Here’s another month-old story I missed when it was new. Last month, HarperCollins acquired The Midlist, a daily newsletter that delivered e-book deals from a variety of publishers to customers’ inboxes every day. The publisher rolled The Midlist into its HarperCollins-only deals newsletter, Bookperk. Publishers Weekly reported:

The combined Midlist-Bookperk operation will, HC said, reach over 1 million readers. “Folding The Midlist into Bookperk is the next logical step as we grow Bookperk into an industry-leading direct-to-consumer platform,” said Angela Tribelli, HC’s chief marketing officer. She added that the combined newsletter will “connect our authors and our tremendous backlist to more than a million readers.”

I found the story when it popped up on The Passive Voice yesterday, and commenters there noted the same big problem with the deal that I see: HarperCollins bought the mailing list of a publisher-agnostic deals newsletter and merged it into its own publisher-centric newsletter. I never subscribed to The Midlist, though I do subscribe to similar newsletter Bookbub. If that deals list suddenly switched over to being the mouthpiece for just one publisher, I don’t think I would find it all that useful any longer. And unlike Baen, Harlequin, or O’Reilly, HarperCollins is not a well-branded publisher, but just another faceless Big Five entity.

And similarly, this means there is one fewer outlet available for self-publishing and indie-publishing writers to promote their works—it’s now all HarperCollins, all the time. Of course, other newsletters will spring up to fill the vacant niche in the indie book promotion ecology—the demand both from self-publishers who want to advertise, and from readers who want to find more self-published books. Meanwhile, all the disgruntled subscribers to The Midlist will drop Bookperk like a hot potato. By no means all of even most subscribers will, but they’ll almost certainly lose all the ones who cared the most, and were likely to buy the most books.

1 COMMENT

  1. You’ve touched on one of the most important issues in publishing today—visibility. It’s always been important, but in the past visibility meant getting reviewed in a print media and getting on the shelves of bookstores. Now it means getting seen in digital media. Email lists are one means. Coming in near the top of search engine results is another.

    Is HarperCollins acquiring Midlist to give their books more favorable treatment. They wouldn’t have spent the money if they weren’t. Is Amazon using an offer of more favorable treatment in their store search results to pressure authors and publishers to give it an exclusive. That’s even more certain.

    ——

    There are ways to beat that system. One is to specialize on themes no one else has taken up. I’ve done that with my ‘hospital series” based on when I worked at Seattle Children’s Hospital on this very unit:

    I spent hundreds of hours walking down the halls you see there. Each of those books is unique or almost so. If you’re looking for a book on their topics, they’re almost the only books in print. Illustrations:

    Children with cancer. There are numerous books on what it is like to be a teen with cancer or to be the parent of a child battling cancer. There aren’t many on what it’s like to be on the nursing staff of a Hem-Onc unit knowing, when you go to work, that as many as a third of the adorable children you’re caring for will die. That’s _My Nights with Leukemia_. The topic is grim, but I do my best to point out the positives.

    Embarrassment. Many hospitalized people fear embarrassment almost as much as they do the pain, yet little is said much less done about embarrassment. _Hospital Gowns and Other Embarrassments_ is a how-to-avoid-it guide for patients, especially teen girls. The almost complete _Embarrass Less_ is a ‘how-to-avoid-doing-it guide for hospital staff.

    Nursing morale. Nursing morale is bad and getting worse. There are numerous books describing how put-upon nurses can fight back. Unfortunately, some nurses and particularly new nurses find taking a stand difficult. _Senior Nurse Mentor_ shifts the blame for that bad morale to where it belongs, on the hospital administration. It offers a practical solution that’s remarkably similar to that the U.S. military adopted in the mid-1990s to keep morale high in an all-volunteer military. The suggestion I offer seems obvious, but as far as I know no one else is offering it. If you want good morale, have a position whose reason for existing is good morale.

    Can I keep up that ‘make it unique’ approach? I don’t know. I do have some unique ideas that might become books and I’ve realized that being the first to write on a topic has its downside—people don’t even realize that such books exist. Still I will try. I’d like to see my writing income go up a bit.

    —-

    What about the poor souls who’s interest lies in genres that are filled to overflowing with books. True, if you enter those fields, you’ve got a ready-made market unlike my pioneering hospital series. But you’ve also got a heck of a lot of competition. What can you do to stand out from the crowd?

    Free or cheap is one option, particularly for the first book in a series. But free means you earn nothing for what may be a year or more of work. Cheap, which typically means pricing that book at $0.99, means the dour Scrounge of publishing, Amazon, is only going to pay your 35 cents for that book (versus twice that from Apple). If you’re going that little on each sale, you might as well make it free. But then you face that same ‘nothing for all your work’ dilemma.

    Become famous. Yeah, that’s hard to do at the celebrity level and I’d rather be dead that do what many such people do to keep their names in the news. But you can create a podcast or a blog on a topic you know well enough to attract a crowd. Having done that, you can then use that platform to promote your books among people who already like what you’re saying. Grammar Girl is a good illustration of how that works.

    http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl

    Would you believe she even has a well-rated grammar game for iPads?

    https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grammar-pop-hd/id666851934

    Note though that you’re got to primarily focused on what your readers or listeners want and only secondarily on hyping your books. You don’t want to sound like an ad for yourself.

    The downside is that you’ve got to be disciplined and better-than-most on a particular topic. But if that’s you, that’s an opportunity.

    —-

    Patience and focus matter and can be used by any writer. Here’s where I miss the boat. Go here:

    http://inklingbooks.prosite.com

    and you’ll see that I’ve written or edited books on a host of topics. But alas, people who develop an interest in what I say in one area—say war history—aren’t likely to be interested in what I say on embarrassment in hospitals and vice-versa.

    That why for many authors the key to success may lie in focusing on one genre and even one particular spin within it, i.e. not just sci-fi but steampunk sci-fi about a Sherlock Holmes-like detective. People who like one of your books will be far more likely to read the others if they’re similar. That was the key to Conan Doyle’s success with Holmes. He couldn’t get people to quit demanding new stories about his detective.

    Feel free to add to my remarks your own suggestions about becoming visible in a literary world where getting noticed seems to be mostly for those who’re already well-connected or publisher/retailers who can buy up publicity machines.

    –Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books

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