Monthly Archives: July 2014

From Barry Eisler via TechDirt:

Just when I thought Amazon Derangement Syndrome couldn’t get any more acute, I woke up to this “letter to our readers” spearheaded by bestselling writer Douglas Preston and signed by 69 authors. One day, historians and psychologists might manage to explain how various authors came to fear and revile a company that has sold more books than anyone in history; that pays authors up to nearly six times the royalties of the New York “Big Five” lockstep rate; that single-handedly created the ebook and self-publishing markets; that offers more choice and better prices to more readers than anyone ever has before; and that consistently ranks as one of the world’s most admired companies.

. . . .

Not only has Amazon not “targeted Hachette’s authors,” it has offered to compensate them for any damage they suffer by virtue of their publisher’s dispute with Amazon. Hachette has refused that offer. Do the authors of this letter not know about Amazon’s offer to help compensate Hachette’s authors, and Hachette’s refusal? Why don’t they mention it?

. . . .

Amazon is not boycotting anyone. All books by all Hachette authors are available in the Amazon store. In the face of this, to claim there’s a “boycott” is either ignorance or propaganda.

Not including a preorder button for a tiny percentage of titles isn’t a boycott. It’s a shot across the bow, and a fairly mild one compared to what an actual boycott of all Hachette titles would look like. As for “unavailable,” if a book isn’t published yet and you can’t preorder it, how else should its status be described?

. . . .

My own Amazon-published titles are boycotted by Barnes & Noble and by many indie bookstores. Tens of thousands of Indie-published authors face the same widespread boycott. An actual boycott, as in, outright refusal to stock books written by these authors — not because of price or other contractual terms, but simply because the retailers in question don’t like these authors’ way of publishing. Yet this is the first I’ve heard any of the letter’s authors express their strong feelings on bookstores preventing or discouraging customers from ordering or receiving the books they want.

What’s really weird, when you stop and think about it, is that if customers being able to read the books they want is really an important value for the letter’s authors, you would think they would love Amazon’s business model and find Hachette’s suspect. After all, Hachette is a gatekeeper — their whole business model is predicated on excluding from readers probably 99.99% of manuscripts. Amazon’s model is to let all authors publish and to trust readers make up their own minds. If customer choice is the real value in play here, you can’t coherently support Hachette and decry Amazon.

Unless, of course, all that happy talk about customer choice is a canard.

. . . .

But anyway… if the value in play here is that a company should “stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business,” I’m gobsmacked that these people aren’t demanding more from Hachette. Hachette pays its authors 12.5% in digital royalties. It keeps the lion’s share of increased ebook profits for itself. It demands life-of-copyright (that is, forever) terms of license. It inhibits its authors’ ability to publish other works by insisting on draconian anti-competition clauses. It pays its authors only twice a year. It has innovated precisely nothing, ever, preferring to collude to fix prices with Apple and the other members of the New York “Big Five.” That’s Hachette’s business record… and these authors, who purport to care so much about a company harming the livelihood of authors, have nothing to say about it?

I guess that’s what they mean by “not taking sides.”

. . . .

[T]hese one-percenters consistently ignore the tremendous good Amazon has done for all authors, and allow misguided self-interest to distort their perceptions and their arguments. They take full-page ads in the New York Times, they give interviews with an adoring press, they publish letters like this one… all to perpetuate a publishing system that is designed to create a one-percent class of winners and to exclude everyone else.

Link to the rest at TechDirt and thanks to Judith for the tip.

PG didn’t realize he was on an email list for SFWA, but he just received the following with the email subject, “SFWA doubling down”:

SFWA’s support of Douglas Preston’s open letter reflects our concern about Amazon’s tactics in their dispute with Hachette and the way those tactics are impacting writers and their careers. We are, unfortunately, aware that this is not the first time Amazon has used negotiating tactics that have injured writers. To be clear, we are doing this in support of writers (members and otherwise) not, as some have suggested, to support Hachette Book Group and “Big” publishing over self-published and small press authors.

SFWA is a _writers_ organization and we have fought against practices that harm writers, no matter what the source, including “Big” publishing, scam agents, vanity presses, etc. If we are unwilling to weigh in on behalf of traditionally-published authors in disputes with online distributors like Amazon, Nook, and Kobo, what chance do we have of supporting other writers in the same arena?

Even as we are signing on to Mr. Preston’s letter, we have not called for boycotts of Amazon, we have not called for members to stop publishing with Amazon, and we have left our Amazon links up on the SFWA website. We recognize that suppliers and distributors negotiate the terms of their relationship but we hope that both parties can conduct this business in ways that do not punish _the very people who provide the products they both sell._ This is not about a conflict between traditional and independent models of publishing and efforts to frame it as such do more to harm than help the lives of _all_ working writers.

Steven Gould
For the Board

From National Public Radio:

You might be surprised to learn that the chart-topping duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis are not signed to a major label. Neither are veterans like Peter Gabriel and Wilco. They’re all self-releasing albums.

But if you self-release, you still need someone to get your name out there, get your product into the marketplace, and get it sold. In other words, you need someone to do all of the stuff record labels used to do. You could do it yourself — or you could hire someone like Kevin Wortis of Girlie Action, a leading music marketing agency based in New York.

“Here we offer sourcing, distribution, sales. We also handle marketing, digital marketing, social media, press and radio promotion,” Wortis says. “We have clients that come in who have chosen not to be with a record company; they want to control all the revenue and they want to do things in their own way.”

. . . .

Ndegeocello herself says that, in today’s environment, musicians don’t have the luxury of just sticking to music.

“The music business is changing,” she says. “I enjoyed the smoke and mirrors, and now I have to be really involved in a way that sometimes — there’s no other way to say it: I just wish I didn’t know.” She adds, laughing, “If it was totally up to me I’d fail horribly.”

Ndegeocello’s manager, Alison Riley, sees clear advantages to the label services model.

“The charm, I think, of a major label is that they have all of the resources in house. But you lose a lot of creative control and you lose a lot of control of one’s career,” Riley says. “It’s a much more collaborative, cooperative experience to work with label services. We have a much greater say in the channels things are pushed out through.”

. . . .

Unlike many recording artists, Suzanne Vega — who had a Top 10 hit in 1987 with “Luka” and was then dropped twice by the majors — maintained publishing rights to her songs.

Four years ago, Vega founded her own label and started re-recording her back catalogue. To get it out there, she signed deals in the U.S. with Red, Sony’s label services division, and internationally with the U.K.-based Cooking Vinyl.

“Rather than being the one waiting to see if they are going to renew my contract, it’s me renewing theirs,” Vega says. “And that makes a difference.”

Vega recently self-released her first album of new material in seven years, and she’s back on the charts for the first time in two decades.

Link to the rest at NPR and thanks to Barron for the tip.

Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.

George Saunders

From The Wall Street Journal:

Novelist Fedor Berezin is living a plotline from his science-fiction oeuvre, right here and now in the separatist badlands of eastern Ukraine.

His books sketch out a future in which Russian soldiers—in one novel armed with plasma rifles and exoskeleton suits, and in another emerging from a dimension where the Soviet Union still exists—successfully attack America. In another book, Mr. Berezin imagines a war in which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization subjugates Ukraine and invades Crimea, only to be rebuffed by Russians using old Soviet gear. “The global fire will start in Ukraine,” he writes in the 2009 novel, one of the more than 15 he has written.

Mr. Berezin, 54 years old, is now the deputy defense minister of Donetsk People’s Republic, a breakaway pro-Russian statelet carved from Ukraine’s industrial heartland two months ago by armed rebels, local dreamers and Russian advisers all fired up by ideas of Russian imperial greatness, a desire to protect ethnic Russians from what they see as a Ukrainian nationalist threat, and by their hatred of Ukraine and the West.

. . . .

Sitting in his sparse office, an automatic weapon by his side and a shoulder patch reading “Polite People” attached to his camouflage uniform, Mr. Berezin, the sci-fi novelist and deputy defense minister, pondered the parallels between his fiction and his reality. “If we all live in the Matrix, then everything happens within it,” he said.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire)

Frequent visitor and commenter William Ockham emailed with this question:

Do you know anyone who subscribes to the BookStats reports (discussed here)?

PG doesn’t think he knows anyone who does, but suspects some visitors may. William wants to conduct some mathematical analyses of Bookstats data.

Send PG a message via the Contact Page if you can help William with his request and PG will forward the info.

From author Dominick Bosco:

This Amazon-Hachette battle is not business as usual. It’s the end of business as usual.
It’s not “just business” when writers not even published by Hachette start signing screeds against Amazon and flinging barbs at self-published writers.

This is not about agency pricing or a bigger cut of ebook royalties.

This is about the barbarians (that’s us) at the gate.

From this point on, the Big 5 are going to fight every step tooth and nail. They and their minions will pour giant cauldrons of steaming abuse on self-publishers while they whine that Amazon is a threat to Western Civilization. Prepare yourself. The Whining Steaming Abuse Machine is just getting warmed up.

. . . .

The picture we should have in our minds is of an army being pushed towards the edge of a cliff by a giant Amazon box. What’s pushing the box? We are. The indies.

It’s not Amazon taking a bigger cut of the pie that will push legacy pub off the edge.

Link to the rest at Dominick Bosco

From Chris Meadows via TeleRead:

Over the last eighty-odd years, the publishers who now comprise the Big Five have grown fat, lazy, and inefficient. Updegrove would have us believe that it’s the services publishers provide to authors that cost so much money, and hence would be cut back if publishers suffer further, but that’s not the case. If those services really were that expensive, how would self-publishing authors be able to afford to pay for those same services out of pocket when they want to publish their own books? Cutting back on them just wouldn’t save that much money. No, most big publisher overhead comes from something else entirely.

Look at the system of returns we have right now. It was implemented during the Great Depression, as a way to take some of the risk out of stocking books so that bookstores would be inclined to spend their hard-earned money to take a chance on something that might not sell. You can see how such an arrangement would be plausible in those bygone days of rock-bottom hardscrabble financial times. So why, then, after the Great Depression ended, did the publishers keep on running that same system for over eighty years afterward, through bust and boom alike?

To this very day, the Big Five publishers print more books than they need, send those books out willy-nilly, and then either allow the bookstores to destroy unsold copies for a refund or pay more money to ship the books back and sell them to remainders dealers, where they then compete for buyers with the full-priced versions of the same book still on store shelves!

. . . .

As e-books and self-published books have come up over the last fifteen years, the publishers have essentially fought them tooth and nail, trying desperately to hang onto their lucrative print business and keep it lucrative. They backed the wrong horse, and now that Amazon’s won, they want to send Amazon’s horse to the knackers.

They’ve shown no inclination toward doing anything to reduce their ridiculous overhead. They’ll even outright break the law if they have to to keep from having to change anything. They’re like a couch potato who’s been told he needs to lose weight for the sake of his heart but still wants to do nothing more than lounge around on the sofa watching TV and drinking beer instead. The writing has been on the wall for years now, but the publishers have determinedly kept looking away.

. . . .

A more efficient publishing industry would be better for everyone. They could afford to pay authors higher royalties. They wouldn’t waste so much paper and fuel, so they’d be that much greener. Their books wouldn’t have to compete with remaindered versions of themselves, so they could be that much cheaper. (Though I’m probably fooling myself in thinking any saved money would go to paying authors more or making books cost less, rather than lining the publishing execs’ own greedy pockets, but oh well.)

But in order to get them there, something is going to have to overcome all that inertia. Whether you like Amazon or hate them, you have to admit Amazon is pushing the publishers to change, to break out of that inertia, to try new things to keep up. The farther Amazon pushes, the more likely they’re going to have to cut out things that actually do cost money, like the archaic returns system or their ritzy New York offices, to stay afloat.

Link to the rest at TeleRead

From The Smashwords Blog:

[W]e examined aggregated retail and library sales data of Smashwords books and then crunched the numbers based on various quantifiable characteristics of the book. 

For this year’s survey, we examined over $25 million in customer purchases  aggregated across Smashwords retailers including Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, the Smashwords.com store, Sony (now closed), Diesel (closed), Oyster, Scribd, Kobo, public libraries and others.

. . . .

The goal of the survey is to identify Viral Catalysts. 

. . . .

The underlying premise of my Viral Catalyst concept is that Viral Catalysts help drive reader word of mouth because they increase reader satisfaction.  Although every author would love to learn the single secret fast track magic bullet to bestsellerdom, there is no such single secret.  Ebook bestsellers become bestsellers based on multiple Viral Catalyst factors starting with book quality but also influenced by cover design, breath of distribution, pricing, marketing, luck and myriad other factors.  In the Smashwords Survey, we seek to identify potential Viral Catalysts that are quantifiable and therefore measurable.  

. . . .

The ebook sales power curve is extremely steep - This isn’t a surprise, but for the first time we share some numbers along the curve (see the slides in the Series section).  A few titles sell fabulously well and most sell poorly.  An incremental increase is sales rank is usually matched by an exponential increase is sales.  Despite the steep sales curve, a lot of Smashwords authors are earning good income from their books.  Your opportunity as a Smashwords author or publisher is to do those things that give you an incremental advantage so you can climb in sales rank.

Readers prefer longer ebooks - We observed this in the prior surveys.  Longer books sell better, and when you view the data through the prism of the power curve, it becomes clear why longer books give authors such a huge sales advantage.
Pricing - The highest earning indie authors are utilizing lower average prices than the authors who earn less, but this doesn’t mean that ultra-low prices such as $.99 are the path to riches.  $2.99 and $3.99 are the sweet spots for most of the bestsellers.

. . . .

Series yield sales advantage - For the first time, we examine the performance of series books.  This new analysis is enabled by the fact that in September we launched Smashwords Series Manager which allows us to capture enhanced metadata on series.  The results are interesting!  Series books outsell standalone books.  

Link to the rest at Smashwords and thanks to Deb for the tip.