring and keeping salespeople. It’s hard to stay motivated when you wait half a year for a paycheck… then realize your publisher has kept most of it.

The other factor is information. Most salespeople get constant feedback on their performance. They know at any point exactly how their sales numbers are adding up. They can use that information to tailor their techniques and improve their sales. In traditional publishing, sales information comes too late to be effective and is often hard to decipher.

When you self-publish on Amazon, through both the Digital Text Platform and Create Space, after the initial six-week wait, you get paid every month. You also have access to hourly, daily, and monthly sales data. This information is direct feedback that you can use to figure out what promotional techniques work best. It can also function as incentive. When you see the sales bump up, it’s exciting and motivating.

Together, the steady income and the sales data provide a great incentive to spend time everyday blogging, tweeting, posting comments, and writing press releases. Wouldn’t it be interesting if traditional publishing houses followed Amazon’s lead and incentivized their writers to be diligent salespeople as well?

Publishers will say: It’s not possible. It’s too much bookkeeping. We’ve always done it this way. But Amazon knows what it’s doing, and it’s kicking ass in the publishing world.

What do you think? Would you work harder if your publisher gave you more sales data and paid you more often?

L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, Passions of the Dead, and Dying for Justice.

The Do's And Don'ts Of Cover Design: Publishing Lesson #1

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This post, by Bob Mayer, originally appeared on his Bob Mayer’s Blog on 2/18/11.

A good cover can make or break a book, especially for on-line buying. In a bookstore, most books are racked spine out, so author name sometimes means more. Readers can pick up your book, thumb through, get a feel for story and writing and then decide. On-line, readers see your cover. It has to say, “buy me, I’m a good book” to the reader. If it doesn’t, why would they take the time to possibly download a sample, or even look at product description? The changes in publishing have given the author many great opportunities and self-publishing is a viable option. However, self-publishing requires the author to make a few major decisions, and one of those decisions is cover.

You have a couple of options. You can do it yourself or your can hire a cover artist. There are many programs out there to choose from. There are many do it yourself programs, free programs, even programs that come with your computer that can create cover design. Even Word has the capability of designing a basic cover, but will the cover be good enough to invite the reader in?   The question you have to ask yourself is it worth your time and energy to do it “right”. Hiring someone to do your covers can run as low as $50.00 and as high as $600.00.

This is not an easy decision, especially when you factor in other costs that go into making an eBook available to the reader. We made the decision to invest in the proper tools to do it ourselves because we had the design background, and the technical ability. We purchased the complete InDesign package from Adobe ($1,299.00) partly for the ability to create covers for on-line purchasing, but also because it made it much easier to create the full-jacket cover for our print-on-demand books and for web design.

Even with the proper tools we made a few cover mistakes along the way.

Publishing Mistake #1: Always Judge a Book by its Cover.

Read the rest of the post on Bob Mayer’s Blog. Note that while the author opted to purchase a professional software suite, the design tips provided in the article are equally applicable for use with consumer-grade software or when working with a hired cover designer, they are not specific to InDesign.

Invitation To The Madhouse ~ Report On Self-Publishing

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Alert: Stay turned to this channel for a special broadcast, Monday, 28 Feb.
Irina Avtsin will tell us all about the power of the word, “No!”.
~~~~~~~~~

{This post is almost a rant and purposefully written in a voice I rarely use…}

A madhouse is where insane persons are confined or a place exhibiting stereotypical characteristics of such a place.

This, to me, right now, is what self-publishing is.

Let me define my terms a bit more precisely:

“Sanity” has roots indicating “healthy condition” or “soundness of mind”. If I temporarily constrict my argument to the term “publishing”, most people who are trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in this arena of human experience would, I feel, tend to agree that publishing is not in a healthy condition or showing soundness of mind.

Many of those same people would go further and claim that self-publishing is the medicine needed for the sick field of publishing.

Well…

I’ve been involved in self-publishing for about six years now and the last year has seen me working overtime to come to terms with how to best take advantage of the opportunities that self-publishing seems to offer.

I don’t have space in this post to detail the ills of the traditional publishing route but anyone interested can easily find much to ponder.

So, try to accept one point on a conditional basis: self-publishing can bring a book to market faster and supply the author with higher royalties than traditional publishing, as long as the author is not already on the bestseller lists or in the stable of a publishing house being preened to take the book-world by storm when the right marketing moment arrives.

If the above statement is true, one would think that an author would find it easier to self-publish…

My experience has been that the word “easy” needs to be carefully defined with ample attention being paid to whether said author has what it takes to build their own following and work intensely at experimenting till they find the particular combination of tasks that can assure them a sufficient platform of eager individuals waiting to render them aid on publishing day.

If you are comfortable with building relationships, if you can be honestly altruistic in those relationships, if you can multiply the number of those relationships, if you have the time to attend to them with care and diligence, if you have the money to pay for or can trade for the expertise of editors, artists, and publicity specialists, then, maybe you would say self-publishing is easier than going the traditional route.

The reason I’ve been willing to persevere in the madhouse of self-publishing isn’t because I can easily fulfill all the ifs in the last paragraph.

I will continue to do all I can to successfully self-publish my work-in-progress because I lack the patience to search for an agent who would accept the unusual book I had to write and must publish, because I don’t have a few years to wait while such an agent finds a publisher who thinks my book can sell and negotiates a contract, because I refuse to be paid a royalty that can have itself disappear in paybacks to the publisher if the book doesn’t sell, and because finding an editor I don’t have to pay and supplying cover artwork are something I was able to personally handle.

So, from my perspective, the crumbling house of traditional publishing and the raucous adolescent scene of self-publishing are both “madhouses” but I’m a writer and I have a book I’ve written and I want people to read it and I had to make a choice…

I chose self-publishing.

I’ve written about this topic before in this blog and using the handy Top Tags Cloud in the side panel will lead you to those other musings…

What are your thoughts, theories, experiences, and rants or raves about traditional publishing and self-publishing?
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Web Seminar Debates How Self-Publishing Will Lose Its Stigma

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This post, by Lynn Andriani, originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 2/23/11.

Thanks to the well-publicized success of authors like J.A. Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and Seth Godin, the stigma surrounding self-publishing is fading fast. Still, it’s far from gone, and a web seminar sponsored by PW and Digital Book World yesterday titled The Evolution of Self-Publishing covered the reasons for self-publishing’s stigma, how and why it’s losing that stigma, and what the industry and individual authors need to do in order to help self-publishing move even further into the mainstream.

But first, about those aforementioned bestsellers? Panelist and author Jason Pinter expressed his frustration at always hearing the same few names repeated as examples of how lucrative self-publishing can be. “What annoys me is that the same names are always used: Godin, Konrath, Hocking, The Shack,” he said. “There’s a sense of people latching on to a couple of individuals who’ve found success and then those people get a lot of publicity. Then it’s, ‘They can do it; I can!’ There is a bit of a fallacy there; it’s not always the case.”

Though there are, of course, many reasons most self-published books don’t sell well. One of the main reasons mentioned by the panelists? Marketing. “It’s one of the hardest things to do,” Pinter said. “Authors really need to look at what their goals are and how they’re going to realistically achieve them.” Carolyn Pittis, svp, global author services at HarperCollins, agreed: “Marketing is the issue of our time. Book marketing is the biggest challenge that anyone in the book business is facing today, purely because there’s so much noise and so much content getting created and so many potential distractions.” Marketing often determines a book’s commercial success—or failure, said Phil Sexton, publisher and community leader at Writer’s Digest. “It’s about what the intent of the author is. How much they’re going to back [their book], whether or not they’re going to try and sell it.”


Read the rest of the post on Publishers Weekly.

The Imminent Collapse Of The Publishing Bubble

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This post, by Candice Adams, originally appeared on the examiner.com site on 1/7/11.

Booms and bubbles are considered economic inevitabilities—when the getting is good, people will keep buying and selling until the last dollar to be made is had. Recent times have witnessed the burst of the tech and housing bubble. Most bubbles generally don’t survive longer than a decade due to a continued escalation in the destructive behavior that eventually dooms the industry. But what if a bubble lasted longer? Could the traditional publishing model be seeing the end of a 40-year bubble?

Bubbles occur for several psychological reasons, but the one that pertains most closely to the traditional publishing model is “The Greater Fool Theory.” This theory, although not scientifically proven but empirically observed, relies on the market’s overvaluation of a product leading to an inflation in price. The price continues to rise as long as a seller can find a greater fool than himself to sell it to. When the price finally plummets, the bubble bursts.

Moreso than books being overpriced, the traditional publishing model has been propped up by several illogical modus operandi that could eventually lead to the collapse of this house of cards.

1. Dog eat dog: Over the past 40 years, the publishing industry has gone from small publishers working with authors to instead being dominated by the “Big Six” corporate publishing houses (Random House, Macmillian, Simon & Schuster, Pearson/Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette). Corporate publishing eventually led to the rise of the literary agent and the retail behemoths Barnes & Noble and Borders. Corporate publishers continued to acquire smaller presses that couldn’t compete with the large advances that corporations could offer. Larger advances led to more complicated deals, which needed to be brokered by an agent who preferred to work with corporate publishers who offered larger advances. With more books in their catalogues and backlists, the small independent bookstore could no long house, nor move, that quantity of inventory, and they were soon largely put out of business by the corporate mega-bookstores. However, in order for corporate publishers to continue to see profit in a very mature industry (and every corporation has to see profit), the Big Six began acquiring and producing fewer titles and attempting to sell more of the books they produce (i.e., publishing high concept book that could be optioned for their film rights, celebrity tell-alls, etc.) So while there is more book-selling space, fewer books are actually sold.

Read the rest of the post on examiner.com.

Context First, Revisited

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This post, by Brian O’Leary, originally appeared on the Magellan Media Consulting Partners site on 2/21/11.

(This post provides the content for a presentation I recently gave as part of O’Reilly Media’s “Tools of Change in Publishing” conference.  It builds on a talk I initially gave last October at the Internet Archive’s “Books in Browsers” conference.  A screencast that includes the presentation visuals has been posted on Vimeo.  It runs about 23 minutes).

For the last couple of years I’ve been writing about a set of publishing topics – piracy, disruptive innovation, print on demand, workflow and content strategy, among others – that I started to think were connected by a common theme.

I first called that theme “a unified field theory of publishing”, more than a mouthful, but I think “context first” is a better and more helpful description.  In that spirit, my talk today addresses the damage done by what I call the “container model of publishing”.

My idea in a nutshell is this: book, magazine and newspaper publishing is unduly governed by the physical containers we have used for centuries to transmit information.  Those containers define content in two dimensions, necessarily ignoring that which cannot or does not fit.

Worse, the process of filling the container strips out context – the critical admixture of tagged content, research, footnoted links, sources, audio and video background, even good old title-level metadata – that is a luxury in the physical world, but a critical asset in digital ones.  In our evolving, networked world – the world of “books in browsers” – we are no longer selling content, or at least not content alone.  We compete on context.

I propose today that the current workflow hierarchy – container first, limiting content and context – is already outdated.  To compete digitally, we must start with context and preserve its connection to content.

We need to think about containers as an option, not the starting point.  Further, we must start to open up access, making it possible for readers to discover and consume our content within and across digital realms.

Without a shift in mindset, we are vulnerable to a range of current and future disruptive entrants.  Containers limit how we think about our audiences.  In stripping context, they also limit how audiences find our content.

Here, scale is not our friend.  It may well be the enemy.  As Clay Christensen first outlined in 1997, disruptive technologies don’t look or feel like what we typically value.  Often enough, they are cheaper, simpler, smaller and more convenient than their traditional analogues.


Read the rest of the post on the Magellan Media Consulting Partners site.

How To: Deal With Negative Online Sentiment About Your Brand

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This article, by Maria Ogneva, originally appeared on Mashable on 2/21/11. Maria Ogneva is the Head of Community at Yammer, where she is in charge of social media and community programs, and internal education and engagement. You can follow her on Twitter, her blog, and via Yammer’s Twitter account and company blog.

Brands try to inspire excitement among their communities so that their fans and supporters will do the selling for them. That’s called advocacy, and it’s much more powerful than self-promotion. There are of course many ways to cultivate that fan base and get your advocates motivated

On the flip side, however, are “badvocates” –- the folks who spread negative comments about you with their networks. For example, Kevin Smith’s experience with Southwest Airlines.

It’s important for any business learn how to handle this badvocacy. To do so, you must first understand its causes.

Causes of Badvocacy
 

In most cases, badvocacy is a result of negative experiences with your brand. These can come from:

  • Inconsistency across channels and touchpoints. With social media, you can touch the customer at any point in the purchase cycle: Pre-purchase, during, and post-purchase. Each of those interactions has to add value and be consistent with the rest of the experience.

    Let’s take support as an example. When you provide multi-channel support, you need to be careful about creating a consistent experience across all channels. Twitter support tends to lead other channels in its ability to provide individual solutions to customers. Other channels tend to lag behind. How many times have you called a support line only to have them route you to another 800 number because information you are looking for is in a different database? An inconsistent user experience can breed bad experiences. 

  • Inconsistency with expectations. Several times, I’ve gotten excited about a product based on the advertised promise, only to discover that that expectation was wrong. This type of disconnect certainly breeds negative feelings because time, effort and possibly money were wasted. 
  • A negative relationship with people who represent the company. Social media can humanize your brand, if used correctly. It’s important, however, that everyone adheres to the highest codes of conduct and is on the same page about company’s policies, news, product and feature releases, etc. A negative interaction with any person, whether in social or traditional channels, will mar the user’s view of the brand. 

Chronic Complainers

Read the rest of the article, which offers specific strategies for dealing with and preventing "Badvocacy" on Mashable.

Book Package Deals

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I often get advertisement pieces from printers calling themselves publishers. One feature common to these offerings is the use of package deals, most of which are named with exotic titles such as the “Gold Program” or the “Star Package.” These special deals provide varying deals based around pre-press services, printing of a certain number of books, and even marketing offers. Here are a few things you should be aware of:

Each package is optimized for the max number of pages or words offered by the package deal. That means the best per page price you will ever get from them for that package is for the max number of pages they offer. Any number less than that means the per page price just keeps going up and up. For example, If the max pages allowable by a certain program is 300 pages and you have produced 250 pages, you will be getting those 250 pages at the 300 pages price.

Oft times the company will offer glowing expectations for royalties described as being in the thousands of dollars. In fact, the company is shooting for the friends and family market, some of whom have the gall to ask you for a list of everyone in your family and your friends who might be interested in purchasing your book. That book will often be way overpriced for the booksellers’ market, meaning bookstores won’t have an interest in carrying your books for the general public. Friends and family, however, may well pay the inflated price to see their loved one’s book. Once the list of contacts you provided are contacted  for sales of your book, the company moves on to the next author, even if they say they’ll market your title for years to come.

This is why experienced folks in the book business warn about the sharks and barracudas out there. Consider yourself warned.

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear’s Book Trends.