Indies and eBooks: Saviors of the Industry! - Nor any drop to drink

So, here we are again. In my previous entries I've laid out my belief that independents and ebooks are going to actually save the publishing industry. The last post even went so far as to suggest one of the ways this could work. But after all is said and done, there's still a problem that can't be glossed over.

Even as eBook sales start to rise, they haven't dramatically increased the number of readers. For every new eBook sold, that really isn't a "new" customer so much as it's one less traditional book sold. Obviously, if publishers started to follow through on the eCommerce side of things that would only get worse. But there's still hope.

A few years ago there was a poll conducted that showed that 1 in 4 adults in the United States hadn't read a single book in 2006. This is pretty damn grim, especially when we can catch photos like this:

This is how Planet of the Apes happened people. Sure, the newest movie suggests that it was science gone awry. But let's all be honest, if James Franco's character in that movie had read a few more books he would have realized literature long ago warned us of the dangers of a smart ape turning on its masters.

worse than illegal immigration

But, to everyone's credit, these numbers are starting to turn around. In fact, one study from 2009 showed a dramatic rise in multiple demographics. Obviously, we all know what caused this even if we don't want to say it out loud, so let's not even go that direction. But for now, just keep that in mind because it disproves the old argument that the crux of the problem is attention span.

But these numbers aren't going to keep going in that direction. All of the big crazes have finished their runs and there aren't any others currently on the horizon. Frankly, the next study could show numbers going back in the opposite direction unless the industry does something to catch that audience's attention again and begin making the crazes the rule rather than the exception.

But how can independents help that?

Problem: the audience isn't big enough

(ironically the same thing that killed the Apollo missions)

There are three aspects which greatly contribute to the success of a book. You look at any major hit in the last couple decades and you'll find that they all have at least one of these, typically two. And the ones that really take off above all the rest and break records? They have all three.

Visibility

In my last post I pointed out that one of the major problems posed by the publishing industry is that there is very limited space to hold all of the books published. With only thousands of spaces and millions of books it can be nearly impossible. Also, as I pointed out in that same post, this is moot if you go digital. But that doesn't change the fact that visibility, by and large, is still a huge factor in whether or not you succeed.

Hell, I'm writing this blog to try to become visible.

But the publishing industry has devoted very little towards advertisement in recent years. It's become common knowledge (at least in writing circles) that you're basically the marketing department for your own work now. Along with the low (almost non-existent) advances and crazy overhead producing a pretty low percentage for the author - it starts to look like publishers are eliminating themselves from relevancy.

It's not to suggest that they don't have a use. If you look at any major hit in recent years there's been at least some marketing push from the publisher that put them where they needed to be. But when was the last time you saw a commercial for a book that didn't look absolutely dreadful?

The publishing industry would probably go as far as to say that they don't advertise that way because there are simply too many books to advertise. Okay, but does that mean that, in the face of too many books, you'd rather not push any of them?

And, really, this leads to the next problem

Interest

If you're going to succeed, this one is crucial. If the audience isn't interested in your work then you better damn well have both of the other attributes or simply kiss your ass goodbye. Non-fiction suffers the most from this because they're constantly writing towards a very limited market. But what about novels? Literature numbers are going up in the last decade and yet we still see books fail miserably left and right.

Well, obviously the audience didn't care about those ones. But, really, shouldn't the publishing industry have some idea of what is and isn't effective? Well, yeah, but only in hindsight. As I pointed out some time back there is a tendency for the industry to react to numbers in knee jerk ways but not actually stop to analyze what's going on. In fact, I'm not the only one that says this. From time to time an industry professional is known to come out and admit that they really wait for suggestions to come to them and are really not very proactive about anything. With a million books being published a year, wouldn't you be a little swamped by it too?

So sometimes visibility suffers, sometimes the interest just isn't there. But then you've got the real whammy waiting around the corner

Quality

This is the killer. Time and time again we find ourselves coming to this issue. If your quality is poor then so too is your interest. If your interest is weak then you're going to have poor word of mouth. If people are interested and then find out that the quality is in the toilet, the word of mouth will do the opposite and destroy you. Quite frankly, this is the alpha predator of the three.

And yet we still have book deals like OJ Simpson's "If I Did It" and the various other tell all book deals that flood the news. Novels by the Kardashian sisters would have been unheard of in a previous age. But their visibility is extremely high and the interest is following suit. So, obviously, easy money since you've got two out of the three. Not long ago, there were rumors of Casey Anthony getting a book deal out of her escapades. The sad thing is, no one really believed it was a hoax until people started to report that there was no such thing.

How low does the bar have to be for everyone to believe that sensationalist news from the publishing industry is all true?

So there you have the major problems. These things have to be resolved before the audience we were handed by the recent smash hits starts to fade. And we have to do it quickly because before you know it...



This will be what the next Harry Potter convention looks like.

This went terribly long, so next time is solutions! But in the meantime, let's see what we can do about getting this particular indie some visibility, shall we? Buy my book :)

Indies and eBooks: Saviors of the Industry! - Water Water Everywhere

In my last post I made some declarations. Some of them, admittedly, are either common sense or a little crazy. But I still believe in the basic premise of everything I have said and will say.

Independents are the key to the publishing industry revitalizing and stepping into the future. To do this, they're going to have to make heavy use of the eBook format that is sometimes despised by what we're going to go ahead and call "traditionalists".

But I'd be a real dick to just leave it there and not explain how exactly I figure they can do this. People can make claims like that all they want and just be speaking from their ass. But that's not how I roll.

So let's get some examples going, shall we?

Problem: The market is apparently flooded.

Not long ago I read something about the 10 Awful Truths of Book Publishing. This was a pretty discouraging article. And if you read it and are emotional about the topic, it's really easy to miss some of the key points in there. First, a deconstruction:

1. The author of the article is the president of a publisher
2. They only crunch the numbers for the non-fiction titles (which are grim numbers, don't get me wrong)
3. This is posted on a website devoted to helping authors advertise

Clearly this has no bias.

But, hey, numbers don't lie. A lot of books are published every year and not a whole lot of those sell. The thing that skews it a little is when you take the number of all the books published in a year and then only focus on the nonfiction market's sales. So that leaves the question, how many of those million books are nonfiction books? Because if you just take the numbers that were included of (nonfiction) books sold in a year (282 million) and the number of average (nonfiction) books sold (<250) you find that there would have to be more (>1,128,000) nonfiction books annually than the annual number of books published (1,052,803) for that "average" to work.

Unless the numbers weren't really an "average" but a cherry pick to try to scare people into...oh yeah! Buying their services.

But even if you ignore that and just get down to the raw numbers, the premise seems to be grounded in logic. People tend to only read what specifically applies to them or interests them. If you write a book that has a niche market then there will be a good chance that you're competing against thousands of similar titles on the same subject. According to the article above, this means that the average non-fiction book sells only around 250 copies a year.

But that's not the thing that I noticed right off the bat. To quote the article itself:

"For every available bookstore shelf space, there are 100 to 1,000 or more titles competing for that shelf space. For example, the number of business titles stocked ranges from less than 100 (smaller bookstores) to approximately 1,500 (superstores). Yet there are 250,000-plus business books in print that are fighting for that limited shelf space."

It sounds horrible, doesn't it? It should, that was the point of the article. It makes it clear just why those sales are so weak: visibility is low and you have a tough climb to get onto the shelf. Obviously this means that publishers, agents and authors have to do everything they can to get onto those shelves. But even then, not everyone can get their book on the shelf. You have to find success before you can even become a success.

This is a huge problem because it shows that, obviously, the publishing industry as it exists now is incapable of keeping up with the flood of published works. And, honestly, if they're publishing books that aren't even getting into book stores, it's easy to see why the industry's finances are becoming so dangerously shallow. In fact, the shortage of shelf space makes it clear why they would publish things that otherwise wouldn't see the light of day (*cough*tell-alls*cough*).

But, we'll get to that tomorrow. For now, too many books, not enough shelves. How can indies and eBooks possibly resolve this?

Solution: Shelves? What Shelves?

The first and most obvious answer is: eBooks don't need "shelf space". For all of the conflict going about how much space you're going to get on a shelf, when you're doing this online, in the digital market that the publishing industry tends to ignore, there's no space constraint worth mentioning.

Now, it's not entirely possible for these all to get the same visibility and there still needs to be some degree of advertisement. But what you must understand about this is that the shelf space issue isn't just about visibility, it's about -availability-. If your book isn't on a shelf, it wont be purchased, likely a competitor that is available on the shelf at that time will be bought instead. This is how the breakout hits start to form, at least in the non-fiction world: lazy shopping.

The people buying these books in conventional bookstores have no idea whether or not the book itself is actually any good until they've read the thing. Rarely do you find book reviews about those thousands of business books mentioned in the article. And, really, if you did, they'd probably look something like this:

So you can already understand that, often, book purchases have little to do with quality until word of mouth takes effect. But when word of mouth does happen to work, it's always going to be inside the reader's circles of interest. You'll only be able to sell books about marketing to people who have something to market. But, in a grand stroke of irony, that marketing book has likely never been advertised!

Obviously, the author, or the people the author's depending on for these sorts of resources, can't seem to figure out how to market the thing.

But that's understandable. If you can only get the book on so many shelves across the country then the old system says advertising will cost more than you could benefit. You can't sell a book people can't reach, so why devote resources to it? In fact, most book advertisements I've seen have consisted either of interviews in random venues or authors appearing at the book stores. And, I don't know if you realize this, most people don't live in book stores so they aren't going to exactly see that.

However, full disclosure: I do have one friend who practically lives in a book store. In theory, you could sell everything to her that way. But, honestly, I don't think she needs to know how to properly manage a merger or initiate a hostile takeover of her competitors. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if she did that it would be considered kidnapping. She's not your market.

But in a digital space, you don't advertise for people to blindly search book shelves. No, you advertise to send people directly to the book. There's no shelf to be worried about, no visibility issues and you never have to worry that someone may have forgotten to stock that particular shelf at any given time. No, if you focus on advertising to a digital space, you're going to find that people find exactly the book that you're hoping for them to find.

And so it's pretty obvious how eBooks can help. But how exactly can independents help with the shelf space issue? Well that's actually fairly simple. You see, independents advertise... a lot. The traditionally published first time author has very little clue just how much work is going to be required to publicize their work. Many people who get published their first time figure that the publisher is going to help them with the advertising. But an independent? They practically took a vow to whore themselves out at every opportunity possible because they know that no one is going to do it for them.

If you let them play in your sandbox, they will advertise for your digital market place - where you keep all of the books you want to sell... for free.

And if there's a million books published every year that means there's a million new people advertising every year. So if you were smart, you'd build a place for these people to go and try your very hardest to become the most independent friendly place in the world. And, speaking on behalf of the independents, if there's a chance for us to make a dime off of it, we'll happily...



Short of selling our souls (sometimes)

Dignity, on the other hand, is on the table in most instances. Support an indie, buy my novel (don't worry, it's not a marketing book, it's fiction! check out the alterpedia posts!) And tomorrow? Quality and audience demands, ahoy!

Independents and eBooks: Saviors of the Industry! An Introduction

Okay, first of all, I know I'm late. But this could have been next September so what are you complaining about? Second, yeah, I know that title is writing a little more than I can cash. Third, I totally believe it to be true.

There's been a recent upheaval in the publishing community as it realizes that independents are on the rise and eBooks are taking a great deal of the wind out of the sails of the traditional book. Some people have embraced this and have decided that this format and this movement needs all the support it can get. But, in my opinion, it's not nearly enough.

For a long time there's been a stigma around the idea of the independent author. They're shut out of most of the writing unions and guilds, they rarely qualify for any of the award ceremonies and getting your work reviewed by a professional can be troublesome and requires some doing. Then, after all of that, if they happen to be a big hit they aren't acknowledged until someone signs to publish more of their work. Up until that point you're not just excluded from the industry - some might blame you for the recent decline in sales. In no other industry is someone treated like a leper for striking it out on their own as much as they are in publishing.

The music industry has embraced several independent talents over the years. Hell, in recent years that seems to be their lifeblood. The film industry devotes entire festivals to their independents. But authors? You better hope you don't ever need someone to piss on you if you get set on fire. Not only will they not do it but the only liquid that might get tossed on the flames is a little of the stuff they've been passing off as water.

In the recent years, this has been invariably tangled up with the eBook debate. The prices are too low, there's too many books on the market, the industry is being bottomed out and people just aren't supporting it anymore! But let's face it people: the real threat is that eBooks make it easier for independents to print what they want to print. Back in the day it was frowned on if you went to a vanity press. Why? Well generally because there were no checks and balances on the people publishing and anything could get through.

And you know what? That made sense back then. I'm the first to admit that there's currently a lot more crap than gems in the independent markets. But at a certain point you have to wonder what exactly the industry is useful for anymore besides promotion. In the past, Twilight would have been printed by a Vanity Press. It lacks polish, is hated by the people who would have originally been considered the audience and was written by a complete unknown. Instead, it proudly sits by other traditionally published "novels" like the Kardashians' "Dollhouse".

Yeah, you saw that right. This is sold as FICTION. The Kardashians, by way of this being a novel, are eligible to be considered "writers" in the eyes of the industry and the community. Sure, it was likely ghost written and no one in the industry will take them seriously. But as far as tradition holds, they're worthy of more respect than someone who's willing to risk their ass on publishing their own work and stepping around the system.

Now, let's step back for a moment and consider this. I'm not saying the whole industry and every publisher is defunct. I'm not even saying that the publishers that published things like Dollhouse and Twilight are defunct. What I am saying is that independents are the path to saving the industry because right now the industry has some key problems and those problems can be corrected by a thriving, celebrated independent market in the same way films and music have done in the past.

But we aren't doing it nearly fast enough.

A wise man once said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

This guy, actually

And yet we writers are in an industry which, for the most part, is trying very hard to do the insane thing. They want to increase their sales but argue against increasing their exposure by opening alternatives. They want to decrease overhead but argue that they need to keep doing things the same way. Some professionals in the industry still resist e-mail submissions because, somehow, this is more of a hassle than being buried under a mountain of paper when their slush-pile takes a life of its own.

Though, to their credit. Some professionals have actually gone in the opposite direction and will now only accept e-mail. These people deserve to be recognized because they figured out how to adapt. And, really, adaptation is the mark of someone who understands history.

There's a proven history in business that the businesses which fail to adapt are the ones which eventually collapse. It's not that this is something which can somehow be willed past. This is a fact of capitalism: If you don't meet the demands of the customer then you have no customers anymore. But we've seen the great sins that have come from this and have watched seemingly powerful establishments of the book world cave-in under their own weight. Really, look no further than Borders to see just how true this is.

When Borders recently fell apart and other bookstore chains happened to stay intact, one of the insiders pointed out that Borders had essentially written off their digital market and was slow to adapt to changes in technology. They'd invested too heavily into CDs, failing to notice the rise in MP3. They invested in everything too heavily, especially in real estate which turned out to be a disaster for them. Their brick-and-mortar stores were costing them a fortune due to bad leases. But the one thing they decided not to invest too heavily in was their online presence.

Because it technically didn't exist.

Not only had they entered the e-commerce market late (and took a beating for it) but they weren't dedicated to it in a way that would benefit them once they did get there. In fact, after trying for only three years to capture a piece of the online retail sales, they went to a company which would turn out to be their greatest competitor and handed them the entirety of their online presence. Who was that company?

Oh...right. I'm sure those guys didn't benefit at all from that deal at all.

But here we sit, knowing the things we do and yet watching the industry fail to make a real effort to actually resolve the problems in front of them. It's not their fault, exactly. They're doing what's always worked in the past. But as we can see here from a video put together in 2009:



Times are changing... and that shit doesn't work anymore.

Tomorrow, I talk about the first problem facing the industry lacking in indies and eBooks. Seriously, tomorrow (since it's already written). In the meantime, go support an indie. I need the ramen.

eXhaustion and the "eVil" of eBooks

Hi, it's been a long time. Way too long really. What have I been doing you ask? Oh, hating the world.

Honestly, my self-publishing experiment turned out to suck more than I thought it would and I found myself burnt out on all of the little facets of self-promotion required. This, by the way, is one of those.

I know most people who start writing blogs happen to treat it like some sort of hobby, but it's always been work to me. It's not that I dislike writing (obviously, look at my posts) but I've always wanted my stories to speak for themselves rather than me rambling on in their place. Honestly, I don't feel all that interesting most of the time. And when my work was suffering, and boy did it suffer, I lashed out a little bit at the social networking and web logging thing. "Oh my god," you're saying, "an emotionally unbalanced writer!"

Yeah, well, let's get something straight, I didn't burn out just because I'm emotionally unbalanced (though I am). I burnt out because there's aspects of the industry which suck hard, like the vacuum of space, and they don't tell you squat about it until you actually get into the thick of things. And you really don't learn it until you're slugging it out with people in a public forum.

But let's ignore that for now and focus on the here-and-now. I've come back to this place where I run at the proverbial mouth for only god knows how long because I have something to say (and because I've decided that my new years resolution is to stop being poor). But what exactly is it?

To put it simply: Technology is not the enemy.

Yeah, it sounds like something that people looking at a blog really don't need to be told, right? But there's this blind-spot, a fear of the future that results from people not understanding the greater meaning of what happens around them.

What am I talking about?

Well, when blogs and news websites rose to power, newspapers started to blame their losses on the people who were doing the same work in a new media. Whenever a new format for music arises, the proponents of the old format always bitch and complain that it's ruining music forever. Sure, the internet gave us Justin Bieber, but half the bands you do like made it through the same way. Years ago they would have done it with CDs and decades ago they would have done it by demo tapes.

The art doesn't change, just the distribution.

Why do I feel like this needs to be pointed out? Because I see a lot of people saying the same thing whenever I stop to listen to the community of readers and writers around me. The thing they repeat over and over is "eBooks are killing the written word."

Really? The rise of eBooks is the thing destroying "traditional" books? This isn't just something that I'm taking offense to because I wrote one (though, I'll be honest, that was salt on the wound) - it's also something I take offense to because it's simply just wrong. Because when I look at the state of fiction and the state of the written word I see it having taken one hell of a hit long before the eReader market turned into the monster it's become.

First, radio made it so you didn't have to read a book to hear a story. After that, film made it so you didn't even have to imagine the images. Then television made it so you didn't even have to leave the house for it. Finally, the internet made it so you could read and write things at the same time and be able to carry it all in your pocket if you wanted to. Considering how lazy the human race is: are you really surprised that cracking open a book happened to start falling to the way side so long ago?

Hell, anyone familiar with Total Recall (or "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale") knows where this is going next. Soon, we're going to be too lazy to actually devote time to it and just have the memory of the story installed in our head. I have seen the future...and it is Austrian.

But even then, that wont be the thing that destroys the art of story telling. No, that's going to be the next evolution of the form.

Truthfully, the thing stifling the publishing industry is... the publishing industry. Books are expensive, time-consuming, heavy and (worst of all) restricted by their costs. We live at a time where the average advance for a new author can barely pay their rent. Meanwhile, millions get handed over to celebutantes for the honor of publishing their half-assed, ghost-written piece of drivel about their "fascinating" lives where they've done nothing of real interest. I'm not even talking about the Justin Bieber book (though you're pushing it kid) because he actually -did- something worth talking about. I'm talking about the books published from reality stars because their 15 minutes of fame happen to be peaking. Basically, I'm talking about this:

Yes, I'm sure they sell, but they're not exactly enticing life-long readers to the book shelves. In fact, if anything, you're flushing money that could have been spent otherwise in advertising and diversification. Besides, most people who would want to know what "The Situation" is thinking are probably going the quicker route of reading Twitter instead. At least that was actually written by him.

So, the industry is in trouble but there's been a sudden rise in eReading. Is this a bad thing? Only if you're horribly attached to the smell of paper (and yes, I've heard that argument from someone before). But when you consider that Amazon is the world's largest bookseller(sometimes qualified with "online bookseller") and they say that their eBook sales have surpassed traditional books... I guess I could see some threat in there.

But then I saw a story this holiday season that made me sit back and gawk. The Kindle Fire is outselling the iPad. And "millions of units a week"? Holy shit, do you realize what that means?

The hot ticket item right now... is an eReader.

And so are all the smart phones, and the tablets and this computer you're reading this post on right now. In fact, you can't be online without having something that could read an eBook. Hell, I've got all the formats to prove it. So Amazon is selling millions of these things and other people are selling more and all of them can read eBooks which are now outselling "real" books... and this is destroying the written word?

Someone's not good at math.

I understand that these arguments against the advance of technology are emotional. You want to keep the connection to the format you grew up with and love. But that doesn't mean that the eBook is going to kill the "book". Because, in the end, the book is more than just what it's printed on. And, after all is said and done, all technology really wants is to be helpful.



Well... usually.

Next up: I'm going to ramble about indies (two days, tops, I promise!)



(no, seriously, I'm gonna post again soon)