When Trad Publishers Start Thinking Like Indies

Today's post is a little later than usual because I needed to really think about the situation I want to address. The main difference between trad and indie publishers is their marketing concept: the produce model versus the longtail.

The produce model consists of leaving a book on the brick-and-mortar book shelf for a limited period of time. It makes sense because the physical constraints of the bookstore can hold only so many paperback and hardback items. Trad publishers have view e-books the same way.

The longtail means leaving books (both e-book and POD books which makes sense for indie publishers because of the high cost of a print run and the waste of the return system) available on the virtual shelf forever because computing space is incredibly cheap these days.

Because of the produce model, the trad publishers have licensed rights to thousands of books that they aren't bothering to sell. And they finally noticed this.

Two weeks ago, Publishers Weekly had an article about Simon & Schuster's CEO Carolyn Reidy and her address at the BISG annual meeting. This is the quote that has me concerned as a rival publisher: "S&S makes its backlist title available to subscription services, she said, emphasizing that these services do not cannibalize print sales and that they also drive discovery."

It's not the subscription service part that worries me. It's the fact that she's noticed that S&S has thousands of books they can dump back into the market and not ruin their front list. In other words, a trad pub CEO has noticed the long tail and plans to use it.

Can S&S pump all these e-books into the market at once? No, not when they've cut personnel to the bone. In theory, they would also need to review contracts to see if they have the rights, which would also take time. Big corporations are more likely to put out the e-books anyway and tell the little, powerless authors to go ahead and sue them.

Even when/if a trad published author manages to get their rights back, it takes time to get their books into e-book shape. Kris Rusch has a good breakdown on how hard it is for indies to keep up with only five to ten books. She also points out that trad publishers are now competing with indies for ad space in places like BookBub., which a couple of years ago carried only advertised deals on indie books. They even emphasized in a recent blog how they preferred older books for their adequate reviews. (And I can't for the life of me find the page that I had thought I bookmarked. When I do, I'll add the link.)

And make no mistake, older books being reissued is happening. In today's Amazon Kindle Daily Deal, a book I've been searching used bookstores for ages popped up: Michael Moorcock's The Eternal Champion. $1.99 for the e-book of a novel that was originally published in 1970. The reader is me *SQUEED*. The indie publisher in me said, "Holy shit."

Granted, Titan Books, which has the reprint rights to The Eternal Champion, is a smaller publisher than S&S, but S&S and the rest of the Big 5 could do this eventually. If writers think the indie tsunami ruins their discoverability now, wait until the large publishers get their reissue machine chugging.

If they do. Just because a CEO has noticed a potential revenue stream, it doesn't mean that they'll take full advantage of it. But I really do think this is the last nail in the indie gold rush.

Does that mean we can't compete? Hell, no! But as I've repeatedly said, we have to be better than the trad pubs to get attention. To that end, I'm working on new covers for my books as we speak.

Indie publishing is a business; we have to treat it as such if we want to compete.

Hatchette Can't Keep Their Stories Straight

In an article released last Thursday, American publishing industry magazine Publishers Weekly claimed Hatchette Book Group's sales rose 5.6% despite their current lack of a contract with Amazon in their headline. The next day, British newspaper The Guardian claimed a 1% dip in sales in theirs. So who's telling the truth?

Actually, both are once you dig through the respective articles. But the headlines are the amusing aspect.

It shows the difference in how Hatchette and the rest of the BPHs are twisting their PR campaign against Amazon in the U.S. The PW article plays into the David succeeding against Goliath meme that is extremely popular in American culture.

Just one little problem with that. Hatchette Book Group is owned by Lagardere Group, a French company whose 2013 revenues exceeded 7 BILLION euros. Compare that to Amazon, an American company, whose 2013 revenues were $74.5 MILLION U.S. dollars. Exchange rates aside, who is exactly the Goliath here.

Hatchette isn't the only foreign player in this game. Most of the Big Five are owned by non-American concerns.Penguin Random House is co-owned by German corporation Bertelsmann and Pearson PLC, a British company. Harper Collins is owned News Corp., whose primary shareholder Rupert Murdoch is Austrailian. Macmillan in controlled by Holtzbrinck, another German concern. Simon & Schuster is the only American player, and it's a teeny, tiny part of media giant CBS Corp.

In Europe, the BPHs don't have to worry so much about getting the news media on their side. A huge chunk of the news outlets are already owned by the parent companies of the Big Five, and they consider Amazon a snotty little American upstart.  But the sad part is the newspaper outlets are facing the same problems as their American counterparts--a loss of readership as more people switch to the internet and other electronic media for their news. And this is why The Guardian had an alarmist headline. "The American are coming! The Americans are coming!"

So what does this all mean?

In the end, not a damn thing. One of my great-grandfathers was fond of the saying, "The only constant in the universe is change."

The Big Five may think their conspiracy and now their little PR war with slow adaptation of e-books, but they're wrong. Not when e-book sales have jumped from less than 1% to over 40% in the last five years. It's time for the Big Five to jump on the change train before they get run over.

The Non-War of Hachette vs. Amazon

If you're in the book biz, all you've heard in the last three weeks is "AUGH! Amazon is taking over the world!"

No, it's not. Although, I'm sure Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos would love to.

As I've said before, Hatchette Book Group, USA, is hardly a wilting Southern flower being trampled by the longhorn bull that is Amazon. They are two multi-national companies duking it out over--

See? No one really knows what the specific issues are because Amazon and Hatchette signed a negotiation non-disclosure agreement.

Oh, you can guess and speculate, but you don't really know. What we do know is that Hatchette has orchestrated a massive PR campaign to paint Amazon as an evil ogre that eats babies. Hey, when you've got newspapers and TV stations in your pocket, why not pull out all the stops when you're not getting your way?

But there's two little problems:

1) The mass of the human race doesn't give a flying fuck what two mega-companies are doing right now. It's one more case of white noise in a multitude of crap they have to deal with in  their daily lives.

2) Even the publishing industry is getting tired of Hatchette's whining.

How bad does a publisher have to be before the rest of the trad industry stops taking your side? Hatchette may have hit that point. Last Friday, Publishers Weekly ran a piece that was, for once, even-handed in the current business negotiations between Amazon and Hatchette. Until now, PW has been on the trad publishers side, touting the party line that Amazon is evil, indie writers are producing a tsunami of swill, and only trad publishers can protect and cherish American literary culture.

*cough*Snookie*cough*

As one small publisher stated in the article, no one blinked an eye when a similar negotiation/battle went on for six months last year between Barnes & Noble and Simon & Schuster. In their case, the issue was end cap and  front table pricing. B&N pulled the same under-ordering tactics that Amazon are, but the only ones who complained were authors whose books came out during that period.

Ironically, Simon & Schuster released indie phenomenon Hugh Howey's print version of Wool during their tiff with B&N. The paper version could have been S&S's 50 Shades of Grey last year, but it had mediocre sales because B&N refused to order large amounts of the book.

But did anyone raise the hue and cry like Hatchette is doing now? Nope. And writers in trad contracts should take a damn hard look at the similarities between the two situations.

Did Simon & Schuster acknowledge their part in your lack of sales last year? Were any guarantees made that you wouldn't lose your contract due to the conflict with B&N? How many of you did lose your contracts due to low sales number in 2013?

As much as Hatchette bitches and moans about Amazon, they won't remove their products from Amazon's virtual shelves. They can't. They'd lose too much money, and their corporate master in France would kick them to the curb in a heartbeat. In fact, Lagardere's CEO issued a statement that there would be a quick resolution to the situation. Reading between the lines, he's telling Hatchette US to get their shit together.

So how much longer will the publishing cyberspace be inundated with anti-Amazon propaganda? Who knows? But no one's paying attention, and even the people carrying the signs are getting tired.