Big Publishers Now Looking to Indies for Marketing Ideas (And I'm Highly Amused)

On a Monday two years ago, a tip popped up on Alter Ego's Facebook feed. A handful of her friends were telling their friends that the first seven books of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series were bundled on Amazon for $1.99.

Yep, Randy Penguin had had a bundle sale.

When indies started doing stuff like low priced e-books and even lower priced bundles, the pundits were screaming from the rooftops that indies were destroying culture. Yet, here we are, ten years down the road since the Kindle was introduced, and the big publishers are doing the exact same thing.

Sadly, things can be traced back to L.K. Rigel's cover for her novel, Spiderwork. Harper Collins liked the original artwork so much that they ripped off cover artist Nathalia Suellen. The matter was eventually settled, but not before L.K. and Nathalia had to get their attorneys involved and the art director at Harper Collins lost her job. And poor author Alix Flinn was blamed for a lot of the mess though it was her publisher who started the kerfluffle, not her.

Obtaining one of the coveted promotional slots on BookBub has been difficult for the last few years. It's even more so now that trad publishers are using it to promote their backlists. I signed up for the SFF list years ago. I've been seeing a lot of old favorites that came out when I was in grade school or even before I was born. Authors like Katherine Kurtz, Andre Norton, and Anne McCaffrey.

The swing side of trad publishing BookBub slots are setting the first book in a series (or even all the volumes released so far) at a sale price to goose sales of the latest release of the series.

The odd part is the pricing for these sale books. The trad publishers are pricing books at $1.99, the price that most indies consider the dead zone. It does make the book stand out from the indie crowd. Part of me would love to know what their actual units are for one of these twenty-four-hour sales.

Finally, the trad publishers are contracting with indie writers again. After unit sales didn't meet the marketing department's expectations between 2012 and 2016, the trad publishers backed away from pursuing indie writers, and more than a few indie writers they did pursue refused to sign. Now, trad publishers are looking at high-selling indies again, but they are being more selective on who they are handing out contracts to. For example, J.A. "Joe" Konrath signed with Kensington Publishing. It'll be interesting to see how things work out with Joe.

As I said in the title of this post, I find these changes funny more than anything. A lot of the things authors have been asking for over the decades are now being delivered--now that those same writers proved they were financially feasible.

We must not be so crappy after all since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?