For more than a year now, I’ve tried to avoid talking about the changing book industry. This is a writing newsletter, not an industry newsletter. Publishing has always been evolving, and you’ll see that if you take a snapshot of the industry from the 1880s or the 1990s and compare it to now. But the changes are pretty far-reaching, and there are some people who don’t seem to realize how dramatic those changes will become.
I’m just going to list some of the things that are happening, with very little editorializing. I’m not going to hit every little thing that has happened, so you may need to fill in the blanks.
The world is changing from paper books to electronic books.
This started with Amazon.com introducing the Kindle, an e-reader whose low price was attractive. However, it can’t be overemphasized that Amazon.com was already the nation’s single largest bookstore. The Kindle found an audience of book-buyers who made perfect customers. The new Kindle allowed readers to instantly download their books, anytime, anyplace, and pay less for them. It let readers shop more efficiently—no more long trips to bookstores.
Amazon’s competitor, Barnes and Noble, accepted Amazon’s challenge and created its own e-reader: the Nook. But a little over 18 months ago, Borders, the second largest book chain, was already in trouble, with a shrinking market share.
Hampered by high debts that it had been carrying for years, Borders was forced into bankruptcy.
Many people thought that other brick-and-mortar bookstores would see a sharp surge in sales as shoppers went elsewhere to buy paper books. After all, Borders had about 30% of the market. Instead, shoppers went electronic. E-book sales rose from about 30% of the total sales to over 50% of book sales about 18 months ago.
Barnes and Noble, the second-largest retailer in the market, re-designed its stores so that they could put more emphasis on selling their Nook, along with games and toys. Thus, they cut their inventory of paper books by about 30%, and this move was a success. Their busiest day in 2010 came on Christmas, when they sold more books than on any other day of the year—when all of their stores were closed! So e-book sales were pushed well beyond the 50% mark.
In January 2011, Amanda Hocking became the first person to become a multimillionaire by selling her own electronic books. Several other authors have begun to follow. Even traditional authors are seeing their sales move from print to digital. Paperback book sales are shrinking dramatically as publishers quit re-printing old titles and let them come out only in digital. In the past six months, my own e-book sales have skyrocketed. I’m currently making much more from electronic sales than I am making on paper sales.
This is true even for new releases. For example, in April one author I know released his hardcover novel, one in a series, to good strong sales—7,000 copies in the first week. But the book sold another 11,500 copies digitally that week, even though the price was at $16.95 per digital book. In other words, most of the readers who had faithfully been collecting the books in hardcover for years simply transitioned to electronic format.
With the opening market for e-books, a lot of authors are going Indie, but are finding that with the stiff competition, it’s hard even for an Indie author to sell well. You can’t just have a good book, they’re discovering, you’ve also got to have great marketing.
So the market is tough. In an effort to get good reviews, I’ve heard that a lot of indie authors are trading reviews—asking strangers to give them raves in exchange for their own raves about the stranger’s book. This kind of incestuous behavior is backfiring. I recently heard one attendee at a book conference say, “I won’t buy indie books anymore, because you just can’t trust the reviews.” Another writer said, “Yeah, but you can’t trust the big names, either. They just write reviews for their friends.” So authors seeking reviews have a quandary. Bestselling authors are busy. It’s hard to get one who is a complete stranger to look at your book for book quotes. Even if you get them, readers have learned to tune out.
Of course, you can hire reviewers at places like Kirkus to write reviews, but those reviews aren’t completely unbiased either.
So getting great reviews isn’t necessarily a good way to attract attention anymore, I’m afraid. We need something else. Even if you do get good reviews, there are people on the internet who like to bash good books and movies in order to gratify their own egos. They’ll dis a book that they haven’t read. Even if people love your work, and are vocal about it, it will backfire.
With paper book sales plummeting, many authors are taking their backlists and selling the titles as e-books. This is good for the author and the fans, but it is hurting the store owners. One author that recently went on a book tour mentioned that at the indie bookstores, he had a couple of store owners complain about authors who sell their backlist, cutting out the bookstore owners. These bookstore owners are taking it as a personal insult, and in some cases may be refusing to support authors who publish e-books. I’d love to find a way to keep them in the loop, and Dean Smith’s idea of selling books as e-books using gift certificates at stores is one great way to do this. We just haven’t found a system to implement this plan.
At the same time, publishers are upset about being cut out of the loop, too. The publishers want to sell authors’ titles as e-books, and several class-action lawsuits have been filed by authors alleging that publishers have been accused of stealing e-book rights, under-reporting sales, or fixing prices on e-books.
The publishers want e-rights so badly, that one best-selling author I know who recently published a nonfiction e-book, found that when he took his next fiction proposal to his publisher, it was soundly rejected. Why? As one person on the acquisitions team said, “If the book is any good, why doesn’t he just publish it himself?” So authors who publish their own backlists may be finding that they face a backlash from publishers.
What does all of this mean? A lot of authors are looking at the markets and trying to decide whether to publish traditionally or as indies. I’m not going to make that assessment for you, but you should know that no matter what route you take, there are potholes and pitfalls.
Tread carefully.
