SinC into Great Writing, #2

Libby Hellmann was the second speaker at the Sisters in Crime pre-Bouchercon workshop and the catchy title of her talk was “To E or not to E.”

Libby thinks the way publishers are behaving with electronic rights is ignorant and blundering.  But don’t rush out to make your own ebooks until you have considered the pros and cons of traditional and self-publishing.

Advantages of traditional publishing: don’t underestimate their marketing support. Though they may not offer much personal support except for a small number of books they are promoting heavily, they do send out advanced reader copies and their distribution channels are strong and broad. Having physical books on retailers’ shelves helps get the word out in a different way than online chatter can do. Contrary to rumor, publishers still perform editing. Booksellers are valuable for the handselling they do, and traditional publishers get books into those stores. Awards tend to go to traditionally published books, though that is changing. Reviews, which tend to favor traditional publications, also give authors a valuable third party endorsement. It’s much hard to get reviewed by influential reviewers if you’re self-published.

Disadvantages: the percentage of ebook sales offered to authors is too small. Publishers tend to be inflexible. They are slow in reporting sales and royalties and slow in paying them. The marketing they’re good at is very short-lived – no more than six weeks for a new book, after which the next group of newly-published books is given the spotlight and your book is no longer promoted at all.

Advantages of self-publishing ebooks: control is in the hands of the author. This is attractive to a lot of writers. There is no need to go through intermediaries – agents and publishers. Libby recommends paying for critical services: cover art (which is different than traditional cover art because it is small and has to “pop”); editing – either copyediting or copyediting plus a developmental editor who can help shape a book. Conversion is a cost. Amazon is where her books sell most strongly, but they have so much control in the industry that it’s worrying.

Disadvantages: Amazon is bad when it is bad – which is often (meaning frequent technical problems when uploading ebooks and their associated files and metadata). There is little available at the moment in the way of third-party recommendation mechanisms (such as respected and widely-read reviews). Since there are no gatekeepers, every ebook has to distinguish itself while in the company of some awful dreck. It’s very difficult to know what works for marketing and very hard for readers to discover what’s good. Pricing is tricky – it’s a buyer’s market right now and Libby’s experience is that low is the most powerful price point. She pointed out that you can’t easily move up in pricing without sales plummeting. Moving down in price is another matter. However be aware that you pay a steep price for going low; Amazon pays a much larger percentage on books priced at $2.99 and up in order to discourage the 99 cent book price point expectation.

She also spoke a bit about marketing and the changing role of agents, who can’t make the income they did when advances are dropping so low. Incidentally, she’s a good speaker – very relaxed, yet energetic.

Next, there was a conversation between author Cathy Pickens and bookseller/publisher Jim Huang. Cathy made the scandalous announcement that Jim actually has read ebooks. (He’s a well-known defender of printed books.) That, of course, gave him an opportunity to talk about why he loves print, which was a good addition to the mix. Jim then made the point that authors don’t have to choose between agent and Big Six publishers and self-publishing; small houses offer a third way. Small publishers have the same distribution potential as major publishers so long as they are represented in the Ingram distribution system. What you need to know in choosing a small publisher is its “access  to market” – and that means the terms of sale are critical. These conditions for retailers (in this case, booksellers) have to match the industry standard (including discount and returnability) and be advantageous enough for booksellers to carry them; that’s what access to market means for authors. Beware of small publishers that can’t provide retailers the conditions that they need to make selling their books a realistic business proposition; you will lose a major advantage of having someone publish your book. Jim also argued that .99 cent pricing is bad for business, not just because the revenue is low but because it makes it seem all books are fungable – when each is actually unique and each choice should be based on the book, not the price of it.

photo courtesy of BMeunier and  MorBCN

public service announcements and reps x two

First, a funny video riffing off the side effects listed in pharmaceutical television ads. Nice job, Unbridled Books! I especially love the literary references to Tolstoi et al.

Second, reported in Shelf Awareness, NAIBA begs publishers to keep reps employed and connected to independent booksellers. This is a part of the process of bringing books to the public that isn’t much known to readers but has a profound effect on book culture. Reps are the link between the publisher and the bookstore shelves, and they are ethnographers of the communities they serve.

Restricting field reps to large stores will give publishers a skewed view of what is a very diverse world–independent bookselling. Sales reps take the time to know our stores, what our customers like, and what is on our shelves. They are the industry worker-bees, travelling the region, taking ideas and trends and pollinating other stores. We learn about other stores from them, what others are reading and loving; what is selling; marketing tips; event ideas; what the publisher is doing; and what authors have books coming out in the next season. They make fans for authors out of our frontline booksellers. They cut through the catalogs to make sure we carry what we’ll be able to sell, and their endorsements are why we buy what we might have ignored.

These reasons are why cuts in field sales reps devastate us. Have you really thought about what this stricture will mean to you? Fewer book sales. Without a doubt, we are not ordering as much through telemarketing. We are definitely not focusing on your backlist through tele-sales, and we definitely miss titles from the frontlist. We also don’t buy as much direct, which makes independent bookselling a less profitable business. The vicious cycle is that we buy less because we don’t have sales reps, and then you devalue our business because we aren’t buying as much as we used to.

Cory Doctorow has previously praised the sales force. Three cheers for reps (and three extra ones for Tom Leigh.)

Finally – squeeeeee! The first book review for Through the Cracks came out in Publisher’s Weekly. “Sociology professor Jill McKenzie hires PI Anni Koskinen to find the man who raped her in Chicago’s Lincoln Park 23 years earlier in Fister’s strong sequel to In the Wind (2008) . . . Koskinen connects with an array of well-drawn supporting characters, including other rape victims, the lead investigator on the McKenzie case, and the attorney who helped overturn Taylor’s conviction. Thoughtful attention to the complexities of police work and social justice lift this gritty mystery well above the norm. Koskinen’s empathy with both cops and victims as well as her fierce, brittle independence make her easy to root for.”

smackdown! the book v. Kindle

There has been more than enough said about the Kindle, which has been good for getting buzz if nothing else. I’ve had my own reservations about Amazon’s extraordinary vertical integration of businesses that give them a major stake in everything from self-publishing to audio to used books to book discussions online. But this series of videos is just goofy good fun. An independent bookseller, Green Apple Books in San Francisco, has started a video smackdown, pitting the book against the Kindle. Here are the first rounds.

Selling your books so you can support your book habit:

Buying a book, in which the TOS (that in reality nobody reads) offers some surprises:

Story time. Nuff said.

No doubt a Kindle-lover could make equally funny videos about the superiority of the Kindle for those who want a book NOW and/or have panic attacks when stuck on a plane with fewer than four or five books. But for amateur YouTube fun, these are pretty sweet. I’ll post more as the smackdown continues.

local booksellers save the planet!

This is great! And oh so true.

book publishing is broken, exhibit C

Shelf Awareness has been profiling interesting tidbits from BEA and one of them was a presentation about a New England independent bookstore, Northshire, that offers print on demand services with a rented Espresso machine. People enjoy watching it make books, and the store sells 150 to 200 Espresso-printed books per month. Given the machine costs a thousand dollars a month to rent, requires a full time staff person, plus takes up a 5′ x 15′ plus clearance chunk of floor space (and apparently a fair amount of under-the-breath cursing because it is finicky) the bookseller thinks it still has the potential to provide a comfortable profit, particularly if it could quickly fulfill orders for frontlist books that aren’t in stock.

But what is their Espresso serving now? Mostly self-published titles, which run $10-$15 for a 200-page book and involve staff time providing layout and other services. Lulu is cheaper, but Northshire is high-touch and has local appeal. They’ve essentially become a small publisher, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say a printer who provides some publishing services. They also print copies of public domain books through Espresso’s arrangement with the Open Content Alliance . There’s a theoretical arrangement with Lightning Source to provide mainstream publications, but very few in-copyright back- or front-list titles are currently available, which the bookseller thinks may be related to the  lack of the Espresso’s system to integrate with publisher’s inventory systems. Or maybe it’s one more technical hassle the publishing industry doesn’t want to undertake until it has blockbuster potential.

The new Espresso 2.0 was rolled out recently. (Northshire has the 1.5 veriosn.) You can see it at work in this promotional video printing a copy of Jason Epstein’s book in which he predicted an ATM-like machine that would print books from an electronic catalog on demand. He partnered with the inventor of the machine to founded the company that makes Espressos.

I can’t figure out the math. The machine costs a lot – far more than a $1,000 / month rental would support. It’s available in a handful of independent bookstores – one each in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia; some university bookstores and libraries also have the machines. Are these demos just to get the word out? Though there is a market to produce nicely printed copies of things like reports and conference proceedings, as well as self-published cookbooks, memoirs, local histories, novels, and poetry, the lack of integration with publishers’ lists mean it won’t change mainstream book distribution, not unless things really change dramatically. That means there is no “greener” or more financially efficient book market as a result – just bookstores becoming print shops and adding an entirely new set of services to their business.

I think there’s a significant market that will endure for printed books. I think readers want to have high-quality books that have been carefully chosen, professionally edited and well-designed; hand-crafted, but not home-made. I would like to think there’s a less wasteful means of delivering them to readers that could be nearly as instant as it is with Kindle. (Don’t you think the reason they use a “whisper-net” is so that you can’t quite hear the price tag of that book you just bought on a whim?)  I’d like to think this efficient and fast delivery could be done without some vertically-integrated Wal-Mart of books becoming our one and only bookstore, self-publisher, and e-book vendor. But for every innovation that shows promise for the development of a healthy book culture that isn’t a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business, there are seemingly impossible barriers for making those innovations deliver books from traditional publishers.

It amazes me that publishers rush to do business with Amazon even while fuming that they have artificially depressed the cost of e-books to sell their proprietary hardware and reset the retail price point. Why can’t publishers do more to maximize the potential that independent booksellers have to create a healthy and innovative book culture? There has to be way.

rebuilding trust in our trust networks

Anita Elberse once again explains why spending millions on a potential blockbuster makes sense for book publishing,* an issue that she previously explored at greater length in the Harvard Business Review.** The only way to make real money is to go after books that will sell lots of copies. In order to sell lots of copies, you have to invest even more money into marketing (e.g. paying for it to be visible in chain bookstores and Wal-Mart and be written up in newsletters: wow, this is a book we think you should read – we won’t mention the publisher paid us to say so). Interestingly, she ties this not to consumer gullibility or to clever marketing, but to the social nature of reading, which has long interested me.

Media companies’ hit-focused marketing did not emerge in a vacuum. It reflects how consumers make choices. The truth is that consumers prefer blockbusters. Because they are inherently social, people find value in reading the same books and watching the same movies that others do. This is true even in today’s markets where, thanks to the Internet, buyers have easy access to millions and millions of titles.

But, but . . . buyers also have access to loads of reader’s responses to books, thanks to the Internet.

This happens to resonate for me with a comment that popped up when a George Mason professor had students in a class on history hoaxes create their own hoax and spread it virally using the social networks made available through Web 2.0. The commentor said it violated trust networks – that people believed in the hoax not because it had been marketed to them or because it was reported in USA Today, but because historians they trusted talked about it. Their trust network, wired through Internet channels, had been breached by someone who deliberately manipulated that network and their trust for false purposes. There are pedagogical and ethical issues involved that are better discussed elsewhere – but the existence of those trust networks woven together by online connections replicates the “invisible college” or Polanyi’s Republic of Science. It’s bound together by trust and based on both expertise and disinterestedness (in John Ziman’s sense of the word).

Readers have trust networks, too. The best way people can determine what to read next is to have a trusted and well-known fellow reader make a recommendation. There are thousands and thousands of online communities that exist for this purpose. The goal isn’t to sell books, it’s to share information about really good books. A side-effect is that it leads to buying books and to satisfying reading experiences that builds an audience for books.In other words, a trustworthy and disinterested social network that promotes reading is good for business. Once it’s corrupted, it’s nearly useless.

Sadly, they are vulnerable to stealth marketing, and have been exploited that way from the birth of Web 2.0. There are countless websites, blogs, and experts explaining how to use people’s social impulses to sneak in marketing messages. To me, this is fundamentally immoral. And it totally permeates the book business, at least in US culture. I don’t see the same frantic marketing dynamic in the Scandinavian countries, where enthusiasm for books is nevertheless high. And I’ve heard British authors say it’s much worse in the US than in the UK, where a hard sell is simply boorish and unwelcome.

The only way for bookish social networks to work well is for us to draw the kind of firm line between sharing honest information about books and advertising that the best news organizations embrace. Authors, too, can be much clearer about when they are promoting their work and when they are acting as members of a reading community.

Here’s my attempt to adapt the Society of Professional Journalists’s Code of Ethics to book blogging and other social networking. I realize that journalists rank a little lower than lawyers in the public eye, but I have a strong attachment to these principles – which I have borrowed from liberally in this adaptation.

For readers (including those who happen also to be writers)

• Seek out interesting books and write about them honestly. Don’t rely on marketing materials to make your choices. Don’t read other reviews before you form your opinion. Tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of literature by seeking out the lesser-known and unusual. Shun sources that are a hybrid of information and promotion, and recognize the special obligation to speak the truth of your experience with books regardless of other people’s opinions or any potential for personal gain or harm.
• Minimize harm. The temptation to be clever should never lead to an unfairly humiliating review. Criticize the book, not the writer or the reader of it. Pursuit of critical rigor is not license for arrogance. Balance the book’s right to a fair reading with readers’ right to know. Likewise, make sure your enthusiasm for a book you love is accompanied with concrete reasons for your enthusiasm so that other readers can make a more informed choice.
• Act independently. Avoid conflicts of interest. Disclose any relationships that might compromise your objectivity or even the appearance of compromised objectivity. Do not review books in exchange for favors, however intangible. Don’t let the potential to grow close to a much-loved author (or to any other opportunity) influence your judgment.
• Be accountable. Don’t get your feather’s ruffled when people disagree with you. Be open to alternative perspectives without abandoning your best judgment.

For writers in particular

• Don’t see every social encounter as a chance to sell a book.
• Don’t strategize everything you say based on what you might get out of it (good or bad).
• Don’t join social networks to use them for marketing. That’s not what friends are for. Besides, it’s deceitful.
• Don’t strike bargains, overt or unspoken, to cross-promote other writers’ works in exchange for their support. Disclose potential conflicts of interest.
• Marketing isn’t half the job. Writing is the job.  Marketing is a semi-necessary evil that can do more harm than good.
• Don’t go for the hard sell. Just don’t. It’s obnoxious.
• Be honest. Be yourself. Act with integrity.

*Thanks to Maxine Clarke for pointing out his article and getting it on FriendFeed.

**In case anyone is wondering, I don’t read the HBR on principle. Any publication that will add to its expensive full-text licensed content in library databases a clause that it cannot be used for classes deserves to be shunned. I guess if your subject is filthy lucre, it’s a great way to write a license. It’s a lousy way to communicate research.

Big Business is Watching You

There’s a fascinating post over at In Reference to Murder by BV Lawson (rhymes with awesome) that could give you utopian / dystopian whiplash. She reports on two events, one which highlighted the Open Library which Tim Spalding predicts will replace Amazon in time. I can certainly live with that! But she also reports on a session at another conference on RFID – Radio Frequency ID tags – being used to keep tabs on where books are and which are being picked up in bookstores.

RFID can illuminate customers’ behavior. It can show how they flow through the store, where they stop, what they pick up, which area sells the most, how these things change during the year. As a result, booksellers can design stores “for the way customers behave, not the way you think they behave,” according to Jim Lichtenberg, president of Lightspeed consulting. [Can't you seem some jokester carrying around a copy of War and Peace for an hour, only to put it back before they leave, stopping in-between at the sections on Cookbooks, Computers, and Graphic Novels just to give the trackers a little nyah-nyah fun?]

Critics are wary of the privacy issues involved, although proponents counter this by saying that in the book world tags contain a minimal amount of data and don’t record any personal information, such as who has purchased a book or where the book goes. Hmmm. Haven’t we heard this before?

Pro or con, it may just be a matter of time before it comes to pass. In March or April there will be a big meeting of people in the book business in the U.S. to discuss how to do an RFID pilot that would take place as soon as early 2009, according to insiders.

So, what do you think—is RFID merely another tool to help the publishing industry or one more stone in the pathway heading toward the Big Brother society of tomorrow?

You probably can guess what I think. Please, God, nooooooooo!