Are Print Books Disappearing?

"Lloyd Jassin, an attorney who specializes in publishing, said a shift away from promising print editions is “a logical reaction to a changing industry.” If publishers increasingly hedge on committing to a print format, Jassin explained, they can take the questions about potential manufacturing losses out of the equation and focus on “building careers, not sell-through.”"

"Contracts that are vague on format give publishers the wiggle room to opt out of costlier-to-produce print books, which generally have higher price points than e-books and, in turn, bring authors higher royalties."

"When the publishers realized, well after signing, that the titles had “no chance of recouping their investment if issued first in print,” he explained, they opted for e-only releases."

Are print books on the verge of disappearing? What do you think?

If you'd like to read the full article on this subject, go to: For MajorPublisher, Will Print No Longer Be the Norm?

Publishing News 9/27/2013

Belgian researchers report the enticing aroma of chocolate inspired bookstore shoppers to stick around longer, and boosted sales of certain genres.

They report shoppers  are more likely to engage in leisurely browsing—and ultimately purchase books in certain popular genres, including romance novels—if the store is infused with the scent of chocolate.  

Agents:

Laney Katz Becker has joined Lippincott Massie McQuilkin as an agent. Previously she was at Markson Thoma.

Hellie Ogden has joined Janklow & Nesbit UK as an agent.  She will be building a list at Janklow & Nesbit for a range of authors. She has been translation rights manager and agent at Greene & Heaton.

Harry Endrulat has joined The Rights Factory as an associate agent.

Publishing Tidbits 6/13/13

Adult ebook sales of $110.1 million were up only 10.1 percent compared to January 2012, but were just $7 million off the month's reported trade paperback sales, now comprising the second-largest segment for adult books. The small ebook increase also confirms there was a much smaller post-holiday boost in digital sales as compared to the same time a year ago.

Children's/YA sales suffered a downturn, however. Sales of $100.3 million represented a 23.6 percent decline from the same period a year ago, largely due to a big drop in hardcover sales (down 29.3 percent to $44.7 million.) And ebook sales also declined a significant 36 percent in January, at $14.4 million, continuing to reflect the difference between rising Hunger Games sales in late 2011 and declining sales in the second part of 2012.

In all, ebooks comprised 27.3 percent of sales in January, as they rose less than $2 million compared to December.

(excerpted from Publisher's Lunch)

Beyond the Wall

As I was reading an article in the Huffington Post by attorney and bookseller William Petrocelli, I kept thinking this guy is in his own cubicle world and can't see beyond the wall. He feels that writers and readers see publishers and bookstores as a hindrance and they would prefer to cut out the editors, designers, distributors and promoters, and make more money.

He does say that "alternative publishing" is "an essential corrective for authors who feel shut out of mainstream publishing." But he feels this is not an alternative to traditional publishing and those writers going their own way don't understand all that publishers do. He also puts forth that eliminating publishers and booksellers would "run the risk of discouraging authors and leaving many future books unwritten…. Without the services of publishers and bookstores, the books that readers want to read are not likely to be available to them in any reasonable fashion."

He believes that publishers are the key because "they make it financially worthwhile for authors to spend their time and energy writing books." And the publishers' and the bookstores' okay on a book is the only way buyers can become aware of books they might want to read. "Without such a system, only the very famous or the very wealthy would be able to write books and reach a wide enough audience to sell those books and make a living. And without such a system many, many writers would be discouraged from spending the time to write books that they knew they would have no reasonable prospect of selling."

His rant is aimed at those who feel publishers and bookstores are obsolete. Personally, I think he would have done better at getting his point across if he had NOT attacked indie authors. I don't think publishers and bookstores are in danger because of writers publishing their own books. I think it's because publishers have for so long relied on certain authors to sell large numbers of books and readers waiting months for the next one to come out. And now readers have many choices to read while they wait on their favorite author. I think they're discovering some poorly written e-books, but also some great writers. And they're coming back to download more and pay less.

I think both publishing systems can survive. For now. And perhaps forever. We can cherish our print books while we embrace e-books.


What do you think?

Stumbling Around

Karen Casey Fitzjerrell is the author of The Dividing Season, a blogger, and a good friend. She's also one of the authors featured in The Corner Café, an anthology of short stories. Her book, The Dividing Season, is fiction, but Karen's a stickler for getting everything right in her books, including the setting and history.

Stumbling Around
Karen Casey Fitzjerrell

Sometimes it pays to back track even though our society wants to operate on the unspoken rule of Full Throttle.

A few weeks ago, in order to save my sanity, I headed off to the Texas Gulf Coast for much needed rest and relaxation. I walked the beach, sipped chilled wine on the balcony and watched brown pelicans glide on warm Gulf of Mexico breezes. In a matter of days I’d down shifted to a more reasonable mode.

My mind drifted back to eight years earlier when I was on a similar mission of reconnecting with the truly important parts of my life. I had taken a side street off the main highway through Palacios ,Texas and literally stumbled onto a fiction writer’s gem: The Luther Hotel. The Luther, originally named the Tres Palacios Hotel, had been built 100 years previously. Not long after completion a Mr. Luther bought the money-strapped establishment and renamed it. At one time the hotel was the diamond of the Texas Coastline. Big money investors from cities like Chicago and New York regularly made the train trip to Texas to stay at The Luther. Back then the hotel claimed it had the longest front porch in Texas. The history of the place was so rich I knew without a doubt I’d include it in my novel, The Dividing Season, that I was working on at the time.

 So it was that on the fourth day of my May, 2012 sabbatical, curiosity overcame me. I drove the extra fifty miles to Palacios to see if the hotel was still standing. It was leaning with age the last time I’d seen it and there’d been a few major hurricanes to hit the coast since that time. I had no idea what to expect but when I rounded a corner and turned onto South Bay Boulevard, there she was standing as proud and lovely as ever. True, she was still leaning. The foundation had sunk at her outside corners, but her middle had a fresh coat of gleaming white paint and a two people were sitting in rocking chairs on the porch. I was delighted.

The two men on the porch turned out to be a new owner and his friend. I explained my mission and they filled me in on The Luther’s history of the last eight years. The hotel is now 108 years old and all her history is still tightly bound inside the rock-hard pine siding.

As an aside, one of the men mentioned a prisoner of war who’d worked at the hotel busing tables back during WWII. I gulped and asked him to please tell me more. As he talked, I couldn’t believe my good and great fortune. I’d been reading anything I could get my hands on that concerned WWII Prisoners of War in Texas. I’d known there was a camp in that same county, that prisoners were often given jobs in towns, but never dreamed I’d find such a connection to the Luther. There I was stumbling onto the perfect location and backdrop for my next book exactly as it had happen eight years earlier.

It was unfortunate that I hadn’t allowed more time to “explore” for I would’ve loved to have stayed the afternoon talking with the two gentlemen. But I gave the new owner a signed copy of The Dividing Season and donated one to hotel’s library. I promised I’d be back with notepads and laptop so I could pick and dig through the hotel’s archives one more time.

A week after I got home, the owner of the The Luther emailed me to order ten signed copies of The Dividing Season and added that he’d like to plan a wine and cheese book signing event. I was flabbergasted.

The moral of this little missive is threefold. One: I should never doubt the power of curiosity. Two: Give away books. You never know what will come of it. And, three: Every now and then let go of the throttle, get out of the chair, away from the computer screen and out into the world to explore and reconnect.

You just never know what you’ll stumble on.

Thank you so much, Karen, for coming to Straight From Hel to share your news about the wine and cheese signing party at The Luther for The Dividing Season. I think that's fabulous! The Dividing Season is available on Amazon in paperback or e-book.

Angel Sometimes Stats

 Angel Sometimes has been on Amazon for about three weeks now. Last weekend, it was available for free downloading. Between this blog and my newsletter, Doing It Write, I have a lot of authors or soon-to-be-published authors who follow. So I thought I'd share a couple of the statistics on sales of Angel Sometimes.

That first free weekend didn't result in thousands of downloads, but it did get hundreds. I have to admit, I'm not anal about checking sales and stats. I tend to forget for days, but I did look Sunday morning, after it'd been free all day Saturday and Saturday night, if there were any night owls roaming Amazon.

As of Sunday morning, 515 people had downloaded the free Angel Sometimes. (If you were one of those readers, thank you very much.)

At 8:30 in the morning, Angel Sometimes was ranked #65,411 Paid in Kindle Store.

Then at 7:30 in the evening, Angel Sometimes was ranked #56,711 Paid in Kindle Store.
(Those were the only two times I checked it.)

At 2 p.m., Saturday, Angel Sometimes was #1,590 Free in Kindle Store and #43 in Kindle Store > …> Suspense. (Pardon the snapshots. I can't tell whether they'll be readable or not!)

By Sunday morning, Angel Sometimes was doing better:
#644 Free in Kindle Store and #26 in Kindle Store > … > Suspense.

Overall, I'm quite happy with how Angel Sometimes is doing. I'm still planning on doing a blog tour for it, but will wait until the tour for The Corner Café is over.

For those of you who are on Amazon with your books, do you constantly check stats or do you forget, like me?

Future of Publishing

I read a really interesting article in The Huffington Post. It was one person's (John B. Thompson) look into the future of publishing.

Here are his 7 trends in the future of publishing:

1. Amazon will continue to grow as a retail channel, while bricks-and-mortar booksellers (including the bookselling chains like Barnes and Noble) will find themselves squeezed further and further, leading to more bookstore closures and downsizing on the part of the chains.

2. … publishers with weak balance sheets and companies that are highly leveraged will face growing financial difficulties … leading to further consolidation in the hands of a small number of large corporations ….

3. … the decline of retail space in bookstores - the shop windows, front-of-store display tables and rows of bookshelves - and the decline of book review space in traditional print media … will make it harder for publishers to get their books noticed, … as publishers are forced to devote more and more of their marketing effort to the online environment ….

4. … income from e-books and other forms of electronic sale will become an increasingly significant part of publishers' revenues, though exactly how significant is, at this point in time, unknown - maybe 20 percent, maybe 30, maybe 50, maybe more, no one knows.

5.  … as more sales shift to digital and the sales of physical books decline, the large publishing houses will face growing downward pressure on their revenues ….

6. … the infrastructure supporting the traditional book supply chain - warehouses, sales forces, etc. - will come under increasing pressure, forcing publishers to scale back their operations ….

7. … small publishing operations and innovative start-ups will proliferate, as the costs and complexities associated with the book supply chain diminish ….

Tell us what you think. Then link over and read the full article.

Self-Publishing

What makes a self-published e-book a success? I think most would say, selling a ton of copies. And while that's true, how do you create a book that sells a ton of copies?

 How about writing a compelling book with interesting characters? That sounds good.

What else?

Let's look at a Canadian author, Shadonna Richards. She couldn't find an agent or publisher, so she decided to follow Amanda Hocking's model and publish on Kindle.

 She hired a professional editor. She started learning how to promote her books. She did her own bookcovers, but worked to make them great. She created a two-line blurb to entice potential readers. And she kept writing.

According to CTV News online, Richards is "now Amazon's #1 Kindle Bestselling Author, with 110,000 downloads to her credit. She's doing so well, she's currently earning about $6,000 a month from her writings."

What are you doing to create a book that will be a success? Share your steps in the comments section.

Kindle Sales

 Virtual Strategy Magazine had a recent article about Best-Selling Paid Kindle Books in March. I'm going to highlight some of the article highpoints. In talking about these 16 books, they included "only paid units and do not take into consideration borrowed or free units."

More than 100,000 books are now available in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, including over 100 current and former New York Times Best Sellers. 

 In March, each time Kindle owners borrowed a KDP Select book from the lending library, the author received $2.18, leading to significant increases in income for independently-published authors. 

Debora Geary was one of the top 10 KDP Select authors in February, and 51% of customers who borrowed one of her books from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library went on to buy one of her titles. 

L.J. Sellers, author of the Detective Jackson Mystery/Thriller series, saw that 25% of customers who borrowed one of her books also bought one of her books, all of which are also available in the lending library. 

 T.R. Ragan is the best-selling thriller author of the Lizzy Gardner Series and was the number one KDP Select author in February. She earned over $11,000 from the KDP Select fund, and her royalties from paid sales of her books increased by more than four times from January to February.

Clearly, the article was an endorsement of the KDP Select program. But it also shows that the program has been beneficial for a lot of writers. [Shout out to L.J. --Yay!] If any of you have your books currently available through the Kindle lending library or would like to provide your own stats or just want to leave a comment, please join us in the Comments section.

Not Surprised

I was reading an interesting article in the Huffington Post and, when I finished it, my first thought was, Hmm, I’m not surprised.

The article was about whether there is gender discrimination among book publishers. Here are a couple of snippets from the article:

The results clearly showed that venerable publications such as The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Book Review and The Atlantic cover significantly more works by male authors.

One of the greatest offenders, The New Republic, reviewed over four times as many books by men than those by women. Similar results were reported for The London Review of Books.

The article looks at all 2011 books published by four of the major imprints: Knopf; Crown; Little, Brown; and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. You can follow the link to see the pie charts included in the article, but here are the overall results from 2011:
Knopf: 96 Male – 58 Female
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 106 Male – 23 Female
Crown: 37 Male – 37 Female
Little, Brown: 52 Male, 17 Female

Then they looked at publications coverage of books, in articles and reviews. There’s quite a few of those. Here’s a few:
Atlantic: 235 Male, 91 Female
Granta: 30 Male, 34 Female
Harpers: 141 Male, 42 Female
New Republic: 344 Male, 78 Female
Poetry: 179 Male, 134 Female

As you can see, women got more notice in Granta and ran close in Poetry, but except for Granta, the men dominated.

What do you think of these results? Does it show gender bias in general? Or are these results skewed because these publications focus on books written by men? Or is this to be expected since overall these four publishers publish more male authors than they do female? There are a lot of other publishers not analyzed in this article. If they had been, would it have made a significant difference in the statistics? What do you think about these results?

Power of Amazon

The big news starting this week off was Barnes & Noble’s declaration that it would not sell in its stores books released by Amazon Publishing. A lot of authors publish their e-books via Amazon – probably a lot of you. This even affects some imprints, like New Harvest, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

According to Jaime Carey, B&N’s chief merchandising officer, “… Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent … has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest.”

Would it stop you from publishing via Amazon if you knew you could not have your print books sold through Barnes & Noble? For most writers, despite the prestige of having your books displayed in Barnes & Noble stores, the decision comes down to where you would make the most money? On Amazon or in a B&N store and in their online store?

According to literary agent, Elyse Cheney, “If you’re doing a print book, you kind of have to be in Barnes & Noble.” The article agreed and said that it seemed unlikely “that many of the 1,900 independent bookstores in the United States would be willing to stock Amazon books.”

To me, this sounds rather like a line being drawn in the sand -- Amazon on one side, bookstores on the other. At the moment, authors are poised on the line itself and having to make a decision what to do. What do you think is best for you?

Book Buying Habits

Would it help writers to know the book buying habits of readers? Maybe. If you think it might, you can go see (it’s a slideshow) the stats and info posted by Verso Advertising.

Here are just a few of the things they noted:
30.2% of avid readers purchased 10 or more books within the previous 12 months

Avid book buyers skew older … and female.

Total estimated U.S. avid book buyers – 70 million

The #1 principal way of discovering new books? – Personal recommendations 48.2%

You’ll even find a slide that breaks down the genres and gives stats on which genre is bought most for an eReader.

There are 41 slides, so you’ll probably find something interesting or revealing. Let us know in the Comment section if something catches your eye or surprises you.

BookStats

If you haven’t already read the report by the Association of American Publishers and Book Industry Study Group of BookStats, you’ll want to link over to an article in Publishers Weekly that talks about it.

Here are some of the more interesting, I thought, conclusions and stats.

Total estimated revenue for all publishers rose 3.1% in 2010, to $27.9 billion, following a 2.5% increase in 2009. E-book sales across all publishing categories rose 29.4% in 2009 and 38.9% in 2010, and accounted for 5.8% of total industry revenue in 2010.

Hardcover sales, after rising in 2009, fell 6.6% in 2010, the same pattern shown by trade paperback.

BookStats data show what other reports have found—retail stores losing ground to online e-tailers in the trade segment.

While online e-tailer's sales rose 88.8% between 2008 and 2010, it was actually mass merchandisers that had the strongest gains, with sales jumping 553.2%, to $218.5 million, an encouraging development for trade publishers … 

Check out the full article, which includes charts with a breakdown of categories, industry sales, trade sales by format, and trade sales by channel.

Is this bad news for print publishers? Is is good news for readers? 

Changing Times

I was reading an article in The Wall Street Journal called “Borders Succumbs to Digital Era in Books,” when I came across two lines that said so much about the state of print publishing. The article focuses primarily about how the demise of Borders bookstores is changing more than just the lives of readers for whom the local Borders was the only bookstore nearby, although that aspect was addressed with this line:

The closures will make Barnes & Noble the only national bookstore chain in the U.S., leaving some Americans to drive long distances to find the largest collections of new bestsellers or wile away the hours among the stacks.

But to me, the real telling line that affects writers was this one:

Publishers, already grappling with seismic shifts in their business, including the demand for e-books, now are trying to gauge how many fewer books they should print, both in terms of physical copies and the number of new titles.

A writer’s advance is most often associated with how many books the publisher thinks you can sell. Fewer print stores mean fewer print sales. If there’s no store near you, you’re more likely to buy via an online store or not at all. And fewer convenient bookstores will most likely lead to higher sale of eReaders, which lowers print sales.

What do you think? Will remaining bookstores focus on high-selling celebrity books? Who will get hurt the most -- midlist authors, newbie authors, small press authors, or …? Will this lead to more eBooks and eReaders or possibly more online bookstores?

A Blanking Good Book

By now, I assume you’ve heard about THE book, Go the ____ to Sleep by Adam Mansbach. I’ve not read it, but it’s all over the news, including The New York Times.

An article in the NYTimes described it as an “irreverent and foulmouthed parody of a children’s book, written in rhymey verse with profanities sprinkled throughout, giving frustrated voice to a universal problem for parents of small and stubborn children.”

One thing you might not have heard is the tale of the publisher, Johnny Temple of Akashic Books, a small operation in Brooklyn. Temple received an email proposal and almost shrugged it off, but instead sent it to his wife, who responded with the words, “I’m weeping.” Then a friend with the New York Public Library told him he absolutely had to publish it.

Once the buzz came out about the book, other major publishers tried to license the rights to the book, even offering Temple close to $1 million. He turned them down and it looks like that’ll pay off for him.

… Akashic has already printed nearly 300,000 copies and sold more than 50,000, many in preorders, since the book does not officially go on sale until next week. It has already spent 43 days in the Top 100 on Amazon.com, reaching the No. 1 spot weeks ago.

And that’s despite a few stores refusing to carry it, even though a moon on the cover hides the “offensive” word.

You can’t see me, but I’m holding up a champagne glass to Mr. Temple and Mr. Mansbach. Good for both of you!

Sad News

I know most of you will be terribly saddened and shocked by this news, if you haven’t already heard.

Snooki’s book bombed.

According to 411mania, it only sold 8,998 copies. Now, I personally, would like to sell that many copies, but they say that number made the book “a total bomb.”

One publisher said it was because A Shore Thing was not a tell-all but rather was “disguised as a novel."

Or maybe it was because of this last statement in the short piece:
“The book also got bad customer reviews on Amazon.”

Heart of the Matter

I post a lot of publishing news here on Straight From Hel. That means I read a lot of news articles or posts, looking for something that would interest you. Sometimes I find great things; sometimes I have to search a long time to find something new to report.

I was doing my usual search for today’s post and found an article about e-publishing.in the Los Angeles Times called Book Publishers See Their Role as Gatekeepers Shrink.

The more I read, the more I thought, okay this is nothing new. It started out talking about Joe (JA) Konrath who plans to publish all his books in e-form as soon as he gets the rights back.

That way he'll be able to collect 70% of the sale price, compared with the 6% to 18% he receives from Hyperion.

Yeah, we’ve heard that before. The article mentioned a few more authors, Seth Godin, Greg Bear and others, who are switching. I was about to click away when I came to the last line:

Godin, 50, said he realized that he no longer needed a publisher to distribute his work or to find an audience: He had cultivated a following of millions through his blog and speaking tours.

And there you have it. The gold key to success in e-publishing (other than creating a great book). Build your readership. Build your platform. Get your name out there on the Internet. When possible, book speaking engagements and ask to sell your books at the back of the room. Get on TV and radio. Get mentioned in papers. Along with the other fifty things you have to do, work your way up the ladder so that readers know you and snatch up your books. The key, apparently, is marketing.

Speaking of marketing … Mary Kennedy came by last Thursday on her blog tour. She sent me an email to say she’d chosen the winners of a copy of her book. Congratulations to:
Nancy Williams
Ann Summerville

As a pre-published or published author, what are you doing now to make your name known?

Animals as Characters

 I’ve read books where animals are characters. They help the sleuth solve crimes or save the protagonist by pulling them away from danger. But have you read a book where the animal is the main character? There’s such a book out right now: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. But it almost didn’t get published.

"It didn't fit any genre – people couldn't decide if it was a romance or a murder mystery," she says. "It had an elephant as a main character – and it was set in the world of circuses. Circuses? No one had any idea what to do with it."

At the last minute, Algonquin Books bought it. It’s now sold 3.7 million copies worldwide and the movie version is just wrapping up. She’s written another one with bonobo apes as the central characters.

Could you write a book with an animal as the main character? If I was thinking about doing that, I’d probably first read the article in The Dallas Morning News, then the book, Water for Elephants.

Paperback Originals

For almost forever, paperback originals have been shunned. If your book came out as a paperback original, it was viewed as not being good enough for a hardback version. And yet, paperback originals were less expensive than a hardback. Still, as the Wall Street Journal said, paperback originals were “viewed by some as publishing's poor cousin.”

Times may be changing.

David Nicholls’s novel “One Day” came out as a paperback original over in England. There are now 300,000 copies in print.

The lower cover price would make it more appealing to the 20-something target audience and buyers in general. Publication was held off until June not only to give the favorable press about "One Day" ample time to reach American shores, but to echo the summer setting of the novel. Then came word—here's the dumb luck part—that Anne Hathaway had signed on for the movie.

While some agents see paperback originals as a way to sell at a lower price and thus draw in loyal readers, reviewers have a tendency to shun them and focus on the big hardbacks. But a few of the big reviewers are now covering the paperbacks.

Frances Coady, the vice president and publisher of Picador, the paperback imprint of Macmillan, said: "You have to ask yourself questions like, 'Is it better to sell 5,000 or 8,000 copies in hardcover and try to reinvent the book in paperback?'—which, unless there's some extraordinary piece of luck, is really hard to do—or 'Is it better to sell 50,000 in a paperback original?'"

I know what my answer would be. I’m guessing it would also be the answer of a lot of you. But...maybe not. Tell us your opinion in the Comments section.

Helping Potential Readers

Yesterday, while working on the Book Review for Black Sun by Graham Brown, I was struck by something on his website. I thought I’d point it out to all of you published writers and soon-to-be-published writers.

He has a page on his site called simply, “Order.”

You might think that would be a page where you could order directly from him, but it isn’t. You might think it’d be a page with a link for you to order from Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble. You’ve be partially right.

It’s actually a page with links to order from 34 places. Each place is linked and the link takes you directly to the book’s order page.

Brown has made it as easy as possible for a reader to order from just about anywhere s/he wants to order.

One click linking, not from one or two or three places to buy the book, but from 34. He’s helping readers buy his book and he’s growing his readership base by making it easy.

Are you making it easy for your potential readers?