Category: Publishing

Indie Bookstores on the Rise

My friend Dean Wesley Smith has a great post up about how small publishers — even one person operations — can get their books into bookstores.  Definitely recommend you read his post, even if you’re coming at this from the angle of a reader rather than a writer.  Dean is right that this is just history repeating itself, but the big change is how little cost it takes to compete as a publisher these days.  With POD (print-on-demand), you don’t need to have inventory on hand.  You don’t even need a physical location at all, except perhaps a PO box.  You can literally create a publishing empire from a laptop.

And he touches on a persistent myth that just won’t die.  Yes, one big bookstore chain (Borders) went away and the other (B&N) is struggling to find itself, but there are hundreds of little independent bookstores popping up to take their place:

The American Booksellers Association, which represents independent bookstores, says its membership — it hit a low of 1,600 in 2008 — has grown 6.4 percent in 2013, to 2,022. Sales were up 8 percent in 2012, and those gains have held this year.  [From  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/independent-bookstores-turn-a-new-page-on-brick-and-mortar-retailing/2013/12/15/2ed615d8-636a-11e3-aa81-e1dab1360323_story.html]

And this:

The American Booksellers Association announced this week in Bookselling This Week that it added 44 new bookstore members last year, including six branches of existing stores. California gained the most new stores, 10; followed by Michigan and New York, which each had four. In addition, 12 established stores were purchased by new owners, including Penguin Bookshop in Sewickley, Pa.; Inkwood Books in Tampa, Fl.; and Moby Dickens Bookshop in Taos, N.M.

In 2014, ABA already seems on track to continue expanding membership. Four stores have opened to date, including The Purple Chair in New Braunfels, Tex., and Blue Frog Books in Howell, Mich. Two stores have new owners. [From  http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/61136-aba-adds-44-stores-in-2013.html]

It’s true that a lot of these are gift stores and coffee shops who sell books among other things, but that’s a good thing.  Rather than have a huge chunk of the retail shelf space dedicated to books controlled by a handful of buyers at a couple of superstores, we now have hundreds of small buyers who can cater to their local niches. Yes, we might not see the heyday of 5500 ABA members and 7000 stores that existed in 1995, especially with ebooks and online retailing taking a huge chunk of the book business, but bookstores have their place. If that weren’t true, their numbers wouldn’t be growing.

About Luck and Goals

Yesterday on the way to work, I heard a great piece on NPR about the power of chance as it relates to success.  You can read the article, “Good Art Is Popular Because It’s Good. Right?” on NPR’s website, or even better, listen to the audio as I did.  Here’s the crux of it:

To test how much of success should be attributed to chance and how much to quality, Salganik created a website that randomly funneled the 30,000 teenagers he recruited online into nine identical worlds.

Each of these worlds exposed the teens to 48 songs from emerging artists — bands that hadn’t yet been signed so were totally unknown to the teens. The deal was that after listening to the songs, the teens could download the ones they liked best for free.

Now in one world — the control world — they couldn’t see which songs their peers were downloading so there was no social influence. But in the other eight, the teens could see which songs had been downloaded before, so they knew what other people thought was good.

“So we had the exact same 48 songs competing against each other, we had the exact same initial conditions, everything starts with zero downloads, and we have indistinguishable groups of participants, because they were randomly placed into the world,” Salganik says.

And what did he find?

Different songs become popular in different histories — and not in small ways, either.

[Read the rest.]

I’ve written about the power of luck in publishing before.  The truth is, I think indie publishing in the age of ebooks is much closer to a meritocracy than traditional publishing ever was, but it’s only closer. Like all forms of success, luck plays a big part.  All we can do is work harder and smarter, giving ourselves the best chance to find an audience.  Nobody is entitled to a huge audience and big bank accounts, and no matter how hard you work, you aren’t guaranteed it.  Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler have a great post up right now about this very subject, where they take on an anonymous “Big Bestseller” who challenges their claim that publishing is much more of a lottery than a meritocracy.  While I agree with them in substance, I don’t think a lottery, which is entirely about chance, is a very useful analogy.  How about poker?  Luck definitely plays a part in poker, but so does skill. And over time, as long as that poker player gives herself the best chances to succeed, by playing a lot and striving to get better, quality will play a bigger and bigger role in her success.

That’s the issue I have with Salganik’s experiment. As far as I can tell, the musician only had one song. The less you work at something, the less work you produce, the less you get better, and the more it’s like a lottery and less it’s like poker.

But chance is a huge influence and always will be.  That’s why the longer I’ve been writing, the more I’ve tried to stop focusing on goals that hinge in any fashion on luck.  I’ve always been a proponent of focusing on what you can control and not on the things you can’t — how well books sell, money, awards, reader response — but lately I’ve taken it farther.  This may sound a bit radical to those of you steeped in the Napoleon Hill way of looking at the world, as I once was, but I’ve tried to remove results from the equation at all.  Instead I focus entirely on  process. Not just a little, but entirely. I mean I’ve tried to remove all “destination goals” from my mind. It’s much closer to a Zen approach, taking a page from Ray Bradbury.  The crux of it is this: It is possible to be a writer who is driven by the work itself and not the world’s response to it.  It is possible to make your goals entirely about pages written, books read, other writers studied, etc, without attaching other destination goals to the back end– and yet still sit at the same poker table along with all the other players, because that is part of the process.  The actual results won’t change, but man, you’ll be a lot happier.

It’s a subtle but powerful shift in thinking I’ve had trouble explaining to people in person, and I’ll probably take another stab at it in this blog before too long, but really it boils down to making the process the goal.  In other words, the Zen archer is driven by shooting arrows as well as she can, not by hitting the target, even if in the end the former often leads to the latter.

The Publishing Revolution Is Over: Indies Won

Bestselling author Hugh Howey and an anonymous “data guy” set off a bit of a bomb in the publishing industry last week when they released a report that used a sample of Amazon data collected from dozens of self-publishing authors and used some sophisticated sales rank extrapolations to paint a pretty interesting picture of where the money and sales are going.  If you aren’t up to date on the report and all the various reactions to it, Porter Anderson over at PublishingPerspectives.com has a nice summary on what many people are saying about it.  Read that, take a look at the report itself, and even download their extrapolations in Excel format.  I’ve been following the discussions pretty closely and I’m already exhausted by it.

Honestly, I didn’t find all that much surprising about the report, and regardless of any problem you might have with it (it is an extrapolation after all), it’s pretty hard to argue with the its bigger picture conclusions.  It confirms what most of us have believed for a few years at least, based on the anecdotal evidence we’ve been seeing all around us:  self-publishing, far from being a vanity fringe, is now a force to be reckoned with, and in fact, will only grow as the preferred option for writers over time.  This is why the insiders in the traditional publishing community are finally responding, some with near hysteria, which is how we know the revolution is over.

Writers have options now.  Real options.   Over time, those options should force traditional publishers to offer better royalties and contract terms, which have been abysmal lately and getting worse.  I say should, because the desire to publish is very personal and emotional for lots of writers, combining both the head and the heart, and most of the time that emotion overrides whatever a contract is saying in black in white.  Being able to say you were published by Simon and Schuster or Random House is always going to hold a lot of sway for a huge percentage of people.  I get that.  I feel it, too.  And under the right circumnstances, I’ll definitely work with traditional publishers again — but only under the right circumstances.

Which is the point.  The indie revolution was never really about self-publishing.  It was about being indie. Independent.  Having options, real options, not the store-boxes-of-books-in-your-garage-and-hope-for-a-miracle kind options, but options that allow you to make the same amount of money (or more) and reach the same amount of readers (or more) as if you went with a big traditional publisher, while still retaining control and copyright.  That revolution is over, and indies won.

Will Libraries Become Publishers?

One library in Tennessee thinks so:

IngramSpark is a publishing, distribution, and print-on-demand platform from the Ingram Content Group, built specifically for independent publishers and authors. The platform promises ebook distribution into 70% of the world, and print distribution to 80,000 retailers and libraries globally.

The first book from the Williamson County library is a children’s book called Bucky and Bonnie’s Library Adventure, written by library staff. “The creation of our first book and the development of our publishing program has been a labor of love and illustrates how libraries of today can move forward in new and exciting ways to serve their patrons,” said Dolores Greenwald, Director of the Williamson County Public Library … [Read the rest at PublishingPerspectives.com]

I’ve been seeing more and more reports of libraries venturing into publishing.  And why not?  It’s something I’ve been predicting for a while, and it makes great sense.  With ebook and print-on-demand technology allowing writers to go direct to readers, and that process getting increasingly easier, who is better positioned to help writers reach those readers than libraries?  In fact, at the library where I work at Western Oregon University, we’re beginning to explore these possibilities ourselves — one of the reasons I was transferred to the library a few months ago.