We’re Eroding Our Book Industry

Killing Our Book Industry

Imagine you’re in a post-apocalyptic world and the most important thing is food. You and many others with you have done your best to build a farm, not just so you can eat now, but also to provide sustenance for yourselves over the long term. Now imagine a newbie coming along and picking all the food because the only thing they are concerned about is feeding their tummy right then. Guess what happens?

The next day they’re hungry again, and now, so are you.

THE FIRST EROSION: False Exacerbated Branding

This is how the book industry works as well. You can either market and plan your author career for a long and fruitful life or you can take the sales list by storm then crash and burn the party. Short books and underbidding standardize pricing will ensure some fast sales all at once. A writer can usually throw several of these out each year. But what about next year? And how long do you think your reader fans are going to continue to be fed junk food? But this type of writer doesn’t look at the long run, their motto is quantity, not quality. And Amazon has made this exceedingly easy for scammers and charlatans to take advantage of this kind of assembly line production of books. Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program proves it.  Amazon is starting to see that one come back to bite them in the butt. So what about you? Do you see it yet? If not, hopefully you will continue reading here to learn what has been done to the industry that we all want to thrive in.

Now while not all short stories are badly written or poorly edited, those that are done well and professionally are in the minority. The reason is due to the ability to self-publish so easily these days has also left the door open and unfiltered to junk books, fake books, and plagiarism. And they have been pouring in at a rate of one book every five minutes on Amazon. The book store selection has gone from 600,000 to 33 million in the last 5 years. Which explains why you may be finding it harder and harder to get your book noticed these days; it’s because you are swimming in a cesspool of books. Even more daunting for the reader is to pick through them to find the story that is going to best entertain them. Enter the first of many forms of erosion on our book industry:

Branding yourself as something you are not. I will just start this part with confessing I have pissed off an avalanche of writers with this one, but let’s get something straight and frankly some reality here, just because your book made it to the top 100 Bestsellers List for an hour or even a day doesn’t make you a best seller. Sorry, but Amazon’s Bestselling ranks are not indicative of a great author or book, it’s to mesmerize their multitude of buyers.  The average consumer doesn’t scroll past the second page of anything. So in order to get readers spread out to encompass as many books and varieties as possible, Amazon devised a multitude of Bestseller Lists. From their perspective, this was an ingenious marketing design. It was never meant to blow smoke up your ass or for you to buy into and grab the trophy and run with it.

Imagine going to the Sports Hall of Fame of and instead of finding the likes of Babe Ruth, Bobby Orr, Joe Namath, Billie Jean King, and Tiger Woods you find a flood of names of rookies who only played one game in their entire career of sports, but here they are all over the trophies and plaques of recognition. Or maybe you pay a couple hundred bucks to go see your favorite bands in an all-star concert and instead find yourself clapping your hands over your ears to a band of first year recorder players. When you go to the Olympics you expect to see some of the best athletes around the globe participate. But go to Amazon today and there is a miasma of covers and blaring caps declaring they’re a *Best Seller*. If your book sat at the top for a couple of weeks that’s something different, but it still may not be enough reason to have plastered everywhere. I’m not trying to take your moment away from you, but there are a ton of authors out there that are wanting their trophies, but they have not produced a product that deserves such a title. To understand this some more there was an excellent article posted just the other day by Brent Underwood at the Observer. Worth a read [Behind the Scam: What Does It Take to Be a ‘Best-Selling Author’? $3 and 5 Minutes.]

 

THE SECOND EROSION: Price Undercutting

Another one of the biggies in the erosion is price undercutting. I met an author one time who had openly stated she priced all her books for $0.99 regardless of size because then buyers were more likely to buy her book over my brother’s that went for $7.99. And she would continue to underbid every author out there to pull in the sales.

Well that’s all fine and dandy, but when they are done with your 88-page book, that reader is going to be looking for another book to read. Eventually, they are going to pay the $7.99 for Becoming His Slave because the freaking thing is 800 pages thick and will last even the speediest of readers a few days.

But here is the thing, at $0.99 authors cannot earn back the cost they put into their books for editing, formatting, and cover art (unless you didn’t do any of those things – and there are plenty of books out there that didn’t, no editing, single photo covers w/title and no formatting). Now if all you wrote was 30 pages’ worth, sorry I side with the readers on this one and $0.99 is rather generous UNLESS you just happen to be one of those really great writers out there that know how to grab their readers by the seat of their pants, swing them around the galaxy, and return them back to from where you whisked them away by the end of the story then …okay… you deserve a little compensation. But how rare is it we see something like that? Very rare and when we do see them it’s from an author who knows their market and brand so well that 30-page galactic romp was most likely a free read to their fans. So let’s put them aside and just talk about the general population of books and undercutting. Here are a few problems it creates, the mass consumer begins to expect all books to fall under the same ‘cheap’ pricing. Amazon’s war against the Big 5 publishers to cut prices makes the consumer mob feel validated in this. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have seen ranting posts made by readers on Facebook about how they won’t buy any books over $2.99 and anything priced above that is unjust. While I have a list of comebacks for this sort of thing, I won’t go on about them here, because chances are if you are an author you likely share a few of them yourself. But the point here is the habit of cheap books has been created. Making it worse was Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program opening up with all you can read books for $9.99. After two years in the making, Amazon’s KU is biting them in the ass now and they are starting to see there is such a thing as too cheap.

The real victims in this are the novel authors. It’s now near impossible for an author to not only recoup any cost (and I assure you editing costs for a book 200k words plus is a pricey bill) but they can’t even make a little something extra for their time. I don’t know a single mechanic or waitress that will work for free but the whole world wants writers and artists to work for free. If you’re not buying my scientific erosion analysis take a look at the number of publishers that have been closing down. Many of the small ones just can’t hang, and recently the Romance genre has seen the announcement of two fairly large publishers announce they are closing their doors.

What really amazed me after reading the news is I got a couple of email requests for new book releases looking for guest spots. All books were with the same publisher and all shorts. I’m talking 35 pages. I can’t imagine a publisher ever making such a ridiculously stupid business decision. I am glad the publisher believes in their author’s work, but there isn’t a chance in hell they are going to be able to maintain a business on a slew of $0.99 books and they sure as hell won’t be able to justify a price that would to the buying market. So why would you put your business and the whole of all your authors at risk by printing flash reads?

And here we are back at our farm. A farm sustains a number of people, in this case it’s a publisher sustaining several authors, but if you market for the short run, you’ll be starving come winter and closing your doors and all those authors will get displaced for your idiocy.

 

THE THIRD EROSION: Piracy & Plagiarism

Sadly, authors are helpless to stamp this out. Making it worse is many of these thieves are trying to now sell our books, getting craftier about it each time. The laws for copyright just don’t do us any service and until the big publishers and the big retailers start taking back the fight, Indy authors don’t even have a high ground to weather the conditions.

So what can you do?

FIRST: Stop being a part of the problem. Leave the title of Best Sellers to the books that have sold thousands or stayed on top of the lists for a notable amount of time.

DO: Cheer the moment you hit a high point, blast it all over your Facebook wall and share with friends.
DON’T: Write it on every single book you produce or every product page if all you had was Best Seller for a day or so. If you only sold 3 books to get there you know damn well you didn’t earn the distinction.
DO: Take yourself out of the false market brouhaha to improve your relationship with buyers. They’ll trust you more if you don’t throw hype at them and not follow through when they crack that book open
DO: Want to really get that title? Then work towards it, write a book that will be remembered and will last.

SECOND: Price fairly. Consider the amount of time you put into your books plus the expenses. Then access accordingly to size.

DO: Leave the $0.99 price for the shorts (18k and less) and maybe for those books you put out 5 years ago that aren’t your biggest sellers.
DO: Novellas 30k-45k should usually fall around $2.99-$3.99 average (books coming from traditional publishers will often be a dollar up on these and most other price ranges)
DO: Novels 50k-70k should often fall around $4.99-$5.99
DO: Big Novels – anything from 75k-150k start to climb in these prices running anywhere from $5.99-$7.99
DO: Super Novels 175k and up tend to start at $6.99 and up to $11.99 (traditional publishers often jump the price grid on these books going as high as $14.99-$16.99) Indies unfortunately get snagged with a huge set back when it comes to Amazon, anything priced over $9.99 results in royalty percentages dropping from 70% to 35% The author doesn’t benefit, the reader doesn’t benefit, only Amazon does, so remember that tidbit when looking to set a price in the high range.
DON’T: Price all your books at $0.99 or at $1.99 just so you can underprice all your competitors, you aren’t winning a race by running in place here.

THIRD: Break the habit of making Amazon your go to buy link. Amazon’s monopoly works because we’ve allowed it, but you can stop that by not publishing exclusively with Amazon and don’t just post the Amazon buy link for your book. We all do this out of convenience and habit, but now we need to learn to STOP doing it. If you are published with a traditional publisher share their buy links first and foremost. It helps them get more sales and you get a bigger cut on royalties. Don’t forget to post Barnes & Noble and iTunes. These are the only two book retailers out there who have even a blink of a chance to compete with Amazon so let’s help them buy driving buyers to those retailers too.

FOURTH: Encourage reviewers to post their reviews to retailer sites other than Amazon or in addition to. This is another reason why Amazon does so well as a retailer, pick just about any book and chances are it has at least a couple of reviews. Go anywhere else, and only 2 out of 10 books receive reviews. Remember, the mass consumer does look at reviews even if it’s only to see you have several of them. So having a couple of reviews on your books at iTunes can help your sales over there in the same way it helps at Amazon.

Authors you planted your seeds the moment you sat down to start writing your books, now its time to start cultivating your crops for the future. After all WINTER IS COMING…