Business End

It was inevitable. Smaller e-book enablers are striking deals with major companies in order to see their content distributed and sold. E-books are no different from any other valuable commodities; they need economy of scale to be able to succeed and survive. The latest is last week’s deal struck between Smashwords and Blio.

Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords, announced the deal and explained it in an email to all the authors who have e-books on the Smashwords site that they would now also be carried by Blio, a major e-book distributor that provides content from the major publishers.

Baker and Taylor, the second largest book distributor in the world, uses Blio to sell its e-books to indie bookstores and libraries. My bookstore, The Book Barn, has its own landing page on Baker and Taylor’s data base. If you go to that page, you can see the Blio connections. You can even download their free AP to turn your computer into a book reader. Blio also connects with Google Books where over 1,000 e-books that have outlived their copyright protection can be had for free.

This is a win/win for everybody. It also levels the playing field with Amazon and Barnes and Noble. All this makes good business sense.

[Here’s a link to the Smashwords blog post about the new alliance.]

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files blog on the Idea Logical Company site on 2/28/12.

A lot of people in publishing would pay a lot of money to get a reliable answer to these two questions:

When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop?

Who will be left standing when it does?

I won’t attempt to answer those two questions in this post. In fact, the purpose here is to begin to generate agreement that those are, indeed, the way the industry’s existential strategic questions should be framed going forward. In my consulting work, it is often my role to provide “synthesis and articulation.” This post will begin to document the synthesis that led to articulating the questions, which are actually implicit statements, above. The catalyst for these ruminations was the news last week about Amazon’s dust-up with Independent Publishers Group (IPG), a demonstration of its power and willingness to exercise it that recalls an incident almost exactly two years ago when they were unsuccessful at bullying Macmillan (or the other big publishers) into giving up their notion of implementing agency pricing.

Amazon was not the first online bookseller. But they appear to have had several distinctions from all others from the beginning. One is that they always saw bookselling as a springboard to a much larger business. That meant that bookselling was, perhaps primarily, a customer acquisition tool, not an end in itself. A second is that they saw, long before it was accepted general wisdom, that perfecting the “customer experience” online was the core requirement for success. And the combination of those two things, in concert with the ubiquitious availability of capital for promising Internet propositions that characterized the late 1990s, fueled growth powered by aggressive pricing that has had their trading partners and competitors agape for nearly two decades.

Any discussion of Amazon’s success must acknowledge that the other key component, aside from the strategic components of long-term vision, smart use of capitalization, and customer-centricity, has been the quality of their execution. This has been true from the beginning and it is still true today. Some of this is subjective, but it still looks to me like they offer a better print searching-and-buying experience than BN.com and a better overall ebook ecosystem than Nook or Kobo. I read on an iPhone and use all the ebook purchasing systems from time to time, but I use Kindle the most because it is the best. I am close to somebody who prefers to buy from BN.com because (she says; I don’t do this research…) they give money to Democrats and Amazon gives money to Republicans, but she still does her searching at Amazon because it works better before she hops over to BN.com to make her purchase.

[An update on that last point since the original posting of this piece. I was challenged on the "Amazon is red" statement by a couple of people whose opinions I trust, so I asked my favorite Democrat for citations and I got two. You’ll see (if you care and if you look) that both of the analyses that delivered this characterization are squarely within the Bush presidency, so they could constitute a company hedging bets rather than expressing political conviction. On the other hand, B&N was blue throughout the Bush Administration. And the point about the search engines, which was the one germane to this piece, remains true.]

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

This post, by LJ Sellers, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective site and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

Amazon is a company. Granted, a retailer with aggressive tactics meant to support long-term growth. But it is not an oversized kid (or childish adult) with personality problems who deliberately picks on weaker people for sport. And when people call Amazon a bully, they dilute the term’s meaning and diminish the experience of human beings who have been personally victimized, bruised, and emotionally scarred by such human behavior.

Amazon functions much like other companies, only more successfully than its competitors. Its tactics, as far as I know, are legal. (The tax issues are still being debated but that’s another subject.) Some people would argue that its tactics are not fair, but what does that mean? Does the word fair apply in business? Again, we’re not dealing with children. The concept of one for me and one for you is not how capitalism works.

Some businesses are content to coast along, partner with others, and not worry about the future. Other businesses are more ambitious. They have long-term goals, and they work aggressively to meet those goals, even if it means putting competitors out of business. Barnes & Noble was once that kind of business. It bought up competitors, closed many retail outlets, and forced hundreds of indie bookstores to fold. People called it a bully too. But it was just business, capitalism in action.

Now the same people who denounced B&N (small bookstore owners, small publishers, and writers clinging to the old model) are crying foul on Amazon and worrying that B&N, now the underdog, will not survive the competition for customers.

I too worry a little that Amazon will dominate the publishing industry, at least for a while, and that customer choice will begin to be limited. But Amazon won’t get to that point by being a bully, just a savvy, fast-growing company with an eye on the long-term future.

And yes, this blog was inspired in response to the struggle between Amazon and Independent Publishers Group, which I blogged about yesterday in more detail. A struggle in which Amazon held firm on its terms and lost the right to publish all of IPG’s ebooks. I saw Amazon called a bully over and over yesterday, but I think the word is misused.

I don’t mean to imply that the human owners of indie publishers and bookstores aren’t feeling emotional about what’s happening in the publishing industry as a result of Amazon’s success. I’m sure they are and rightfully so. But Amazon’s success is not a vendetta, and there’s no point in taking it personally. Those emotions will just keep people from making rational business decisions.

What do you think?

One thing that happens when you go to a writing conference is you end up spending a lot of time with writers. Many kinds of writers. And that can be very instructive.

There were several hundred writers in attendance at the San Francisco Writers Conference, which ended yesterday. Throughout the four days there were writing workshops, keynote addresses, “ask the pro” sessions and a lot of panels and presentations about options in self-publishing.

Although most of the sessions were on writing topics, the incredible popularity and explosive growth of self-publishing, both with new and already-established writers is the obvious rationale for presenting this material. And there were some people who were clearly interested in pursuing the self-publishing option.

Slogan of the Day

In almost every presentation, somewhere along the line I heard, “It’s the best time to be a writer.”

And why not? Armed with only a laptop and an imagination, a writer today can create her own publishing story, gather fans, learn to market her books, and start to make real money though book sales if she keeps at it and has good skills.

In many of these self-publishing presentations there were stories told of authors who had followed this same path and arrived at the promised land, where agents and editors are calling you with six- and seven-figure offers.

Just before the big panel I was part of on Saturday morning, I read in Publishers Weekly about the latest, Brittany Geragotelis, who used the reader community Wattpad to accumulate over 16 million reads of her work, attracting a six-figure contract from Simon & Schuster.

The Dark Side: Still There

It was also interesting that many writers had never considered self-publishing. On the last day of the conference there was a big, two-hour panel discussion on “The Great Adventure: Joining the Self-Publishing Revolution,” moderated by Carla King (Self-Publishing Bootcamp) and including Mark Coker (Smashwords), Brian Felsen (Bookbaby), Jan Johnson, (Turning Stone) and Jesse Potash, (PubSlush). And me. Pretty good panel, wouldn’t you say?

The room was reduced to half its usual size by dividers, and it was still only about half-full.

Where were all the writers?

They were upstairs, standing in a long, long line that snaked from a room at one end of the hotel, through the lobby and in front of the front desk. Each grasped a sheaf of papers and many looked nervous.

This was the core of their visit to the conference, and maybe the reason a lot of them paid to come to San Francisco: “Speed Dating With Agents.” A chance to sit down and talk face to face to a literary agent is a powerful draw for an unpublished writer.

I thought about some of the writers I know. Many are quite technophobic. Just learning Word is a major accomplishment. I know people who can write prose that will melt your heart, but they never figured out how to attach something to an email.

These writers will never join my training course. They might read the blog because you can get it in your email. The whole thought of “formatting” makes them nervous. They just want to write, and let other people take care of the rest.

I’m not so sure it’s the best of times for these writers. It could be coming into the worst of times. As popular fiction moves to ebooks, publishers try to find an economic model that will survive digitization, and marketing becomes a necessity for the average author, what are non-technical writers to do?

Most of the new self-publishers who are in the news get there through using social media for marketing. Many are bloggers or do blog tours. This is a community in which uploading to Kindle Direct Publishing is about as easy as booking a flight online.

But even in 2012, many writers aren’t there yet, and the dream of landing that contract lives on.

Do you think there will be writers who are pushed aside by the technical requirements of the new era in publishing? Or will there always be publishers to take care of the business end of things for writers who want no part of it?

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

This Beyond The Book podcast and transcript are provided in their entirety by the Copyright Clearance Center.

In this interview, Ingram Chief Content Officer Phil Ollila discusses what book publishers should consider when setting out for new markets, specifically international markets. He explains how the advent of the digital file has changed the barriers to distribution of content, opening up opportunities abroad that previously may not have existed. He also discusses how publishers can go about sharing their work with audiences worldwide.

In the publishing world, regime change is underway. It’s not happening in Tahrir Square or even in Times Square. The old is giving way to the new in the virtual square, and players like Ingram Content Group have declared themselves on the side of the new regime.

In his role as Ingram’s Chief Content Officer, Phil Ollila leads a number of Ingram business units including wholesale merchandising, Lightning Source, Ingram Publisher Services, and digital distribution through CoreSource. Last fall, Ingram launched Global Connect, a program to allow publishers in any country to print and distribute titles in countries where Ingram has its own operations as well as in countries of one of its partners. Ollila tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally what book publishers should think about in 2012 when setting out for new markets.

“Today, when we think about the delivery of books and the distribution books, one thing we should think about is the consumer, and not necessarily the traditional supply chains of bookstores,” he explains. “For publishers, their content can now be available on a worldwide basis with a single entry point. In the past, they had to think about selling rights in a foreign rights market, or the physical delivery of that book on a ship or a train or an airplane.”