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Monks and Scribes Guild Seeks Injunction
Against New Self-Publisher, Gutenberg |
Recently we've discussed some of the attractions that no-cost self-publishing providers offer to book writers. Amazon's KDP for e-books, and CreateSpace for printed books, were the focus of our earlier discussions, though there are also other providers. I published a Young Adult novel,
Leaving Major Tela, in both formats with these providers, and found it a generally interesting and encouraging experience. Now, another new development has arrived: reader-powered publishing.
It reminds one of how the music industry's decades-long, rigid control of who gets to have their music made available to the public, and how much it should cost, crumbled with the arrival of internet alternatives. Some, like pirating, were not valid alternatives, but others like
You Tube gave artists a chance to gain an audience, and revenues, from a large, potential fan base without going through the major labels. Here's how things have evolved in a related way for book publishing.
Legacy publishers are the long-serving, traditional publishers for the book industry. Over time, many of these publishers and their imprints have been acquired and merged into a fewer number of mega-corporations. The modern business practices and required profit margins imposed by the mega-corporations on their new publishing divisions have led to smaller editorial staff to acquire new manuscripts, guide them through the publication process, and conduct the marketing program. Since they have trimmed their work force to far fewer skilled editorial staff to do this work, the initial acquisition process has largely been farmed out to private, literary agents, who now act as the industry's first-line gatekeepers--at no cost to the mega-corporation.
Gatekeepers--there appear to be many literary agents available to do this job, but they all must compete to sell to the same mega-corporations. The marketability of any manuscript may depend on genres and themes that are currently in vogue, as researched by the mega-corporations, and a new writer working with a theme in any other area has difficulties getting past the gatekeepers. Agents, without a sufficient number of well-known writers contributing material to them, may choose to resort to passing along part of their overhead and operating costs to their hopeful, new writers--an increased price of admission for the writer.
The mega-corporations also depend to a much greater extent now on enlisting the free services of authors in their marketing campaigns, such as making book-signing tours. Some authors may relish this, others may not.
The early business models of the new, self-publishing providers seem designed to give authors greater access to getting their book produced in e-book or printed versions, with minimal gatekeeping hurdles, and at essentially no cost to the author. However, there has been little marketing followup by the self-publishing provider, aside from displaying an attractive webpage wherein the book description and its contents may be sampled online by the prospective reader, and which provides the reader an opportunity to click on the ordering button. But how to coax the reader to find that page? Providing links on your own blogging pages, or getting the book reviewed by other bloggers, are typical author strategies. An author can also make his book more attractive to the casual web surfer by publicizing favorable reviews from prominent readers' websites, like ReadersFavorites.com, or GoodReads.com. Such marketing is hard, and requires a degree of luck to get a following, but it can be done in a writer's available time, and from his own office.
The newest business model of "reader-powered" publishing" is the (Amazon) Kindle Scout venture. In this model:
Authors who want to get their books published submit to Kindle Scout and accept the Submission & Publishing Agreement. The first pages (about 5,000 words) from each book are posted on the Kindle Scout website for a 30-day scouting period where readers can nominate up to three books at a time. The more nominations a book receives, the more likely it gets discovered by the Kindle Scout team. If selected, the book will be published by Kindle Press and all the readers who nominated the book will receive an early, free copy and be invited to leave reviews.
When an author's book is selected by this process, Kindle Press offers a $1,500 advance and 50% e-book royalties.
Kindle Press books will be enrolled and earn royalties for participation in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited, as well as be eligible for targeted email campaigns and promotions. The advance and e-book royalties seem acceptable, but the proposed Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited compensation is not specifically given. In the past my opinion of those programs in the earlier (and ongoing) business model has been they provide library content to serve as free perks to attract subscription-based customer programs, but provide little or no compensation to the writers.
I think I might like to submit a manuscript to Kindle Scout, and if so, would report more on the experience later.
Several earlier posts discussed independent self-publishing platforms (ISP) for both e-books and printed books. My experience with Amazon in producing a Kindle edition and a print edition of a YA novel (the print edition with CreateSpace, an Amazon-owned company) was a very satisfying experience, and did not cost me anything. Special support services (formatting, editing, cover design)were available for a fee, but are not necessary for most authors with average skills.
However, after creating and making the book available through an ISP company, the role of marketing the book seems to be left more or less to the author. A wide gamut of on-line vendors, like Amazon Books, Google Books, Barnes & Noble, and others, can be selected to list the book and collect an agreed royalty amount on any sales; however, there may be very little effort by those vendors to find and direct readers to the book. This had been one of the valuable services provided by traditional publishing companies. Besides being gatekeepers of which books can be published, the traditional companies would generally send out copies of the finished book to their lists of nationwide book reviewers and media columnists to help generate an awareness and demand for the book. They might also arrange book tours (one has to smile to think of them trying to get J. D. Salinger to do a book tour). To some extent, the ISP author can do some of this work by searching for independent or organizational reviewers on the Internet, and providing them with the necessary digital or print copies of the book. Some reviews might be provided free, and others by prestigious organizations can cost up to a couple of hundred dollars. The author has better prospects to enlist a reviewer if the book is newly published or has been published within the last two or three months. Consequently, one can see from all this that it would be most effective if the ISP author had some sort of plan, and/or arrangements made, before he ever clicks on the 'publish' button with the ISP.
Some of the positives and drawbacks of the ISP option for an author are illustrated in an interview with author John Edgar Wideman, reported by Sejal Shah in
The Writer's Chronicle of May/Summer 2014. Wideman has a son, Danny, who worked for an ISP, named Lulu, and decided to publish a book titled
Briefs with them.
Briefs was an experiment. It got all the reviews you could want, under the circumstances. And also because Danny worked there I got a lot of services that if you self-published in Lulu, you'd have to pay for. For example, the expensive business of sending books to reviewers. My self-published electronic book was treated a bit like the old way that my hard copy books had been. A publicity service sent books to the media and tried to get me interviews. A publicity person promoted and followed the book's progress. Books were made available in conventional hard copy format, so that was cheating in a way. The results don't tell a lot about self-publishing or electronic publishing per se. My conclusion after the whole thing was that even with the extras I got, a self-publishing venture was premature. It still is premature, for a person of my status, used to having a certain kind of attention. You're taking a real leap of faith and financially, you're giving up, in my case, what might be a substantial advance.
Not being on bookstore shelves killed Briefs. Someone browsing in that nice bookstore ...is not going to see Briefs. A bookstore has to pay for copies of Briefs, and then they own the copies, can't return them. The other thing is the Times refused to review Briefs, because it was self-published ...They did run a story about the manner in which Briefs was published, but it was not a review. Almost all the articles about the book were not reviews; they were general interest pieces about the publishing industry. That meant no reviews of the book, and at the same time no one was going to trip over the book in a bookstore. So why would anyone buy it? Where would they find it? As far as merchandising strategy, Briefs fell into very predictable cracks. I was disappointed, but I'd do it again. I liked the adventure; I liked working with Danny; and I learned a hell of a lot.
As might be concluded from the foregoing discussions and interview excerpt, ISP is a works in progress. There are pluses and minuses in it for most authors, but the business model of the traditional publisher has contemporary issues that need to be addressed, also. One thinks of the music recording industry, which had a business model that served them handsomely for many years and did well for a relatively small number of artists, too. However, the internet opened up possibilities for many more artists that had been shut out by the traditional gatekeepers' system, and brought with it upheavals to the business model that are still ongoing. Now, the book publishing model's turn may have come.
