The Nameless Horror

Some quick(ish) deeper noodlings on the first month stats for 3NJ I posted earlier today:

• The tail-off in visitor numbers is expected (and entirely normal for this sort of venture). Launch day traffic was far, far higher than I’d expected. The downside to launching with next to no content on board already was that people were mostly checking out the concept. (The upside was that no one’s been coerced into contributing and I’ve not had to go touting for content; I hate cold-asking people.) It might have been better to have more authors on board pre-launch in order to retain readership rather than the ‘IF I BUILD IT THEY WILL COME’ totally haphazard launch approach (Suw, the weekend before it went live: “What’ll the launch strategy be?” / Me: “If nothing’s broken or missing come Monday I’ll write an announcement and post it to Twitter. Then we’re live.”). OTOH, there’d be no guarantee it would’ve worked even if I had wanted to do it, which I didn’t, and to be frank it’s not like I can complain about the numbers. I linked to the announcement twice, as did Steve and Suw. And that was it. The rest was from people, whole viral chains of them, sharing it because they liked it, and that’s cool. Next month will be the thing, seeing how it goes.

• 500 submissions in a month out of nothing is awesome. As is the fact that dealing with them hasn’t been terribly taxing. Most people seem to have no trouble with the formatting instructions and all I have to do is skim and hit ‘go’.

• That said, I wish I had a notification system for problem subs. It’s on a to-do, though I suspect I can’t do it without hacking WP in a way that’s probably beyond me.

• Outbound link tracking is also to-do. That’s very annoying.

• I’ve emailed… ooh… half a dozen publishers, maybe a couple more. Directly for the smaller ones, to PR for a couple of larger ones. I’m genuinely surprised not to have had any response at all (not even “Never contact us again, you maniac.”). My experience of publisher publicity in the past has been that if there’s a tool - a free one at that - that writers can use to gain audience, you jump on it. Wrong department? Wrong approach? I dunno. There are plenty of others I can try as I get the time.

• Getting regular readership seems to be the thing that’ll make or break 3NJ in the long run. Content, so far at least, it seems good for, which is cool.

It’s an oft-stated fact about self-publishing that “there are no gatekeepers”. No one stopping your work from being out there and finding an audience. No one to tell you sorry, your book doesn’t meet our criteria at this time.

This, though, is only partly true.

It is true that there’s no one stopping you making your book available for the world to see through whichever channel you choose to put it. It’s not true that there’s no one who decides whether your book finds an audience. (At least, not readily.) Without passing these new gatekeepers, your odds of finding significant readers are greatly diminished unless you already have a large following of your own. These gatekeepers are the cheap/free book promotion sites like Indie Book Bargains, Awesomegang and Pixel of Ink.

Even after the minor massacre wrought by Amazon’s changes to its affiliate income rules (whereby, as I recall, most of an affiliates click traffic earnings had to be for paid items, not free), having a book listed on these sites’ daily deals can make an enormous difference.

Unremarked and unmentioned, either of the Rourke novels on a three-day Amazon freebie weekend picks up a few hundred downloads at most. (I don’t have them in front of me any more, but they’ve varied, probably due to holiday time/not holiday time, between 400-600 on the occasions I’ve tried. Hardly boat-rocking numbers, but consistent.) The last time I put TDI on free I also submitted it around the various freebie list sites, which cost nothing but time. It was picked up by two of them that I know of, and saw about 1,700 downloads, enough to pitch it up to around the #250 mark in Amazon’s free list and into the top 20 crime. TTOG did even better and was picked up by three sites (again, that I know of). It saw 2,600 downloads and peaked around #130 overall, #9 in mystery and #5 in crime.

Clearly getting listed makes a vast difference, but it’s not a given. Unless - in some cases at least - you pay to do it. Otherwise, the sites’ owners pick ones that look/sound good, or, sometimes, filter by review numbers and overall star rating, both of which are very difficult to achieve honestly without first having a large readership already. (Note that this is not a gripe; I quite understand the need to filter from what must be a large number of posters.)

I was genuinely dubious of the effectiveness of listings on free/bargain Kindle sites, but I was wrong. These sites are in many respects the new gatekeepers of self-publishing. You may be able to pay to get through more easily, but they still hold a lot of the keys.

There is a drawback, of course, and that’s the issue of price. Unless the same lift can be provided for ebooks you need to pay for, to some extent free downloads offer an illusion of readership reach. While some people are browsing for something to look at now, many others are just hunting for bargains that they may or may not get around to. I’m no different; I have two books by friends to get round to once I’ve finished the dead tree Jack O’Connell I’m reading (slowly), and only then could I look at the sea of random freebies and bargains and all the rest that have accumulated in various forms and various formats over the past few months. Unless I’m sent to jail or find myself laid up in hospital for a long time, my chances of reading all of them are basically zero.

Still, be that as it may, the numbers are concrete. Twitter doesn’t put books in front of eyeballs. Blogging won’t win you a quick audience. But an acceptance from the right bargain site can. Next up in the experimental numbers stakes would be determining if the same happens for paid books, and seeing what fifty bucks of guaranteed mentions will get you.

(3NJ deliberately unmentioned due to youth of service, only tangential relevance to a gatekeeping discussion since it’s open to all, and obvious conflict of interest.)

There are numerous opinions of the Apple ebooks trial verdict. This one by Adam Engst is well worth reading as a summary of Cote’s ruling. Equally worth reading is Philip Elmer-DeWitt’s look at its strengths and weaknesses for CNN, linked to in that piece.

What is not worth reading is this one in the Guardian by Dan Gillmor. Gillmor is clearly a massive fan of Amazon’s, to the point that he’s able to eat up inaccuracies and bizarre personal interpretations.

So, [publishers and Apple] decided to work together against their common enemies: Amazon and genuine competition.

… The way they eliminated competition – for a time – was to insist on changing the terms of bookselling online. Before, publishers had sold digital rights, mostly to Amazon, as it was by far the biggest online retailer, based on the wholesale model that physical bookstores have used

There was lengthy testimony from B&N making it readily apparent that the agency model for ebooks was not an Apple invention. B&N had used it themselves for the Nook store in 2009, before Apple. (And, as far as I’m aware, the flat 30% charge has been standard iTunes practice for music and apps since the year dot.) The reason B&N used it was the same reason Apple used it: it was more attractive to publishers feeling squeezed by Amazon. Apple had also originally intended to use a wholesale model, according to Eddy Cue at least, but publishers, led by HarperCollins, wanted an agency model.

[Publishers wanted to get away from the wholesale model because] Amazon was going to monopolize the ebook market.

It already was. Most pre-iBookstore estimates had Amazon with 90-95% of the market.

They agreed with Apple to do things this way – and to a contract that forbade them from working with retailers that sold books at lower prices. Hence, Amazon had to go along or not get its books in the first place.

No, they didn’t. There was an abandoned draft terms sheet requiring publishers to use agency pricing on all accounts used in negotiations between Apple and the publishers, and a never-sent (presumably because LEGAL ADVICE), email from Steve Jobs saying they could sell with Apple only if they forced Amazon to switch to an agency model. The actual sent email said nothing of the sort, and the terms draft was dropped fast as being unenforceable. What replaced it was a ‘most-favoured nation’ clause allowing Apple to price-match regardless of what publishers had set prices at - which is standard; Amazon has one, Kobo has one, etc. etc. Apple were seeking to protect themselves from being priced out of the market by Amazon. The MFN did that, and they were happy.

The publishers, who come off a lot worse in the trial than Apple do, went to Amazon after agreeing to the iBookstore terms and demanded Amazon offer them a similar deal. But not because they were forced to. They did it because it would mean they could raise prices, as they were deeply concerned about the public’s perception of ‘fair’ ebook price levels and Amazon’s discounting often to the point of loss leading.

(And it worked. Prices went up. Amazon, ironically, earned more under the agency model. Publishers, equally ironically, earned less. People bought less because ebooks became more expensive. But it allowed publishers to keep the perceived average cost of an ebook up for a time.)

Apple and Amazon use draconian DRM (digital rights management) to restrict how buyers can use what they’ve bought – namely, by restricting which devices will display them. If the publishers ditched the DRM and sold directly to the public, they could charge a fair (that is, lower) price and make more money.

Oh dear. Publishers can choose with both sellers whether to protect their books with DRM. (See Tor for an example of a publisher who’s gone DRM-free.) DRM policy is not set by the retailer, but by the publisher. I agree that publishers are nuts for using it, and that it doesn’t achieve its stated aim, but they are under no compulsion to use it outside their own paranoia.

Amazon’s DRM has no device restriction; it has a software restriction. You can only view DRM-protected Kindle books in your Kindle app. But since they’re free and cross-platform, there’s no device limit per se. (Technically the same is true for iBooks, but since that’s limited to iOS devices only, until OS X 10.9 brings Macs to the still-Apple-only party, it’s more or less the same thing.)

There is also nothing stopping them from selling directly to the public, and this has nothing to do with DRM. Penguin, I know, actually used to do so for a time years ago. Why they haven’t built their own online selling brands for ebooks is one of the things about publishing that I least fathom.

(Other than, these days, Amazon’s willingness to instantly stop selling a publisher’s books as a bargaining tactic. See Hachette, Macmillan, et al.)

Second, Apple might consider backing off its “my way or the highway” view of the world. This is even less likely, but worth a mention anyway.

One might say the same for Amazon.

I have no particular dog in this race, though I’m not a fan of the Amazon approach to doing business, but, y’know, be choosy what you read on the subject.

It’s obvious, and has been for some time, that discovery is the tough nut to crack in the brave new world of publishing, for traditional and self-publishers. Traditional reviews used to be a key source of readers, but mainstream media book review sections have been squeezed for years and largely only cover big releases. Online reviewing has fragmented into a sea of book blogs (which I think is largely a good thing, to be honest; I like the idea of releasing a stranglehold on popular opinion previously held by newspapers. It just makes it hard to know who to listen to and where, even, to find reviews). Bestseller lists have only ever perpetuated sales for books on those lists.

There was a brief golden age for self-publishers when promotion via social media actually worked because it was a novelty and when offering a book for FREE was mind-blowingly freakish, crazy behavior that deserved retweeting to the nth degree. Now it’s everywhere and most people are jaded by it. I think anything that tries something new to get around this issue has a chance at making waves. So far the majority of the feedback I’ve had has been of the “Wow, this is such a cool idea! At last, something new!” variety. Whether I’ve executed that idea well or not, only time will tell. If I haven’t, someone else will do, because behavior needs to evolve.

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