Amazon | Apple | Barnes & Noble |

Kobo | Smashwords | $4.99

Here’s the blurb:

Take your sales to the next level! The author of the award-winning, bestselling Let’s Get Digital is back with an advanced guide for more experienced self-publishers.

There are over 1.5 million books in the Kindle Store, with thousands more added every day. How do you get yours noticed? Visibility isn’t a challenge that can be bested once – it requires continual work. But there are tools and strategies to do much of the heavy lifting for you.

In Let’s Get Visible: How To Get Noticed And Sell More Books, you’ll discover how to:

• Leverage Amazon’s famous recommendation engine to take advantage of the various opportunities it provides for exposure
• Position your books for discoverability on other sales venues
• Minimize the time you spend promoting so you have more time to spend writing
• Promote in a cost-effective way that actually works

By using these tips, you will get your book noticed. And getting noticed is the key to growing your sales.

Amazon | Apple | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Smashwords | $4.99

But hey, that’s marketing copy. Here’s what the first reviewers had to say:

“Let’s Get Visible is the best tool I have discovered for a writer to push sales and visibility to the next level, and an indispensable addition to the library of any indie writer. If you’re an indie writer and you’re not buying this book, you simply aren’t playing this game to win.” – Michael Wallace, bestselling author of The Righteous.

“Gaughran distills complex subject matter and explains it in a way that anybody can easily understand, and takes the guesswork out of promotion at Amazon. He removes the mysticism and gets you as close as anyone outside of Amazon will probably be to understanding how stuff works behind the curtain.” – David Wright, bestselling author of Yesterday’s Gone.

“If you are a self-publisher looking to improve your ability to get eyeballs on your books, I can’t recommend this title highly enough. The book contains many ideas I’ve used successfully and several I’m now excited to try.” — Cidney Swanson, bestselling author of Saving Mars.

You can check out all the reviews on Amazon US and Amazon UK, and, if you hadn’t guessed already, you can grab a copy at:

Amazon | Apple | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Smashwords | $4.99

As promised, my mailing list was told about the new release before anyone else, and they’ve been busy sending the book to #2 in the Writing category on Amazon. The only thing blocking its path is something called Let’s Get Digital.

I’ve been running a 99c sale on Digital (links here) to celebrate the launch of Visible and at this point both books are amplifying each other’s sales. Digital was picked up by the good people at Pixel of Ink yesterday, which really boosted my numbers, and I took out an ad on BookBlast.

The logic behind promoting Digital to help Visible is obvious, but the reason my mailing list heard about the launch first is because I’m deploying a launch strategy from the book called Spreading the Love.

So far, it’s working very well, and Visible should nose past Digital at some point today, now that the door has been crashed down.

* * *

I had been circling the idea of Let’s Get Visible for some time.

While there are plenty of books to help self-publishers just starting out, or those still on the fence, there is little on the market for more experienced self-publishers. The books that are out there – at least the ones I sampled – seem to push strategies that are either ineffective, time-consuming, or, to be honest, at least somewhat shady.

I was also keenly aware that marketing is the area where self-publishers need the most help. I get more comments and questions about promotional strategies than any other topic. It’s also the area where self-publishers waste the most money, and, crucially, time.

The aim of Let’s Get Visible is to teach you how to replace costly, time-consuming promotional strategies with ones that actually work, and won’t eat into precious writing time.

I had a lot of help with this book. Authors a lot more successful than me were extremely generous with their time, their data, their insights into how Amazon works, and how to capitalize on the visibility opportunities there. I must single out a few for special mention.

Debora Geary pretty much pioneered this marketing approach, and was very patient in (repeatedly) explaining to me how all the various algorithms worked and how an author could take advantage of them. Ed Robertson and Phoenix Sullivan did all the heavy lifting in breaking down crucial things like the Popularity lists and how they are calculated (and how that effects marketing plans). I’m merely reporting back from the front.

Phoenix also took the time to read an earlier draft, along with Monique Martin and Cidney Swanson. When you have a team of bestselling authors beta-reading your book, you can’t go too far wrong.

So many more writers shared sales numbers and marketing strategies, and provided advice and encouragement. If I named them all, this would turn into an Oscar speech, but they know who they are, and they have my unending gratitude. This book would not have been possible without the openness of the self-publishing community, and its willingness to experiment and share results.

It also wouldn’t have been possible without my blog readers, who provided a sounding board for ideas and endless data grist for the theory mill, as well as continuing encouragement to get the bloody thing finished!

Thanks guys.

Writing is a glamorous occupation – at least from the outside. Popular depictions of our profession tend to leave out all the other stuff that comes with the territory: carpal tunnel syndrome, liver failure, penury, and madness.

Okay, okay, I jest. I love being a writer. Sharing stories with the world and getting paid for it is bloody brilliant. It’s a dream job, and like any profession with a horde of neophytes seeking to break in, there are plenty of sharks waiting to chew them to bits.

Publishing is a screwed up business. The often labyrinthine path to success makes it much easier for those with nefarious intentions to scam the unsuspecting. But it doesn’t help that so many organizations who claim to help writers, to respect them, to assist them along the path to publication are actually screwing them over.

Before the digital revolution made self-publishing viable on a wide scale, the dividing lines were easier to spot. Traditional publishers paid you if they wanted to buy the rights to your novel. Self-publishers were people who filled their garages with books and tried to hawk them at events. And vanity presses were the scammers, luring the unsuspecting with false promises and roundly condemned by self-publishers and traditional publishers alike.

Today it’s very different. The scammy vanity presses are owned by traditional publishers who are marketing them as the “easy” way to self-publish – when it’s nothing more than a horrifically expensive and terribly ineffective way to publish your work, guaranteed to kill your book’s chance of success stone dead, while emptying your bank account in the process.

Some of you might think: hey, it’s just business. Caveat emptor and all that. And don’t these people know how to use Google?

That’s easy to say from our position of experience. Do you remember how naive you were at the start? Do you remember just how badly you wanted to get published? Do you remember the crushing grind of the query-go-round?

I’m not surprised people get scammed. When you want something so badly, and you can’t seem to make progress towards that goal – no matter how hard you work – you start to go crazy. You get desperate.

And it’s much harder to tell the scammers from the legitimate organizations when they are owned by the same people.

Take Penguin-owned Author Solutions, one of the worst vanity presses out there. Here’s how they hoodwink inexperienced writers into using their horribly expensive service.

If you Google a term like “find a publisher” the results are littered with sites like FindYourPublisher.com (which I’m not going to link to because that will help their SEO, but you can cut-and-paste that address).

The website purports to be an independent resource, helping to pair you with the most suitable publishing company. Or as they put it:

dedicated to helping both first-time and experienced authors identify the most suitable indie book publishing company for their book. With the information you provide about your book and goals, FYP makes a recommendation as to which indie book publisher has the best publishing package to help you reach your publishing objectives.

Below this message is an online questionnaire asking you about your book. When you have completed that and handed over your phone number, the site makes a recommendation based on your answers.

Except the only companies recommended are Trafford, AuthorHouse, Xlibris, and iUniverse – all of which are scammy vanity presses, all owned by Author Solutions. And, fitting with the rest of the pattern, FindYourPublisher.com is just one of many (many!) such sites owned and operated by Author Solutions, purporting to make independent recommendations, but only recommending Author Solutions companies.

I have sympathy for those hoodwinked by awful companies like Author Solutions. The dividing lines aren’t as obvious as they were. And inexperienced writers naively assume that a company like Penguin has their best interests at heart. Maybe it’s the cuddly logo.

Newsflash: Penguin doesn’t care about writers

When Penguin bought the world’s biggest vanity press for $116m last July, many people in the publishing business gave them a pass. They claimed that Penguin would clean up the cesspool. But instead Author Solutions CEO Kevin Weiss was given a seat on the Penguin board.

A seat on the board!

Emily Suess wrote an excellent guest post here back in February, detailing how the slick Author Solutions scam hadn’t changed one bit since the Penguin takeover.

It’s now almost a year since Penguin bought the company (instead of buying, say, Goodreads, but I digress). It should be clear to everyone now that Penguin has no intention of changing Author Solutions’ scammy approach. In fact, Penguin just announced plans to take the scam global.

Penguin has been looking under the Author Solutions hood for 10 months now. Its conclusion was this: we can make this bigger. We can take this scam on the road and start exploiting writers all over the planet.

And Penguin is still getting a pass for this crap.

The Penguin Omerta

The Publishers Weekly piece on Penguin’s aggressive expansion plans for Author Solutions makes no mention of the company being a universally reviled vanity press that has cheated 150,000 writers out of their savings.

This is something I’ve been noticing for a while, and Publishers Weekly isn’t alone. The pieces in The Bookseller, GalleyCat, and Digital Book World also make no mention of the widespread criticism that Author Solutions has attracted, nor do they mention that the company is currently the subject of a class action suit for their deceptive practices.

More disturbingly, my comment pointing this out appears to have been scrubbed from The Bookseller, is stuck in the moderation queue on Digital Book World’s piece (despite explicitly stating that they had posted it).

The reaction at the London Book Fair was similar. No-one from traditional publishing wanted to talk about Penguin’s ownership of Author Solutions. No-one wants to talk about how a supposedly legitimate publisher now owns the most successful author scamming organization on the planet.

These guys are probably taking their cue from the New York Times, who won’t mention anything remotely critical about Author Solutions, but are happy to spend lots of time showing them in a positive light (like here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Writer Beware

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has done sterling work over the years warning writers away from people like Author Solutions both on their own site, and through their industry watchdog Writer Beware.

However, I would love to see them go one step further.

Remember those awful Random House digital-first imprints? Public pressure forced Random House to change the horribly one-sided terms it was offering writers. That result was achieved after Writer Beware blogged about it, SFWA president John Scalzi followed up, and SFWA itself threatened to de-list Random House as a qualifying market.

What Author Solutions is doing to writers is far, far worse.

Isn’t it time to do something about this? Isn’t it time to threaten to de-list Penguin as a qualifying market if they don’t clean up Author Solutions?

Hands Up If You Don’t Own A Vanity Press

There’s only one problem with this approach. Where do you stop? Because you would have to threaten to do the same with all these guys too:

1. Simon & Schuster hired Author Solutions to run their own scammy vanity press – Archway Publishing. If that wasn’t enough, they then offered a bounty to bloggers to lie about the company.

2. Harper Collins-owned Thomas Nelson have their own crappy vanity operation called West Bow Press – also “powered” by Author Solutions.

3. Harlequin, never afraid to turn down a penny, jumped in the game a few years ago. Author Solutions provided the white-label vanity operation for them.

4. Showing that it’s not just the larger publishers, Hay House contracted Author Solutions to set up Balboa Press – another scammy, crappy, overpriced vanity press.

If it was down to me, I would threaten to de-list all these guys until they cleaned house, but Penguin would be a good start, given they (a) it all comes back to Author Solutions, (b) Penguin owns Author Solutions, (c) Penguin has shown no interest in addressing concerns, and (d) Penguin is planning a massive expansion of the Author Solutions scam.

Writers Digest & Lulu

I’m sure Digital Book World’s reluctance to mention the problems with Author Solutions has nothing to do with the fact that they are owned by F+W Media, which also owns yet another crappy vanity press – Abbot Press (which has some of the worst prices out there).

In a refreshing change of pace, this crappy vanity press is not actually powered by Author Solutions. Abbot Press is a division of Writers Digest. Yes, that Writers Digest.

If that catches you by surprise, I’m sorry to say that Writers Digest went over to the dark side a few years back, and now spam their subscribers with crap like this.

I’m sure Author Solutions was disappointed to miss out on that deal but at least they can console themselves with the new partnership they struck with  Lulu last month to provide premium (i.e. overpriced and ineffective) marketing services to Lulu customers.

That’s right. Lulu made a deal with the devil.

How Can We Fight Back?

Penguin think they can continue to ride out the storm, ignoring the criticism and collecting their ill-gotten gains, but if we make enough noise, they will have to respond. That starts with sharing this post, or, even better, blogging about it yourself.

But it also means reaching out to inexperienced writers and trying to steer them away from these crooks. We need to get the message out that self-publishing is not the impossible task it’s painted as. Sarah Woodbury has a helpful post on the basics here, and I have another here. Feel free to point newbies to them, or write your own.

Each time you see an article talking about Author Solutions and not mentioning all the issues, comment underneath and call them on it. Even if the media don’t change their one-eyed approach, readers will see the comments.

If you’re a member of a writers organization like SFWA, RWA, or MWA, ask what they are doing about Penguin. Ask them why they haven’t threatened to de-list Penguin. And keep pressing them! The SFWA (and the RWA) were really strong in response to Random House. We need the same from them again.

150,000 writers have been screwed over already. I think that’s enough. Don’t you?

CORRECTION: Abbott Press (the Writers Digest vanity press) shares the same address as Author Solutions so I think it’s safe to assume it’s being run by them. The packages are all quite similar, as is the marketing. Indeed, Emily Suess names Abbot Press as being powered by Author Solutions (scroll down to bottom). More profit for Penguin! Hooray!

UPDATE (Weds May 8): The editor of The Bookseller has made a wishy washy defence of his reasons for deleting my comment criticizing them for their whitewash of Penguin and Author Solutions (here, scroll down). You can see my response below that.

* * *

For all those who have been patiently waiting, Let’s Get Visible will drop some time next week – just waiting on the proofed version.

My mailing list peeps will hear about it first – a day or two before I get to blog about it. Sign up here to get an automatic email when it’s released.

His reasons? ”Publishing is like Hollywood—nobody ever does the marketing they promise.”

While I think it’s great that someone as high-profile as David Mamet is self-publishing, I was very disappointed to find out the way he’s doing it.

Self-publishing is big business. By my estimates, self-publishers have captured 25% of the US ebook market. It can be lucrative on the individual author level too, with writers getting up to 70% royalties if they publish themselves.

The reason why those percentages are so high is that self-publishing allows you to bypass the traditional middlemen (agents, publishers, distributors) who each took their own slice of the pie before the author saw any money.

Literary agents in particular must be worried about what that means for their future, which explains their ludicrous reactions when someone like Barry Eisler states the above. However, a company called Argo Navis – a publisher-owned distributor – has come to their rescue, providing them with a way to re-insert themselves in the chain between self-publishing author and reader. And get their cut of course.

Mamet is represented by a major literary agency – ICM Partners – who are just one of many agencies to have signed a deal with Perseus Books-owned Argo Navis.

What Do Argo Navis Offer?

Essentially, Argo Navis are a distributor. They offer a portal through which authors’ work can be distributed to all the various retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo.

In exchange for this relatively trivial service, Argo Navis take a 30% cut. You read that right. After the retailer takes their standard cut (usually also 30%), Argo Navis take another 30% before passing on payments.

Obviously, this is massively overpriced compared to distributors like Smashwords or Draft2Digital, who only take 10%, and especially so when you compare the cost of going direct to retailers like Amazon (it’s free). But the problems with Argo Navis don’t end there.

Services like cover design, editing, formatting, scanning, and conversion are not included in this hefty price tag – but are available for a premium. Who provides those services? According to their website, it’s “third party specialists.”

In other words, Argo Navis outsources those tasks, just like any self-publisher. Except presumably they get a piece of that action too. Their price list for these services is not publicly available – and only distributed to literary agents (who won’t be picking up the tab, of course).

As the price list is hidden, I can’t speak to its contents, but I strongly suspect it’s not competitive (charging for cover design by the hour and formatting by the page is usually an indication that fees are high). From what I’ve seen of the covers and formatting though, the service provided certainly isn’t premium.

Why Are Literary Agents Using Argo Navis?

Argo Navis has been very clever with how they market their service. It’s pitched as agent-curated self-publishing - hey, it’s a step up from assisted self-publishing. Argo Navis don’t (and won’t) deal with authors directly, and will only accept titles for distribution submitted by literary agents.

This in turn allows agents to tap into what I call The Myth of the Segregated Marketplace - where authors believe that the visibility challenges resulting from the open nature of digital distribution are exclusively faced by self-published authors. Of course, those challenges are faced by all authors – however they publish. And given the abysmal rankings of books published via Argo Navis, it’s not a challenge that they are handling well.

But what’s in it for the agent? For starters, royalty checks come to their offices first (after Argo Navis have taken their considerable bite). This allows the agent to deduct their 15% before the author sees any money. Of course, it allows unscrupulous agents to take a little more – something enabled by Argo Navis only providing sales reports to agents rather than directly to authors – but I digress.

Many authors have mixed feelings about agents moving into publishing – and for good reason. But at least (some of) those agent/publishers are providing nominal value for their 15% cut – arranging cover design, editing, formatting, and handling the distribution in-house by uploading to the various retailers.

However, the agencies using Argo Navis are taking the lazy approach to locking down their cut. They aren’t uploading. They aren’t optimizing metadata. They aren’t arranging for cover design. And they certainly aren’t paying for it.

Instead they are simply passing the manuscripts from the author to the distributor, billing the author for any services they need and taking their 15% cut. And what have they done for that cut? Put them in the hands of a crappy distributor who is taking 30% of their royalties (on top of the 30% the retailers take and separate from the 15% agents are getting).

At this point you would be forgiven for thinking that no reputable literary agency would go for this. Well, I wish that was the case. Here’s a list of agencies that have signed up with Argo Navis:

• Writers House
• ICM Partners
• Carol Mann Agency
• Cynthia Cannell Literary Agency
• The Hartnett Agency
• Paul Bresnick Literary Agency
• Pinder Lane & Garon-Brooke Associates
• Curtis Brown (US)
• April Eberhardt Literary
• David Black Agency
• Elizabeth Kaplan Literary Agency
• Folio Literary Management
• Levine Greenberg Literary Agency
• Liza Royce Literary Agency
• Melanie Jackson Agency
• Janklow & Nesbit Associates
• Joëlle Delbourgo Associates
• Arcadia Literary Agency
• Harvey Klinger
• APA Talent and Literary Agency
• Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency
• Irene Skolnick Literary Agency
• FinePrint Literary Management
• Donald Maass Literary Agency

These are some of the biggest names in the business. These are some of the most respected names in the business. And they all have a fiduciary duty to their clients – a legal obligation to seek the best deal for their authors.

I’ll leave it to you to decide if they are fulfilling that duty.

What’s In It For Authors?

There’s no upside to being funneled into this program. Participating authors get lower royalties, no sales reports, slower payments, and lose the ability to make quick changes to things like pricing – which is essential for marketing.

The money is the big one though, so I’d like to focus on that:

• An author self-publishing direct with KDP will receive up to 70% of list price.
• An author who self-publishes via Argo Navis will receive 41.65% of list price.

In real dollar terms, that looks like this:

• A self-publisher with a book priced $4.99 on Amazon receives $3.49 per sale.
• Argo Navis clients with a book priced $4.99 on Amazon receive $2.08 per sale.

Instead of getting their authors a better deal, these literary agents are ensuring they get a much worse deal. If I had self-published with Argo Navis, I would have forked over five figures in commissions to them and whatever agent lured me into the scheme. That’s crazy!

But maybe we should look at how books published via Argo Navis are actually performing. Maybe they have some special tricks up their sleeve to get books noticed. The operation was launched in October 2011, so we have a significant track record to look at.

Well, this is the highest ranked Argo Navis book I could find. It’s at #58,822 in the Kindle Store. That’s the best performing book! It’s selling 1 or 2 copies a day. This is the second-highest ranked book. It’s at #90,978 – selling just 1 copy a day (and look at that awful cover).

Unfortunately for authors already funneled into the program, those books are outliers. Most Argo Navis books are selling 1 copy a month (or less!). Some haven’t sold a single copy ever (like this or this). One of those has been out for three months!

It’s easy to see why these books are underperforming. Some of the covers are terrible and are saddled with uninspiring blurbs. Some of the books are only put in the generic Kindle eBooks category, rather than something more granular like Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals - where they might actually get discovered. Some of have even misspelled the authors name (this).

The sad thing is that it’s the authors who suffer most. I’m sure some of these books are great – I can see glowing reviews from places like Kirkus – but they just aren’t getting a chance.

Why Am I Targeting Literary Agents Instead of Argo Navis?

Argo Navis is awful – overcharging for basic services and hugely underdelivering on basic competency – so why am I focusing on the literary agents?

It’s simple. Argo Navis isn’t an open platform. Authors can’t deal with them directly. Only agented writers can self-publish through them. Only agents can submit books to them.

Literary agents – who are supposed to be on the side of their clients – are the ones funneling authors into this program. This is on them.

But what do the agents think? Here’s what Amy Berkower of Writers House said:

After reviewing many of the digital publishing options available, we concluded that the service provided by Argo Navis was the best fit for the majority of our authors.

Really Amy? Argo Navis is the best you can do? How is Argo Navis taking such a huge chunk of authors’ royalties the “best fit” for your clients?

But hey, it’s not all about money. April Eberhardt of April Eberhardt Literary was asked about Argo Navis and explained her motivation for signing up:

Most self-publishing is not of high quality. There has been a disregard of publishing standards and that needs to change. I’m looking at a new way of doing things, a model of agent-led self-publishing where authors get guidance to bring their self-published work to a professional level.

April, don’t make me link to those god-awful covers again. I beg you.

There must be some other reason to sign with Argo Navis. Maybe Carol Mann of the Carol Mann Agency can help. She said:

I like the idea of an imprint available to our clients that singles out agent-curated material in a sea of self-published titles.

Have you seen the rankings, Carol? The Argo Navis titles seem to be drowning in that “sea.”

What’s In A Name?

Where did that awful name come from? According to their promotional copy, the company “was named for the constellation Argo Navis, formed, according to mythology, from three parts (sail, deck and keel) of the famed ship Argo, sailed into history by Jason.”

Funny, I thought it was because of the golden fleece these guys are pulling.

UPDATE (May 16): It has come to my attention that one of the literary agents mentioned in this piece is emailing commenters calling this a “misinformed and one-sided article” and inviting people to a Skype chat there they can “learn more about what I do for authors, as well as how and why I do it.”

I’ll be blogging about this in more detail on Friday, but it speaks volumes that this agent is approaching people in this manner rather than publicly addressing the concerns I have raised. If you have received such an email or any similar communication, please get in touch with me at david [dot] gaughran [at] gmail [dot] com

Barnes & Noble re-launched PubIt! this week as Nook Press, a largely superficial makeover which failed to address some fundamental problems, like restricting access to US self-publishers only, and introduced new howler: updating existing titles causes the loss of all ranking, reviews, and momentum.

There were only two noteworthy things, to me, about this launch. First, the PubIt! brand had been closely associated with Barnes & Noble. This re-launch seems like an attempt to tie the Nook Press brand to their subsidiary Nook Media, probably in advance of a sale (Barnes & Noble already sold a stake to Microsoft, and a smaller slice to Pearson – Penguin’s parent company but maintain a controlling interest in Nook Media).

This re-launch is full of things that sound great in a corporate press release (innovative editing tools!) that most professional self-publishers won’t really care about, which makes me further suspect this is more about prospective purchasers.

Second, and this is what I want to focus on today, Barnes & Noble finally released some hard numbers regarding self-publishers. From their press release:

* PubIt! continues to attract 20% more independent authors every quarter.
* Titles from self-published authors continue to increase by 24% each quarter in the NOOK Store.
* Customer demand for great independent content continues to dramatically increase as 30% of NOOK customers purchase self-published content each month, representing 25% of NOOK Book sales every month.

That last point really caught me by surprise. Self-publishers have obviously grabbed a lot of market share on Amazon, but conventional wisdom was that (for a variety of reasons) they fare worse on other retailers. While I’m sure that’s still the case, it seems the phenomenon was overstated.

25% of Nook sales are self-published e-books. This is in reference to units sold not dollar amounts, but I’ll deal with that distinction in a bit. Nonetheless, that’s a crazy number! Aside from it being great to see how well self-publishers are doing, particularly on a venue that puts so many obstacles in their path, it also gives us an opportunity to look at the market as a whole.

In an interesting interview with Digital Book World last Friday, Kobo’s CEO Mike Serbinis revealed the following:

In some countries, our ebook units sold from Writing Life are on par with one of the big-six publishers. In one of our countries, self-published books [as a category] is beating the largest publishers.

Again, this is heartening. It’s amazing to me that self-publishers (as a whole) have grabbed a bigger piece of the market – in some countries – than the largest publishers. However, for the purposes of this piece, I’m more concerned with the American market – where Serbinis admitted Kobo’s market share was still in the “low single digits.”

The Kindle’s share of the US market is far larger – with most observers pegging it at between 60% and 65% (most of the rest is split between Apple and Barnes & Noble, with Google, Sony, and Kobo combined perhaps getting around 5%). But how much of that have self-publishers grabbed?

Amazon is famously tight-lipped about such matters, so we have to put the pieces together ourselves. As such, the method is necessarily crude, but it’s the best I’ve got.

The Kindle Indie Store

In August 2011, Amazon launched the Kindle Indie Store, which showcases hand-picked work in a variety of genres from KDP authors. It also has a Top 100 list, ordered by Sales Rank, just like the regular Kindle Store Top 100.

By comparing the position of self-published work in the Kindle Indie Store Top 100 with it’s overall Sales Rank, we can get a pretty accurate idea of what proportion of the top-selling books are self-published.

When the Kindle Indie Store first launched, I tracked the Indie Top 100 for a few weeks. Invariably, the book that was #100 in the Indie chart was around #400 to #500 in the overall Kindle Store – meaning that, at the time, roughly 20% to 25% of the top-selling items in the Kindle Store were self-published e-books (and those numbers held up throughout the list).

As I tracked those numbers over the next few months, that proportion varied somewhat, but never wildly – aside from seasonal effects (i.e. traditional publishers performed better after releasing their big books in October/November, and self-publishers’ performance improved when they put out their new titles in late December and carried that into January).

Today, you’ll see that the book at #100 in the Indie chart is #346 in the overall Kindle Store – meaning that 29% of the top-selling items in the Kindle Store are self-published e-books – and that proportion has been stable enough recently.

The Kindle Store contains more than just e-books, with things like digital subscriptions to the New York Times, magazines, blog subscriptions, and games regularly appearing in the Top 100. If you were to subtract all of those, and try and isolate e-books, that figure (easily) goes north of 30%.

This staggers me. 30% of the top-selling e-books on Amazon are self-published, beating out the biggest authors from the largest publishing houses in the world – as well as titles from Amazon’s own imprints (which aren’t included in the Indie Top 100).

This roughly tallies with the limited data we do have from Amazon, who recently announced the top-selling Kindle Books of 2013 (January to March). Seven of the Top 20 were self-published (and that’s not counting formerly self-published work, or Amazon imprint books).

Without more detailed numbers from Amazon, it’s hard to know whether these percentages hold true further down the rankings, but looking at the huge number of categories and granular sub-categories in the Kindle Store – which all have their own bestseller lists, filled with self-publishers – I think it’s safe to assume that is the case. If anything, looking at those genre bestseller lists, I would guess that proportion grows.

Now we can start putting the pieces together. When we factor in the respective market share of Amazon and Barnes & Noble (and Kobo), that leads to the following estimate (which might be conservative): self-publishers have captured 25% of the US e-book market.

I’m fully aware that there is a lot of guesswork involved in compiling an estimate like this. I don’t know if someone has attempted it before (if they have, please point me to it). I’m putting this out there to be poked and prodded, so please point out any flaws in my logic.

Obviously, I’m taking the numbers from Barnes & Noble and Kobo at face value, and using a very crude method for ball-parking the share of the market that self-publishers have grabbed on Amazon. In the absence of more detailed data, it’s the best I can come up with. If you have a better suggestion, I’m all ears.

Finally, please note that I’ve assigned a near-zero value to self-publishers’ market share on Apple. There’s no data and no reliable way to estimate that I’m aware of – which is why I’m pretty sure my estimate for the US e-book market is conservative.

Unit Sales v Dollar Amounts

I imagine that many will respond by saying that this is all in reference to unit sales, and the industry standard of quantifying market share is to refer to dollar amounts.

Quite frankly, I think that’s mistaken. Talking about things like e-book market share in dollar amounts might be important to traditional publishers – who are anxious to replace falling print revenue with new digital income – but it’s way less important to self-publishers (who price at the lower end of the range and don’t really care if readers are paying less for digital editions).

Talking about market share in terms of unit sales is, in my opinion, a much better metric for seeing where things stand and where they are headed – but I’m happy to debate that.

London Book Fair – Your Suggestions for KDP, Createspace and Kobo

LBF 2013 kicks off next Monday and I’ll be wandering around, kicking tires. I’m one of Kobo’s Authors in Residence and I’ll be at their booth on Wednesday from 12:00 to 12:30. If you are around, drop by and say hello.

I’ll also be talking with Kobo about their self-publishing platform and sharing ideas I have for improvements, and I’ll try and do the same with KDP and Createspace.

I already have a list of issues I’ll be bringing up. For example, I’ll be asking KDP to fix the category system, and offer us some way of changing price that doesn’t involve going through the whole publishing process again. If you have your own suggestions of issues to raise with Kobo, KDP, or Createspace, please post them in the comments.

Undeterred, Turow sought out the considerably larger platform of the New York Times’ Op-Ed pages on Monday to decry The Slow Death of the American Writer.

On reading the latter, my first thought was: if Scott Turow didn’t spend so much time hating Amazon and pretending self-publishing didn’t exist, maybe he wouldn’t be so depressed.

It’s easy to poke fun at Scott Turow’s views. A child could de-construct his arguments, while laughing at how a practicing lawyer is unable to grasp the definition of the word “monopoly.” If you want a proper debunking of his Op-Ed, Techdirt do a good job, but I think there’s no real point attempting to engage Turow on this issue. His hatred of Amazon and fear of change is completely clouding his logic.

What bothers me about Turow’s obsession with Amazon and his opposition to change is not his blatant disregard for the facts (or the definition of words), it’s that he allows this Luddism to become all-consuming, blinding him to the issues that really matter to writers.

Even if we granted Turow his brain-dead thesis, we still have time before Amazon becomes The Great Evil and exclusively powers its website with the tears of exploited writers.

But there’s a bunch of really awful stuff happening right now that Turow ignores, and has been ignoring, since his term as Authors Guild President began.

Price-fixing 

When rumors first broke that the Department of Justice was investigating collusion to fix prices between five of the six largest trade publishers in the US (Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette) and Apple, Scott Turow called for the investigation to be dropped.

He didn’t even want to find out if price-fixing was taking place. Turow, a practicing lawyer, didn’t want to know if federal law was being broken.

When the DOJ determined that collusion to fix prices had indeed taken place, and reached a settlement with three of the five publishers (the other two would settle in time), Turow opposed the settlement.

Penguin’s purchase of Author Solutions

Penguin purchased Author Solutions – the largest and most reviled vanity press in the world – in August last year for $116m. Scott Turow and the Authors Guild have been completely silent on the fact that Penguin is now in the business of scamming inexperienced authors.

Simon & Schuster’s Vanity Press

Big Publishing likes nothing more than chasing each other’s tails. As soon as Penguin started shaking that shady money tree, Simon & Schuster just had to have a piece. Scott Turow and the Authors Guild haven’t said one word about Simon & Schuster opening a vanity press and hiring Penguin-owned Author Solutions to run it, nor have they commented on Simon & Schuster bribing writers to lie about their scammy operation.

Digital Rights Grabs

Random House was caught red-handed forcing unfair terms onto writers via their new digital-first imprints which included no advance, assignment of all rights and subsidiary rights – even though they had zero plan to do anything other than publish an e-book edition, no meaningful reversion clause, and shady Hollywood accounting that would transfer all their normal business costs onto the author, to be deducted from royalties. Scott Turow and the Authors Guild had this to say: nothing.

Those are just the biggest stories that have happened recently, and I could easily have mentioned publishers forcing increasingly onerous contract terms on writers (and being disingenuous about what they mean), agents doing the same with representation agreements, publishers grabbing rights they never paid for, and agents moving into publishing (some of whom are aping the worst contract terms from large publishers) – all of which Scott Turow and the Authors Guild have been silent on.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had a progressive president of the Authors Guild? Imagine them saying something like this:

There are at least two ways that e-books represent a favorable development in my mind. Those who have the cash to invest in one of these devices find that any place with a wireless connection can become a virtual bookstore [...] There is no trip to the store, no waiting for the online retailer to get it to you through the mail, factors that tend to temper the impulse to buy. For these reasons, I suspect that e-readers increase book purchases among those who own the devices. That’s obviously encouraging news to authors.

Or this:

Far more important, e-books and e-readers have the potential to dramatically lower the barriers to getting published, and to allow books that traditional publishers aren’t willing to back to compete on a more even footing.

Who was this open-minded sage? Scott Turow, in his first letter to Authors Guild members, September, 2010. I wonder what happened…

But hey, maybe I should give Scott Turow a bit of a break. He seems a bit down. I don’t know how much time being President of the Authors Guild eats into his schedule, but I suppose it’s not nothing. And, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t receive any compensation for that role.

In any event, most of the myopic screeds published by the Authors Guild aren’t written by him. Turow often provides a juicy Amazon-bashing quote, and pens the quarterly letter to members, but the regular blog posts are written by the Executive Director of the Authors Guild, Paul Aiken.

Paul Aiken is quite the mystery man. Aside from references to his participation in the Google Books Settlement, there’s little information on him available online. Even the Authors Guild doesn’t provide a bio for the guy who has been their Executive Director since 1996.

I can tell you this though, documents filed with the IRS show that Paul Aiken receives $180,000 a year for his services.

Scott Turow is clearly too afraid of change to keep up with the latest developments. His New York Times piece demonstrates that he’s unaware of this new thing called self-publishing – which is enabling thousands of writers to pay bills and make a living from writing, in many cases for the very first time, thanks in no small part to Amazon.

With Scott Turow’s seeming inability to keep up with change, is it too much to ask that Paul Aiken help him out a little bit?

Given that Paul Aiken has earned over half a million dollars from the Authors Guild in the last three years, is it too much to ask that he be even somewhat aware of the paradigm shift which has taken place in that time?

Considering Paul Aiken receives annual compensation over seven times what the average Authors Guild member earns from writing in a year, is it too much to ask that he take another look at the horrible Back-In-Print program run by the Authors Guild – that funnels its own members into the scammy clutches of iUniverse?

In the Authors Guild’s defense, that partnership was originally agreed in 1999 – long before Author Solutions purchased iUniverse, dismantled what was reasonable service, and rebuilt it in their own exploitative image. But the world, and self-publishing, has moved on considerably since then.

It would be great if the Authors Guild could do the same and stop providing fresh victims for the world’s biggest vanity press.

It would be fantastic if the Authors Guild provided information to their members on the full range of options available to them for getting their works back into print, instead of just providing one terrible option: Author Solutions.

I don’t think it’s asking too much, given that, (a) the Authors Guild was established “for the purpose of serving and protecting the interests of authors” (b) Paul Aiken gets paid $180,000 a year to be the Guild’s Executive Director (c) he is currently doing a crappy job of “serving and protecting” the interests of its members.

But I guess Scott Turow doesn’t care about that.

UPDATE: Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler have posted a rebuttal to Scott Turow’s Op Ed that’s worth reading. One thing that jumped out at me: the Authors Guild is now blocking comments on their blog posts. Needless to say, censoring debate is… just the kind of “Soviet-style repression” Scott Turow is worried about!

I’m not going to deal with the Chicken Little stuff. I have less and less patience with people who claim that Amazon has or is striving for some kind of evil monopoly that will subjugate authors and readers when all the evidence to date is that they will treat authors better than any publisher and provide readers with cheaper books, a bigger selection, and a better customer experience than any other retailer.

There are some more reasonable fears about what this purchase entails. I would like to deal with these in turn, then discuss how I think this acquisition will be beneficial to writers – particularly self-publishers. I respect the fact that this is a hot-button issue for many, and that reasonable people will disagree with my perspective.

I welcome any (respectful) discussion on these points, and I’m open to being convinced by the opposing side.

As I see it, some of the more reasonable fears about this purchase include:

1. Amazon will change Goodreads from being an independent home for readers to discuss the books they love

I can understand this fear – particularly if you are a Goodreads user, and spend a lot of time in the site. It’s not unreasonable to be worried about what happens next with a site that you love. I also understand the feeling of ownership that (rightly) develops in a community like Goodreads – especially one that has literally built the site into what it is today.

No-one has a crystal ball here, but all the indications are that Goodreads will retain its independence. That point was stressed in a blog post from Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler. He said that Amazon has pledged to support Goodreads in “continuing to grow our vision as an independent entity, under the Goodreads brand and with our unique culture.”

Chandler went on to say this:

It’s important to be clear that Goodreads and the awesome team behind it are not going away. Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community that we all cherish. We plan to continue offering you everything that you love about the site—the ability to track what you read, discover great books, discuss and share them with fellow book lovers, and connect directly with your favorite authors—and your reviews and ratings will remain here on Goodreads.

You might argue that’s typical merger/acquisition PR spin, but until there’s any evidence to the contrary, I think we have to take Otis Chandler at his word. After all, Goodreads would be nothing without its fantastic community of readers. Why would they mess with the very thing that makes Goodreads what it is?

If you are more worried about Amazon’s intentions, here’s Amazon VP Russ Grandinetti in a revealing interview with PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen:

Our mentality here is to first do no harm, and make sure that if we’re going to do integrations, users genuinely find it to be a big benefit.

Again, you might say talk is cheap, that actions speak louder than words. Well, let’s look at Amazon’s actions.

Amazon purchased a 40% stake in LibraryThing seven years ago. It bought Shelfari outright five years ago. It bought IMDB.com fifteen years ago. The independence and brand of those communities has not been compromised in all that time.

2. Goodreads will drop links to other retailers

Again, nobody can see into the future, but we have the words (and deeds) of the main players here to guide us.

In Otis Chandler’s blog post on the purchase, he stressed that:

It’s incredibly important to us that we remain a home for all types of readers, no matter if you read on paper, audio, digitally, from scrolls, or even stone tablets.

There’s no prevarication or doublespeak there. It seems pretty clear to me that links to other retailers will remain. Again, if this is a promise they break, the community would be outraged, and Goodreads is nothing without its community.

Some worry that links to other retailers won’t have the same prominence as before, that Amazon’s links will now be front-and-center. Honestly, Amazon’s links should be front-and-center. They are the biggest retailer of books in the world, with the highest-rated customer service, and manufacturers of the most popular e-reading device.

Not having Amazon links in a prominent position (which is how things have been for the last year after the Goodreads/Amazon data dispute) does a disservice to the majority of Goodreads users who are Amazon customers and/or Kindle owners.

3. Amazon will force the integration of Amazon and Goodreads reviews

I can understand why Goodreads reviewers would be worried about this. They put a lot of time and effort into their reviews, and may not want them appearing on the Amazon site (for whatever reason).

But I don’t think that’s going to happen. All the indications are that automatic cross-posting of Goodreads reviews to Amazon will be a (potential) option - not something that something that is going to be forced on anybody.

From a practical standpoint, forced integration wouldn’t really work anyway. There’s a very different review culture on Amazon and Goodreads. The latter’s reviewers are famously tougher – which is partly explained by the guidance both sites hand out to reviewers (3 stars on Amazon tends to mean “so-so” or “mediocre” whereas on Goodreads it usually means “I liked it but it didn’t blow me away.”)

Again, it comes down to what’s best for the community. As Otis Chandler said:

We’re going to think about this in terms of what’s best for our members. Maybe if we find books that don’t have any Goodreads reviews we might consider that, but I don’t think there’s any specific plans to do that at this time.

4. Goodreads will become a site exclusively for Kindle owners

The statements above are quite clear that this isn’t going to happen, and that Goodreads will remain a home for anyone who loves books – however they read them.

It’s also clear that Amazon and Goodreads will be working together to provide extra features for Kindle users. Owners of other devices may gripe about that, but I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. This purchase has enabled the new features not prevented them for other devices. Amazon can hardly be expected to provide the technical know-how on how to integrate features onto EPUB devices they haven’t designed or manufactured.

5. Amazon will force Goodreads to stop providing reviews to Kobo

To be frank, I expected Goodreads to stop providing reviews to Kobo at the first opportunity. I was very pleasantly surprised to hear that won’t be the case. Again, Otis Chandler couldn’t be clearer: “we’re not going to shut [the Kobo feed] off.”

I think that’s cool and a gesture of good faith. Some members of the community may place little stock in these words (and past deeds), but they should take some comfort in the fact that clear pledges have been made by Amazon and Goodreads about what happens going forward. If they break their word, the community will be able to hold their feet to the fire. Which leads on to the next question.

If all the above is true, why did Amazon buy Goodreads?

In a word: data.  Goodreads has millions of users who have rated millions of books. That data alone makes this acquisition attractive to Amazon.

As I explained in a recent blog post, Amazon’s success is powered by an incredibly complex (and data hungry) recommendation engine. The more data Amazon can crunch, the more accurate those recommendations will be. And the more accurate those are, the more money Amazon makes.

Goodreads has also made big strides in improving its own book recommendation algorithms, and I’m sure Amazon is excited about looking under the hood, seeing how it all works, and applying that knowledge to their system.

If you have an issue with that, then you should pretty much stay away from Google, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, and any other large internet site that routinely collects user data.

Amazon’s interest doesn’t end with data. Goodreads has been making steps towards monetizing its site more effectively. Often such moves are met with resistance by users, but its inevitable on any free site. Everyone has to come up with some way of keeping the lights on.

It’s also clear that Goodreads didn’t have the funding internally to make all the improvements it would have liked to serve its users better. This deal will allow them to do that.

I’m also sure that Amazon has a plan to help Goodreads monetize the site more effectively. It’s what they do. Again, if you have a problem with that, it would have been the same had anyone else purchased Goodreads (and it was inevitable that somebody would).

How does this acquisition help self-publishers?

I see three primary benefits:

1. More advertising opportunities on Goodreads, and a better return on investment. Goodreads already has an advertising program, but it’s hardly the best ROI in the business. Amazon has the experience and know-how to improve the program – and self-publishers are always looking for more (effective) places to advertise their books.

2. Amazon’s recommendation algorithms will be vastly improved with all the data that Goodreads has been collecting. Anything that makes Amazon a more trusted source for book recommendations levels the playing field for self-publishers – the vast majority of whom make 90% (or more) of their sales at Amazon, despite the Kindle only having around 60% of the market.

3. Amazon buy links will no longer be obscured at the bottom of a long list of other retailers (where self-publishers don’t sell as well).

4. Finally, all these new features that are being talked about will make the Kindle a more attractive device. Because Amazon provides self-publishers with a much more level playing field than the other retailers, this gives us a fairer chance of nabbing those readers.

These are my initial thoughts on the purchase. Of course, we’ll have to see how it will all play out. What do you think?

* * *

Note: I’ll be absent from the comments until tomorrow, but I promise to catch up then. I’m handing Let’s Get Visible over to my betas in about six hours (eek!) and then I have to race into town to meet an American friend who has flown in for the weekend.

If you have been waiting on Let’s Get Visible, apologies for the delays. I wanted to make sure that it was the most up-to-date resource possible, and the recent changes prompted some rewrites. It will be published very soon, and if you want to be the first to hear when it’s out, sign up to my mailing list here.

Happy weekend!

There seems to be a view in certain self-congratulatory circles that publishers have finally got to grips with the digital revolution, that they have weathered the fiercest part of the storm, and that they are well-placed now not just to survive, but to thrive.

There are innumerable problems with that view, of course, but today I’d like to focus on one core truth of this brave new world that publishers have failed to grasp.

Namely, there are only two essential components to publishing in the digital era: the writer and the reader.

All of the old middlemen – agents, publishers, distributors, retailers – have to justify their cut, as the writer can now bypass them and go direct to readers. The only middlemen (IMO) currently making a compelling case for their cut are retailers. Self-publishers are more than happy to fork over 30% to Amazon to access their ever-expanding customer base.

Publishers seem determined to move in the opposite direction: making the proposition of publishing with them less attractive rather than more attractive, reducing advances, worsening contract terms, and treating writers as marks rather than partners – despite whatever guff accompanies the launch of their latest initiatives.

The recent actions of two of the largest trade publishers have drawn criticism from all across the writing community – not just self-publishers – and are thus not as easily dismissed as the rantings of a jaundiced indie zealot.

Let’s start with Random House; the rest can wait in line.

Digital-First Imprints Put Authors Last

By now, you have probably heard of the scandalous terms Random House offered authors via its new digital-first imprints - Hydra, Alibi, Flirt & Loveswept – before being forced to revise some of the terms in an embarrassing climb-down.

If you are already familiar with this part of the story, you can skip to Problems Still Remain below. For those who missed it, or want a quick refresher, here’s a recap.

The original terms offered by Random House were:

1. No advance.
2. Assignment of all rights and subsidiary rights for the lifetime of the copyright.
3. No meaningful reversion clause, meaning you’ll never get any of these rights back - even the ones they don’t use - unless Random House deign to return them.
4. A 50% net royalty rate. Which sounds okay until you realise that “net” doesn’t just mean what the publisher receives from the retailer, but that amount minus all the costs of publishing and promoting the book.

Watchdog group Author Beware broke the story, and a few days later John Scalzi eviscerated Random House in this excellent post. (The latter especially is worth reading.)

It should be obvious to all of you why you should never sign anything with terms like this. But just to hammer the point home, it combines the worst of both worlds: no print distribution (but you give up your print rights), no advance, you sign your rights away forever, and you have no reasonable means of getting them reverted at any point.

And lest there be any confusion, we’re talking about all the rights. Even though Random House only plans to publish your work as an e-book, they want print rights. They want audio rights. They want foreign translation rights. THEY WANT MOVIE RIGHTS.

Also, that “50% net” is incredibly misleading. Under the original terms, before Random House starts paying you any royalties, you would have to accumulate enough sales to cover the costs of publishing and marketing your book.

To be clear: none of this was speculation. I saw an offer letter from one of the imprints. I have also seen excerpts from the contract that deal with how the publisher calculates the (extremely misleading) “net” royalty rate. Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware has been passed similar information regarding Hydra, and Scalzi has seen the (original) contract from Alibi.

SFWA v Random House

The obvious egregiousness of these contract terms led to the SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, of which Scalzi is President) de-listing Hydra & Alibi as qualifying markets for SFWA membership.

Random House attempted a mealy-mouthed defense of their horrendous contract terms, before being slapped down again in a terse letter by the SWFA, which also threatened to de-list Random House as whole if these terms became the norm for the publisher.

The story spread quickly, covered in outlets as diverse as Boing Boing, Forbes, and The Guardian, before Random House announced changes to its terms.

Problems Still Remain

The new terms from Random House are an improvement on those originally offered. Gone is the requirement for an author to pay back the costs that are normally borne by a publisher – for the ebook version at least. If the book is selected for a print edition, the author will still have to repay those costs before seeing any royalties.

From the excerpts of the contract I saw, these include the cost of printing, binding, shipping, storing, distributing, and dealing with returns.

Random House also claim that the out-of-print clause has been strengthened and allows the author “to request reversion of his or her rights three years after publication if the title fails to sell 300 copies in the 12 months immediately preceding the request.”

No-one has seen the new contracts from Random House, but I’m a little worried about the word “request” there. Without seeing the contract language, we don’t know if Random House are compelled to grant that “request.”

Indeed, if you are a regular reader of The Passive Voice (and you should be) you will know that publishers can often claim a contract provision means one thing, when it really means another.

Of course, even if the out-of-print clause is worded in the author’s favor, there’s nothing to stop Random House dropping the price of the book to $0.01 for a single day and selling 300 copies before jacking the price back up again, and disqualifying the book for rights reversion.

If you think that’s something they wouldn’t be capable of, I respectfully direct you to the original terms they offered authors (and signed authors under), before it became a PR mess.

I find it amusing that Random House first stuck to its guns, and then only agreed to make some changes when headlines appeared comparing them to a “predatory vanity press” when they have recently struck a deal to merge with Penguin – who run their own predatory vanity press (which Random House will soon co-own!). But I digress.

Author Solutions Class Action?

Speaking of predatory vanity presses, a class action suit has been launched against PublishAmerica. You can read all about that here, along with details of the suit and a call for writers who have been “published” by PublishAmerica to submit details to the attorneys handling the suit.

Joining PublishAmerica in the dock could be Penguin-owned Author Solutions. One of the firms involved in the PublishAmerica case - Giskan Solotaroff Anderson & Stewart – are also investigating Author Solutions for potential class action suit.

I know that several of you have been victims of the various subsidiaries of Author Solutions (such as Xlibris, iUniverse, Trafford, Author House, Palibrio, Inkubook, WordClay, FuseFrame, PitchFest, Author Learning Center, BookTango, etc.).

The law firm involved in this potential class action suit is trying to collect as much information as possible at this preliminary stage. While there are many steps between opening an investigation and lodging a suit (or indeed having your day in court), sharing your experiences with this law firm can only help. You can do that here.

Of course, Penguin’s purchase of Author Solutions makes them a juicier target for any such action, and if Penguin attempt to wriggle out of any liability, words like this from Penguin CEO John Makinson will come back to haunt him:

“We spent time getting to know the people at Author Solutions and their sophisticated operation,” Makinson said. “They have skills that can help us at Penguin.”

Simon & Schuster Offers Bribes To Pimp Author Solutions

A fellow publishing blogger has passed on the following email:

Dear [REDACTED]

Simon & Schuster recently launched Archway Publishing as a new type of offering for self-publishing authors.  With services delivered by Author Solutions, Archway was developed to help authors achieve their publishing goals and reach their desired audience.  S&S has provided guidelines on book design, introduced certain unique self-publishing services, designed packages tailored to meet specific author objectives, and will monitor titles for potential acquisition. 

Your blog is an important resource to help authors navigate the variety of self-publishing options.  We believe Archway is a unique new service for authors, and would be valued by your readers.  The Archway Affiliate Program enables partners to earn a $100 bounty for each author they refer who publishes with Archway.  Click here to learn more about the affiliate program.  In addition, we’d like to extend to your audience a 10% discount off any Archway package, when referred though affiliate links on your site.  We can also create contests, webinars, and creative for your site, or discuss other ways to work together.

Please let me know if you have time for a brief call and visit www.archwaypublishing.com to learn more about Archway.

Regards,

[REDACTED]

I’ve redacted the names (and the emphasis is mine), but I can confirm that the person signing the email is a Marketing Associate at Simon & Schuster, and the phone number attached goes to the offices of Simon & Schuster.

While Author Solutions have offered a similar “bounty” (don’t you just love that word!) in the past (see here), this time it’s coming direct from Simon & Schuster. It appears that Simon & Schuster are learning just as much from Author Solutions as Penguin hope to.

When Simon & Schuster joined forces with Author Solutions to rip off writers, there was a firestorm of criticism. Instead of addressing those critics, instead of revising their scammy program, Simon & Schuster has decided to pay people to lie about it.

If you see anyone pimping Archway Publishing or Author Solutions, ask them how much they are getting paid.

Dymocks-owned D Publishing is Toast

As we have seen from the Random House debacle, public pressure can have an effect, which is why I’ll keep blogging about Author Solutions. In case you think that this kind of pressure can only effect the more media-friendly stories involving traditional publishers, think again.

D Publishing was launched in December 2011 (by Australian bookselling chain Dymocks) with some of the most oppressive terms I’ve seen to date. The good news is that Dymocks has announced the closure of D Publishing, effective by month’s end.

I don’t know the full details behind the decision, but I can’t help but feel that the massive public outcry over the terms steered many writers away.

Penguin has been more successful at shrugging off criticism of Author Solutions. Indeed, Penguin CEO John Makinson recently said he was “proud” of the purchase.

He might not feel the same way if the class action suit is lodged. After all, we all know how the last one went.

Free Books For You

If you’ve made it this far without reaching for the whiskey, I feel like I owe you something. As you might have noticed from the sidebar, I’ve three free books today on Amazon.

The big one I’m pushing is my South American historical adventure A Storm Hits Valparaiso, but you can also pick up my short stories Transfection and If You Go Into The Woods for free too.

My historical is part of a bigger promo where you can pick up some fantastic books for just 99c. Any downloads/shares are appreciated. Happy reading!

UPDATE: I don’t want any non-Kindle owners to miss out, so if that’s you, leave a note in the comments and I’ll send you a copy of any of these when the exclusivity period with Amazon ends (soon).

Like many of you, I’ve tried a little of everything at this point, and the list of stuff that works is far, far shorter than the list of stuff that doesn’t.

But what if I told you that you had a chance for some serious exposure? Imagine appearing on a reality TV show with millions of viewers, week after week. That level of visibility should have some kind of effect, right?

YA fantasy writer and King of The Nerds contestant Genevieve Pearson is here to share her story:

* * *

“Writing is easy. It’s the marketing stuff I don’t understand.” I remember telling my husband. So many queries, review requests, blog posts, ad space purchases, and my new book, Revelations, was still just…lingering. My first book, Chasing Power, didn’t have as good of a cover or summary, and yet its initial sales had been better and it still sold more by the day than Revelations did. I suggested a title change, concerned that people were seeing the book as too serious, too religious. My husband didn’t like this idea and advised me to wait. “There’s always the show.” He said.

The show. The show. Several months prior, I’d sent off an email on a whim to a casting call for a show called King of the Nerds. It was going to take the format of a Big-Brother style reality show. Eleven contestants would all live together in a house, competing in challenges and whittling down the playing field week by week.

I’d entered on a whim, but despite my initial low-expectations, every now and then I’d get notice that I’d made it through another round of finals.

First I was in the top fifty, then twenty. Around March I was notified that I was in the top 16, and my ‘ha ha ha, wouldn’t this be fun?’ was becoming a viable possibility as I was asked to provide grocery lists, given a list of what to pack, and found myself studying at home in case I made it.

And I did. And once on: I stayed on, eight episodes worth of me on a national TV show with over two million views, not counting repeats. My twitter and FB fan pages exploded with likes and followers (I estimated I’ve added about 100 Twitter followers every day since the show aired) and I began eagerly checking my KDP sales page for what I expected to be a huge jump in sales. My social media profiles mentioned my books, my website was appealing and easy to find. I’d laid it all out, nice and easy to google. And yet, the sales increase was modest, if that. My increase was an average of one or two more books a day more than my before-TV sales numbers.

Now I’m nearing the run of the show and wondering, what else could I do? Every day I get messages asking me if my books are published, and the names of my books. I happily respond, but I’m confused by the frequency of the question. Type my name into Amazon and my list of books pops up. Just look at my web page and the titles and links to buy my books are right there. Why the ongoing confusion?

And why is this still not enough? My hope with going on the show was to gain exposure for my books. And yet, for all intents and purposes, even though I’m more visible, my books remain unseen. I can plug them more — should plug them more — but even that is not always an effective tactic. At around 3500 twitter followers and 1500 FB fans, I posted a simple plug (“A lot of people have been asking about my book, here is a link to where you can buy it!”) about my books on Facebook as well as on Twitter. While regular statuses on Facebook will garner 40-100 responses, the plug generated a mere 15 original responses. Also intriguing was that while around one third of those comments directly stated that they were buying one of my books right then and there, and another one third implied they were buying them, only three copies of my books sold that day.

This leads to another interesting fact about fans — as much as they may like you, and may want to be your friend, that does not always translate to buying from you. Even when they say you have. I’ve lost track of how many times someone direct-messaged me asking about my book, I responded to them with the link, they wrote back that they just bought it and yet…no sale. Not on Smashwords, Kindle, B&N — nada.

One issue, I’ll admit, is that there is a definite disconnect between the books’ target audience — young women from the ages of 16 up — and my fans — young men from the ages of 16 up. It’s a completely disparate demographic, and many of the men who are fanning me on social media are more into video games and comic books than reading YA novels.

But I also wonder if I approached this from the wrong perspective. Perhaps rather than expecting my TV appearance to draw people into reading my books, I should have been drawing in readers and using the TV appearance to hook them after they were already interested. Maybe rather than expecting the fans I already have to be interested in my writing, I should have been trying to increase the visibility of my books and creating new fans through that avenue — ones more amenable to my genre and style.

Either way, I’m definitely doing something wrong, and hoping for a new perspective on how to bridge the gap between fans and sales.

* * *

Thank you to Genevieve for sharing her story. She appears in the finale of King of Nerds on TBS tonight at 10pm Eastern and her books are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

This is a topic I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while as I’ve experienced plenty of exposure in traditional media, and I always monitor my sales afterwards to see if there is any bump. Usually it’s negligible. Even when I’ve been featured in national newspapers with circulation figures in the millions, sales were largely unaffected.

I think there are several inter-related reasons for this, but from my own experience and other authors I’ve spoken to, one thing is clear: traditional media exposure does a very poor job of shifting e-books.

Digital consumers are spoiled. When they see a product online they are interested in, it’s usually accompanied by a clickable link. Anything without an easy, immediate way to purchase is quickly forgotten in the maelstrom of the internet

If you appear on a TV show, or do a radio interview, or are given a view column inches, your target readers (if you reach any of them) don’t have a way of easily and immediately acting on any interest that your books may arouse.

It’s very different online, where you can drop a clickable link anytime you mention your books.

On the internet, consumer behavior is easily tracked. Usability studies are unanimous: with every click (or step) you place between the consumer and the product, an increasing proportion fail to complete the transaction.

Marketing digital products to someone offline creates a yawning gap which is only traversed by a tiny percentage. The disconnect that Genevieve mentioned above between her target readership and the audience of the show merely compounded the problem.

It’s much more effective to focus our marketing efforts online. And it’s much easier to target readers when they are all gathered at one place. Like Amazon.

For this reason, Let’s Get Visible focuses on teaching you strategies to optimize your placement at Amazon, increasing your opportunities for the kind of visibility that does translate into sales.

Visible will be off to the editor soon. You can sign up here to get an email when it’s released.

His path wasn’t easy. When David uploaded his first book, way back in February 2010, he was working in Pizza Hut.

The popularity of his books, and the speed with which he was able to publish them, meant that it didn’t take long before he was able to quit that job and write full-time.

David’s stellar sales (over 350,000 books to date) led to big offers from major publishers. But he wasn’t able to accept any of them – until recently.

David is here today to tell us more. Trust me when I say this is quite the story:

Hi David, thanks for agreeing to come along and speak with us today. I’ve been hoping to chat since you signed that big deal with Orbit a couple of weeks ago. Why don’t you kick things off by telling us a little more about that?

For a long while I was stuck, unable to sign any deals or approach any new agents due to a stupid decision on my own point (more on that later). But recently I was able to buy out, sign a new agent (Michael Carr, who is totally awesome), and then we began cooking up a plan of attack. Our best case scenario involved Orbit, who we sent out a feeler email to see if they were interested in the rights of the Shadowdance Trilogy.

To put it simply: they were. It seemed I barely blinked, and suddenly we’d agreed to terms. They’ve acquired the Shadowdance Trilogy along with the sequel trilogy (Watcher’s Blade) I’d begun. They’re all being melded together into one big six-book series, the first three of which I believe Orbit plans on releasing in a three-book barrage over the course of this upcoming Christmas holiday season.

You’ve signed over World Rights for the series, but there are a number of foreign deals in motion. How does that work?

Heh, how it works so far is either I get an email inquiring about rights, which I forward to my agent, or at some point Michael (agent guy) sends me an email letting me know this or that deal is in the works. My involvement is pretty much non-existent, which is how it should be. I’m not even going to pretend I’m knowledgeable in such matters. Best I know at this point is that interest seems high, I’ve forwarded a lot of emails to Michael, and that I cannot wait until I have a nice row of foreign translations on my bookshelf.

But those deals aren’t the only ones you have made recently. You have something else to announce today.

The other exciting news I finally get to reveal is that I’ve sold a trio of books to the Amazon imprint, 47North. They take place in the same world as the rest of my books, though centuries before, detailing the creation of man and the war between the brother gods who made them. The other unique bit is that these books (the first being Dawn of Swords, with the entire trilogy currently titled The Breaking World) were co-authored between myself and a great friend of mine, Robert Duperre.

Quick bit on Rob: I met him fairly early in my career, when he wrote me with an embarrassingly glowing review of one of my Half-Orc books. We began to chat, I read his zombie books, and we basically hit it off (despite him being a New England Patriots fan…not everyone can be perfect, I guess). At one point, when I was completely stuck on one of my Shadowdance novels, I called him up and starting throwing him ideas. After that, he became my reliable alpha reader, going over various plotlines and characters before even my editor got a look. He’s kept me from doing a ton of stupid mistakes, of which I’m grateful.

Anyway, I’ve had readers wanting me to write this Gods’ War set of events for a while now, but I never really felt there was enough there. Not sure why. You’d think a giant war would do it. Finally I mentioned it to Rob, and a day later he presented me with a full outline for the first book, coupled with several new families, a new race of people known as the Wardens, and a ton more. While I saw in my head a big, faceless war, Rob saw a far more human struggle, and it was absolutely perfect.

So besides getting to work with another author effectively writing professional fanfic (love you Rob!), this series was a chance to try something a bit different. Everything I suck at, particularly world-building and giant doorstopper novels, is something Rob does without even trying. He’s added so much to my writing, and while the style is a little different, its resulted in a phenomenal story, with near all credit of that going to Rob.

So 47North gets one series, and Orbit gets another. But you’re not done with self-publishing, right? You have other titles that you haven’t sold as part of either deal.

I don’t think I’m done with self-publishing, but I’m making a guess here on some fairly incomplete information. Right now, based on the rate Orbit will be publishing my books (once they’re done with their initial back-to-back-to-back release of the first three), as well as the split-duty with Rob on the Breaking World books,  I think I will have a month or two to spare between projects. Should that be the case, I have no intention of twiddling my thumbs. As for my various projects that haven’t been sold, well…for all I know, Orbit may snap them up a year from now. Or Amazon. Or maybe I’ll keep them self-published. Right now, so much stuff is up in the air, I’m not even going to pretend I know.

The term “hybrid author” is quite fashionable these days, but many people seem to talk about it as if it’s some kind of hedge – i.e. covering all the bases in case the indie path gets tougher, or that traditional publishers get smarter about digital. But with you I get the sense that each of these moves is quite strategic. Can you explain a little about the motivation for each of the deals you’ve signed – both Orbit and 47North?

I’ve done the self-publishing thing. I’ve experienced its ups and downs, and feel that as a whole, I’ve topped out at how “big” I can be through it. The Orbit deal is me trying to see if I can, through their advertising, their editors, their effort, push my name a tiny bit higher into the stratosphere. Basically, I’ve seen what I can do. Now is my chance to go all in with a traditional publisher who I feel puts out an incredible quality product.

As for 47North, it’s a bit trickier. They’re very much the new kid on the block, their paper presence is certainly smaller (though they’re trying to grow it, I know). With Orbit already investing six books in me, trying to push for nine was just too much. Given all the work Rob put into it, I also didn’t want to shelve it for two years to see how Orbit’s Shadowdance books performed before pitching it again. Well, Amazon had shown interest in me before (they were curious about the Shadowdance Trilogy as well, but this was during my five-year-deadzone…again, more on that in a second).

Anyway, Michael (my agent) read Dawn of Swords and loved it, just loved it. For a little while, we actually thought Orbit would prefer those given the more traditional nature and giant size (apparently the lure of assassins is just too strong, though). But with Amazon, we have a publisher willing to work with us, as well as with Orbit in ensuring no conflicting launches, etc.

It also gives Rob a great foot in the door, which he absolutely deserves.

So now I’ve got a traditional publisher about to flood the old world, I’ve got Amazon about to advertise and launch three books of mine into their digital world, and I’ve got my old self-published stuff for those who burn through those and want more. Overall, I feel quite happy where I am right now.

It’s going to be fascinating to watch the effects of combining the national print power of someone like Orbit with the unparalleled digital marketing prowess of Amazon. But that’s the future. I want to turn the clock back a couple of years.

You were part of that first wave of self-publishers which came to prominence when the market exploded in November 2010. Since then, the authors who came to prominence around the same time (Hocking, Locke, Konrath, Sullivan etc.) have all signed deals of one kind or another – either with Amazon’s imprints or with traditional publishers. What took you so long? You must have had interest. Was it simply a case of waiting for the right deal? Or is this the bad decision you referred to at the start?

So here’s where I reveal how incredibly stupid I was. Back when Dance of Cloaks was just starting to take off, I was contacted by a publisher located in Europe. They were interested in doing a translation for Dance of Cloaks, which of course I was ecstatic about. They also wanted to know if I was interested in agency representation, because they also operated an agency.

Now I was a bit hesitant about this one, but I tried to shop around to a few agents, see if any would represent me in this foreign rights offer, as well as maybe shop around a few more. Turned me down, all of them. And so I said what the heck, let’s go forward.

But here’s the problem. The terms of the agency deal were crap. And I don’t mean just poor, I mean total, outrageous. My lawyer said we have a 50/50 chance of a judge ruling the contract unenforceable level of crap. Their royalty percentage was, and I’m not kidding here, 50%. Even worse, there was no out-clause. I was locked in for five years.

Woah. That’s… I have no words.

Yeah. I like to think I’m an intelligent guy. I navigated the early Kindle marketplace as if I knew what I was doing. But when it came to this deal, my ego got the best of me. I wanted a foreign translation. I wanted an agent. I justified the royalty rate by figuring all of these deals would be foreign deals (the agency was located in Europe, after all). Half of something was better than a hundred percent of nothing, right? No agent looked at me, even with a foreign rights deal on the table, so what were the odds of a US offer actually coming in that would make me reconsider self-publishing?

This is the part of the movie where you get that sinking feeling.

Or want to slap the main character. The thing is, I knew it was stupid to sign it. My dad argued repeatedly to not do it. I refused to show the contract to several writer friends, because I knew they’d tear it to pieces. I didn’t hire someone like PassiveGuy to go over it and make sure it wasn’t evil. I wanted even that tiny sliver of respectability, and because of that I freaking screwed myself over hardcore.

And then a few months later, when Shadowdance took off like a lightning bolt, my ‘agency’ contacted me asking for sales information and a few other things. I sent it, and they told me they had a good deal in the works. Shrugged, awesome, couldn’t wait to hear about it. And then one day they sent me an email, basically saying: We have a six-figure deal on the table, publisher’s about to call you.

My response: uhhhhh…what?

Okay. Let’s recap. Around two years ago, the Shadowdance series starts selling like crazy, and you receive a six-figure offer from a major publisher. But you also know that if you accept, you will have to fork over 50% to this agency.

Which meant there was no way I could accept it. And said agency would have known that if they’d kept me in the slightest loop as to what they were doing. When I took that call, I remember one of the questions I was asked was why I had chosen to pursue a traditional publishing route when I was doing so well self-publishing. I bit my tongue, but so badly I wanted to tell them I didn’t even know I was trying to pursue a traditional publishing route until that morning.

Anyway, I thought I could still barter down the percentage of our agency deal, given how this massive offer was on the table, and it was just obvious I couldn’t accept it with any sort of financial sense as is. They offered to go down to 20%… but only if I also extended my agency contract for another five years.

Not a great option either.

I couldn’t believe it. They admitted to me their contract wasn’t generous, offered me 20%, and then simultaneously tried to screw me over again. These were supposed to be the people watching out for my interests when it came to publishers, yet all my talks with them boiled down to “Please, please, please take this deal they offered us” without a single revision change or counteroffer. Ten years? Dear lord. I lawyered up at that point.

Long story short, turned down the deal, and decided that despite the horrific nature of the contract, plus the poor translation of it into English, it just wasn’t worth trying to pursue to court and spending all that money. So I let it die. After about two years, I decided to see if said agency would accept a buyout of my contract. After a bit of negotiations, I cut them a check, celebrated like mad, and then started searching for an agent.

Phew. That’s quite a tale. I’m glad it all ended well for you, and that you were able to get out of that awful contract.

Me too. Less than three weeks after I was free of them, I had two publisher deals.

I got what I deserved for signing something so stupid, but I’d like to think they also got screwed over by their own eagerness to pull a fast one on me.

I’d like to put the business stuff to one side for a moment, and talk about the books themselves. As you know, I’m a huge fan of the Shadowdance series. The opening book – A Dance of Cloaks – was the first fantasy I’d read in maybe ten years. I used to be a huge fan of the genre, and had grown up reading guys like Tolkien, Eddings, and Feist, before the gap between Jordan’s Wheel of Time books became too much.

Reading your work, I was struck by how much the genre had moved on. You don’t have very black-and-white characters battling some intangible Great Evil, and you certainly don’t open with a lonely farm boy who is unaware he possesses great magical powers. Your stuff is a lot grittier and bloodier and the characters are quite nuanced. Who influenced your style?

The most obvious influence is R.A. Salvatore. I devoured his stuff growing up, rereading a ton of his earlier series (particularly the Dark Elf Trilogy). All the sword and sorcery aspects, the blistering pacing and the detailed sword fights, I can all attribute to him. As for the good/evil characters… I don’t know. I do have very good characters, I have very evil characters. I also have a ton of gray characters. But I don’t think of them in those terms. Every one of them is human (or, uh, close enough to count) which means they can screw up. They can make mistakes. A good man can perform an evil deed, and an evil man can perform a good deed.

Honestly, much of my influence on characters, in making them believable and relatable, comes from Stephen King. A bit of my style probably comes from him as well, so between him and Salvatore, that’s probably helped a lot in keeping my writing accessible. Probably won’t win me any literary awards, though…

Before I finally got around to actually reading one of your books, I was a huge fan of your covers. Is it the same artist who does all of them?

Peter Ortiz has done each and every one of my novels, and he’s just awesome. Forget any talent I might have. I’m pretty sure his covers are what helped distinguished myself during the early chaos of the digital world.

I’m convinced those covers played a part in your initial success. Telling great stories helps, of course, but a killer cover will get lots more people checking out your work in the first place. I presume covers like that don’t come cheap. When you were starting out, was making that kind of investment a difficult decision?

See, this is the miracle part.. .they did come cheap at first. The cover to Weight of Blood cost me a whopping $100. When Peter told me that number, I nearly fainted. He was my top choice, someone I assumed I had no chance I could get. But even on my pathetic little Pizza Hut salary, I could risk $100. At the time, self-publishers as a whole were not anywhere near as professional, at least when it came to overall presentation of their work. I saw so many horrendous covers, and more than anything, that is what I was determined to avoid. I might not belong on some of those best seller lists, but by god, I was going to look like I belonged.

Now, let’s just say after doing so many covers for me, and being overall awesome to work with, I pay him drastically higher than that for my more recent covers. But he’s still worth it.

Aside from the importance of covers, have you any advice you want to share before you go?

Go into this with your eyes open. Find people who know what they’re talking about and listen to them. Find people who will read, edit, and review your work with actual teeth, not just kindly words. Whether traditional or self-publishing, expect to work your butt off, fail plenty, and often times look like an idiot. If you can endure that, then you might find some awesome moments along the way. Oh, and have fun.

* * *

A huge thank you to David Dalglish for taking the time to answer my questions. If you have some of your own, I’m sure he’ll be along in the comments. David’s website is here and you can catch up with him on Facebook here.

Most importantly, you can get his books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo. And, by Christmas, every bookstore on the planet!

Sleeper hits are the exception for a reason. It’s a lot easier to hit the bestseller lists when you are on the front table of every single Barnes & Noble than if you are spine-out at the back of a handful of stores (or gathering dust in the warehouse).

It often comes as a surprise to those outside publishing that these bookstore spots are bought and sold, that whether a book is face-out or spine-out (or on the front table) is something that tends to be agreed in the contract between the publisher and the retailer. But when you explain how valuable this “real estate” is, it all makes sense to them (even if the scales fall from their eyes a little).

It’s very different on Amazon – where a weird form of meritocracy decides which books are visible, rather than backroom deals only available to large publishers. While Amazon hasn’t done away with “virtual co-op” completely, the vast majority of slots where books are recommended to customers are open to any book, author, or publisher – if they perform well enough.

When it comes to books, Amazon’s basic philosophy is simple: it will always (attempt to) show you the book you are most likely to purchase. The system is largely agnostic, meaning Amazon doesn’t care if the book it displays is published by you, me, them, or Penguin, and it also doesn’t care if the book is 99c or $14.99 – it will show you the book you are most likely to purchase.

In simple terms, the system is based on aggregating data about your browsing, purchasing, and reading habits, and then extrapolating about what you would like to read next based on all the other customers with similar histories (we aren’t as unique as we’d like to think).

Those recommendations manifest themselves in different ways. One of the crudest iterations is the Also Boughts (that strip of books on the product page of your book, which displays the other titles that customers have purchased along with your cri de coeur).

At the other end of the scale are the millions of personalized emails that Amazon sends out to its customers every day with tailored purchase recommendations, like this:

Some of you may quibble about how useful those recommendations are, but you should note that writers especially may get some odd suggestions (not the above, which I’ve heard is great!). You have to remember that your browsing habits play a big part in this, and if you are regularly stalking other books to check on their performance, Amazon will likely recommend these to you (along with similar books).

For customers with “purer” browsing histories though, the recommendation engine can be spookily accurate (and is widely considered to be the best in the e-commerce world). And, of course, its accuracy increases every time you browse, purchase, and read, and with every huge chunk of investment Amazon makes in honing its algorithms.

It’s quite the challenge for physical bookstores. In a recent post, Passive Guy described it perfectly:

When a customer walks into a Barnes & Noble store, is it possible for a clerk to be waiting at the door with a selection of books that the customer will probably want to read? This is exactly what happens whenever an Amazon book purchaser visits the Amazon web site. As a matter of fact, Amazon performs the electronic equivalent of rearranging a Barnes & Noble so all the visitor’s favorite book types are right at the front of the store.

Of course, Barnes & Noble also has an online store, and Amazon faces additional players in the e-book arena like Apple and Kobo. But all of Amazon’s online competitors share the same fundamental flaw: the customer experience is considerably poorer.

Kobo’s search function is deeply flawed. Apple make it plain difficult to simply browse. And the problems with Barnes & Noble’s online store are so widespread, I needed a whole separate post to spell them out.

While some of the disparity in customer experience is down to lack of investment, simply throwing money at the problem won’t close the gap because there are two distinct philosophies at work.

In the case of all three of Amazon’s primary competitors, it’s quite clear that they want to train customer attention on that “virtual co-op” – the prominent spots that large publishers have purchased to hawk their books.

I’m sure these retailers make good money from auctioning off these spots, and I’m sure they are also quite pleased that the books they are granting this all-important visibility to are ones priced at $9.99 rather than 99c.

But it’s a huge mistake. Explaining why will require a little detour to Silicon Valley.

The reason that Google beat Yahoo is simple: relevance. While Yahoo auctioned off advertising spots to the highest bidder, Google’s AdWords made the relevancy of the ad (decided by the click-thru rate) a key component in deciding which ads got the prime real estate above search results.

Google knew that approach might make them less money in the short term, but it also knew that, over time, users would trust the ads more (i.e. click on them more), if they were more relevant. And we all know what happened next.

I’m sure Amazon was watching that battle as their recommendation engine takes the same approach: it always shows readers the books they are most likely to purchase even if that recommendation makes them less money than the alternative.

Amazon knows that if its customers trust the recommendations, they will act on them more often (and spend more money). They know that will make more in the long run.

That’s why Amazon is winning. But it’s also why self-publishers tend to do much better on Amazon then elsewhere – even when you factor in the size of its market share.

We don’t tend to have access to the front tables at Barnes & Noble – either online or in the physical stores. The whole point of those front tables is to draw readers’ attention, to intercept them before they start browsing the shelves.

Amazon gives us much more of a level playing field; those all-important opportunities for visibility – those digital front tables – are open to everyone. And because those front tables are displaying the books customers actually want to read, rather than the ones large publishers most want to sell, people buy more books.

The danger for large publishers is clear: they aren’t just losing control of which books get published, but also which books get recommended.

* * *

Amazon made an important change today that’s worth noting. It’s worthy of its own blog post, but, quite frankly, I don’t know how it’s all going to play out yet. They sent a message to all members of their affiliate program this morning, regarding a change in the terms and conditions.

In short, you won’t receive any affiliate income in a given month if:

(a) 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links; and
(b) At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks.

I’ll leave you to speculate what this all means in the comments, but my initial thoughts were that the big reader sites are going to have to severely restrict featuring free books (or stop altogether) and that this will have a big impact on KDP Select.

You can read the changes yourself here, and thanks to Ed Robertson for the tip.

* * *

Speaking of changes, this kind of thing is part of the reason why Let’s Get Visible: How To Get Noticed And Sell More Books has been delayed a couple of times. Regular readers will know that this book aims to give you a deeper understanding of Amazon’s recommendation engine, and outlines a variety of strategies to maximize your visibility.

Visible is coming soon though, promise. You can see the new cover in the sidebar of this blog, and you can sign up here to get an email as soon as it’s released.

I’m also conducting a little experiment (given that the cover is ready), and I’ve uploaded the book details to Goodreads. A few people have added it to their To Read shelves already, and I’m curious to see if they get any kind of notification when it’s released.

If you want to add it to your own Goodreads shelf, you can do that here.

Enjoy your weekend, and let me know what you think of those Amazon affiliate changes.