Michael Printz Honor Book
Congratulations to our client John Barnes, whose debut YA novel earned a Michael Printz Honor Book award. Editor Sharyn November (Viking) was tireless in her editing and support for this fine, disruptive novel. The Los Angeles Times loved it, and it has received many great reviews and blog acclaim. You can read all about it at the authors site.
Authors have just won a great battle in the war over their royalties without having to negotiate anything. Since the Kindle was released, our agency has been unwilling to embrace the platform, not because of the technology but because of the business model. Amazon claimed 65% of all revenues, a full 15% higher than common retailer rates for paper books. We have always favored the Apple iTunes/App Store model that pays the owner 70% of all revenues. Apple just hasn’t been selling ebooks. With Publishers receiving only 35% of the retail price of Kindle books, they’ve been unable to offer authors more than 15% for selling the authors words in electronic form; a crazy bad deal since there’s no physical book involved and zero risk of returns. While some publishers have obtained better terms from Amazon, all details have been secret and authors and agents had to agree to royalty rates, the value of which lay beyond a locked door.
A few days ago, Amazon opened the Kindle to individuals who could format to their standards. This was big news because previously Amazon wanted authors to go through “publishers” who would rake off income, but do little beyond formatting text files.
Today, Amazon has adopted the Apple model. Why? Because the rumors of the Apple iTablet-thingy are so compelling. We will have more as this develops but you can read the news at many business websites. Here’s the Motley Fool Story.
There are hooks and obligations in this new Amazon business model, so this does not mean that every author should jump in blindly. However, it does mean that published authors with control of their out of print backlist can now consider ebooks as a viable business. Our advice is that while this is good news: good for Kindle owners, good for authors, and good for Amazon; we should all wait until after January 27 to start negotiating contracts so we can see what Apple announces.
Today’s Wall Street Journal reports on a negotiation between HarperCollins and Apple to release ebooks for the new Apple tablet device to be announce next Wednesday. The article indicates HarperCollins staff leaked this story but a photo caption in the WSJ online edition claims an “announcement” by the publisher. This is probably sloppy journalism unless this is an Apple sanctioned leak as Apple normally never permits partners and suppliers to pre-announce anything. Read the WSJ article here.
This should be good news for both authors and the reading public, but the story suggests the price of these ebook editions will be between $14.99 and $19.99. I suspect this is bogus or simply HarperCollins’ hoped for position. At such high prices, the viability of ebooks will depend largely upon the physical appeal of the Apple product rather than the content of the books themselves. We will have more on the state of ebooks and Apple thingys later this week.
see more Funny Graphs
As I was looking at our agency equipment expenses for 2009 and planning new purchases I suddenly realized that printing has all but ceased in our offices. We now have more scanners than printers. We print something every week, but we scan something almost every day. Print devices are better than ever: better color, faster speeds, higher resolution, but there’s little reason any more for us to print documents. We read author’s works on-screen, on the Sony Reader or on the iPhones. We review and negotiate contracts by email attachments. Looking forward, I see more scanners for us. They free up so much time to think and space to shelve those wonderful published books that make us all some money and provide a comfy read.
This year we acquired a small USB-scanner that looks like a fat foot-ruler. It will (slowly) scan a legal page but we use it primarily to scan those pesky lunch receipts, the financial record of an agent’s favorite sales activity. They fill up your wallet or purse, and have to be sorted, recorded and accounted for taxes and such. But now we don’t have to fight the paper clutter. One scan, a bit of OCR and the computer will tell me when I was where with whom. Cool. But even before we have pulled all the benefit from this small scanner, I can now take a picture of the receipt right in the restaurant with my iPhone and a new type of product that turns your mobile phone camera into a scanner will eliminate several steps.
Increasingly, what you see is all you need to keep.
Both of the nation’s leading technology columnists, Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal and David Pogue at the New York Times (Not Yet the Season for a Nook), roasted Barnes and Noble’s ebook reader in their reviews today. Click through and read what the e-sages have to say. Note: you may have to register or subscribe to read the columns. You can also read Walt’s review at his All Things Digital site.
I have no comment yet, because I (like everyone else) have never seen a Nook. In general, I applaud developers of e-book readers and hope this additional product will spur consumer choice, but I think we will still have to wait for Apple’s tablet to get an iPod-class example of e-readers. Of course the biggest obstacle to e-books is not the merit or temporary bug-level of individual models but the predatory nature of the business models. Vendors want to trap consumers in their business model rather than replicate and expand the nature of reading and pocketing a profit along the way.
Don’t be misled, e-books are coming. Partly because of technological advantage, and partly because of blind greed on the part of publishers and retailers. They hope to continue to make profits from owning 85-96% of the retail price for books while keeping the price to consumers at the level of physical books. This cannot continue. Publishers and retailers see making huge profits selling an e-book for $24 and never having to ship, inventory or display a physical object. I can’t see this. But then I never saw all the colored lights in the 70s either.
In today’s Apple 2.0 blog at Fortune, Phillip Elmer-DeWitt has rounded up the latest rumors on the unicorn-like Apple tablet device. Read Apple tablet set for spring launch for the details. This is the first collection of tablet rumors that include details of what the cash flow deal will be with publishers for ebooks, and the numbers are right in line with our agency projections for the past two years.
Currently the Kindle Portable Bookstore device has kept 65% of the retail price for e-books giving authors ultimately only 15% of 35% for electronic editions of their works. That’s a 5% royalty on an ebook sale where no physical product is involved. It has always been our agency position that authors should get at least 33.5% of the retail price of an ebook sale, sharing a third each for Publisher and Retailer. The Fortune story also quotes a Wall Street Journal story that Simon and Schuster and Hachette are holding off on e-books, you can read that through Fortune or here.
Today’s e-book market is the wild west with publishers making corporate edicts that they must control e-rights, will never revert titles kept available on some spinning disk somewhere and offering a pittance to the authors. The publishers are not totally at fault; they are greedy but they didn’t think up this mess alone. E-book channels are murky and schoolyard bullies who make devices and try to sell electronic books either demand large shares of the cash flow or tie the works to their proprietary devices. The agent’s and author’s business challenge has been to cope with publishing deals in which we are offered 10-20% of the “net” when the net is computed behind a closed door that even the publishers cannot always see behind. The Apple model should clarify things a lot.
More as we learn it.
Adam Pennenberg has written an informative piece at Fast Company, the business news website, that reveals a business practice agents and publishers have bemoaned for years: bookstores have to be paid to promote the books they stock. I won’t recap the issues in the article, just go read it here. In brief: placement on the front table in a major chain bookstore costs the publisher up-front, about $30,000. Yes, after the publisher has paid the author’s advance, the costs of publishing and manufacturing the books, they also have to pay the booksellers to try to sell the book.
What Adam omitted from his article is that the chains only guarantee a 65% to 75% compliance with the “promotion.” This is why, even if your publisher paid a co-op fee, you can’t find your book in some stores at all.
Ever since executives fleeing the collapsing retail grocery business joined booksellers a decade ago, they’ve made two changes that damage their own adopted industry.
First, they switched the book retailing model from selling books, to charging for shelf space for displaying books. This works in the grocery business where beer and canned soup turn over every day and the consistency of content is key to retailing. Everyone wants every can of Campbell’s tomato soup or Pepsi to be exactly the same. Books are different. An obscure novel by Mark Twain might sit in the store for two years before selling. Bookstore space devoted to shrinking backlist choice is a casualty of mentally valuing space over variety of titles. The practice of pricing space hurts books and opens the door for Amazon to stock titles that can’t be economically carried in every bookstore. Amazon wants to be paid for promotions too, but that’s just the spread of a bad practice. As Adam explains in his story, only a small part of a bookstore’s space is pre-paid, compared to a retail grocer, but just enough to hurt new authors and publishers. Inescapable point: every can of beans is substitutable; every book is unique.
The second error of the grocers in the book business was to abandon all marketing technique except discounting. Discounting and couponing work in the grocery because money saved by the consumer on the weekly, or coupon, special can be recovered by impulse purchases of high profit items. Unfortunately in bookstores, discounting new or unique works, makes them less profitable to publish and channels the impulse money into candy and trivial works that can be jammed up near the register. Since everyone goes in the grocery at least once a week for milk, bread and whatnot, creating the image that everything is discounted at your grocery chain, can draw business. Discounting is an effective draw for pure commodity retailing; milk is mostly milk. Books are different. Except for uniform series novelists, every book is different, and even in series like Harry Potter, the substance of the novel changes from book to book. By continuously broadcasting the message to consumers that low price is the decision criteria for buying books, booksellers have poisoned the concept that content matters. If low price is the qualifier for all books, why do I need to buy any particular book today?
I believe that book chains don’t really want to be in the book business. They just want money because they control the access to readers. This allows them to dodge the question of responsibility for doing their job (selling books) and instead to collect an entitlement (basically a tax) for being in control of a step in the process. Unfortunately, they never draw new book buyers into their stores. The message is always: if you buy books we got a bunch of cheap stuff here, but they don’t even try to get new people to buy books. That would require a different type of marketing.
Last year, one chain did try something new. Picking up a CEO from the department store industry (and you know how well that business is faring) he explained that “we sold more dresses displayed full front, than sleeve out in racks, so we are now going to feature more copies of fewer titles racked face out.” I don’t know how this is going but I await the new bestseller in petit, small, medium, and full figure in a choice of pink, teal, and cocoa.
The brass of self-publishers is without limit, but one fellow named vic.martin, just sent me an email I have to share. His plan cuts to the heart of self-publishing and eliminates all the usual risks of turning what you print into money. As always, the author’s own voice is so much better than any summary I could craft:
Just a brief insight of my ways and means of making millions of Euros, I have a printing papers for printing Euros currencies, the result is that of original Euro currency, Upon your request, samples are readily availble for your perusal, so that you can check out the result, it has no different with the ordinary Euro currency, the bank accepts it as the production is of a very high quality,it is generally acceptable legal tender.
If any US Treasury Agents are reading my blog, get in touch. I’ll be happy to pass on vic’s email address.
Michael Hyatt, the CEO of Thomas Nelson, chimed in on the Harlequin Hoopla today and his blog is worth reading if you take your blood pressure medicine first. Don’t take our word for what he said, go read his blog and our comments.
A lot of what he says about publishing is accurate. What’s surprising is how candid he is. He intends to refute three tall tales of self-publishing and yet reinforces them all. Throughout, there’s an overall slap at agents.
Self-publishing dilutes the brand of the sponsoring company
His argument against brand dilution is mostly accurate: consumers are largely brand blind, and the example he gives for the “imprint challenge” is undoubtedly true. However, readers are not completely brand insensitive: how does he think readers of Thomas Nelson books would respond if Thomas Nelson started publishing books on atheism or that were manifestly below the usual quality expected of Thomas Nelson? Would Thomas Nelson hear from readers, or would readers vote with their dollars? Both, I suspect. He says he knows what his brand represents and that WestBow Press is “fully within that tradition.” The WestBow Press website says “We want readers to have confidence in our books.” Yet WestBow Press is willing to accept payment for publishing all comers under the WestBow Press imprint, (provided that the submitted book meets stated Christian criteria), and on the WestBow website promote publication with WestBow as an opportunity to be discovered by Thomas Nelson. While Christianity may be all about offering hope, what WestBow/Thomas Nelson doesn’t say is that the likelihood of being “discovered” from your book at WestBow is probably about the same as being “discovered” at a diner in Hollywood, even if you are wearing a nice sweater (cover). Hyatt is unfortunately blind to the ethical issue of running both a real business and a predatory one that promises everything and nothing at the same time, and charges far more than what an author who merely wants to publish his book might pay a copyeditor and a printer for the same pleasure of having 500 copies in his garage.
Grumpy old agent comments: Apply his ethical blindness to other aspects of life and the churches will open casinos. Church members are used to giving money to their church with no earthly return. Gamblers pour money into casinos with a false hope they will eventually win it back. What’s the real difference? Both models move money from individuals to organizations with feeling good the only return. At home, his position will tempt husbands world wide to carry on tawdry affairs and justify them by saying: “She means nothing to me, she’s just extra, non-committal sex”–oh, wait, they already do this… Like the cheating spouse, Harlequin, or likely Torstar and Thomas Nelson, want it both ways. WestBow will take the author’s money and pretend-publish a book with no other chances for publicaton, while refusing to publish any book that doesn’t meet their Christian criteria regardless of merit. OK but the same logic will justify all kinds of “I did it because it felt good” activities.
Self-publishing will flood the market with poor quality books.
Hyatt argues that fake books will not flood the market and drive out real books, because book stores won’t carry them and being listed in a database won’t make them noticeable. He makes the case for the futility of self-publishing pretty well. Nice job here. He concludes:
We live in an age when technology and the public’s desire for self-expression make user-generated content viable. If people want to publish their own book through print-on-demand (POD), subsidy or vanity publishing, or whatever, why should anyone else care?
Excellent point, particularly as in his blog, he admits that “very few of these [self-published books] find their way to bookstore shelves.” Do they put that on the WestBow Press website – no, they charge $2,799 for the “essentials needed to increase your chances of commercial success.” Perhaps none of the WestBow authors will read Mr. Hyatt’s blog and discover that their chances of commercial success are so close to nil.
Self-publishing rips off the authors.
Hyatt’s final point is that informed authors, or those who would like to be published authors, should be allowed, even encouraged, to toss their money down any sink hole they want. Bernie Madoff never required anyone to give him money, he just made up a big, fat lie that the promised returns were real. Self-publishing is simply a set of available tools, but Author Solutions taps individual’s needs for their own profits.
And as for Mr. Hyatt’s comment about publishers being “ripped off” because “Most of the books we publish don’t make money?” “Ripped off?” Have authors been delivering the phone book or sheaves of folded paper instead of their contracted novels?
Hyatt throughout is building a case against agents, a pretty self serving argument. In reality, most of the concern is being voiced by authors. I’m one of the few agents speaking out on this topic, but more will, because agents are the people most aware of the business model in publishing and are most concerned with the author’s rights and income. Agents do provide access, and the price of admission is a book good enough to be commercially published. Agents only get involved if we believe our time is worth what our 15% commission which we will earn from the author’s future income. The Association of Author’s Representatives (AAR) membership stipulates we cannot charge reading fees or otherwise profit from rejections. Author Solutions makes its money from authors, not from selling books to readers, and unfortunately, few self-published authors make any money from selling books to readers, either.
Both Carolyn and Ashley Grayson contributed to this item.
