Hugh Howey's Blog, page 29

Books are EXACTLY like razors

The timing of this is uncanny. After hearing from Snowflakes United that books are not like razors, and then blogging about how they used to be very much like razors, we have a story in the New York Times today about razors that could just as easily be about the publishing industry.

From the story (which you should go read), in which direct-to-consumer razor start-ups are taking millions of customers away from the multi-national conglomerates:

[the razor companies] are also part of a bigger push among e-commerce companies that see opportunities in selling products as varied as mattresses and eyeglasses, where the established companies are accustomed to plump profit margins.

 

“There’s kind of a game going on, where there’s way too much margin,” said David Pakman, a partner at Venrock, a venture capital firm that is an investor in Dollar Shave Club. “The big guys are overcharging you, while smaller companies like ours can give you the best products in the world for a fraction of the price.”

 

In 2004 Gillette reported a 60 percent gross margin before being bought by Procter & Gamble. Gillette’s blades now often cost $10 to $40, depending on the number of razor cartridges purchased.

 

This is where Michael Dubin, co-founder of Dollar Shave Club, saw opportunity. Mr. Dubin offered a subscription service online, shipping razors for $1 to $9.

 

The company said it expected to generate $60 million in revenue this year, triple its revenue for 2013. One million people receive the company’s products in the mail monthly or every other month through its subscription service.

Where the men’s grooming industry is different than the publishing industry is the reaction to sudden competition. Publishers responded to the rise of self-publishing by aligning themselves with the scam factory that is Authors Solutions (which David Gaughran covers brilliantly and damningly here), while the men’s grooming industry is choosing to mimic these upstarts and even embrace the challenge:

To defeat the new competition, some of the giants are trying to mimic some of their smaller rivals’ tactics. Procter & Gamble, for instance, now offers an online subscription service for ordering its Gillette razors.

 

“New entrants to our category stimulate more conversation about shaving, which is positive for us as the market leader,” Procter & Gamble said in a statement.

But here’s where it gets really interesting. One observer thinks these corporations will have a hard time competing directly. Why? Out of fear of upsetting established retail partners.

“The incumbents are kind of trapped,” Mr. Pakman said, partly because of marketing costs. For one new product, the ProGlide with FlexBall razor, Procter & Gamble reportedly set aside $200 million for marketing. “Gillette really can’t sell directly to customers because they can’t tick off the retailers. And they can’t cut their prices by two-thirds, because their whole business model would break.”

This is the exact same predicament the Big 5 publishers find themselves in. One of my foreign publishers lamented to me at not being able to lower the price of my ebook because of the threat from bookstores to not stock the physical title in retaliation. And one of the deals I did with a major publisher was on condition that I didn’t do a digital-only deal with an online company out of fear of being blacklisted by the largest brick and mortar chain in that country. The established players are entrenching themselves against these pesky upstarts. It puts the Hachette / Amazon dispute into perspective, doesn’t it? Now you see why the one-percenters are siding with the legacy industry. It’s their razor blade sales that are being cut into. What I don’t get is the Authors’ Guild taking the wrong side in all of this. Is it because the Guild is run by one-percenters? Have they so clearly lost their mission?

The AG siding with Hachette and against Amazon would be precisely like an auto workers’ union siding with General Motors in a dispute with the largest chain of automobile dealers in the country. Digest that for a minute. You’ve got a chain of dealerships selling more cars than anyone else in the country, and when General Motors threatens that relationship by refusing to negotiate with them at all, the auto workers union goes after the dealers. Now imagine the same auto workers union taking GM’s side as they collude with Ford, Dodge, Toyota, and Honda to fix higher prices on the customer while moving from 50% margins to 30% margins and making less money for the workers. Yeah, that’s what the AG has done and continues to do.

(If you want to see more parallels between publishing and the car industry, check out how dealerships are waging a legal war to prevent Tesla from being able to sell cars direct-to-consumer. Corporations are getting away with stomping on small companies, upstarts, and consumers by winning PR battles and winning in the courts. We can’t let that happen to the book trade, people!)

What also fascinates me about this story is the steady flow of articles in the New York Times on how technology is disrupting industries around the globe. These stories are like clockwork. They have to do with the sharing economy, the success of videogame indies, the rise of online music stars, the inroads being made by Netflix, Twitch.tv, and deals being done by comedian Louis CK and musicians Macklemore and Ryan. But on the topic of the publishing industry, they have instead taken the side of multi-national conglomerates and against the indies and upstarts. A glaring difference. Would their coverage of the music industry be just as archaic if they had a New York Times Music Review supplemental in the Sunday edition? Or is it the fact that their reporters are by definition writers, and perhaps aspiring novelists as well? Or is it the $104,000 ads taken out by the one-percenter authors?

Marx would surely note the irony here that the means of production have finally fallen into the hands of the people, and that this trend is being derided by his otherwise ardent supporters. He might, of course, bemoan the fact that it was through capitalism that his dream came to fruition.

Books Were Once Like Razor Blades

Remember fanzines? Dating back over a hundred years, they were the first scalable form of self-publishing. Students with access to moveable type printing presses would delight in composing anthologies of short stories or news tid-bits and running off a hundred copies or so. In the 1920s, writers of science fiction bypassed the limited space in Amazing Stories and produced their own works in the first of many genre fanzines. Other fanzines brought together horror film fans, fringe music scenes, political commentators, and conspiracy theorists. These xeroxed works were the successor to the coffee shop and the precursor to the internet.

After the web gained popularity in the mid-90s, the fanzine moved online. Websites and blogs filled the same function, except now these works were permanent and the potential audience went from hundreds around town to The Residents of Planet Earth. Fanzines were read and then lost, discarded, recycled, forgotten. They had a limited lifespan and a limited audience. They were as disposable as razor blades.

Recently, we’ve seen a group of authors argue that books aren’t like razor blades (an insult to people who make things for a living, but set that aside). But maybe these old-fashioned writers are on to something. Because books were indeed like razor blades just ten years ago. They were printed once, and then they gradually wore away, whether through use, by rot, or the fact that most went out of print.

Like fanzines and razor blades, books started off fresh and then wore out over time. Once a novel went out of print, you’d have to scour used bookstores or online book resellers to find a moldy copy. The first weeks and months of release were everything. Books were disposable. They disappeared.

The ebook and the print-on-demand paperback are to novels what the internet and blogs became to fanzines. Books are now preserved for all-time. It’s ironic, I think, that the company most responsible for preserving the written word with both Kindle ebooks and Createspace print-on-demand paperbacks is seen as a threat to reading and writing. It would be like accusing the internet of getting in the way of connecting people and aiding in the exchange of thoughts and ideas.

Some people seem eager to get back to the grand old world of limited-run printouts stapled together and scurrying away on a breeze. These are the people who profited the most from that scheme, the middlemen and the 1% of authors lucky enough to be included. Clay Shirky nailed it when he posited that the old guard is terrified of the popular acceptance of reading. The fringe has the potential to go mainstream, which will mean more people getting lost in books, more writers earning a living, a growing culture of literature, and a widening of voices and genres. Those who valued their participation in the rarefied airs of literature’s fanzine days are understandably disturbed by this. Democratization is almost always resisted against by the chosen elites.

Ignore the naysayers, for they are on the wrong side of history. The changes taking place have massive and positive implications for writers. Every book you write will be in print for the rest of time. They won’t grow old. They won’t grow dull. They are no longer like razor blades. Every undiscovered book was launched today. They will launch every day. New readers will come of age; old readers will rediscover a lost love of reading; the next generation of readers are being born right now.

If you take the complaints people make about the self-publishing of literature (the spewing volcanoes of crap and other offenses against people’s artwork and free expression) and apply those same complaints to the internet, what you have is China’s attitude toward the World Wide Web. Do all the unbrowsed websites and blogs get in the way of surfing your way to TMZ.com? Absolutely not. But those sites and thoughts are out there, representing the free expression of their creators, and all it takes is one set of eyes to find them, love them, share them, for those sites and blogs to take off.

Write knowing that your works will never expire, and that no one can deny you the right to publication. This was the attitude fanzine authors used to stoke their passions for over a century (and still). It’s the power of this democratizing force. Books are now forever; they remain fresh; they’ll never go out of print. It’ll be decades before most people adequately appreciate this. Get ahead of them by writing today.

 

 

The War of Art

I’m discovering this fantastic book a little late. A creative writing student at Appalachian State told me about Steven Pressfield’s writing book, THE WAR OF ART, years ago, and it’s been on my radar ever since. Finally picked it up before my last road trip and inhaled the thing. The first third of the book is my favorite; it deals with overcoming resistance to getting work done, and it applies to a lot more than just writing. Check it out.

 

Snowflakes United

I guess that would make them snowballs?

This group of authors should stick to writing. Where they can edit. And they don’t have to speak live. Especially about things of which they know less than nothing (that’s where what you think you know is gobsmacking-bonkers-wrong).

Roxana Robinson is president of the Authors’ Guild and a vocal supporter of Authors United, which is continuing their appeal to unreason. Here, she is absolutely crushed by Paul Kedrosky, who does an admirable job of not cracking up on camera.

The argument being made by Authors United is that books are not products and are therefore not subject to distribution agreements. The fact that Hachette does not want to negotiate with Amazon is not their concern. The fact that Amazon and Hachette do not have a long-term distribution agreement is not their concern. They claim not to be taking sides, but they have yet to appeal to Hachette to negotiate in good faith. Instead, they call on Amazon, a retailer, to capitulate to whatever demands Hachette, a multinational conglomerate, is making.

Their most recent letter is being sent to Amazon’s board members, whom I assume know a thing or two about business and will get a laugh out of this nonsense. In fact, the letter was so offensive, that Authors United had to go back and edit it (which made it more offensive). Books written in China by Chinese authors are denigrated in the original; in the new version, all non-US authors are deemed to be inferior.

Thanks to Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader, you can see the differences between the two letters here. Neither version makes a lick of sense.

During the interview posted above, Roxana says a few contradictory things that should raise eyebrows. Somehow, Amazon is hurting Hachette authors with lower sales, but at the same time Amazon’s customers are revolting and simply buying these books elsewhere. So are sales down or are they the same? In the Authors United letter, Douglas Preston writes that sales are down and that these lost sales are not being made up elsewhere. And Amazon’s reputation with its customers has indeed moved; it’s gone up.

But why deal with facts? These are special people who do something that can’t be outsourced (ignoring the dearth of foreign literature translated into English) and can’t be done cheaper (ignoring the fact that publishers aren’t putting the same resources into acquiring, editing, designing, and releasing books). Do they really take themselves this seriously?

The fact is that they wrote a book meant to entertain or educate. And then, instead of controlling that work of art or giving it away, they sold the rights to a company based in France, which will own those rights for the rest of their lives and the lives of their children. They sold out. They made a deal. They took a wad of cash, as if their art were no more than a crate of razors. They no longer have a say in where the books are sold or for how much.

While I’m sure practically everyone is sick of hearing about this standoff, I hope the bizarre PR campaign being waged by Hachette, the New York Times, the Authors Guild, and this handful of authors is unsuccessful. The aim here is the same as the collusion between the Big 6 and Apple, which was to jack up the prices of ebooks on customers.

Cheating didn’t work. Lying isn’t working. And suing isn’t going to do it either.

My advice to Hachette is to start competing. And my advice to authors is to stop selling your art like so many cheap, outsourced products, and then pretending like you still own it.

 

 

The Bookseller and Nook Press

Very cool announcement from Nook Press this week about a partnership with The Bookseller in the UK to highlight 10 new self-published titles a month. The titles will be featured in The Booksellers We Love This Book magazine, and one would assume online at the Nook store as well. Kinda like the editors’ picks you see at other outlets, but only for indies. Targeted emails will be sent out as well, which many authors have found to be the most effective marketing tool.

I can’t imagine anyone scoffing at this, though some will probably look for ways to be cynical. Not me. This is a major development for readers and writers alike. Stigmas are falling; self-publishing is now seen not only as viable but in many ways superior to any other path to publication, especially for authors just getting their start. If your goal is to publish with a major house one day, self-publishing is a great way to find your voice and your audience, to hone your craft, and to prove your mettle. It is no longer a death knell for aspiring writers. That’s a major change in this industry, and it happened fast.

Discoverability, of course, is still the greatest struggle any new writer faces, and this is true of all authors, however they publish. I’ve watched brilliant debut works languish as a bookseller and more recently as a reader and industry observer. But Nook Press and The Bookseller are showing a commitment to coming up with more ways to hook up great books with great readers, to get authors discovered, and to give more writers a chance of breaking out. Which is more of what this industry needs.

Read FutureBook’s take on it here.

And I’ve added it to my The Tankers are Turning post about all the positive developments being made by traditional publishers and outlets.

Ruminations on Exclusivity

Ready for some cardio? Let’s talk exclusivity.

Amazon has long made exclusivity a major part of their publishing campaign. With the introduction of KDP Select in late 2011, Amazon began offering merchandising opportunities to authors who published on Amazon and no where else. This has always been a controversial and unpopular move. The #1 decision many authors face today is not whether to go traditional or self, but whether to go KDP Select or not.

The first advantage KDP Select offered was the 5 “free days” per 90 day Select period. These free days were golden tickets for a while, and many authors’ careers took off by taking advantage of the program. KDP Select also meant inclusion in the Kindle Lending Library, where Amazon Prime members get to select one free ebook per month. Self-published authors have been paid out of a pool of funds, with a historical average of around $2.16 per borrow, while traditionally published ebooks have received the full sales commission for every download. So began the divisions that would cause rancor among self-published authors.

The controversy really lit up with the introduction of Kindle Unlimited. Those in KDP Select (exclusive to Amazon) were automatically included. Reports have been very mixed, but many who aren’t in Select say their sales have gone down as readers enjoy the buffet-style unlimited reading. Those in KDP Select (and by extension in Kindle Unlimited) largely report this as a boom time, with sales and borrows combined more than making up for the earnings lost by pulling out of other outlets.

The greatest controversy, perhaps, has been the limited-time trial of Kindle Unlimited by top-selling authors, who have been allowed into KU without going exclusive. I’m one of those authors. This is not a lifetime exclusion; it is very much limited, just to entice those who make a lot of income elsewhere to see the potential benefits of exclusivity. I think Amazon knew that none of us would dare try this program without seeing for ourselves, in our own dashboards, just how it would play out.

Read another post about KU and similarities to 2011 here.

Here’s a comment I made today at KBoards about my KDP Select thoughts.

Now that a couple of months have gone by, and I’ve been able to watch my dashboard closely, I can say for certain that KU has more than covered the readership I gain from the iBookstore, Nook, and Kobo combined. That is: I would have more readers by being exclusive to Amazon than I would by having my ebooks everywhere else. I might be earning slightly less money, but with considerably more fanbase. This is the conundrum we face as we weigh whether or not to go exclusive, a decision I’m faced with right now as my limited time trial expires.

Another author posed the question of exclusivity like this: Would you rather sell 2,000,000 books to readers in Indiana, or 200,000 books around the globe? If the goal is to have your stories read, and exclusivity furthers that goal, then it isn’t a narrowing of readership.

This is further complicated by the fact that every retailer is in every home and practically on every device. You can read ebooks on most anything that has a screen. There are apps for reading ebooks on rival devices, which means publishing with Barnes & Noble places you on every Apple device and every Android device. For the exceptions to this rule, all my works are DRM-free and can be converted to be read anywhere. Is exclusivity really about limiting reader access when access is practically unfettered?

Another way to ask the question is this: What do we make of an author who only publishes with Simon & Schuster? Are they exclusive? Absolutely. But their books are available in many places. (Except when S&S is in a dispute with B&N, in which case you’ll have to shop elsewhere.) Who you publish with is limiting, though you don’t see authors urging each other to publish a book with every major publisher, “just in case.”

In 2012, I blogged about my results after pulling out of KDP Select. I was getting a handful of emails a month from readers who wanted to know why they couldn’t find my ebooks on the Nook store or the iBookstore. Feeling bad for these readers, and anxious about whether or not I was limiting my readership, I backed out of Select, even though it had helped launch my career. In May of 2012, I saw early signs that the readers I would gain elsewhere would not make up for the readers I would lose by the loss of KDP Select visibility. I’ve seen nothing to counter that observation since. I lose readers by spreading my ebooks far and wide. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s true.

It might also be true that spreading our ebooks everywhere hinders retailer competition rather than increasing it. After all, the indiscrimination of signing up for all services means they don’t have to compete for our business. They are guaranteed to have it by those who urge us to “publish everywhere, no matter what.” I’ve blogged about this before, and also how it takes getting used to the idea that we can move our eggs from basket to basket at will. None of these decisions are final. The KDP Select period is a mere 90 days. How do you think publishers would treat their authors if they could move to another publishing house every 90 days? How would digital retailers treat us if we exercised this right more often? It seems clear to me that the lack of discrimination harms us more than it helps us.

Again, since May of 2012, my other outlets combined have failed to make up the difference in readers lost from borrows on Amazon. Part of this is certainly my focus on Amazon as my go-to store for customers. Their affiliate program, the ease and familiarity of their site, and the huge penetration of their devices and apps, made it my go-to outlet when someone needs a link to one of my books. Success feeds into more success. Just as major publishers focus on their largest sales accounts, I did the same with Amazon. Do I owe them my career? Or do they owe their lead among ebook retailers to those of us who concentrated our efforts on their sales platform? Or did their early advantages lead to that concentration, which led to our success, so on and so on?

I have a lot of friends who have done well with publishing, and we debate these chicken-and-egg questions. I personally see the joint success as a symbiotic and friendly amplification of good will and hard work. Amazon gave us opportunities; we seized them; we both benefited. Amazon is not my friend, but they’ve been an honest and fair business partner. And the best part is that they don’t own my self-published works. I do. As I stated above, no decision like this is permanent—it’s only for 90 days at a time. Compare that to publishing with a major house like Hachette, where you will be subject to the whims of its management for the rest of your life (and your children’s lives!)

Just this week, another salvo was fired in the fight to gain exclusivity. It is the recently announced KDP All-Stars, open to authors enrolled in KDP Select. This is a bounty program for the most-read authors and titles by measure of total sales, plus the borrows from the Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited. The bonuses are significant. And they are monthly. In the self-publishing community (and in the first sentence of this paragraph) you will hear authors interpreting this from our perspective, as a lure to draw us in. But I think it’s more than that. I think it’s a way of harnessing authors as a sales and marketing force.

The result of this bounty program will be more authors urging their readers to check out their books on the Lending Library and in Kindle Unlimited, to give the program a month trial, to read for free. For 100 or so authors a month, the bonuses will help even the playing field between the roughly $1.70 / month paid per borrow (post-KU) and the full commission given to traditionally published ebooks. The program works similar to ACX’s bounty program which rewards getting users to sign up for Audible. Again, it turns us into an eager and enthusiastic sales force, something I’ve suggested publishing houses should do more often.

Of course, some already see this bounty program as an unfair system by which the successful get even more rewards while the struggling author gets nothing. But following the bestseller lists, I know that those 100 authors per month will change, and more and more authors like Wayne Stinnett will find themselves with a nice bonus and a reason to write more, publish more, and promote their works on Amazon.

As the time ticks down on my trial run in KU, which way am I leaning? Toward exclusivity. A larger readership is only one advantage. It’ll also be easier to keep my works up to date by only having to upload to a single site. Another bonus will be to concentrate my sales into a single set of bestseller lists. One of the drawbacks of being published everywhere is the reduction of visibility, ironically. The more sales are concentrated in a single outlet, the higher your ebooks will be on bestseller lists, and the more prominent to casual browsers. Reviews will also be more concentrated. Like with the publishing house analogy earlier, all efforts are channeled into the biggest sales outlet.

What are the drawbacks? You can’t make the NYT or USA Today lists if you are exclusive. But that just highlights how un-linked those lists are to actual sales—and I haven’t seen that making those lists increases sales so much as gives a rough indication of past sales. Another drawback is that I will lose some readers who only shop elsewhere, but that leads back to the question of whether it’s better to have fewer readers across more outlets or more readers in a single outlet. If you were offered an end-cap in every airport bookstore for a year, where they would display all of your works, would you pull your titles from all other outlets? I would. That visibility would be incredible.

That leaves the biggest complaint I’ve seen about exclusivity, which is that retailers will go out of business, and then whoever is left will destroy us and take all our shiny things away. I don’t understand this argument. Digital baskets are too easy to weave, and retailers like Apple and Google are not in danger of disappearing, ever. As I write about here, again, the lack of exclusivity is what hampers competition. When an author only publishes with Harper Collins, she doesn’t worry that Penguin Random House will go out of business. She assumes they’ll remain competitive to draw in other authors. Perhaps her next work as well. It’s really useful to imagine a world where traditionally published ebooks could be moved to another house every 90 days. Does anyone really think publishers would offer worse treatment in such a world?

The reason I’m blogging about this is because it isn’t easy. The results of my years of experimentation and rumination are counterintuitive. I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with where the data has led me, but it’s impossible to dispute my results. I have another month to watch my dashboard, see how Amazon is going to fund the KOLL/KU account, and then it’s all or nothing. I don’t know if my thinking out loud helps anyone else, but that’s my hope. It certainly helps me to write it all out, the pros as well as the cons. A lot of authors are facing the same conundrums. These decisions only get easier by sharing.

 

 

DRM: Dumb or Brilliant?

Harper Collins is employing a new watermarking DRM scheme, so they can tell where their pirated e-books are being sourced from. There are so many levels of dumb and brilliant here that it’s impossible to make a judgement, not without knowing the motivations of those involved.

If the idea is to actually stop piracy, the program is dumb as a bag of rocks with chains wrapped around it held fast by a bevy of padlocks. This won’t stop piracy. And it isn’t like piracy is even a concern. The music industry learned this (mostly and eventually). It takes a few clicks to stirp an ebook of its DRM. It’ll probably take an extra click or two to get rid of the watermark. Really, the only way to make a tamper-proof watermark would be to alter the formatting or content slightly for every outlet you upload to.

So how could this program be brilliant? Well, if it’s a scheme by the DRM manufacturer to make millions of dollars by selling snake oil to fearful publishers, it’s ingenious. I would think the engineers behind this are savvy enough to know it won’t stop the piracy, and they are probably savvy enough to know that piracy has almost no effect on ebook sales (in fact, our July AE report suggests that removing DRM might increase ebook sales. Studies in the music industry have shown the same effect And in traditional publishing, Tor has seen no detriment to going DRM-free).

Another way this program could be brilliant (though I fear no publisher is clever enough to think of this, and I’m probably giving them ideas) is to wage a fruitless legal battle with certain *cough* Amazon *cough* retailers. DRM removal on ebooks is a cinch. Buying ebooks on Amazon is a cinch. There’s a good chance that many of the pirated works are coming from Amazon sales. Perhaps publishers want a way to point back to the source and threaten legal action on the retailer, rather than tracking down the individuals who are doing the actual pirating.

Otherwise, what do publishers hope to gain with this program, other than annoy their paying customers who get locked into a single device? Let’s say they know a pirated ebook started with a purchase at Amazon. What then? Ask them to beef up their proprietary DRM? If Apple can’t keep their devices from being jailbroken (often on the day of release and with very smart people at Apple’s disposal), what hope does ebook DRM have? None.

To get around the unavailability of Harry Potter ebooks, fans took the time to go through the print books and TYPE THE WHOLE DAMN THINGS OUT. And then they uploaded these hand-made ebooks to warez sites. Publishers only lose money by fighting the needs and wishes of their paying customers. And their efforts don’t impact the people who refuse to support artists and publishers, anyway. There are hoarders out there who amass gigabytes of ebooks without any plan to read them, and these aren’t lost sales. It’s just a weird psychological dysfunction. Publishers should learn to ignore it and to embrace DRM-free media.

 

 

The Tankers are Turning

I gave a talk at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory last week, and one of the questions that came up during the Q&A was whether I’m a pessimist or an optimist. The second part of the question was if I thought the world I depict in WOOL has any chance of coming to fruition.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard a variant of this question. Often it’s as blunt as: “Why do you write such depressing stories? You seem like such a happy guy!”

I believe there’s a fine balance between begging for a better future and also being thankful for the progress of the past. If you ask me, the world is getting measurably better for the vast majority of people year after year. I think Steven Pinker’s work on this topic covers it best, especially his excellent Better Angels of our Nature. What’s important, in my view, is to pause in our protestations now and then and give homage to the progress others have made, to recognize the change happening around us before we dust ourselves off and demand one more concession.

This is true of social, ethical, and political progress. But it applies to less important things as well, like book publishing.

Those of us who self-publish are nimble. We can pivot on a dime and publish at the drop of one. If we have an idea, we can implement it the same day, see how it works, share our results, and at the same time learn from others. Not even Amazon moves fast enough for us. We often complain about how long it takes the ‘Zon to implement ideas. To the five major New York publishers, of course, Amazon’s advances must seem like the blitzkrieg.

If the five major New York publishers are like oil tankers, then Amazon is a destroyer, and we are erratic (and possibly annoying) jetskis. We are impatient for progress much as revolutionaries (and visionaries) in other fields often are. But I think it’s important to remember that there are visionaries on the decks of those other ships as well. A lot of smart people see where we need to go. Some of them have even turned over the wheel. It just takes longer for these behemoths to bend their wake.

Before I list a handful of the signs of progress I’ve seen the past year or so, I want to head off the cries of “but they have this and this to do.” Of course they have a lot to catch up on. That will almost certainly always be the case. We race rings around these lumbering craft, but let’s be aware of progress made. Let’s even cheer them on now and then. Stuff I’ve seen in the past year:

After years of wondering why publishers don’t sell direct in order to gather customer data and avoid issues with retail partners, Harper Collins launched their own retail site.
Something I hesitated to suggest as a distant possibility came to fruition much earlier than expected (last year in fact) when Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint began celebrating and hyping a number of its authors as “Indies.” Rather than be cynical about this, I see it as a positive sign that the stigma of self-publishing has plummeted at major publishing houses. More than plummet, the notion of self-publishers as something to aspire to has become a reality.
Publishers are starting to experiment with reasonable ebook prices. Many of the top-selling traditionally published ebooks this year were in the $4.99 range, including John Green’s excellent The Fault in our Stars. (Now back up to $7+, but it was at $4.99 for most of this year.)
Backlist titles are also becoming more affordable. I’m buying traditionally published ebooks more often, as the number that I see priced above $8.99 are becoming fewer and fewer.
At least three publishers are rumored to be working on moving their operations out of the most expensive real estate in one of the priciest cities in the world.
A few publishers are experimenting with subscription services on a limited basis.
Random House launched a portal for its authors that in some ways is superior to anything offered by digital retailers. The portal shows sales, foreign rights acquisitions, royalty statements, and includes marketing tip videos.
Random House (and I believe others) have worked on creating communities among their authors, including forums where authors can meet and share advice. Tapping into authors as a resource is a very positive sign from the world’s largest publisher.
Release schedules are picking up, with books and sequels coming out in the same calendar year. The hesitation to publish two books by the same author in a 12-month span has rapidly deteriorated.
Publishers (following Baen’s 2008 experiments) have worked on ways of crowdsourcing the slush pile and opening themselves to general un-agented submissions.
More digital-first imprints are giving a wider range of authors a chance to work with a publisher, build a readership, and hone their craft.
On the contract side, my agent has seen progress on a number of fronts, including the openness to strike non-compete clauses, better thresholds for reversion, a little movement on the deep discount royalty rate, and other positive signs that show self-publishing is having an impact as a competitive route to publication.
Not quite publisher-directed, but there were indie winners at both the Rita’s and the Hugo’s this year. And several conventions saw modest progress in becoming more inclusive to self-published authors.

There are certainly areas of improvement that I’m leaving out. Make a note in the comments, and I’ll add them to the list. And again, this is a break from pointing out all the places where further progress can be made (even refinements to the items listed above). No doubt there are plenty. But the tankers are turning. We’re just zipping around too fast to notice most of the time.

David Streitfeld is Dangerous and Disingenuous

David Streitfeld of the New York Times has now cemented himself as the blabbering mouthpiece for the New York publishing cartel, and while he is making a fool of himself for those in the know, he is a dangerous man for the impression he makes on his unsuspecting readers.

(I should point out here that I’m a 7-day-a-week home delivery subscriber to the New York Times. I start every day by reading the physical paper. I love it. But they do make occasional hiring mistakes.)

A dishonest man with access to a pulpit is like a poisoner with access to a well. David Streitfeld is a dishonest man. He is a reporter with an agenda. A good case in point is this head-scratcher: Just one summer ago, David made reference to Orwell’s well-known disdain for cheap paperbacks to draw a comparison to Amazon’s fight for lower ebook prices. A year later, the same David Streitfeld claimed that Orwell was a fan of cheap paperbacks. What changed?

What changed is that Amazon used the same Orwellian quote in proper context, just as David did a year ago, but we all know that Amazon simply can’t be right about anything. And so enterprising Amazon-bashers reframed a partial quote from Orwell in an attempt to have the deceased man stand for the opposite of his opinion, in an exercise as disgusting as it was Orwellianly ironic.

There’s also this gem of a piece which ran the day before Douglas Preston and company paid over $100,000 for an ad in the New York Times. It states one side of this debate (much as Douglas Preston has been doing) and serves as an advertising twofer. It’s not reporting; it’s shilling. One highlight is its dismissal of a petition calling on Hachette to negotiate in good faith, which garnered over 8,000 signatures in mere weeks, by comparing it to a year-old petition calling for the protection of whales which drew over 200,000 signatures.

In what has become known as “Whale math,” the opinion of 900 authors is worth a fawning article (complete with Douglas Preston hanging out by his writing shack on his 300 acre summer estate), while the opinion of 8,000+ authors is meaningless . . . because far more people care about saving whales.

When I read articles like these in my beloved New York Times, I worry for their reputation. I wonder if I should write a letter to their board expressing my concern. We obviously have a reporter here in the pocket of monied interests, one who can’t even agree with himself year to year, and one who works in deliberate and bizarre ways to dismiss one entire side of the debate.

Let’s look at all that David Streitfeld gets wrong or deliberately misrepresents so we fully understand just how either dishonest or ignorant he is being about this Amazon / Hachette dispute:

After six months of being largely cut off from what is by far the largest bookstore in the country, many Hachette writers are fearful and angry.

Largely cut off? If I go to Amazon right now, all of Hachette’s books are available for purchase. The only books I can’t get are the ones that aren’t even out yet. Amazon removed pre-order buttons from books it may not have the ability to sell once they release. There is no “largely cut off” here. None at all. But readers may suspect this is the case if all they hear is David Streitfeld’s propaganda.

Check out this doozy:

In the Harris Poll of corporate reputations, [Amazon] once again took top honors this year. But that prestige is taking a bit of a beating as the fight with Hachette drags on.

So, because of Amazon’s actions, they have fallen from first place to . . . first place? Where is David’s fact to buttress his opinion of a beating? Reporting that Amazon took top honors in a poll of corporate reputations, and then saying that this reputation is taking a battering without referencing anything at all, is worse reporting than you’ll find on my stupid little blog. David, your board should be ashamed of you.

The entire article, in fact, is a dishonest and forceful echoing of Preston’s letter, replete with threats of growing discord and plummeting prestige. While the letter to the board members will likely do nothing, Streitfeld’s salvo is another loud boom in the PR war where those with microphones get amplified and those with mere votes and voices are muted.

David points out that:

Anyone contemplating ordering his latest novel, “The Lost Island,” written with Lincoln Child, is warned it might take as long as three weeks to arrive. That, as Amazon and its customers know, might as well be forever.

Without mentioning the fact that this delay is due to Hachette’s shipping inefficiencies. Why should Amazon sell pre-orders for books when it has no lasting contract with Hachette? Why should it stock predictive quantities of their titles in warehouses when it may not be able to sell that stock in the near future?

Douglas Preston gets this wrong as well. In this latest letter to board members, he says that Amazon could employ some negotiation tool that does not impact authors. I’d love to hear his ideas. Or at least one idea. How can Amazon hurt Hachette without hurting its authors? Impacting sales is going to impact the 15% of that money that trickles its way down to the writer.

The reasonable move from Amazon would have been to stop carrying Hachette’s titles months ago until Hachette began negotiating in good faith. Hachette went months without responding to Amazon while their contract ticked down and expired. Amazon’s solution to removing authors from harm was to fund a pool to make their royalties whole until the dispute is settled. They’ve made three such offers, and Hachette hasn’t so much as countered a single one. The cries of “disingenuous” could be tested by calling Amazon’s bluff or making a counter offer that helps the authors while hurting Amazon. But no one has suggested this other than those of us who are supposedly Amazon’s shills.

Hachette has instead refused to remove its authors from the line of fire. The company is using them as a shield. And the New York Times has chosen not to report on all the details and on both sides of this negotiation. Rather, they have chosen to engage in a deliberate negative PR campaign against Amazon. They have chosen to support a publishing cartel that recently colluded in a price-fixing scheme that harmed readers. They have chosen to make as their publishing spokesman a reporter who contradicts himself from one summer to the next, a reporter who sings the praises of a handful of elite authors in exchange for 6-figure ads while dismissing the thousands of authors who disagree.

 

 

Barnes & Noble on the Brink

You know you’ve had a rough time when flatlining is a sign of good health. That’s the news from B&N as same-store sales decreased a mere 0.4% when investors were expecting a 2% decline. Shares rose on the news. The loss of only $30 million this quarter was mostly made possible by slashing the investment in Nook, which B&N plans to divest itself of by next year. The latest Nook tablet is a modified Samsung device, in fact, as B&N has veered from heavily investing in ebooks, swearing them off, heavily investing again, and most recently . . . swearing them off.

I worked in a B&N while in college, and have spent many an hour in their stores as a customer. I’ve also watched them closely as a publisher, hoping they would help grow reading and the adoption of ebooks. In my view, they haven’t done much right in over a decade. Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that B&N used to be the bad boy who knocked the indie bookstores out of business (or the fact that indie bookstores have been on an amazing comeback over the past six or seven years). What could B&N do better? How can they turn this around without becoming a gift shop that has a few racks of books in yonder corner?

The first thing I’d do is bring back the comfy armchairs. Remember those? A big part of my job at B&N was gathering the piles of books left around the armchairs and reshelving them (this task fell just ahead of collecting the subscription insert confetti around the periodicals).

Go to a B&N now and try to find an armchair. They have been removed. Perhaps the thinking was that people were reading and not buying, but that’s never how I used those chairs as a shopper. Sure, I left a stack of books behind (much kinder than reshelving them improperly), but I also purchased a stack of books. As an employee, I watched customer after customer do the same thing. But management saw the abandoned piles without realizing many books on the receipts came from the originally larger piles, and so the chairs were removed. The stores became less of a destination. There was less pair-bonding between shopper and store. Not as much cuddling or foreplay. Might as well sit at home, naked in front of the computer, and go for the dirtier, quicker, and less satisfying solo act of shopping online.

B&N has a long history of making decisions like these that go against the needs and wants of their customers. Shelving books according to paid advertisement is the biggest sin. We used to receive strict schematics called planograms (familiar to many sectors of retail), that instructed us where to place each title on a display. Compare this to the indie bookstore I worked in, where we were able to shelve according to regional tastes, employee recommendations, and actual sales rates. B&N applies the same sort of silliness to their Nook bestseller list, where the books readers want are often forced down to lower rankings while paid co-op space is provided to publishers in order to promote books nobody cares about.

When the customer of retail becomes the publisher, rather than the reader, you have a problem.

Loyalty cards are another issue. These cost a yearly subscription, and being asked if you have one right at the moment of transactional copulation is a buzz-kill. Dreading the pressure of signing up is a great way to block the dopamine release that might get me to come back. It would be like my wife, in a moment of tenderness, asking me if I remembered to take out the trash. No? Well, would you like to? Are you sure? It’ll save you a guilt-trip right now and 20% off any future guilt trip for the next year.

Regular discounts on all books (even if only 10% on paper and 20% on hardback) would have moved much more product than a loyalty card. The indie store I worked in did frequent promotions like this, and the results were obvious. All hardbacks were discounted, all the time. All staff picks (and there were hundreds throughout the store) were as well. Both sets of books flew, as we reduced the incentive to shop online and provided real curation, not bought curation.

What could have saved B&N (and what might work right now if launched immediately and with gusto) is a plan to embrace digital, not just in product, but in customer connection. If B&N offered a free audiobook and ebook with the sale of every hardback, and a free ebook with the sale of every paperback, they could get people through their doors. More importantly, the perceived value of the purchase would go up without impacting the actual cost of the transaction. Buy a book, get some electrons for free.

Except it would be better than free for the publishers and the bookstore. To qualify for the digital freebie, all you have to do is flash your FREE loyalty card. In exchange for the digital wares, B&N supplies the publisher with data on shopping habits. People who bought this book also like that book. And if there’s an author event (I’ll get to that in a moment), the readers who like similar books are notified in advance and invited out.

Speaking of author events, why not have more of them? B&N seems to hate author events. Indie bookshops excel at these. Part of the problem is the ordering system. Have a weekly indie night where a local self-published author supplied their own books—these are then purchased through the B&N till—and the author is given a cash cut on the way out the door. No need to predict sales and stock books or return them. I tried this with my self-published books, and the B&Ns I talked to were unable to process how this would even work. No, they would have to order them in advance and return them. No flexibility or creativity. Meanwhile, coffee shops and art co-ops were able to manage this, and we all made out.

At my B&N in college, I organized reading groups and book clubs. What happened to these? And where are the writing groups or the affiliation with NaNoWriMo and Camp NaNo? Where are the writing workshops? Turning B&Ns into the hub for all the aspiring and published writers in the community is a no-brainer. This is like comic shops having a gaming night. Sure, people don’t spend a ton during these events, but they make the store a hub of their social lives. We reward those hubs. Our lives orbit them.

All it takes is appealing to what the customer wants. Which requires remembering who your customers are. We’re the guys and gals draped sideways over the comfy chairs, piles of books at our feet, heads bursting with all we want to read, and often with all we dream of writing. Cater to us, not the stockholders. Cater to us, not the publishers. It’s what the indie bookstores are doing. And it’s why they’re going to eat your lunch.