Claire Ryan's Blog, page 15

HarperCollins UK Boss Outs Self As Being Hilariously, Wilfully Blind

The Passive Voice brought this story to my attention today - HarperCollins UK boss tells publishers: take storytelling back from digital rivals. There are some choice quotes from this particular article that I simply must post here…

Publishers have allowed competitors to jump in, he says, whether they are startup companies producing apps or authors publishing their novels on Amazon. Now they “need to take that space back” by producing content for games players, tablet computers and other devices…

Redmayne expects demand for ebooks to continue to grow before plateauing at roughly 50% of all book sales. But the industry needs to think far beyond ebooks and audio books, he argues, and create content for a range of devices: apps, games for consoles, video. These are attracting new readers, people who “didn’t feel at home in bookshops” and who have discovered reading through their iPad or another device…

“We need to think about brands. In a world where Amazon is knocking out hundreds of emerging authors every year, it becomes increasingly difficult for emerging authors to be discovered, so we need to think about how we build brands like John Grisham, James Patterson,” he said, revealing he is a fan of Bernard Cornwell, author of the swashbuckling Richard Sharpe novels. “Michael Morpurgo, Hilary Mantel, JK Rowling – people who have transcended being an author and are brands in their own right … and in a digital world they are going to create a huge amount of value.”

I know I like to mock the traditional publishing industry something fierce, but good grief, I just can’t top this. I actually struggled to read much of this without laughing out loud.

I mean, seriously? “Publishers have allowed competitors to jump in” when it comes to storytelling? Man, where the hell have you been over the last hundred years of cinema – or do movies and television not count as storytelling competition? How about the last few decades of computer gaming? And now you’re pointing at apps and self-published authors as your main enemy?

I honestly cannot parse this level of complete obliviousness. Dear Charlie Redmayne, that ship has long since sailed and publishers were not on it, and if anything – ANYTHING – shows just how out of touch you are, it’s this:

“Publishers have historically been the most innovative and creative of organisations,” he said.

Someone who says this about traditional publishers – the same people who had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital age by Amazon; who still treat Amazon as their nemesis despite all the money they make there; whose response to the ebook revolution was to stall, ignore, and fundamentally misunderstand everything about it – is someone so wilfully blind that they’re in need of a roadmap just to put their pants on in the morning. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the head of HarperCollins, supposedly the man with the plan and the technical know-how.

HarperCollins? A “Storyteller”?

In short: No. In long: Hahahahahaahaha no.

One of the comments on PG’s link rightly pointed out that publishers don’t do this. Authors and other creative individuals are the storytellers, and publishers are distribution and marketing. The fact that Redmayne conflates the two is so highly telling as to be astonishing, and it’s indicative of something very fundamental to the mindset of the traditional industry.

Here’s how I break it down:

They think that ‘publishers = literature’. Not ‘authors = literature’; authors are the providers of raw material, in the same way that a bauxite mine produces the raw materials that will someday become a Macbook. So, if ‘publishers = literature’, then by extension, ‘publishers = storytelling’. Authors are an afterthought. And all of their talk and business practices bears out this mindset, that they are still the most important link in the chain from author to reader, simply because they were for years and in spite of the fact that technology has blown most of their relevancy out of the water.

And in the whole article, the only thing he had to say about authors was how to ‘build brands’. I’ve talked before about the author as a brand unto themselves in my marketing book – link in the sidebar for anyone who wants a free copy for reference – but at least I was speaking directly to authors there. Redmayne talks about them like they’re the latest Xbox, for gods’ sake! It’s insulting and dehumanizing, and consolidates the whole ‘ivory tower’ feel he’s got going on there.

Frankly, if I were working at HarperCollins, I would be shitting bricks after reading this. I made the following predictions over a year ago, and they still hold true now as far as I’m concerned:

The Big Six (now five) will downsize, consolidate and possibly merge over the next few years as they trim sails and try to survive in the brave new world of publishing.
Paper books will continue to crash, and with them, even more book stores will close.
The survivors will be incredibly consumer orientated, and focused on delivering a good sales experience – closer to a boutique than a supermarket, possibly incorporating extra services for readers like a cafe with comfy chairs, or even a small lending library.
Ebooks will continue to explode, and Amazon will remain the dominant player with very little competition from the traditional publishers. If a disruptive service appears, it’ll be from a source far outside the usual publishing paradigm, like Netflix.
Non-traditionally published authors will come to dominate the bestseller lists.
Literary agents will start to go out of business, and some will re-orientate themselves around a new list of services that don’t necessarily include the Big Six (now five).

Seems like the only thing that’s taking a while is the fifth one. Give it time, though… As for Charlie’s warning, that publishers should start trying to take space from app makers and self-published authors, despite having none of the expertise to do so?

Yeah, good luck with that.

Related Posts:

How to Spike Your Book in One Easy Step
Essential Free WordPress Plugins for Authors
Kobo Release Another Statement about the Purge
Top Free WordPress Themes for Writers
Why Traditional Publishing Will Fail

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Let’s Talk to Sonya Solomonovich, Author of Dryad

I had a chance to catch up with another Vancouverite lately – Sonya Solomonovich, who’s just released her latest book called Dryad, a time-travelling eco-thriller with some fantasy thrown in for good measure. I asked her a few questions on her experience of the technical side of self-publishing.

Which services do you publish on, and how easy or difficult do you find the process?

I publish on Smashwords, Amazon’s Kindle store, and Createspace. This is my second book, so I find it much easier now that I’m familiar with the process.

Overall, I’d say it’s pretty easy, and I’m not the most technology-savvy person. In order have your book made into an ebook on Smashwords and Amazon, you need to change the formatting of your Word file, and the free Smashwords formatting guide has all the information you need. Anyone who is reasonably familiar with Microsoft Word can do it.

Also, one thing I wanted to mention is that you don’t need to convert the document into an ebook yourself. This seems to be a misconception that a lot of indie writers have. I kept hearing about people using Calibris or some such thing, but it’s really not necessary. I simply uploaded my formatted Word document onto Smashwords and KDP, and they converted it into ebooks.

Do you do your own formatting and cover design?

I do my own formatting, but I’m not much of a visual artist, so I hired an artist to create an original cover. It was expensive, but I like the idea that it’s created specifically for my novel and not just a bunch of images cut and pasted from random places and put together in a haphazard way as many indie book covers seem to be.

What would you say is the biggest technical challenge that you’ve faced so far?

Getting the right information on how to format and upload the ebook content. I came across a lot of misleading information about it on the internet, and as a result I wasted some time trying to create an ebook when I didn’t even need to do that.

There’s lots of options out there for online marketing for self-published authors. What have you found that works well for Dryad so far, and what else would you like to try?

I’ve done an interview and am in the process of doing a giveaway on Goodreads. I think the interview helped sell a number of copies, and the giveaway will be more beneficial in the long run because not many people purchased it but lots of people have added the book to their “want-to-read” shelf on Goodreads. I’m also planning a virtual tour in November with Sage’s blog tours.

My personal favorite promotional technique is giveaways. People can’t say no to something that’s free, and hopefully they’ll enjoy the book enough to write a review! But all in all, I don’t know if it makes much of a difference what type of promotion you do as long as you are doing something, whether it’s reviews, guest posts, interviews, or giveaways. The important thing is to try to reach as many people as possible by promoting your book on various blogs and websites (ie. not just your own blog), so just doing some kind of promotion every week should help keep sales up.

Lastly, tell us a little about your next project, or your future plans.

I would like to keep writing novels of course, but I don’t have an idea for a new one yet. I’ve left the ending to Dryad quite open, so maybe a sequel will be forthcoming.

Thanks to Sonya for her time! Check out Dryad here, and add it to your reading list on Goodreads here.

Related Posts:

The Great Erotica Ebook Purge
Why Traditional Publishing Will Fail
Cunable by the Numbers
Buy This Book WordPress Plugin
On the Amazon display problem…

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Essential Free WordPress Plugins for Authors

So, I’d like to follow up my post on WP Themes for authors with something on the best free WordPress plugins. So let’s take a look, shall we?

Unfortunately, these are limited to self-hosted WordPress installs. Sorry, free blog people! Don’t worry though, your WordPress.com blog has enough functionality to start with if you’re not willing to dig into a more complicated setup.

Again, all these plugins are available free from the WP Directory.

Buy This Book Plugin

Of course I’m going to mention my own plugin… Buy This Book is a neat little tool for displaying your books in your sidebar with a slideout menu of different service links. It’s also supported by yours truly, and I take suggestions for new functionality all the time. It’s designed to make it easy for an author to add a basic display for selling their books, and it’ll show up to three books per widget.

Newsletter Plugin

Okay, for all you authors who want to build up a mailing list, Newsletter is the in-depth way to go. It’s got dozens of different options, but top of my list is the fact that it lets an author collect email addresses and customize different subscription options. It also has a number of options for displaying a subscription form, which is a must if you want more flexibility.

Jetpack Plugin

Jetpack is about the most useful all-rounder in the WP Directory. It’s written by the WordPress team, and one of the main features in the free WordPress.com blogs, and now you can get all its tasty features on your own self-hosted site too!

Jetpack just has too many great additions to count, but my personal favorites are the easy-to-add contact form, the custom CSS module, the sharing options, the WP statistics, and the automatic mobile theme addition. For authors who’d like to offer an email subscription option without going through all the trouble of Newsletter, Jetpack also has a basic subscription widget.

It does require a WordPress account to make it go, but they’re free, so what are you waiting for?

Better WP Security Plugin

Okay, so I know a lot of authors just ain’t that technically inclined, and anyone who’s not technically inclined needs to watch out for their site security. The easiest option I know of is to install Better WP Security, and run through whatever recommendations you can with it. You may not be able to change your admin user ID – and frankly, I’m not sure you’d want to try if you don’t know what you’re doing – but the bare minimum of switching on a login counter lockout can make a big difference.

Trust me, there are not-nice people out there who’d just love to break into a site and leave malware all over it, so really consider this one.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

So, this is another no-brainer. You need some SEO control, okay? This is just a given. WP SEO is my plugin of choice, seeing as it gives you a nice little SEO checklist for each post. If you’re aiming to build up a lot of traffic through search engine traffic, you absolutely need this. Otherwise, just get it anyway, because it’s good practice.

Are there any WordPress plugins I wouldn’t recommend?

Well, that depends. I’m not going to say that there are plugins to avoid in particular, but it’s worth noting a few basic guidelines:

Don’t run too many plugins. How fast your site is generally depends on how good your host is, and how many plugins you run at once. If your site is slowing to a crawl, then you need to disable a few, or get better hosting. You can also get a caching plugin like WP Super Cache, which might speed things up a bit. But in general, don’t go nuts with the plugins. Stick to the functionality you really need.

Beware of any plugins that are not in the WP Directory. If it’s not listed in the Directory, then I generally won’t use it. Anything not in there is usually split between two camps – the ones that can’t be trusted, and the ones you have to pay for. (The same goes for themes.) The untrusted ones are… well, untrusted. They could have anything in them, like malware or whatever. The ones you have to pay for may not be worth the money, unless you’re a bestseller, so tread carefully with those.

One exception to this are addons to popular free plugins, like the extra modules you can buy for Woocommerce. Those are generally good value and well written.

Got any other suggestions for plugins? Leave them in the comment here.

Related Posts:

Top Free WordPress Themes for Writers
Is Outskirts Press really Top Ranked?
Buy This Book Plugin updated
Buy This Book Update
Buy This Book WordPress Plugin

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Kobo Release Another Statement about the Purge

Guess what just landed in my inbox? Seems that Michael Tamblyn, the CCO of Kobo, is still feeling the heat from that pesky purge where they decided to rip every self-published book out of their ebook store, while leaving traditionally published titles alone. Here’s the full text:

A Kobo Writing Life Update

I’d like to give our authors a quick update on Kobo Writing Life in the UK and elsewhere.

As you may be aware, in the face of some fairly intense media scrutiny, we launched a major review of the books we offer for sale to make sure they comply with our content policy on offensive material. We cast a wide net across our catalogue that included genres and books coming from self-published authors, aggregators, and publishers, and we quarantined many of these while we conducted the review which made them unavailable in the UK during that time. The review had to happen fast, and we didn’t enjoy it, but with our esteemed 300-year-old retail partner on the front page of major newspapers and some content clearly in violation of our posted standards, we needed to move quickly. Almost everyone on the Kobo Content Team, spread across a dozen countries and time zones, was involved at one point or another. The urgency was driven by our desire to make sure we were running a store that met our own expectations and equally by the need to get our authors back up and available for sale again in the UK as fast as possible.

The good news is that the vast majority of self-published Kobo Writing Life titles are once again available on Kobo.com in the UK, with most authors experiencing a gap of only a few days before their books were once again in the catalogue. As well, we have been working closely with our self-publishing aggregation partners. Most of their titles are once again available in the UK or will be in the coming hours. If your book is still unavailable and you think it shouldn’t be, send a message to writinglife@kobo.com and the team will get on it.

For those few titles that remain unavailable, some feel that we chose a path of censorship. All I can say is that if your dream is to publish “barely legal” erotica or exploitative rape fantasies, distribution is probably going to be a struggle for you. We aren’t saying you can’t write them. But we don’t feel compelled to sell them. And yes, many titles live in a grey zone with far more shades than the fifty that sold so well in the past year, but that is what makes this all so challenging and so interesting. Many of our readers have no problem with an erotic title in their library next to their romance, literary fiction, investing or high-energy physics books. And we are here for the readers, so erotica stays, a small but interesting part of a multi-million-title catalogue, in all of its grey-shaded glory. My thanks go out to Mark Lefebvre and the whole Kobo Writing Life team and to all of our authors who have been so supportive and understanding in the past two weeks. We will continue to work on reviewing processes and author education about what we can take and what we can’t. It will never be perfect, but our belief continues to be that if we focus on readers and growing our business around them, we will get it right much more often than not.

Sincerely yours,

Michael Tamblyn

Chief Content Officer

Kobo

@mtamblyn

In response, I say only this:

I’m sure you’re a nice guy, Michael, but when you decided to chuck the indies – NOT the mainstream publishers – under a bus due to an entirely contrived moral panic, you lost me. You and your service can’t be trusted, and it begs the question of why self-pubbed authors would be willing to do business with you from this point on if this is how you respond to bullshit from the Daily Mail. And, while stuff like Fifty Shades, Lolita, and other such books from the big publishing houses are still listed on your store, you frankly don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to your content policy on offensive material.

Sorry, but you’ll be taking the heat from this debacle for a while. Better get used to it.

The post Kobo Release Another Statement about the Purge appeared first on Raynfall.

Is Outskirts Press really Top Ranked?

So, many of you already know about the laughably silly press release running around from Outskirts Press, in which they claim that:

Outskirts Press, the leading self-publishing and book marketing services provider, announced today that it has been voted #1 in Self-Publishing Services by TopConsumerReviews.com, the leading provider of independent reviews and rankings of hundreds of consumer products and services.

Now, once you’ve stopped giggling, let me explain what’s going on here. (No, it’s not that they’re actually the top ranking self-publishing argle bargle whatsit.)

This is not an article for you

I know it looks like it, but it’s probably not. It’s a press release, not an article, written by Outskirts, and syndicated by PRWeb, a marketing company. You can pay PRWeb about $80 per release if I recall right.

Take a quick look around Google for this article and you’ll see the various sites where PRWeb’s network has placed the article. (I’ve actually dealt with them personally and you can’t deny they’re good at what they do.) Now take a look at this:

 

That links to Outskirt’s site, of course. This is a pretty solid SEO strategy – write up a nice PR thing, give it to PRWeb, watch the links roll in. So, the balance of probability is that Outskirts isn’t looking to impress actual authors who might be interested in its services. It’s actually going after the search engine rankings to raise its profile among the entirely clueless. And it’s a successful strategy – do a Google search for self-publishing, and Outskirts is on the front page.

Affiliate Income from Outskirts Press

So why is TopConsumerReviews in on this? Pretty simple – TCR only seems to review products on which it can earn affiliate income. So my money is on there being a tidy little business arrangement between Outskirts and TCR where they get a cut of sales that happen as a result of traffic from them. I’m pretty sure about this because of the various tracking cookies with referral information being stored when a user clicks from TCR through to Outskirts.

The ‘Top Ranking blah blah blah’ is pretty much just a cheap excuse to write the press release. Don’t kid yourself on that count, because it’s likely there was no one else in the running and that top ranking was part of the marketing arrangement. TCR certainly isn’t holding itself to much of a standard when it comes to reviews – if you check out their main page, you’ll see that the different categories are all high value search terms.

So, in summary and all amusement or outrage aside, this whole thing is part of a consistent and well organized marketing/selling strategy on the part of Outskirts Press, and their target audience is the usual ignorant publishing newbies who have never heard of Amazon KDP or Smashwords. If you’ve ever wondered how operations like Outskirts and AuthorHouse get their business, in seeming defiance of all reason and common sense, here it is.

Long story short, don’t believe everything you find on Google.

Check out The Passive Voice blog for more info.

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Top Free WordPress Themes for Writers

Look, you’ve got to have a blog. That much goes without saying at least. But it also has to look cool, because the author is the brand and you have to get used to selling yourself. WordPress is as good a place to start as any, if you want to get going with social media, but it still begs the question – so many themes, so little time!

Well, here’s my top picks for writers. If any of you don’t have a blog yet, get yourself over to WordPress.com and sign up! All of these themes are free and listed in the WP Themes Directory.

Expound Magazine Style Theme

Lots of options, and I just love the front page posts. This one’s definitely for an author who’s big into blogging and has plenty of photos to enhance their content. Those who are short on photos need a different style – this theme will look lackluster without them.

Esplanade Theme

 One of my personal favorites. Esplanade is a great choice for an author who wants to showcase multiple books in the big front page slider. It comes with enough options to make a blog distinct, and a few different layouts depending on your preference.

Serena Minimalist Theme

 For authors who prefer a completely clean, mildly antique style that focuses the reader on the text. Serena’s excellent use of typography make it a great choice for authors who lean towards literary and historical fiction.

Sunspot Dark Theme

 Sunspot is another favorite of mine. Not many options, but it’s got a huge amount of style and the color works well for authors who write thrillers or crime novels, especially if their covers go with the orange and dark grey scheme.

PinPress Pinterest Style Theme

 Pinpress is my choice for children’s authors. A custom background and custom header, as well as the flow layout, mean this one can be made exceptionally colorful and bright in just a few clicks.

Dusk to Dawn Genre Theme

Dusk to Dawn tends to pop up quite a lot – its dark, organic style lends itself well to fantasy and urban paranormal books. It’s got a very simple layout, and may be too limited for some authors, but it’s a good startup theme for those who just want to post on their blog and move to something more complex later.

Expressionista Custom Color Scheme Theme

 Despite the dark orange here, Expressionista is my choice for romance and erotica authors. It’s got a wonderfully extensive set of custom color options, and along with a custom background option. Finding a red or pink WP theme that’s just the right shade is sometimes a big chore, so this one is definitely recommended.

Koenda Business Theme

 For the non-fiction and business authors among us, Koenda is a good, solid choice. It’s got a clear sense of style with plenty of options for calls to action.

MesoColumn Social Media Theme

Finally, for the author with a lot of social networking going on, MesoColumn has a great layout and highlights the different social media links. A great choice for authors who are spread across a lot of networks at once.

The post Top Free WordPress Themes for Writers appeared first on Raynfall.

The Great Erotica Ebook Purge

So here’s the deal, for all of you authors who are wondering what’s going on. Yes, all two of you.

The Kernel wrote an editorial about how – SHOCK, HORROR – there is porn on the internet. More specifically, there’s porn on Amazon and Kobo, in the form of ebooks. I am truly surprised! And indeed astonished! (Spoiler: no I’m not.) Why did they do this? Because it’s a great way to get traffic and clicks.

What, you think they actually care? Nah, don’t be silly.

Anyway, they ran with this for a bit to get more sweet tasty traffic, and served up some more link bait in the form of how high street book retailers do it too on their sites, thunderous demands for Amazon et al to filter their content, and other such articles.

The Daily Mail in the UK noticed this and decided that this was their kind of inane, sensationalist garbage, and also ran with it, thus starting a giant moral panic among people who view the internet as a weird, dysfunctional enemy of tradition and good family values. (Which it is, but let’s not get into that right now.)

This precipitated an appropriately sized shitstorm in the key of ‘won’t somebody think of the children?!’ WHSmith, a major offline retailer in the UK, seems to have caught the brunt of it, with Kobo catching most of the online flak, and Amazon and Barnes and Noble picking up a few jabs along the way.

At that point, everyone and their dog started running around like headless chickens and the collective PR teams of these companies had to do damage control. WHSmith were caught between a rock and a hard place, seeing as they get their online ebook listings from Kobo. They took their whole site down. Kobo pulled all the self-published titles from their stores, thus screwing over umpteen authors who are ostensibly not involved in this and whose books are not X-rated.

Amazon just pulled the titles in question.

If you think this is a good thing, because it’s protecting the kids etc etc, consider this: books like Lolita, Fifty Shades of Grey, and other books from traditional publishers with questionable material were left untouched, because those bring in too much money. The Daily Mail still has a topless model in their paper on Page 3.

The word you’re looking for here is ‘hypocrite’.

So Where Do Fetish Erotica Ebooks come from?

I’m not going to stoop to calling the books in question ‘filth’ or whatever. They’re fetish stories. Yes, I kid you not, themes of incest and rape are actual fetishes, even if they seem like bloody awful ones. Their origin lies in fanfiction, and believe me when I say that the people who are shocked by the stuff in these articles would have a coronary the size of Texas if they encountered the dark, subversive, and infinitely varied currents  of adult fanfiction. And who is writing them, you may ask? Who could produce such immoral narratives? The answer to that, dear readers, is women. Better than 90% of fanfiction authors are female. These sprang from the twisted, unfettered heart of the female libido, set loose in the marketplace by the success of Fifty Shades of Grey.

This was likely inevitable, when you think about it. When Fifty Shades took off, plenty of people wanted to get in on it, and many fanfiction authors took it as a chance to break out into actual monetary reward for their work. As it turns out, writing porn for women is hilariously profitable! So someone had to notice at some point that there were lots of writers selling lots of porn to a female audience (who, might I say, are ridiculously underserved by the mainstream porn market), with no sign of it being a problem to anyone, and of course that kind of thing can’t be allowed.

What happens at Amazon, Kobo, B&N now?

Now we got ourselves a problem. Up to this point, the big websites have been an even playing field between the self-published authors and the traditional publishers. That’s no longer the case. They’ve shown that they’re willing to throw all self-published authors under a bus in order to protect their name, but they wouldn’t dare do it to the major publishing houses. The other half of the issue is that these services arbitrarily decided what’s acceptable and what isn’t, and that kind of crap isn’t going to fly very far in business. The uncertainty means that self-pubbed authors can’t trust them.

Time for another revolution?

My money is on another service specifically for erotica coming out of this, if Amazon et al refuse to carry the weirder fetish stuff, kind of like how Youtube started throwing porn off their site, and it all pooled into places like RedTube. Another possibility is that offline retailers who want to sell ebooks will use a whitelist of acceptable content in order to avoid this kind of controversy, thus making themselves even more irrelevant because everyone will shop at Amazon for the greater range of titles, and adding to the continued bleating from handwringers about how Jeff Bezos is destroying reading as we know it.

Watch Amazon above all else. How they react will determine how this will all play out. Just don’t be fooled – this is a moral panic, largely manufactured, by cynical link bait artists.

Read more of this:

David Gaughran weighs in

Kobo’s email response to all this to authors in the Writing Life program, which actually got me laughing because it’s so obviously, desperately full of spin

Adult ebook readers start a petition to stop their preferred books being removed from ebook retailers

The CEO of Kobo says that they support freedom of expression, fails to add ‘just not on Kobo.com’

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Major change to Raynfall.com

Raynfall has been pretty quiet over the last few months. Due to some major changes last year, I wasn’t able to devote myself fulltime to the business. It’s not fair to just let it go, though, so I’ve restructured most of the site and given it a new direction.

My great strength is always tech, above all else. So here’s what I’ve got planned – Raynfall will be a centre for tech-related things for authors, like new website themes, new plugins, tech solutions to author problems, and new online marketing channels. I’m planning to support the site with some advertising, and offer a number of tech services to authors who need them – which I’ll add later, as I develop them.

Advertising for Authors

So the big thing I want to add in is a section for advertising for authors. One 125×125 banner will always be reserved for self-published authors’ new releases, which I’ll put up for free. The other three 125×125 slots will be shuffled depending on what other advertising is available.

More info here!

Hosting for Authors

Raynfall has been transferred to a new reseller level host on Site5.com, so it’s nice and snappy fast. I can now offer hosting services to authors as a reseller, which is great. For authors who want to handle their own hosting, Site5 has a few great deals going – link in the sidebar over there! ->

For those who just don’t want to handle all that, drop me an email at info@raynfall.com, and I’ll get you set up.

What now?

Now I start building out the site, and passing along the most valuable tech news I can find. Busy busy…

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Why Traditional Publishing Will Fail

With the merger of Penguin and Random House, we now have Random Penguin, a mega-corp that represents about half of the traditional publishing industry. The question now is where do they go from here? How do they, and the other four big publishers, take control back from Amazon and start a new golden age of publishing?

Hah. No, I’m kidding. Sorry, that’s about as likely as me commuting to work tomorrow on a unicorn. My opinion is that the traditional publishers are headed for a slow death, and if there is a new golden age of publishing, it’s already started – and Amazon was the one to make it happen.

Here’s why.

Amazon built the ebook market they have to sell to now

Amazon also built the new self-publishing market, but that was a pretty obvious step when you think about it. They created the Kindle, made buying ebooks simple, cheap and easy, and started hammering nails into the brick and mortar bookstores’ collective coffins. When they opened up the Kindle to direct self-publishing, they were really just completing the circle – from writers to readers, with no need for the traditional publishers.

Amazon created the market, made it hugely successful, and then made 90% of what the traditional publishing houses do obsolete, along with their entire customer base of bookstores. For some reason, they’re not terrified by this.

They have no data and the wrong kind of expertise

Okay, so the big publishers want to compete with Amazon. Amazon has a recommendation engine that’s spent years being refined and improved. It’s got statistical data on book sales that would make the average analyst wet their pants. It’s got teams of the best technical minds that money can buy, all working on innovations and new features and all kinds of exciting stuff to harness new technology and increase sales.

The traditional publishers have none of those things, as far as I know. Royalty payments to authors have a reputation for inaccuracy. They have no idea how or why people buy books, not to the level of detail that Amazon does. They’ve never had to know, up to this point. They have a sales team, yes, but that sales team knows all about selling to bookstores, not to end users. They can talk about developments in the industry and all that, but I don’t see any job openings that might suggest they’re building an actual dev team who might create the kind of platform that could take on Amazon.

They’re building the wrong stuff

Okay, so they’re low on tech knowledge. But you know what publishers do know about? Authors.

Remember when Penguin started up Book Country? And we were kinda enthusiastic for a while, because it was something new at least, but it was not very user friendly? And then it started offering mediocre and largely overpriced publishing packages? And then Penguin bought Author Solutions, the company that makes a living by ripping off authors, and integrated their overpriced crap into Book Country?

Yeah. That’s what I mean, right there. I don’t think it was the only reason Pearson (Penguin’s parent company) bought AS, but that’s the trend I’m seeing. The traditional publishers are still stuck in a business model that doesn’t include actual readers, and it’s easier to stick to what you know even when that’s a bad long term strategy.

The right stuff they build isn’t good enough

So, I get the feeling that someone at the big publishers sort of has an idea about this new technology. The problem is that they’re just not going the right way about it.

Here’s two examples:

Bookscout, the Facebook app from Random House that makes recommendations based on your likes. Nice idea, but, well, Amazon already does that. Just not on Facebook. As far as I can tell, no one uses it and I’ve never heard of it before today.

Bookish.com. This was a big thing, a recommendation and bookselling website pushed by three of the Big Six, but the problem is that it’s just not bringing anything new to the table. It launched, got a burst of traffic, and now it’s not really going anywhere, if Alexa.com is to be believed.

Challenging Amazon is going to take a lot more than this.

They’re not helping their customers

What I mean here is that they’re not really doing much to help bookstores. The independent stores seem to be weathering the Amazon storm better than the big chains, and yet they’re partnering with tech companies like Google Books or Kobo. Chain bookstores are becoming more like Target or Walmart.

The point here is that the traditional publishers are almost completely dependent on bookstores, so maybe they need to be a lot more involved in keeping bookstores open and stocked with books.

Their biggest customer base is slowly dying out or stocking products other than books to survive, right now. Could the publishers not offer them more money for premium display space? Give them a bigger discount on books? Anything would be better than nothing, and it looks like nothing is happening.

In Short

Look, the basic problem here is the same as it was with buggy whip makers a hundred years ago when cars were just getting popular: technology has moved on. The big publishers are in the business of selling paper books, and paper books have their place, of course. But the future of reading belongs to the tech companies like Amazon, who know how to make the best use of the ubiquitous technology in our lives. Unless the Big Six – or Big Five, now that Random Penguin is a thing – can wrap their collective business brains around this, they’re doomed.

Yeah, I know you like paper books, person who is now saying ‘But I like paper books and I buy them!’. That’s great and I’m sure you’ll keep buying them. But we have a generation of kids growing up who learned to read on devices like the iPad, and believe me, how they think about books is what you should be watching out for.

So, where to go from here?

Ebooks have exploded in popularity. Self-publishing has done likewise. The paradigm is already in place where authors can use a service like Amazon, or its successor, to sell their product direct to readers and undercut the hell out of anything the publishers put out.

Where the publishers need to go from here starts with figuring out what’s left after you take away all the stuff Amazon has made irrelevant.

On the author side:

Distribution? No longer important. The Internet, and POD technology, takes care of that.
Editing and cover design? Authors can buy those services as they need them, for less than what they’d give up in royalties.
Getting into bookstores? Now we’re getting somewhere, but that’s going to be less and less important as time goes by and ebooks become more of the market. So this is a perk, but not something to be relied on.
Prestige? Well… for some authors, yes, but this attitude isn’t going to last as self-publishing becomes more accepted.
Expertise? Yes. Absolutely. The publishers know about books.
Networking? Ah, now this is the big one. This is something they can offer that Amazon can’t. The big publishing houses have all kinds of contacts that authors can take advantage of.

On the reader side:

…I got nothing. It’s not like they were offering anything to readers to begin with, and they’re not really offering anything special now.

There isn’t much, is there? And this is why I think the publishers are ultimately going to fail: the few things that they can offer that no one else can are just not enough to sustain a business their size.

Solutions?

The big publishers have a very rocky road ahead of them. I expect there will be more mergers, but this isn’t going to change things. So here’s what I think they should do.

Hire programmers. Hire them out of Google or Microsoft if you have to. Have them build a Netflix-style service for books, tailored to an individual’s reading speed, that automatically sends new recommended books to them, with a skip function if they don’t like the blurb. But seriously, anything that Amazon can’t offer is what you need to look at.

For gods sake, just accept that ebooks are cheap. Indie authors look at your $14.99 price point and laugh all the way to the bank, because they at least know how to optimize the price for maximum profit. I know you don’t want digital downloads to cannibalize hardcover sales, but if you don’t get over this, you’ll never survive.

Reading is now competing with movies, TV, video games, music and a whole list of other pasttimes. You’ve got to innovate, to develop new ways of getting your books in front of people and to find ways of engaging them that doesn’t feel like social media cargo cult stuff. Hire a team to do R&D. Look at tie ins to other mediums. You’ve got contacts in Hollywood, get out there and use them. Look at viral advertising. Stop pretending that you have to keep readers at arm’s length, and turn your brand into one worth remembering. All those different imprints, by the way? They’re making sure you’re virtually unknown among ordinary people who read books.

While you’re at it, start moving your business away from large warehouses full of physical books. (Expensive, collectable physical books will still sell.) Lower the print runs and set up POD centers that can produce small orders of books locally and overnight them to bookstores in the area.

Start an online program for independent bookstores, where they can see which authors are doing book tours in their area, so they can contact them. Set up an in-store affiliate program – if people buy a physical book, they can get the ebook at a big discount and download it right then and there.

Forget Author Solutions. No savvy self-publisher is going to give you the time of day if you push that overpriced crap on them. You want to really pull self-published authors in and make money off them? Open up your Bookflix service to them, and start profit sharing on the same terms as Amazon.

Final thoughts

I still think the big publishers are doomed, unfortunately. The changes they need to make are just too big, and they move too slowly. I expect to see them shrink like nothing else in the next decade unless, by some miracle, they completely change their business model in the next few years.

For what it’s worth, though, I still don’t apply most of this to Baen, and maybe Tor. If any publisher or imprint has a hope of surviving, it’s those guys. Independent bookstores will also survive, because they’re small enough and nimble enough to change when and how they need to.

And authors? Authors will always write and sell books. Now more than ever, that’s pretty damn easy.

(Usual caveats apply about this being my own opinion, etc etc, as an observer of the industry. Take with grain of salt and all that.)

The post Why Traditional Publishing Will Fail appeared first on Raynfall.

Why Traditional Publishing Will Fail (And What They Could Do About It)

With the merger of Penguin and Random House, we now have Random Penguin, a mega-corp that represents about half of the traditional publishing industry. The question now is where do they go from here? How do they, and the other four big publishers, take control back from Amazon and start a new golden age of publishing?

Hah. No, I’m kidding. Sorry, that’s about as likely as me commuting to work tomorrow on a unicorn. My opinion is that the traditional publishers are headed for a slow death, and if there is a new golden age of publishing, it’s already started – and Amazon was the one to make it happen.

Here’s why.

Amazon built the ebook market they have to sell to now

Amazon also built the new self-publishing market, but that was a pretty obvious step when you think about it. They created the Kindle, made buying ebooks simple, cheap and easy, and started hammering nails into the brick and mortar bookstores’ collective coffins. When they opened up the Kindle to direct self-publishing, they were really just completing the circle – from writers to readers, with no need for the traditional publishers.

Amazon created the market, made it hugely successful, and then made 90% of what the traditional publishing houses do obsolete, along with their entire customer base of bookstores. For some reason, they’re not terrified by this.

They have no data and the wrong kind of expertise

Okay, so the big publishers want to compete with Amazon. Amazon has a recommendation engine that’s spent years being refined and improved. It’s got statistical data on book sales that would make the average analyst wet their pants. It’s got teams of the best technical minds that money can buy, all working on innovations and new features and all kinds of exciting stuff to harness new technology and increase sales.

The traditional publishers have none of those things, as far as I know. Royalty payments to authors have a reputation for inaccuracy. They have no idea how or why people buy books, not to the level of detail that Amazon does. They’ve never had to know, up to this point. They have a sales team, yes, but that sales team knows all about selling to bookstores, not to end users. They can talk about developments in the industry and all that, but I don’t see any job openings that might suggest they’re building an actual dev team who might create the kind of platform that could take on Amazon.

They’re building the wrong stuff

Okay, so they’re low on tech knowledge. But you know what publishers do know about? Authors.

Remember when Penguin started up Book Country? And we were kinda enthusiastic for a while, because it was something new at least, but it was not very user friendly? And then it started offering mediocre and largely overpriced publishing packages? And then Penguin bought Author Solutions, the company that makes a living by ripping off authors, and integrated their overpriced crap into Book Country?

Yeah. That’s what I mean, right there. I don’t think it was the only reason Pearson (Penguin’s parent company) bought AS, but that’s the trend I’m seeing. The traditional publishers are still stuck in a business model that doesn’t include actual readers, and it’s easier to stick to what you know even when that’s a bad long term strategy.

The right stuff they build isn’t good enough

So, I get the feeling that someone at the big publishers sort of has an idea about this new technology. The problem is that they’re just not going the right way about it.

Here’s two examples:

Bookscout, the Facebook app from Random House that makes recommendations based on your likes. Nice idea, but, well, Amazon already does that. Just not on Facebook. As far as I can tell, no one uses it and I’ve never heard of it before today.

Bookish.com. This was a big thing, a recommendation and bookselling website pushed by three of the Big Six, but the problem is that it’s just not bringing anything new to the table. It launched, got a burst of traffic, and now it’s not really going anywhere, if Alexa.com is to be believed.

Challenging Amazon is going to take a lot more than this.

They’re not helping their customers

What I mean here is that they’re not really doing much to help bookstores. The independent stores seem to be weathering the Amazon storm better than the big chains, and yet they’re partnering with tech companies like Google Books or Kobo. Chain bookstores are becoming more like Target or Walmart.

The point here is that the traditional publishers are almost completely dependent on bookstores, so maybe they need to be a lot more involved in keeping bookstores open and stocked with books.

Their biggest customer base is slowly dying out or stocking products other than books to survive, right now. Could the publishers not offer them more money for premium display space? Give them a bigger discount on books? Anything would be better than nothing, and it looks like nothing is happening.

In Short

Look, the basic problem here is the same as it was with buggy whip makers a hundred years ago when cars were just getting popular: technology has moved on. The big publishers are in the business of selling paper books, and paper books have their place, of course. But the future of reading belongs to the tech companies like Amazon, who know how to make the best use of the ubiquitous technology in our lives. Unless the Big Six – or Big Five, now that Random Penguin is a thing – can wrap their collective business brains around this, they’re doomed.

Yeah, I know you like paper books, person who is now saying ‘But I like paper books and I buy them!’. That’s great and I’m sure you’ll keep buying them. But we have a generation of kids growing up who learned to read on devices like the iPad, and believe me, how they think about books is what you should be watching out for.

So, where to go from here?

Ebooks have exploded in popularity. Self-publishing has done likewise. The paradigm is already in place where authors can use a service like Amazon, or its successor, to sell their product direct to readers and undercut the hell out of anything the publishers put out.

Where the publishers need to go from here starts with figuring out what’s left after you take away all the stuff Amazon has made irrelevant.

On the author side:

Distribution? No longer important. The Internet, and POD technology, takes care of that.
Editing and cover design? Authors can buy those services as they need them, for less than what they’d give up in royalties.
Getting into bookstores? Now we’re getting somewhere, but that’s going to be less and less important as time goes by and ebooks become more of the market. So this is a perk, but not something to be relied on.
Prestige? Well… for some authors, yes, but this attitude isn’t going to last as self-publishing becomes more accepted.
Expertise? Yes. Absolutely. The publishers know about books.
Networking? Ah, now this is the big one. This is something they can offer that Amazon can’t. The big publishing houses have all kinds of contacts that authors can take advantage of.

On the reader side:

…I got nothing. It’s not like they were offering anything to readers to begin with, and they’re not really offering anything special now.

There isn’t much, is there? And this is why I think the publishers are ultimately going to fail: the few things that they can offer that no one else can are just not enough to sustain a business their size.

Solutions?

The big publishers have a very rocky road ahead of them. I expect there will be more mergers, but this isn’t going to change things. So here’s what I think they should do.

Hire programmers. Hire them out of Google or Microsoft if you have to. Have them build a Netflix-style service for books, tailored to an individual’s reading speed, that automatically sends new recommended books to them, with a skip function if they don’t like the blurb. But seriously, anything that Amazon can’t offer is what you need to look at.

For gods sake, just accept that ebooks are cheap. Indie authors look at your $14.99 price point and laugh all the way to the bank, because they at least know how to optimize the price for maximum profit. I know you don’t want digital downloads to cannibalize hardcover sales, but if you don’t get over this, you’ll never survive.

Reading is now competing with movies, TV, video games, music and a whole list of other pasttimes. You’ve got to innovate, to develop new ways of getting your books in front of people and to find ways of engaging them that doesn’t feel like social media cargo cult stuff. Hire a team to do R&D. Look at tie ins to other mediums. You’ve got contacts in Hollywood, get out there and use them. Look at viral advertising. Stop pretending that you have to keep readers at arm’s length, and turn your brand into one worth remembering. All those different imprints, by the way? They’re making sure you’re virtually unknown among ordinary people who read books.

While you’re at it, start moving your business away from large warehouses full of physical books. (Expensive, collectable physical books will still sell.) Lower the print runs and set up POD centers that can produce small orders of books locally and overnight them to bookstores in the area.

Start an online program for independent bookstores, where they can see which authors are doing book tours in their area, so they can contact them. Set up an in-store affiliate program – if people buy a physical book, they can get the ebook at a big discount and download it right then and there.

Forget Author Solutions. No savvy self-publisher is going to give you the time of day if you push that overpriced crap on them. You want to really pull self-published authors in and make money off them? Open up your Bookflix service to them, and start profit sharing on the same terms as Amazon.

Final thoughts

I still think the big publishers are doomed, unfortunately. The changes they need to make are just too big, and they move too slowly. I expect to see them shrink like nothing else in the next decade unless, by some miracle, they completely change their business model in the next few years.

For what it’s worth, though, I still don’t apply most of this to Baen, and maybe Tor. If any publisher or imprint has a hope of surviving, it’s those guys. Independent bookstores will also survive, because they’re small enough and nimble enough to change when and how they need to.

And authors? Authors will always write and sell books. Now more than ever, that’s pretty damn easy.

(Usual caveats apply about this being my own opinion, etc etc, as an observer of the industry. Take with grain of salt and all that.)

Related ArticlesThe Author as CustomerThe Brave New WorldBeware of Author SolutionsOn the Subject of Special SnowflakesThe Theory of Infinite Shelf Space

The post Why Traditional Publishing Will Fail (And What They Could Do About It) appeared first on The Raynfall Agency.