We are now in a period of disintermediation which essentially means the number of entities in the supply chain between the content creator and the customer have been reduced. The reason for this is because the supply channel has become incredibly efficient and cost effective. If you can type up a book in Word, you can publish it digitally on platforms like Kindle and Smashwords.
The challenge authors face right now is this:
Contracts are being signed right now that extend 2-3 years out (and maybe longer). The digital reading market is growing and authors need to be equipped with what that will mean. In other words, if digital market is 30% then only getting 8% royalty will require a much higher advance to recoup the royalty loss. If the digital market becomes a force in 2-3 years or even just a few years beyond that, would you rather have no advance and a higher royalty?
Many authors are looking at the growth in digital, the decline in mass market sales, the reduction of Borders’ footprint, the decreased orders from Wal-mart and thinking, hey, this digital thing might not be so bad after all. I think with the inclusion of digital book sales by the NYTimes and USA Today, digital books are finally gaining an imprimatur of respectability. For the record, while at TOC, a bunch of us made predictions about what the digital book market would be like at the end of 2011. I said it would represent 60% of trade publishing revenue. A year ago, I probably predicted that 30% wouldn’t be achieved for five years.*
As I said in the beginning of 2010, this is both a great and terrible thing:
This is both a boon and a curse. It’s a boon because it means that more books of a greater variety will be available to the reader. It’s a curse because that means more books a reader must filter through to find new reads. Quality will vary wildly. But the fact is that there is a number of books out in the marketplace that are of low quality, poorly edited, with horrible covers, that aren’t worth your time or your money. When I looked at the free list of books that All Romance eBooks were promoting during the holidays (probably because those publishers participated), it confirmed what I thought already: the dross is already here and in large number.
The current publishing system is a system of filtration. Authors submit to agents who submit to editors. The editors produce books that are bought by retailers and wholesalers and the reader gets to choose from that selection. Except not exactly. With the rise of online book purchasing, the decline of physical brick and mortar stores, and the rise of digital books, the reader is confronted with a panoply of reading choices. Too many, in fact. One reason why 30% of book discovery happens in the bookstore is because readers are being offered a smaller and more manageable selection.
The big question is how do we find good stuff to read in the future? I’m going to suggest four ways.
1. Metadata. Metadata is the text (letters and numbers) that are embedded in the file and identify the contents of a digital book. Metadata can include the blurb but also keywords associated with the digital file. One of the reasons that people believe that Google Books will be a dominate player in ebooks is due to its knowledge of search and people’s usage of search terms. But Google will have to seriously step up its game. This is what shows up for What I Did for a Duke by Julie Anne Long.
Authors who self publish (and publishers of course) need to ensure that the books have metadata that make it easy for readers to find the books that they want. I.e., if I want to read a historical friends to lovers story containing a marriage of convenience plot, I should be able to type that into a retailer site (or somewhere) and have those books pop up.
2. Social sharing sites. I get a ton of recommendations via Twitter and I’m sure people say the same thing about Facebook. I also pick up recommendations from Goodreads. There are other social networking platforms for bibliophiles such as Library Thing and Amazon’s Shelfari (against which I still hold a grudge because of its terrible spamming of readers).
The takeaway is that you never know which reader will be influencing another reader, but we do so via social networking sites, blogs, and emails. Authors getting their books out there to readers will be a key to discovery.
3. Epicenters of influence. In the future, I think there will be new epicenters of influence such as authors banding together forming coops and editorial epicenters.
Author coops. A number of really good backlist titles can be found at AWritersWork.com including titles from Patricia McLinn, Patricia Rice, Jasmine Creswell and others. The problem with these books is that the covers, for the most part, make the books look less than professional. Compare the covers to these books published by a group of authors under the imprint “Wicked Writers“. Ironically, I prefer the books at A Writer’s Work to those offered by Wicked Writers, but by covers, there is no comparison and I don’t just mean because there is man titty on the Wicked Writer’s covers. The WW’s also do something clever by branding each cover with a consistent logo. If a reader reads a WW book, she can tell almost instantly which books she might also be interested in purchasing.
I definitely see advantages to the WW method of self publishing and look forward to books published by groups like Unusual Historicals or The Oddshots. (This is theoretical and not based on any insider knowledge). The point is that authorial coops can work like an extreme version of the author endorsement on the book cover. Of course, there are drawbacks to that type of branding or endorsement. I have an instinctive recoil every time I see Deborah Anne MacGillivray’s name on anything. Most of the authors at Wicked Writers I have tried at one point or another and thus it’s not likely I would buy anything under that brand. However, I think that type of author cooperative works well because it leverages the readers of many instead of just a few.
Editorial epicenters. Back in 2006, Sarah Wendell mused about whether readers would glom onto editors’ like they’ve glommed onto authors. Currently, editors try to buy books that sell but there are certain editors that have a flair for a particular type of book. Cindy Hwang is fairly well known for her paranormal authors (Christine Feehan, Nalini Singh, Meljean Brook to name a few). Wendy McCurdy has a stable of historical authors (Madeline Hunter, Jo Goodman, formerly Elizabeth Thornton, Sherry Thomas). If editors start freelancing and offering their editing skills to self published authors (which I believe will happen), editors themselves can become their own sort of publishing imprint. (I had an idea to do this with the launch of the anthology in the winter, but I think it will be cost prohibitive and by that I don’t want to front the money for putting out quality books and I wouldn’t put out books unless they were professionally edited, copy edited, with a professional cover).
4. Aggregators. As disintermediation increases, books will come at the reader from a thousand different sources and that will simply be too much. What will happen, I believe, is that there will be aggregators of content. (This will also reduce the costly time investment in self publishing). To some extent Smashwords, Scribd, and others are already aggregating and delivering content but I suspect that there will be services that will collect content from various writer coops and then deliver them to readers in more manageable form (searchable, sortable data).
How do you think you will find and buy books in the future? Do you browse for books online and if so how? Are you willing to try new authors that are published in non traditional ways or are you sticking with published books and how do you tell?
*BTW:
Oh, how the landscape has changed so dramatically. In preparation for this post, I re-read several posts in the Dear Author archives. It was under 2 years ago when the president of RWA effectively said that digital publishing wasn’t a legitimate career path! In 2007, I was writing manifestos to ebooks, trying to justify them to readers. In 2008, I was begging for publishers to digitize their books and wondering whether the publisher business model would change. But I was also saying that self publishing equated with inferior to me. My opinions have changed since then, obviously. I wonder if Pershing’s opinons have changed?
Reprinted, with permission, from Jane’s Dear Author blog
Quite a good article.
On the quality thing I suggest that quality is in the eye of the reader. There is ample dross in the professional publishing arena already and it is simply not true that the established publishing route protected readers against sub standard writing. The only concern publishers have ever had is ‘can we sell this title’. Quality was never a controlling factor.
Jane’s points about how readers can find quality eBooks and eBooks that suit them are very well made. Readers will indeed be faced with a bewildering amount of choice and not everyone will be happy to go along with the online best seller sham.
In my view there will indeed be a huge opportunity for Influencer web sites. Whether they are created by key reviewers or online eRetailers who implement some kind of reliable and consistent filtering, or the kind of social reading sites like Copia, already covered on Teleread in the past.
I see an opportunity for authors with an established name to make a splash here. An established author with a web site recommending eBooks that they themselves recommend would be a powerful driver of influence and a valuable guide for readers of that author looking for guidance.
“Back in 2006, Sarah Wendell mused about whether readers would glom onto editors’ like they’ve glommed onto authors.”
“If editors start freelancing and offering their editing skills to self published authors (which I believe will happen), editors themselves can become their own sort of publishing imprint.”
Publishers are beginning to learn, to their dismay, that readers are only interested in authors. Branding has never worked for publishers. Why in the world would anyone think this would work for editors, who are even more obscure as far as readers are concerned, than publishers? Book=author.
The idea that authors will seek out successful genre editors is intriguing but unlikely to occur because too few authors are willing to pay the price of even basic editing, and the well-known editors named do not provide basic editing services — they are substantive editors who work hand-in-glove with authors to make a book flow. They are expensive to hire and after hiring them, an author would be wasting his or her money if the author didn’t follow through with a professional copyeditor and proofreader, which means adding to an already large investment.
To make such a concept work, many, if not most, authors would need to overcome their reluctance to invest in their own product.
I have no trouble finding quality indie books for my Kindle. Sure, there are a few out there that desperately need editing and formatting, but most indie authors take pride in their work and know that a professional appearance for the book reflects on their reputation. I find backlist titles from traditionally published authors are usually the biggest mess. The publishers seem to rush the books out by doing a quick OCR with no post-editing. These usually cost more too.
I get my books from reviews on book blogs, sites like Kindle Nation Daily, DailyCheapReads, and Books on the Knob. I get them from Amazon’s recommendations. I also get them directly from the authors in the Kindle forum.
After long practice I can go through a shelf of printed paperbacks in a bookstore in about twenty seconds to establish whether anything I want is there. This is largely because the older books I am interested in are different in size, format and presentation from their modern equivalents. If I have to browse through a hundred identical thumbnails on the Internet it takes much, much longer.
It’s not an issue at the moment because most of the books I want aren’t available electronically anyway. But there is a crying need for people with cataloguing skills, even in large establishments like Amazon, to ensure that finding and identifying eBooks on the Web is as easy as it is for pBooks.