Business End

Articles about the business aspects of publishing and self-publishing.

How To Build A List Of Readers For Your Next Book Launch

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So you’ve written a book and you’re about to publish it. Maybe you know you’re going to write another, maybe you have six more planned in the series, or maybe you have no idea what will come next, but you think perhaps you should know who your readers are. These days we all have to market ourselves and if you can market directly to people who love your work, it’s that much easier.

You are in the most powerful position right now to capture information about your market.

If you have no website, no twitter following, no social media presence at all, no speaking platform – nothing else at all – you can still start building a list of people who like your writing.If you have all these things, you can still capture a specific list who love your books.

Simply add to the end of the book a link to a website with a sign up list.

You can do this inside your print book or at the end of your Kindle book. Even if your book is out there, you can modify your files for print on demand or ebooks. So it’s not too late for anyone.

The example right is at the end of Pentecost and www.ProphecyNovel.com points to a signup page.

How do you actually set up list-building software?

Read about the basics of list-building here. I use Aweber (affiliate link) which is one of the best and most highly reputable services as well as being easy to use. You also need a site to put it on (you can use a wordpress.com free site) and a URL if you want an easy to remember one. This one just points back to a page on this blog so nothing too exciting there but I will point it to a special page once Prophecy gets going e.g. free chapters etc.

This has the obvious benefit of giving you a list of people who liked your book enough to sign up for the next one. You can email them directly when you have your next book out or send out information prior to get the launch started early.

It also has the added benefit of giving you a kick up the ass! I get emails daily showing that people are signing up for Prophecy and every day, I think I could have made another sale. There is great power in the backlist, and great earning potential and this is a daily reminder I need to get on with the series.

How are you building a list of readers for your next launch? Does this help?

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Author Ethics: A Practical Guide

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This post, by Julie Ann Dawson, originally appeared on her Tales From The Sith Witch, a Bards and Sages blog, on 9/3/11. It serves as an introduction to a more thorough project of research and analysis on the topic, so please be sure to click through on the ‘read the rest’ link at the end of this excerpt to view the supporting research notes and related essays.

 In 2004, I self published my first full length book, September and Other Stories.  I immediately began to contact some review sites in order to obtain reviews.  Some never responded.  Some responded with a “we’re sorry but we’re backlogged” excuse.  One, however, responded very firmly that “I no longer review ANY self published books.” 

It seemed like a curiously worded rejection, but reviewers have a right to review what they want so I let it go.  Since the site also offered advertising, I queried about the cost of placing a banner ad.  The response was even more firm. “Look, I don’t do business with self publishers.”

Being new to the industry, I thought I must have done something wrong and upset the site owner.  That hadn’t been my intention, so I sent her an apology for whatever it was that I did.  A couple of days later, she sent me an email apologizing for overreacting.  This led to a startling conversation. 

The reason she had stopped reviewing self published books was because she was terrified of self publishing authors.  She had received several threatening and harassing responses to perceived negative reviews of self published books.  The most recent incident and the one that convince her to stop reviewing self published books altogether, was a man who threatened to find her and rape her daughter.  She was in the process of getting a restraining order, because the man had called her house to let her know that he knew where she lived.

I wish I could say over the years this was an isolated incident.

Bad behavior is not unique to self-publishing authors.  I think most horror readers remember Anne Rice’s rather public meltdown on Amazon.com regarding negative reviews of Blood Canticle*.  John Lott used the fake persona of Mary Rosh to anonymously defend his own work and post reviews of his book More Guns, Less Crime*.  In April 2011, Dilbert creator Scott Adams admitted to engaging in sock puppetry to defend his work*.  These incidents grab our attention because of the celebrity status of those involved, but also because such public displays are thought rare.

But the media doesn’t report on public meltdowns of self publishing authors.  Nor do bloggers spend their hours unraveling the elaborate astroturfing schemes of self publishers.  Yet there is a general acceptance of the belief that such unethical behavior is far more common among self publishers than it is traditionally published authors.  And not only is it more common, but more extreme. 

*footnotes are provided for these references on the source post


Read the rest of this post about Author Ethics, and also see the supporting research notes and related essays, on Julie Ann Dawson’s Tales From The Sith Witch blog.

Ebook Pricing: A Rumination

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There have been numerous articles, online and off, discussing ebook pricing and I won’t bother to list or link them here – I’m sure you ingenious readers can find them. So why am I chiming in again? Well, it’s a fluid subject, always on the move. More and more people all the time are taking up ebooks and it will become the norm. It’s impossible to put timeframes on something so variable, but it will happen.

There are several theories on how ebooks will fit into the mainstream. Firstly, it’s important to remember that it’s not either/or. You don’t have to choose. I love all books. I love print books and ebooks. The vast majority of new books I buy these days are ebooks, but if I really like something I’ll get a hard copy to go on the shelf. Or if a book is a particular piece of art, I’ll get it. I love getting contributor’s copies of books I have stories in, because I’m a vain fucker and like to point to the brag shelf and say to people, “Yes, I have work in all those anthologies. And those are my novels. Ahaha.” Shut up, I need validation.

I see the general breakdown of production settling into something along these lines: All new titles will be ebooks, some, especially from smaller publishers, being only ebooks. Alongside that I see a lot of publishers using Print On Demand technology to make paperbacks available to those who like them. And then a short run of actual printed stock, possibly limited edition hardbacks for collectors. That makes three primary delivery systems of stories – electronic, mass-market (though probably POD) and artefact. This is my prediction, but it’s not particularly relevant to this post. I’m looking here at ebook pricing based on the fact that ebooks will become mainstream and will eventually be everyone’s primary method of consuming stories. Don’t get upset, there’s nothing you can do about it. Have you seen Star Trek? How many real books do you ever see? Yeah, it’s gonna be like that. You can’t hold back the future any more than you can hold back the tide with a broom.

So, how should we price ebooks? I ran this question by the straw poll that is my Twitter and Facebook tribe and got some really interesting answers. Firstly, I’ll give my personal opinion.

An ebook should always be cheaper than the print book, by a fair factor. If most paperbacks are $9.99 or less, then ebooks of those titles should be $7 at most. If a book is really popular and in demand, like the new George R R Martin book, it can be more. The Kindle of that one is $17, which is fine, because the only other option is a $40 hardcover. At least, that’s true for Australia. On Amazon, the book is listed at $35 but on special at $18.81. Add postage to Australia and it’s close to $40 again. However, once the paperback edition comes out, that ebook puppy better drop to less than the paperback price or the publisher is taking the piss.

So, for the purposes of simplicity, let’s look at standard paperback vs ebook pricing. If the print edition is $10 or less, the ebook needs to be at most two thirds of that price. There’s no production cost once the e-edition is set up and ready. There’s no distribution cost. And there’s no physical artefact for the reader. Sure, we’re buying the story and that deserves to be paid for, but the item itself is also a factor.

“What about the poor starving author?” you cry. I am one, so don’t come crying to me. Of course the author needs to be paid and we need to value his or her product. But let’s not get all high and mighty without the facts, ma’am. Ebooks generate a massive royalty compared to print. If the author has signed a good contract – and they should be getting a new agent if they haven’t – they should be getting a royalty model on ebooks different to print.

My novels are $9.99 in paperback and $3.99 in ebook. (So reasonable I’ll wait here a moment while you go and buy them… got ‘em? Good. You’ll love them.) I make a bigger royalty on ebooks than I do on print, even though the retail is less than half. That’s because the margin on print production to retail is very slim and I get a slim cut of that. The margin on ebook to retail is far bigger, often up to 70%, and I get a far bigger slice of that pie. Mmm, virtual pie.

So authors can actually do better selling ebooks for far less than print books. Right now, if I sold 10,000 copies of RealmShift this year, I’d much prefer to shift 10,000 ebooks than print ones, as that would pay me far more handsomely. And I do like a handsome paycheque. I would also love to sell 10,000 copies of anything this year, please tell your friends.

Personally, I’m against the popular 99c price point for ebook novels. As an introduction, or a special offer, it’s a good idea. But for novels I think it generally undermines the value of the product. In my experience, most avid readers will view a 99c novel with suspicion and expect it to be shit. They’ll often be right in that assumption. It’s important for authors and publishers to not devalue their content. As one author said, “If people think my novels are only worth 99c, I don’t want them as fans.” That’s a bit extreme, but he has a very valid point. If people aren’t prepared to pay the equivalent of a cup of coffee for your months of hard work, well, fuck ‘em.

I have a novella available for 99c, which is deliberately priced low for several reasons: It’s only around 30,000 words, it’s available for free right here on this website and it’s a teaser, to help people notice me. I also self-published it, so I keep all the royalties, such as they are. Sure, I think it’s worth more than 99c, but I also think it’s fair to charge that and hope to get more readers that way.

So my thinking is that the sweet spot for ebooks is the $3 to $7 price range, with exceptions made for very special items. Authors will make at least as much, if not more, than they would from paperback sales and consumers get to read more and still value the work of the people they like to read. Given that paperbacks here in Australia are usually around $20, I’m actually happy to pay anything up to $15 for an ebook, but I really stop and think twice if it’s over $10.

I won’t name names, because I didn’t ask permission to use the comments, but here’s what some of the people on my social networks had to say on the subject:

I’ve paid up to $9.99 for a book a really wanted, but insofar as most genre fiction the price range generally is settled between $4.99-$7.99. A lot of indies sell their books at 99 cent, but I personally think that is a mistake because all it does is get the value shoppers and it rarely builds a loyal following. At least at the $4.99 range you have wiggle room to offer periodic sales and such.

I’ll pay up to $15, but only for something I really want to read. Generally $7-10. I tend to steer clear of anything at 99 cents simply because it’s so ingrained in my mind that anything priced so cheap can’t be good.

I’d pay up to $15 though the most I’ve yet paid was half of that. I love that you can get classics and foreign books, many that are not available in print here in Australia, for free or very cheap.

I think 10 bucks is reasonable.

I usually pay around the $10 mark – give or take $2-$3. Like others, I get twitchy if it’s only 99c or so, unless I know the author.

$2.99. Can’t borrow ‘em out. Can’t resell them. No physical formatting. No shipping. No distribution.

I get uncomfortable with anything over the $10 mark, but have no real basis for that limit. Will pay more for favourite authors just as I was and am willing to pay for hardcover rather than wait for paperbacks for same.

$5 its a new technology.

I generally won’t pay more than $5 depending on restrictions. If it’s only a license to read (a la Kindle) I pay less

up to $10 is ‘buy without thinking twice’ & up to $15 is ‘buy at once if I *really* want it. Anything higher, I hesitate.

$6-7? Like to compensate author/editor for the work, but don’t want to pay non-existent print/delivery etc costs.

So from that selection of comments it seems there are certainly a number of things people still take into consideration and DRM is a big factor. But the general consensus is ten bucks or less overall, with a couple stretching out to a maximum of $15. Interesting times, indeed.

You’ve read my thoughts and heard a few others. What do you think? How much will you pay? And how much or how little do you think is unreasonable?

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

Social Media Roundup

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Now that so many authors are getting savvy to the ways of the web and the need to utilize social media effectively, it seems hardly a day goes by that we here at Publetariat don’t come across some commentary or how-to article on the matter. Here are some we’ve decided are worth a closer look.

The New York Times Technology department reports that Half of America Is Using Social Networks, which should convince you that making social media an integral part of your author platform strategy is definitely worth the effort.

If you have never used Twitter and have no idea what it’s all about, this YouTube video, Twitter in Plain English, is for you.

If you’re even further behind the curve and have no idea what social media are all about, Social Networking in Plain English provides an excellent, easy-to-understand introduction.

But maybe you’re more of a Facebook fan. In that case, you’ll want to check out Mashable’s Facebook Guide Book.

Over on Slate, Farhad Manjoo and Emily Yoffe debate the question: Is it OK to tweet your own horn?

Along those same lines, kikolani.com offers tips on how to self-promote through social media without turning off your online friends and followers in a post entitled Self-Promotion Through Social Media – Don’t Be A Narcissist.

Back on Slate, Kevin Gold addresses the "leaky" nature of internet privacy on social media sites like Facebook. As it turns out, people can learn plenty of your personal details just from your contacts’ profiles and links.

Now get out there and get social!

Writing Full Time: What Does It Look Like To You?

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I haven’t written a post in some time, because I was working furiously to finish the first draft of Uneasy Spirits, the sequel to Maids of Misfortune, my historical mystery set in 1879 San Francisco. The manuscript is now out to my first set of beta readers, I have just finished a week of family visits and entertaining my grandchildren, and, to keep from obsessing over whether my beta readers will like the new novel, I thought I would try to take stock of my writing process. I was particularly interested in looking at my own speed after the lively discussion on blogs this past month over this topic prompted by Dean Wesley Smith’s post on writing four novels a year.

Last fall I made the decision to retire completely from teaching (see this post) and start to work on my writing full-time, as the number of sales I was making of Maids of Misfortune began to increase enough to compensate for that loss of income. In December 2010, after my last set of finals were graded and turned in, I went off to visit my daughter and family for Christmas, and when I got back I took out the outline I had written over for Uneasy Spirits and started to write, January 3, 2011. I finished the first draft, June 28, 2011, almost exactly 6 months later.

During this six-month period I kept a log where I recorded the number of words I accomplished for each day that I worked on the novel. I was very surprised when I added up the number of days I wrote and discovered that over that period (181 days) I only wrote on 90 of them (50%). Suddenly my full-time writing looked part-time. So where did all the days go?

First of all, I wasn’t always in town, because I am definitely part of that generation who is sandwiched between family responsibilities. With a father with worsening Alzheimer’s, and a daughter who had a second baby in sixteen months, I was away from home on four visits that totaled 23 days. So, I really had 168 possible days to write. This got me up to working 55 % of the available days.

Then, there is the question of weekends, because the 181 days figure included all the days of the week. Now, while I have found myself working seven days a week on some aspect of my writing and publishing, to be fair to myself, subtracting the days I was out of town, and the weekends of the days I was in town, left me with 127 writing days in that six month period. Given that figure, I wrote on 71% of the days available for writing.

Suddenly I don’t feel like such a slouch, particularly when you figure in the amount of time I spend as an indie author in the other aspects of the business of publishing, and that as an officially retired senior, I could be just living a life of leisure. (Smile)

No longer feeling like such a slacker, I considered the issue of actual writing speed. Smith says he can write 750-1000 words an hour. This of course has caused a great deal of discussion among the author community, and, I can only say, more power to him. Personally, I find my writing speed is much slower. I always start a writing day rereading what I have written the day before and making at least minor corrections. This gets me back into the story, but it certainly eats into my average words per hour. Writing a historical novel means that I often spend a great deal of time looking things up, often on the internet. For example, I frequently check to make sure a word I have used was in common usage in 1879, or the correct name for the architectural detail of San Francisco houses of the period, the name for a piece of women’s clothing. Former president Grant was in and out of San Francisco during the time period my novel was set, so I had to keep checking to see if he was in town on particular day to weave that into the narrative. While I sometimes make a note to look something up later, I have found that most of the time if I don’t do the research right then, I have trouble moving on.

As a professional historian, this part of the writing is a lot of fun, and I don’t want to deny myself that fun for the sake of speed.

As a result, given those detours, figuring out the number of words per hour didn’t make sense (I started out trying to keep a record of this and gave up very quickly.) So the most I could come up with was average words a day. In the six months, I wrote around 140,000 words (yea, I know, that’s a long novel, but my first book was 117,000 words and nobody complained, and I expect I will be cutting when I get into the revision period of this one.) This turns out to be an average of approximately 1500 words a day. The least number of words I wrote in one day was 360, the greatest number of words was 3376. I was really on fire that day!

What does this mean? Well, I figure that it will take at least two months to get feedback and rewrite. During that time I will be getting the cover designed, reworking my website, planning my launch, and putting out a new edition of my first book Maids of Misfortune, with a preview of the sequel, and probably a 99 cent price for promotional period. Then there is the formatting and uploading of Uneasy Spirits which I don’t anticipate taking more than about a month, including time to ship the POD proofs. Then during the following two months, I expect to spend time marketing, including writing and publishing some more short stories, and I will begin to outline the next novel. In short, six months to write the first draft, six months to get that draft rewritten and the book well launched. If all goes as planned, I will be starting all over again next January on the third book in my series.

Turns out, instead of being a four book a year writer, as Smith proposes, I am a one book a year writer. Yet if I was thirty years younger, and needed less than eight hours sleep, and wasn’t taking a trip to visit family every fifty days, and was willing to write shorter books, I could certainly produce at least two a year. And, if in addition, I was at the start of my life as a writer and could reasonably expect that at the end of four years I could have six to eight books out there producing, potentially forever, as ebooks, this would be a very economically sustainable career.

I’m not any of those things, but nevertheless, one book a year makes for a very satisfying retirement career. That is, if my beta readers don’t hate the new manuscript!

So, what does writing full-time look like for those of you out there fortunate enough to have made writing your day job?

 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s site.

Publishing Innovation Awards Gets QED ‘Seal’

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This podcast and accompanying transcript from Beyond The Book, which originally appeared on that site on 8/21/11, are provided in their entirety by the Copyright Clearance Center.

Recognizing innovation, usability, user experience and quality design, the Publishing Innovation Awards identify excellence in 21st century digital publishing including e-books, enhanced e-books, and book apps. For the 2012 PIAs, entrants are eligible to receive the new QED seal. Based on a 13-point inspection checklist, awarding of the QED (for Quality, Excellence, and Design) signals an e-book reader that the title will render well in whatever their preferred reading format.

“We’re at a really interesting stage in e-book development. We have a proliferation of kinds of books, and kinds of devices, and kinds of publishers, and it’s just the Wild West,” Anne Kostick, a PIA advisory council member, tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “The QED is intended to create something of a benchmark for quality in a field that really is still all over the place, still very mysterious for purchasers of books.”

“The mission of Digital Book World has always been for practical, optimistic book publishing, both in digital and in print,” explains Matt Mullin, community relations manager at Digital Book World, the awards’ sponsors. “We are very interested in the new things that are being done to create products that are truly digitally native, but also work for the mission of book publishing in general.”

Category winners for the Publishing Innovation Awards will be announced during the Digital Book World Conference and Expo in New York in January, 2012.

 Publishing Innovation Awards Gets QED Seal [19:25m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download


Here’s the transcript of the podcast.

 

What’s the Difference Between an IP Lawyer and a Contracts Lawyer? Why Does an Author Care?

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This post, by Passive Guy, originally appeared on his The Passive Voice on 8/23/11.

Passive Guy thanks all who wished him well in his new endeavor both in comments and in emails. This encouragement is very much appreciated.

One emailer requested that PG describe the difference between an IP Lawyer and a Contracts Lawyer. PG has described himself as an attorney who works with contracts or a contract counsel.

IP is short for Intellectual Property. In the United States, there are four broad classes of intellectual property:

  1. Patents
  2. Trademarks
  3. Trade Secrets
  4. Copyrights

Patents involve the majority of IP lawyers. A patent attorney is not only licensed by his/her state bar, but is also licensed to practice before the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO).

With a few exceptions, only attorneys who have an undergraduate degree in a scientific or technology discipline – engineering, chemistry, pharmacology, physics, etc., etc. – are permitted to become patent attorneys. In addition to having the requisite educational background, a patent attorney must also take and pass a separate patent bar exam.

Being licensed to practice before the USPTO allows an attorney to file and prosecute patent applications for inventors. An attorney without this qualification may not represent an inventor in USPTO proceedings.

Patent litigation is another story. No special patent bar admission is required to litigate the validity of patents in federal court. Some patent litigation attorneys are patent lawyers and others are not. The expertise necessary to prosecute a patent application is much different than the expertise necessary to try a case before a jury.

The owner of a patent has the right to prevent others from making, selling, etc., anything that is described in the claims of the patent.

The reason patent law involves the most IP attorneys is that it’s a lucrative specialty. Recently, Google announced an agreement to acquire Motorola for $12.5 billion. It was reported that Google’s principal reason for making the purchase was to gain ownership of Motorola’s portfolio of approximately 17,500 patents.

The other three broad areas of IP law involve much smaller groups of specialized attorneys. Neither Trademark nor Copyright law require any special educational credentials or separate bar admission.

A trademark is a symbol, word, or words legally registered or established by use as representing a company or product. Trademarks are everywhere. When you see a ® or a ™ next to a company or product name, you’re looking at a trademark. When you see a ℠, you’re looking at a service mark, which is a type of trademark that applies to services, not products.

Read the rest of the post on The Passive Voice.

The Collapse Of Complex Narratives

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This post, by Luke Bergeron, originally appeared on his mispeled site on 11/2/10.

Clay Shirky turned me on to “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by Joseph Tainter. I’ve been reading it for a number of weeks, whenever I feel in the mood to mentally tackle the subject matter.

In a nutshell, the book’s thesis is basically this: In order to solve problems, societies must add complexity. Complexity is a valid method for solving problems, but increasing complexity comes with increasing energy needs.

Once a society is no longer able to sustain the energy costs of its level of complexity (i.e. when it reaches the unsustainable end of an unsustainable model) the society collapses. Tainter provides many examples of this model in previous societies including the Roman Empire. Specifically, he claims Rome collapsed because the level of energy and capital needed to maintain the empire was solved by the continual conquering of external societies. Once there was nothing close to conquer to acquire easy resources, the society became unsustainable and collapsed.

The idea the book presents fascinates me for several reasons, because the idea seems to easily extend itself into all complexities that could aptly named societies: personalities, gadgets, markets, businesses, and even our own current struggle with oil and energy in America. But the aspect that fascinates me most, as a writer, is narrative.

In this post I’d like to talk about the narrative as a society and see if it’s possible to apply Tainter’s ideas to building a functional narrative. I’d like to examine the idea of writerly resources, and also see if there are any lessons we can glean.

Why You Should Bother Reading This

But first, I’d like to get the “why” out of the way. (Feel free to skip to the next heading if the overzealous “why” doesn’t interest you.) Why apply Tainter’s ideas to an aspect of human creation that he did not intend? I absolutely loathe the tendency in literary theory to apply, with seeming random chance, the ideas of one thinker to a system of ideas for which those ideas were not intended.

There are so many dreadful examples of this type of thing in literary theory that I can’t even begin to address them all, but, in case you don’t know what I mean, the most egregious have titles like “A Marxist Application of Capital in Examination of Dr. Suess’ The Snetches” and “Horton Hears a Who: An Neo-ecological Critique in Seventeen Parts” and “The Lorax Versus Gwendolyn Brooks: A Jungian Microbattle” and so on. Obviously, these are all fictitious examples, but you surely understand the concept.

The problem with these types of analyses is twofold:  one – these types of articles are based on the understood premise that one must publish to gain and retain university tenure and one of the easiest ways to do this is by applying whatever thinker’s ideas happen to be in vogue at the moment to whatever fiction or nonfiction also happens to be in vogue at the moment, with the understanding that the combination of the two must not have been broached before. Of course, since the spread of the vogue is tumultuous, one is never short of topics. Whether this is a valid juxtaposition (aside from its use to build a career out of gibberish) is never considered.

Two, as an extension of one: these types of articles do nothing to extend human understanding of epistemology, literature, or anything else useful – they only do what they are intended to do, which it is to create a vortex of verbose verbiage so devastatingly complex so as to shame university colleagues to admit they had neither the time, interest, or capacity to delve into its dark, demonic depths to attempt to understand it, and will be happy thus far, to extend tenure if only, please, would the Professor kindly leave the room and never speak of the broken artifice of the system again. Or, at the very least, if it must be spoken of, maintain that the system is both a healthy and valid method for determining suitability for a teaching position at a place of higher learning and the apt self-aggrandizing pat on the backside in front of lesser-published colleagues.

So, why, then, knowing all that, must I persist in this seemingly random application of Tainter’s ideas to narrative structure if I’m not pursuing tenure and know that this post will be overlooked by 99.7% of the reader’s of this site because it also seems a dark, demonic vortex of verbose verbiage? To that I answer, with a bipartite bellow: “Screw you, you dissenting curmudgeons!” and “Well, I’m interested – please feel free to regard this as a type of mental masturbation in the worst possible way.”

But in all seriousness, I’m writing this because I believe there is actual gold to be mined here. There are lessons to learn and time to be stolen from writing fiction. And I am no one if I am not a writer who enjoys analysis, lesson learning, patronizing talk, and procrastination. So onward and upwards!

Narrative as a Society

 

Read the rest of the post on Luke Bergeron‘s mispeled.

Selling Ebooks – How Indie Booksellers Can Compete

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As a Smashwords ebook author and publisher and an independent bookstore owner, I have been concerned about the direction ebooks are taking us. At times I have been feeling like I was running a buggy whip  business while folks down the street had started to sell gasoline. How could I compete?

That has been the quandary for many independent bookstores. If they didn’t have a very expensive website with the American Booksellers Association on their IndieBound.com system, they had no access to sell ebooks to their customers. That has changed with the advent of book distributor Baker & Taylor’s new service for independent bookstores who use them as their primary first-choice for book orders.

If you go to https://thebookbarn.mybooksandmore.com/MBM/screens/products/general/general.jsp you will find a landing page similar to what you would find at Amazon, but easier to navigate. Halfway down the page you will find:

This will take you to an information page and also allow you to download an e-reader app onto your computer. When looking for books on the site’s search engine, if there is an ebook version available, it will show up along with the hardback version, the various audio versions, the reinforced library version, the trade paperback, and the mass market paperback. If you want the ebook, click on it to go into the shopping cart. It will give you a choice of formats. The rest is business as usual. Notice that we have built automatic discounts into what we offer through our site on Baker & Taylor. Oh, BTW, if you need to rent textbooks, click on that tab and perform your search. Once found, that goes into either the shopping cart or the rental cart, depending.

In addition to the ebooks for fees selections, you can also peruse GoogleBooks for their thousands of free open-source materials. I’ve downloaded eight free ebooks about Buffalo Bill Cody and Leavenworth’s history that I can use for research material in support of my historical performer gigs. These were written in the late 1800s and early 1900s and are no longer protected by copyright.

In all, this really levels the playing field for us. Anything bought through this site goes toward our bookstore’s account. In other words, we get our share. Now we have the ability to sell in two markets we’ve always wanted and didn’t have the ability to do so. This may prove the salvation of mom & pop stores like ours. We’re really grateful Baker & Taylor recognized the need and came up with a solution in which everybody wins.

 

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

Self-Publishing: How You Can Learn And Improve

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Those who say that self-publishing is a vast world of bad quality writing, are right… still right. They do not take into account the fact that self-publishers learn and improve.

Self-published authors, those who think seriously about their writing, are highly motivated to find answers to their failures or successes, are willing to analyze and receive feedback. All that to write, publish and promote a better next book.

The beauty of the Internet is that they can find almost everything here. They have the same access to knowledge, resources and tools as big publishers.

Many of the tools were already mentioned in this series. Let’s say, the author is using Bite-Size Edits. He can observe, bite by bite, how his text is being edited and improved. Or after testing a couple of self-publishing platforms he decided to focus on two of them. Or he learns that the best way to communicate with readers is podcasting.

Internet is the biggest self-improving system on earth. Users are learning from each other – from comments, number of likes or favorites, number of retweets, you name it. Every such micro-fact can be, and usually is, analysed. And self-publishers have tools to make the analysis more accurate.

Let’s start from book statistics functionality. The biggest and most advanced platforms offer different ways and levels of analyzing how the book is doing. You can then match it with your online activity and locate the effort which gave best results.

One of the best analytics is provided by Feedbooks. It shows not only a number of downloads and favorites. What is tremendously useful is the split into different file formats, clients (apps, browsers) and countries. You can see how many of your readers are using mobile devices with Android operating system or how many of them are downloading your book directly to a computer. This can help you intensify your communication to the most promising group of readers.

Feedbooks stats

Analytics dashboard at Feedbooks

If you promote your book heavily on social media, you can use tools to measure the effectiveness of your activity. The most common and advanced one is Bit.ly. It’s a URL shortening tool with an extended statistics functionality. You can check the influence of every link you share: the number of clicks, tweets, Facebook shares, likes and comments.

The basic way to use Bit.ly is to check the impact of the message associating the link. Send two tweets to your book page – each time with a different text. You’ll see which one is more convincing.

Another great tool to consider is Hootsuite. It’s a Twitter client with many powerful features. Among many options, you can compare traffic to your blog (Google Analytics) with your Twitter activity. Other Twitter based analytics tools are Klout, TweetReach, BackTweets and TweetStats.

If you liked this article, please share it with your friends. Get free updates by e-mail or RSS, powered by FeedBurner. Let’s meet on Twitter and Facebook. Check also my geek fiction stories: Password Incorrect and Failure Confirmed.


This is a reprint from Piotr Kowalczyk‘s Password Incorrect.

The Day Digital Died

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This post, by Evan Schnittman, originally appeared on his Black Plastic Glasses blog on 8/1/11.

It was a seemingly innocuous situation… I was sitting in a room filled with publishing types: book publishers, librarians, agents, industry press, metadata specialists, and consultants of varying shapes and sizes. We were there in an advisory role to one of the digital publishing conferences.

Things started innocently enough – the usual suspects began to chime in (I am shamelessly unable NOT to talk in a group). As I spoke I began to feel a strong sense of familiarity. And that feeling grew and grew as the conversation rolled forward until I felt I was having a deja vu on steroids moment. It dawned on me that I was in the exact same discussion about the exact same conference in the exact same room as I was last year. And you know what – it wasn’t déjà vu, it was reality.

We were having the same discussion because we were talking about digital as if it were a new way of thinking, publishing, selling, etc. We were circling the carcass of a topic that had been discussed ad infinitum – because it was all speculation and postulation. And nothing is better fodder for discursive debate than speculation and postulation!

At that moment I realized the world of publishing is now so thoroughly changed by digital, that digital is no longer a discrete topic/subtopic/theme/raison d’etre. Digital has ceased to be an independent, stand-alone, separate entity; digital is now blended into the very fabric of the entire publishing business.

And so, as we sat and attempted to determine the topics of a conference that would be presented to hundreds of participants and thousands more via broadcast and Twitter, we became stuck on what was possible and practical to discuss.


Read the rest of the post on Evan Schnittman‘s Black Plastic Glasses.

The Lawsuit US Publishers And Apple Are Facing Over Agency Pricing

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This article, by Philip Jones, originally appeared on the Futurebook blog on 8/10/11.

Five US publishers and Apple have been named in a US lawsuit that alleges the companies "illegally fix prices of electronic books" and that the publishing houses "forced Amazon to abandon its discount pricing and adhere to a new agency model, in which publishers set prices". The suit alleges that "collusion was a necessary ingredient of the publisher defendants’ anticompetitive plan to gain direct control over e-book pricing".

Sounds scary enough, but if you look at the detail of the complaint there isn’t a whole lot of evidence to back it accusations of conspiracy, though it will nevertheless raise concerns on both sides of the pond, particularly as regulatory inquiries are ongoing.

US law firm Hagens Berman filed the suit in a San Francisco Federal Court against Apple, along with Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, over the agency model of e-book pricing. The same firm is also investigating claims that several large e-book publishers are under-reporting the number of e-books sold, paying authors less than their share of royalties. Worryingly for publishers, the law firm claims that once approved, the lawsuit would represent any purchaser of an e-book published by a major publisher after the adoption of the agency model by that publisher, and has called for "potential plaintiffs" to get in touch via an online form.

The suit has its origins in the switch to the agency model in early 2010, led by Macmillan US, which resulted for a period in that publisher’s e-books being delisted from the Amazon.com website. You can trawl through The Bookseller’s articles from that time here. Though Macmillan moved first, it was closely followed by Hachette USA in early February, and ultimately by the three other US publishers named in the suit – but not by Random House, which did not switch until late last year, and is not named in the filing.

Read the rest of the article on the Futurebook blog.

Why Are Agents Speaking Anonymously About Amazon Publishing?

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This post, by Richard Curtis, originally appeared on e-reads on 8/14/11.

In a recent Publishers Weekly article about Amazon’s foray into trade book publishing, every agent PW interviewed spoke “under condition of anonymity.” Why?

Apparently, writes PW’s Rachel Deahl, “their chief concern is selling a book to an untested entity. One agent said he would be particularly leery about taking a big author to Amazon. ‘As a matter of rule, I don’t like to test the waters with big authors. I’d rather deal with a firm that is well established.’”

We find this statement astounding. It seems to equate Amazon Publishing with all those one-horse self-publication presses with interchangeable names started up by penniless ex-editors. What makes these agents imagine that Amazon, boasting enough assets to acquire all Big Six publishers without raising a sweat, would fail at book publishing any more than it has failed at any other goal it has set for itself?

The anonymous agent’s remark is even more puzzling when you look at the deals reported daily in Publishers Lunch and note how many famous agents are making “nice” deals for books by big name clients with those selfsame small presses after the Big Six turned them down. “Nice” is defined (by Lunch‘s founder Michael Cader) as advances of $1 to $49,000, sums that no self-respecting superagent would be caught dead admitting just a few years ago.

 

Read the rest of the post on e-reads.

What It's Like Being A Writer: An Examination and Explanation

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This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 8/10/11.

Okay, you know how Muggles don’t get what it’s like being a wizard? And how crazy people don’t know what it’s like being sane and sane people don’t know what it’s like being crazy?

Those who are not writers do not know what it’s like to be a writer. Ask someone who is not infected with the Authorial Virus (Types A through G) what a writer does and you’ll probably get a blank stare. Then that person will noodle it and shrug and say, “He sits up there in his room with his My Little Ponies, pooping fairy tales out of his fingertips for ten minutes. Then he masturbates and talks to people on Twitter.”

[Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

Masturbate? Well, fine. Everybody’s got a lunch hour, and it doesn’t take me 60 minutes to eat a damn sandwich. Nothing wrong with exploring my own body with various textures and food products. As for Twitter? Hey, you go and mill around the water cooler like a bunch of thirsty water bison, and I go and mill around Twitter like a digital version of the same.

But I do not defecate fairy tales out of my fingertips. If only the act of writing was quite so simple as all that.

(And, by the way, leave my ponies out of it. They didn’t do anything to you.)

Point being, it’s time to take this big callused toe of mine and drag it across the sand. There, then, is the line. On this side is me, the penmonkey. On that side is you, the… I dunno. Pen-muggle. Shut up.

What I’m trying to say is, this is what it means to be a writer. Got people in your life who just don’t grok the trials and tribulations of the everyday word-chucker? Show them this.

I Swear On The Life Of Word Jesus, It’s Actually Work

This one sucks because you know what? I get it. I’ve tried explaining to people what I do, and at no point does it sound like work. “Uhh, well, I wake up at 6AM and I get my coffee and then I get in front of the computer and I… make stuff up… and then I try to convince people to buy the things I just… made up.” It sounds like the world’s biggest scam and explains why so many people want to be writers.

I might as well have said, “I sit out in a sunlit meadow and play Candyland with a bunch of puppies.”

Let’s just clear this one up right now:

Writing is work. It’s not back-breaking labor, no — though, by now I probably do have scoliosis (and a Deep-Vein Thrombosis whose clot-bullet will probably detonate in my brain) — but it is mind-breaking just the same. I can sit here for hours metaphorically head-butting the computer monitor until this story — or article, or blog-post, or sex-toy instruction manual — bleeds out across the screen. And then I have to keep fucking with it, keep hacking it apart and juicing my skull-meats until it all makes sense. Everything else is emails and spreadsheets and outlines and porn and shame and homelessness.

Am I doing work on par with fire fighters or soldiers? Fuuuuu-huuuu-huuuck no. But neither are you, Mister Cubicle Monkey. Or you, Target clerk. So. You know. Hush up.

All I’m saying is, no, I don’t need a “real job” because I already have one.


Read the rest of the post on Chuck Wendig‘s terribleminds.

What To Do With Your Stale-Dated Prose

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Ah, progress. Had telephones existed in Verona of old, Romeo and Juliet would’ve been able to synchronize their plans perfectly and avoid all that mistaken suicide business. Consider the movie, It’s A Wonderful Life: if security cameras had been mounted in the Bedford Falls Building and Loan, George Bailey and his scatterbrained Uncle Billy would’ve known in a matter of hours what became of the missing $8,000, and Clarence the apprentice angel would’ve had to find another way to earn his wings. Underwater radar and GPS technologies could’ve reduced Moby Dick to a short story. My point is, changes in technology and social norms can eliminate certain kinds of problems and conflicts, create previously unforeseen problems and conflicts, and more generally affect the way people behave.

 

Many writers and authors are jumping into the indie fray these days, dusting off old manuscripts and shorts that have yet to find a home with a traditional publisher, giving them a cursory once-over and forging ahead with indie publication. I applaud these efforts, and hope they continue. But a word of warning: that pre-publication once-over needs to a be a bit more thorough if your material is contemporary, but more than a few years old.

If your upper-middle-class dad gets lost when he hits the road in his brand-new SUV, the reader will be wondering why he doesn’t just use his car’s (or phone’s) GPS to get back on track. Similarly, if your characters’ pop culture references include The Oprah Winfrey Show and the post-divorce exploits of Lady Di, those references are dated and the reader will notice.

You may think, "So what if the reader becomes aware at some point that the book was written years ago; it’s not like they’re going to stop reading it, or think it’s a bad book just because of that." I don’t disagree, but with all the distractions of the modern world’s wonderland of electronics, technology, social media and noise of all kinds, it’s already a big enough challenge to get and keep your reader’s attention. Anything that takes the reader out of your story world for any reason is to be avoided, even if it’s only for the moment or two it takes the reader to mentally observe, "Nobody uses Thomas Guide road map books anymore; this story must’ve been written a long time ago." Far worse for the reader is the supposedly contemporary story in which the central conflict or source of tension would be easily eliminated with some modern (and common) convenience or other, like caller ID or the internet.

However, stale-dated prose doesn’t necessarily require an extensive rewrite. It just calls for the author to manage reader expectations. The simplest fix is to insert subtle cues and signposts in the beginning pages that will let the reader know your story takes place in the recent past. This may be as simple as editing to highlight the anachronisms, rather than merely observing them in passing. If you make a point of the fact that your protagonist works in the Twin Towers in New York, the reader will immediately know the story must take place prior to 9/11/2001 and therefore won’t expect to find anything that happened, was invented, or was popularized after that year.

Stories that were intended to be of-the-moment when they were written will probably require a more extensive edit to update or eliminate dated references. For example, your story about the impending doom of Y2K will no longer work as the straightforward thriller you had in mind when you wrote it. You can either take it in the direction of satire or comedy, or change the threat to something people are still worried about today: 2012, anyone?

Finally, don’t lose sight of editorial repercussions. If you decide to change your protagonist’s paranoia about Y2K to paranoia about 2012 for example, make sure you update all such references throughout the manuscript to maintain consistency.

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