Mary Sisson's Blog, page 133

Progress report

Today I just carefully read over the feedback I've gotten on Trust--looks good, looks doable, looks worth doing.

If you're saying, "That's IT? Don't you know there are more hours in a day than THAT?" then you just aren't taking nerves into account. I actually had one of those dreams last night where you're taking a class, but you haven't actually been because it's not something you were really interested in doing, and there was an exam on a book, and you don't have the book and never actually did the exam, but the professor has an exam with your name on it, and where did that come from? And you know that to clear things up, you're going to have to explain that you never actually bought or read the book, which was the only on on the syllabus, and probably should have dropped the class long ago.

In other words: This makes me nervous. I just need to ease into it and things will go fine.

Virtual floor placement and retail sales

More evidence that the comments on The Passive Voice are well worth reading: M. Louisa Locke wrote a great analysis of why most indie authors don't have good sales on Barnes & Noble--but some do.

She writes:

First of all, when you first go into the books store [on Barnes & Noble's Web site] and look at the side for the categories (which I see as looking for book shelves) and choose Fiction, you are given 4 choices versus 19 for Amazon's Fiction listings. Say you are interested in historical fiction–there is nothing for you. So then you look at the stuff in the center of the page–and you get the equivalent of the tables at the front of a bookstore (you know, best sellers, new releases, editors picks)....

[She eventually finds historical fiction, but it takes forever and she's not sure she could do it again.] As the author of an historical mystery, I know that these odd byzantine browsing paths help explain why I sell so few books on Barnes and Noble, while other authors (who are in one of the main 4 categories or instant collections) are selling well. The readers just aren't finding my books.

 

Floor placement is incredibly important to brick-and-mortar retail. It's why a company like Coca-Cola will pay extra to have their product placed on the eye-level shelves or (even more expensive) stacked up at the end of the aisle of the grocery store. It's why when you go into a department store, the first floor is cosmetics and handbags--those have a higher profit margin than the actual clothing you have to go up three floors to try on. And it's interesting to see that floor placement is every bit as important in a virtual store.

I've seen theories that Barnes & Noble just attracts a different audience than Amazon--and I'm willing to believe that they do to some degree, because different brands typically appeal to different demographics. But clearly one piece of Amazon's success in selling indie authors (and they are very successful at it--a large majority of indie writers make the large majority of their sales on Amazon) is their virtual floor plan. If you highlight only the best sellers, then that's pretty much all you'll sell. If you make it easy to find weird and obscure titles from people no one has ever heard of, then you'll sell those, too.

(And yes, the post she left the comment to is the result of a tip from me, because I knew Passive Guy would be interested in the subject. But her post is actually on another topic, so I don't think we're too far down the rabbit hole here....)

Progress report

After a few days of not being able to work on the layout, I finished it today! Huzzah!

Ordinarily I would go ahead and print it out and proof it and then find some really tiny mistakes and then input those corrections into both the layout and the e-books. But, man, those LibraryThing reviews! Even people who had issues with Trang want to read the next book ASAP. So I think I'm bumping Trust up to top priority, with the large-print edition of Trang downgraded to being the project I work on when I haven't had any sleep.

Funny numbers

Not shockingly, there's been a lot of coverage of Barnes & Noble lately.

Whether or not the company is going to go under is pretty much an academic concern for self-published authors. (And here's a more optimistic assessment than mine, although I feel a certain obligation to point out that that position is hedged with such inspirational examples as Research In Motion.) Authors are suppliers, not employees or investors, and the cost of putting a book up on B&N is zero, so, you know, if they get out of the soup, very nice for them, and if they don't, presumably other retailers will pick up the slack. Really the only numbers a self-published author needs to worry about with B&N is his or her own sales figures.

But being a former business reporter, I wanted to note something that Passive Guy first pointed out: No one knows what B&N's share of the e-book market actually is. How could they know that they have 25% or 26% or 27% or 30% of the e-book market, when overall e-book sales aren't reported anywhere? Certain numbers that public companies report are federally regulated--lie about your 2012 profits, and you get in all kinds of trouble. But most numbers (especially those companies like to throw around in press releases) aren't--and guess what category "percentage of the e-book market" falls into?

This is an old, old problem in publishing: Even with print books, the best data available is far from perfect, and it doesn't cover e-books. I don't know that it's possible to gather good data about e-books: Even if you had audited reports from the major retailers, publishers and authors can sell books from their own Web sites, so how are you going to account for that?

So we're left with that old journalistic standby--guesswork! Guesswork and (my favorite) not telling people that it's guesswork!

For example, in The New York Times, you see "the company has made quick work of capturing almost 30 percent of the e-book market in two years." And then you see a bunch of quotes from B&N executives saying that, wow, this is an amazing business to be in--look how much market share they've captured! And so quickly! Certainly it makes lots and lots of sense for someone to come along and buy it!

Of course, there's also this, also from The New York Times, "I.H.S. iSuppli, a research company, estimates that Barnes & Noble has 13 percent of the e-reader market after two years in the business, versus 67 percent for Amazon. The company tracked shipments of display parts to prepare its estimates."

Oh! So B&N controls only 13 percent of the market!  It's not the same market--they could control 13 percent of the e-reader market and almost 30 percent of the e-book market simultaneously. But the Nook is an e-reader, not an e-book. It's not B&N's e-book business. Nor is it B&N.com. It's a device, and they control 13 percent of the market for that specific device, not including tablets or cell phones or other things that people read e-books on.

(ETA: Of course, the 13 percent figure is also guesswork, but at least it honestly identifies itself as guesswork and provides the reader some idea of how it was determined, which helps a reader decide whether it's a good guess or not. That's a lot better than regurgitating data provided by an interested party as though it were sacred writ.)

Again, this is of academic interest, really, but it may help you make more sense of future events. There's a bit of a snow job going on right now--nothing wrong with that, really, it's not like I post the "meh" reviews of Trang here. Just be aware that reporting is usually regarded by companies as a venue for marketing.

B&N not doing so well

Barnes & Noble is looking to sell assets and may spin off the Nook. It looks like they're running out of money. This can happen when you're trying to develop a new business at the same time your old business is collapsing--you just don't have the funds to invest properly in the new line or to get past that initial money-losing period of development.

It will be interesting to see what happens to their Web site and the Nook. (Nobody wants the brick-and-mortar bookstores--not even Barnes & Noble itself.) A new player who isn't encumbered by B&N's financial history could step in and make a big success of one or the other, or both could just go away. B&N itself is obviously going down, and I am not optimistic regarding their prospects of finding a buyer for their more-appealing assets: Their problems are longstanding and well-known, so at this point any potential buyer will probably wait until B&N actually goes into bankruptcy and then snap up those assets on the cheap.

(Oh, and I've been unproductive the past couple of days because of kids and general life crap, but I should get back in the saddle today.)

This is funny

Ha-ha-ha. But yeah, lay off the sauce anyway. Funerals are not yet accepted as a serious art form.

She's doing it!

Yes! Crabby McSlacker plans to self-publish! Excellent news! (But stay away from these guys, Crabby!)

The review page is up!

It's here! Look at what nice things people say! Aw....

You know, this really does help with the motivation--it's hard to get going if you feel like the end product is something no one cares about or wants. But now, people are all excited about reading the next book! Sounds like I need to get off my ass and finish it, doesn't it?

I find it especially cool that people who don't ordinarily read sci-fi like the book. Sci-fi is worth reading!

What authors want

So, yeah, I still haven't figured out Google e-books. It occurred to me that maybe I'm not allowed to put a book up there, because I'm self-publishing and not a publishing house? But of course I couldn't find that information.

Now there's a rumor that Apple will do it's own self-publishing platform, plus Kobo (which has a larger presence overseas) may do one as well.

It seems like people are just now figuring out, Hey, Amazon is making some good business off of them there self-publishing authors! The cost to Amazon of, say, keeping Darcie Chan's book on their servers is minimal, and she's made them more than $250,000 in six months! You can't beat that with a stick!

So everyone wants in now, but as often happens with these "me-too" businesses, everyone wants to ignore what made the original business successful. Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords ARE EASY. Got that? Yes, creating a file people can easily read is a little complicated, but actually uploading it and making it available for sale? EASY EASY EASY EASY. Like I said, you never saw whiny posts about that aspect of the process until I tried Google e-books (and then I made up for lost time).

One aspect of the Apple rumor that is particularly amusing if it is true is that they will be demanding exclusivity from authors. That's a joke, right? Amazon only recently began offering authors certain perks in exchange for exclusivity. It's a totally voluntary program, and what popularity it has is because Amazon can really move books for you--but even with Amazon's selling power, they are only asking for three months' of exclusivity, and it's certainly not a requirement for listing your book. I can't imagine anyone giving up access to, say, Amazon or B&N or even Smashwords in exchange for being in the iBookstore (which you can get into via Smashwords anyway).

Oh, and another thing? The current players PAY WELL. A royalty of more or less 70%.

Are these new players going to succeed in this business? Well, if they make it impossible to use the service, if they put draconian requirements on writers, and if they don't offer them enough money, I'm going to go out on a limb and say no.

It's almost like this is a business, and authors are rational economic actors, is it not? I realize that authors have a reputation of being patsies, and that this reputation is sometimes deserved, but I'm going to be generous and note that for a very long time, authors had basically no choice other than to get screwed. Nowadays things have changed--past tense, have already changed. Apple isn't some White Knight riding into the rescue here--if it's actually entering the field, it's entering one that's pretty well occupied by some pretty generous players.

Progress report

I laid out SIX chapters today--whoo! Yeah, it's amazing what I can accomplish when I actually have the time to work on something.

You know, one problem with breaking compound words so that the break separates the two words is that it makes it really confusing when you're trying to figure out which hyphens to keep and which to ditch in a new layout. "Walk-ing" is easy, "Five-Eighths" is easy, but "life-like" or "non-committal"? Those sent me reaching for Webster's.

With this layout, I'm experiementing with using Word more (I know, it's my nemesis, but I try to make it a useful nemesis). One of the problems with Word is that if you take a two-page view (which you need to do to make sure the two blocks of text in a spread are the same length) it assumes that your chapter's first page is on the left-hand side of the spread, which isn't always true. Acrobat doesn't have that problem, so before I'd switch back and forth a lot between the two, which was a pain and really time-consuming.

So I'm trying to use Word's two-page view. When the chapter starts on a right-hand page, I cut the page onto the clipboard while I'm noodling in Word. Then I paste it back into place before I move everything over to Acrobat. That's actually worked fine. The larger problem is that, you know, I'm using Word, which just isn't as reliable as one might like. Word moves lines around and repeats them and pretends that they are someplace they aren't, so even if it looks like everything's going great, I still stop and put the layout into Acrobat every ten pages or so. Otherwise I'll discover things like six missing lines (seriously, six!) on the third page of a 45-page chapter (remember, this is the large print edition, so these chapters are HUGE), and I have to lay out the whole damned thing again.