Category: Publishing

A 25 Cent Book in 1950 Would Be $2.44 Today

That’s if you trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with its terrific CPI Inflation Calculator, which lets you enter an amount going all the way back to 1913, and, with the click of a button, see what the inflation-adjusted price would be today — or another year.    

I checked this site in response to David Gaughran’s blog post, “The Great  E-book Pricing Question,” where he makes a number of interesting points:

There’s more guff written about pricing than almost anything else, resulting in an extremely confusing situation for new self-publishers. I often see them pricing too low or too high, and the decision is rarely made the right way, i.e. ascertaining their goals and pricing accordingly … [Read the rest at Let’s Get Visible.]

I think David glosses over the mountains of research that do show that price affects the perception of value, not to mention the side benefit of being able to run sale prices at steeper discounts, which often has more positive results (Bookbub.com has a nice post on this), but that aside, his overall point is valid — that indie publishers can cry all they want that their books should be worth more than a cup of coffee, but what the writer wants, and what the market will bear, are not the same thing.

Amazon lists most of their genre fiction ebooks at $4.99, with backlist often at $3.99.  Is this the correct price?  Four years after publication, Simon and Schuster still sells the ebook edition of my first novel for $11.76, a price I think is insane, but who knows, perhaps they’re onto something.  My sharp friends Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith generally advocate pricing a little higher than most indie authors, and they have valid reasoning behind their approach, especially when you consider they have started a traditional publishing company, albeit one that’s smartly taking advantage of all the new technologies.  And of course there are loads of writers, like Joe Konrath, who happily price at $2.99 or $3.99 and are doing very well.  Who’s correct?

No one, at least as far as I’m concerned.  Or everyone. With ebooks, price can’t primarily be about supply and demand, because supply is infinite, but it is affected by not only what consumers are willing to pay, but also by your goals as a publisher.  There is no correct price for all ebooks.

Now, that said, where do I come down? I think Amazon is probably onto something, but even they, with their mountains of proprietary data on their own customer’s buying habits, which you would think would give them an enormous advantage, currently only have five out of the top twenty books on their own Kindle bestseller list.  A twenty-five percent hit rate is pretty good, but that’s their own bestseller list on their own site for a product they created!  (And look at how prices are all over the map on that list; that alone should tell you something.) Still, I think ebooks are closer in parallel to movie rentals, and no one says that a .99 movie rental at your local Redbox is somehow devaluing the movie.  Louis CK now sells his comedy specials direct to his fans for $4.99, and he’s made millions doing so.  It’s a pretty safe bet that his fans don’t think he’s devaluing his work, but instead think they’re getting a good deal.  That’s what I think, anyway, and I’m one of them.

What’s wrong with giving people a good deal?

Which brings me back to the title of this blog post.  When the paperback novel was released in Britain, and here in America, it was just as much a gamechanger as the ebook.  That’s why the arguments about cheap book prices devaluing literature sound so familiar.  We’re just rehashing the same argument that was had about paperbacks.  “My books are certainly worth more than a Big Mac at McDonalds!” the writer claims.  Well, that certainly may be true to that writer, but who cares?  The average price of a Big Mac in America in January 2014 was $4.64, which is pretty close to where Amazon prices their genre ebooks, and most writers would be happy to move as many ebooks as McDonalds moves Big Macs. Pocket Books priced paperbacks in the forties and early fifties at 25 cents and sold millions — a price that would be the equivalent of just under $3 today.  Boy, did some folks howl about how books priced so low couldn’t be “real books,” just as the reincarnated literati, like zombies who eat books instead of brains, say the same thing today.

The Pocket Books strategy sounds pretty familiar to indie authors — try to sell books outside the traditional distribution channels. Today’s indie author is following a similar model by selling outside traditional publishers altogether.  If you dig even deeper into history, though, you’ll see that even Pocket Books, which only wanted to focus on reprints in the beginning, did its part to safeguard the status quo:

“Successful authors are not interested in original publishing at 25 cents,” Freeman Lewis, executive vice-president of Pocket Books said. Hardcover publisher Doubleday’s LeBaron R. Barker claimed that the concept could “undermine the whole structure of publishing.” Hardcover publishers, of course, had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. They were still receiving 50 percent of the royalties by selling reprint rights.

Fawcett silenced the skeptics by selling more than nine million copies within six months. Authors did the math, and writers of genre fiction—thrillers, Westerns, and romance especially—jumped at the opportunity to write paperback originals. Still, “serious” literary writers insisted on staying in the hardcover market for the prestige, and critics in turn declined to review paperback originals. Clearly, the stigma was still there … [Read the rest at the Smithsonianmag.com]

Sound familiar?  There are lots of authors who refuse to self-publish because of perceived stigma, just as there are lots of authors who do self-publish but refuse to price their ebooks too low for the same reason.

As I said, I don’t think anybody is right here, just people with different goals and different biases, but studying the rise of paperback prices over the years (Mike Shatzkin has a nice older post on this that’s worth reading), it’s obvious that the cost of an average paperback rose much faster than inflation.  This might have more to do with changes in the distribution system than publisher greed, but whatever the cause, all we’re seeing now is a return to a time when cheap books brought in waves of new readers, turning what used to be an activity of a tiny “educated” minority into something the masses could enjoy.

And it looks like cheap ebooks are doing the same.  What could be wrong with that?

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If you enjoyed this post, consider buying one of my own ebooks, most of which are currently priced at $4.99.  That’s a little more than a Big Mac, but not by much.

Getting Someone to Buy a Book Is Only a Writer’s First Hurdle

This survey over at Book Riot is not at all scientific, but it does match what I’ve been hearing from lots of people.  In the digital age, our “to be read” piles are growing at an exponential rate:

In our latest TBR poll, we got nosy and asked you to reveal how many books are on your TBR. The first thing that became clear is that everyone has their own definition of TBR. We didn’t want to lock you down or limit you, so we just asked for your number and where you keep your TBR, whatever TBR happens to mean to you. As usual, we’ve broken down the numbers, and we’ll leave most of the interpretation up to you.

[Read the rest at BookRiot.com.]

Which raises the additional point:  Getting someone to buy your book is only a writer’s first hurdle, especially today, with an explosion of available books.  Getting them to actually read the book — that’s the next challenge.  My own Kindle has at least a hundred books on it waiting to be read, and that’s to say nothing of the print books weighing down my nightstand or my desk. I doubt I’ll ever get to all of them. It’s also why the initial sales results that writers get using promotional tools like Bookbub.com, while nice if they fatten your bank account, aren’t as significant as the sales that follow in the days, weeks, and months to come — at least if you’re interested in gaining readers, not just buyers.  And that is more about the writing itself then your snappy cover or your catchy blurb, which, while difficult to do right all by themselves, and necessary now just to get a book to the starting line, are very easy when compared to offering your reader a story so engaging they not only read the book immediately, they come back for more.  

It’s something I’ve been thinking quite a bit about lately. Why do I buy a book and read it now when I’ve already bought books that are gathering dust on my bookshelf (with ebooks, metaphorically speaking)?  What makes me read this book but not that one?  Certainly if I pay more for a book, I’m more likely to read it, but not always. I’ve bought books for 99 cents that I read right away. I’ve paid full price for books at Barnes and Noble that are still waiting to be read, years later.

How to Take All The Fun Out of Writing and End Up With Something Soulless and Soul-Crushing

Here’s an article over on The Book Designer that had me shaking my head today:

When you decide to write and publish a book, you want to be confident you will bring a book to market that has never before been written—or read—and that your target readers want and need.

To write that book, tell that tale or fill that hole, do some work before you start your manuscript. As part of your initial planning process, study other previously published books and use this research to help you develop the confidence to write and publish a singular book …

[Read the rest of “How to Fill a ‘Hole’ on the Bookstore Shelf’ at the TheBookDesigner.com]

A singular book? I don’t often link to articles on publishing that don’t resonate with me, simply because there’s too much stuff that does resonate for me to share with you those things that don’t (and there’s little objective truth in this business), but this one, wow . . . It so goes against what I’ve learned about the actual creative process that I can’t believe that people really write this way.  Does anyone?  

When I was at the Oregon Book Awards a couple weeks ago, a young writer asked me what I would tell her if I had only one piece of advice to give.  Essentially, I said this: “Write for you. Don’t worry about everybody else.  Write what makes you happy, or angry, or sad. Make yourself laugh or cry or cheer. If you can do that, there’s a good chance your manuscript will do the same for other people, because we’re all made from the same basic stuff. And at the end of the day, at least you’ll have that.”

And that’s what I believe.  I wouldn’t worry too much about being original.  I’d focus on being authentic.  If you’re authentic, as any kind of artist, whether you’re penning a song, writing a novel, or painting a water color, if what you’re writing comes from deep within you, then you won’t need to “fill a hole” on the bookstore shelf.  You’ll create your own space.  

That’s how art works.  There’s always room for another authentic voice.

The Public Library as Publisher

As you’ve probably noticed, libraries becoming publishers is one of the developments I’m watching closely.  Here’s  Jennifer Koerber writing about “The Public Library as Publisher” at Library Journal:

Unlike previous library publishing efforts, Provincetown chose to follow a curated model, using a selection jury made up of staff from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Provincetown Art Association Museum, and local artists and authors. Provincetown Public Press will publish a small number of quality ebooks each year, primarily due to cost—the Library serves a population of 3,000 with a $300,000 budget —but also because the Press is “striving to become a respected outlet with the ability to provide exposure to up-and-coming writers and artists,” said Clark.

Well worth reading the whole article, which cover a number of libraries flirting with publishing.

Here’s the thing about publishing.  It’s taken on an almost mystical quality in the past fifty years or so, but at its Latin core, all that the word publish means is to make public.  The real game changer wasn’t print-on-demand or ebook publishing.  The real game changer was the Internet, which, as it has evolved today, allows anyone to make a blog, a website, a podcast, a YouTube video, and, yes, a print-on-demand book or ebook public with little or no middlemen in between.  That’s all publishing. The only difference is the format.

Now, as the article so nicely demonstrates, the labor doesn’t change, and whether you should publish something yourself is a different question than  can you publish something yourself, but as libraries move away from being purely information repositories, and instead information portals, then it makes sense that they become a place where that information can flow in both directions.