The traditional publishers are dying. A much different industry will emerge in the next few years.

Why do ebooks by top authors not sell? Because the publishers price them like hardbacks. No one is going to pay hardcover prices for an ephemeral ebook. In fact, they must be priced cheaper than paperbacks - $2.99 or less.

Publishers cannot afford to sell at those prices - their overheads are too high. More: you can self-publish, and keep around 70% of the cover price. How much do you get from a publisher? Why would you accept so little?

How do you self-publish? And if you do self-publish, how do you get a bookstore to carry it?

> It's not you. You're fine. Your
> writing is as good as ever. The
> business is changing

Um, I realize that this is a vendor speaking to butter up her clients, but these sentences don't go together. When a business is changing, the problem *IS* you.

Adapt or die etc.

Rummy.

@a_random_guy: You missed the point. The new paradigm is to BYPASS the traditional book stores. And the established publishers.

The new wave of book stores (e.g., Amazon) makes it very easy to self-publish, and you can do it directly from your own (or lesser-known "publisher") website with a little work. And keep most of the incoming money. If you sell 10,000 copies of something at $1, then you get to keep about $6,000 (after money transfer fees, etc.). If a traditional publisher only sells 10,000 copies of something, you don't make squat.

BTW, the next thing that needs to happen is low-friction micropayment systems that don't gouge you like the credit cards or PayPal.

The problems with self-publishing:

1. Often-crappy quality of printing, layout, editing, writing.

2. No bookstore distribution.

Per a company (Greenleaf) that claims they get distribution for self-published books to bookstores...books they make the authors pay $10K to $30K for editing and layout, etc.: It's too much to ask consumers and retailers to change the way they buy books -- it's a lot to ask people just to buy your book.

3. Trade paperbacks have a hard time getting reviews in the newspaper. The organizer of a book event I participate in told me they think self-published books are mostly crap. If you can't get a publisher, your book probably isn't worth reading, in her view.

I have readers who won't buy a book on Amazon...a good many older readers, actually. And then there are people that see a book in bookstores. I lose something by losing bookstores.

No bookstore distribution -- no Barnes & Nobles distribution -- is a big deal. My publisher last time around made me change my title because Barnes & Noble didn't like it. That's how much money is involved from just one bookstore.

@Amy: Barnes and Noble will not exist within 24 months. They are nearly bankrupt, along with all of the other big-chain bookstores. Amazon had already wounded them, and ebooks are finishing them off.

Anyone who loves books will have already noticed that the selection available in the big bookstores has dwindled to a fraction of what it used to be. They try to hide this by displaying books face-out rather than spine-out, by arranging their displays differently, etc.

Several big-name authors have already announced that they will start self-publishing, and more will follow suit. The traditional publishers make most of their money from the few best-selling authors. Once their best authors jump ship, given the demise of the big bookstores, and with the high prices and idiotic DRM on their ebooks, the traditional publishers will soon follow Barnes and Noble into bankruptcy. Five years, max.

How to self-publish? Here is a starting point.

Borders is out of business. There aren't going to be many bookstores left. As a guy who loves books, it's too bad, but it's not changing. The people who adapt will make it. those who don't, won't.

Patrick, take a look at this: http://www.ttgnet.com/daynotes/2011/2011-24.html and scroll to the entry for June 10th. There are links to some good information on self publishing there.

The pricing, as noted, has got to change. There aren't many books I'd pay a lot to read. There are a lot of books I'd pay a little to read. Publishers are doomed. Editors with talent who go into business for themselves and provide this service to authors for a fee will do fine.

John Locke made a bundle figuring this self publishing out. His books could use some better editing, but are a bargain at one dollar each on my Kindle. It would probably cost me more in gas to go to the library to read something for free.

Amy has something most new authors will struggle to get - an audience. Put something on Amazon - plug this column. Use the column to plug the content on Amazon. How about a best of Advice Goddess Advice columns? Assuming you retain the rights to your work, it could be done fairly easily. I'd buy it to read the old ones.

The other problem with self-publishing is that you lose the publicity knowledge/contacts that comes with a publishing house. This isn't to say that self-promotion angle can't be done, but just because you're good writer doesn't mean you're a rock-star at self marketing.

It's also very hard to write a book, self-publish and then spend the time/money required to push push push that book when you don't have any advance. Everyone hear about the person who self-publishes and sells a million copies, but you don't hear about the thousands of people who self-publish and sell 150 copies.

Oh well, as crid says, Adapt or die, etc.

I am very good at promotion, but there's also time and a great deal of money involved (to buy books, send them out). Without connections as a publicist, it's nearly impossible to do what I did to get The Advice Ladies recognition: Call up CNN and ask if they'd seen the tiny piece on us in the NYT and get Gary Tuchman to do a big piece on us. Etc.

I got myself on The Today Show, thanks to walking packets around to the messenger centers in Manhattan, with an envelope with my picture (in the yellow evening dress holding the fly swatter) and the caption: "Miss Manners With Fangs" --LA Weekly

But I didn't get to be in studio -- it was just a 30 second segment in my house about rudeness. And it really didn't do much for book sales without it being a feature on me.

Other things I worked very hard on -- AARP, a CNN.com piece -- have fallen through...but not without myriad calls and emails sucking away my writing time.

I'm an enormously slow writer, too, because I need to say something worth reading and that takes a good deal of thought and work to write and a great deal of work to revise. I pay someone to edit every word that goes out publicly, save for stuff on my blog. And on my current book, I've been paying that editor and a 21-year-old recent Rutgers classics grad to read and comment.

I'm different from most authors in that I don't need a publisher to create the actual book. I have a copyeditor I refer to as SuperDave (because he's the most amazing person on grammar I've ever encountered, and a great guy, to boot). Gregg shot my book cover on "I See Rude People," and I wrote the back cover copy and fought to have the front cover fit with my book and what I know about how the eye reads type, etc., and look like a book men wouldn't be embarrassed reading.

Oh, and I forgot to say that I know to pay an editor and really good layout person as well. These are the things that people generally don't do when they self-publish. So their books are often ugly and unreadable.

Why do ebooks by top authors not sell? Because the publishers price them like hardbacks. No one is going to pay hardcover prices for an ephemeral ebook. In fact, they must be priced cheaper than paperbacks - $2.99 or less.

Last time I was between jobs, I worked as a part-time editor for an e-book publisher. All those books were less than $5 (many were less than $2). They were the worst crap I've ever read, but they had a voracious target audience, and their top authors earned six figures -- grammatical errors, poor story-telling, Lifetime Network-esque dialog and all. Many of their readers waited eagerly for the next idiotic release and snapped it up -- because at $2, why not?

Several big-name authors have already announced that they will start self-publishing, and more will follow suit.

And this, I think, will be the tipping point. When blogs first became a "thing," many were crap, and it was a widely ridiculed medium. Now, it's understood that they are simply a channel -- and that respected writers/journalists can build careers out of them and rise above the noise.

My husband frequently bugs me to write a book. He thinks it's more acceptable than blogging.

I'm never going to get rich writing like I am now, but it's enough to support the family, should I need to be the sole provider.

When a business is changing, the problem *IS* you.

Adapt or die etc.

Exactly. I'm sure there were similar arguments when the car was invented. "No, it's not you. Your horseshoes are as good as ever. The business is changing."

We can lament the death of print books all we want, but the business won't respond to nostalgic sadness.

E-readers are a great deal for customers, and that's what will push sales. I won't often wait to get to a bookstore or order online when I can have a book instantly in my hands.

Sure, there are people -- especially older people -- who won't switch to digital, but those people will die eventually, and authors will have to adapt to the market that's left.

What's happening to the publishing industry now is what started happening to the music industry about ten years ago. The big chain music stores are just about gone. There's a Fye and a Sam Goody left here. The Fye has an OK selection (except no classical anymore) but nearly everything is priced at $20 and above; their in-store traffic is still pretty decent from what I've seen, but it seems to be a lot of lookie-lus and not many buyers. The Sam Goody actually carries very little music anymore; it's mostly video and T-shirts and celebrity magazines. And if you walk around their store, you realize that a huge amount of their floor and wall space is taken up by stuff that isn't product -- posters, cardboard cutouts, etc. Makes me wonder how they stay in business. Myself, I do nearly all of my music buying online these days: Amazon, CD Baby, Artist Shop, and (for classical) Arkiv Music. And I do some downloading, mainly of electronica where most of the artists only release one track at a time. I'm glad I'm not a professional musician these days. I don't know how the hell they keep from starving.

I'm currently teaching myself to write Android apps. So I'm about to experience that world of self-publishing first hand, in a somewhat different form. I suspect I'm going to be one of those 150-download authors. But you never know until you try.

When a business is changing, the problem *IS* you.

Exactly.

Borders is gone. Barnes & Noble is on life support, but still struggling to stay alive by going digital. But the publishers still operate on the brick and mortar model.

Like the record companies, they cling to an antiquated business model and demand the world stop changing around them.

Publishers and the other customers at Belle Watling's are clinging to their memories of the past and pretending the present events aren't happening.

From Matt Welch in Reason:

The business of America isn’t necessarily business. It’s change. Constant, creative, destructive, entertaining change. As we look back over the last 10 years since that awful, still-indigestible morning of September 11, 2001, it’s tempting to make the counterintuitive claim that we’re the same country as ever, gossiping about the sex lives of politicians, enforcing no-fly zones against Middle East dictators, tuning in to The Simpsons. Much of that is true. But on a daily basis we vastly underestimate how dynamic America is, particularly in comparison to the aims of the Islamic medievalists who turned commercial aircraft into flying death machines 10 years ago.

Regardless of whether they hate us for our freedoms or for our promiscuous, hegemonic foreign policy, jihadists, like most fundamentalists, seek to forcibly create an atavistic, unchanging idyll. Those of us fortunate enough to live in the centers of modern liberal capitalism, in contrast, embrace and create change every day, consciously or not.

When the planes hit the towers, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia was all of nine months old. Facebook (launched in 2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) were still no more than gleams in their founders’ eyes. In 2001, according to Forbes, the then-feared AOL-Time Warner was the ninth biggest company in America by market valuation, and the telecommunications giant WorldCom was the 25th most profitable. In 2002 AOL-Time Warner lost $99 billion, and by 2003 WorldCom was bankrupt.

The churn of change isn’t limited to the tech-nology sector (although it’s also true that technology is no longer sealed within a “sector”). American life 10 years ago was filled with phenomena and controversies that look bizarre in retrospect. Two weeks before 9/11 a federal District Court judge upheld a Florida law barring homosexual couples from adopting children, a law that the state’s social conservatives said was necessary because “scientific evidence” proved gay-raised kids were more likely to be sexually abused. In late 2010, Florida’s mostly Republican establishment didn’t bother challenging a state appeals court decision overturning this last-of-its-kind ban.

Why do ebooks by top authors not sell? Because the publishers price them like hardbacks. No one is going to pay hardcover prices for an ephemeral ebook. In fact, they must be priced cheaper than paperbacks - $2.99 or less.

THIS.

I love to read, but when ebooks cost the exact same amount as a real book, they aint gonna sell.

Also I think 3/4s of the Barnes&Nobel's in the Phx area have closed, and I cant for the life of me recall the last time I saw a Borders

I think some form of print books will always be with us. I cant imagine leafing thru my farside collection on a kindle

Seems to me there's very little to be gained by bemoaning the end of print. If I were a writer, I'd be looking for a literary agent that is actively incorporating SEO and other forms of online marketing in their services. This function should not be left to yesterday's publicists.

So considering I'm still working with ghost editor Nicole Bokat on polishing my novel THE PARANOIA CLUB (and I'm almost finished writing another novel), will this wild new world of publishing actually end up working in my favor in some crazy way? After all, the book world is changing every day!

Just wondering: is our astute friend Susan Shapiro's "Secrets of Selling Your First Book Seminar" undergoing changes as a result of the publishing world's changes?

It's always something! :-)

Was just listening to a facinating panel on self vs traditional publishing. Had one author who was very self publishing/ new publishing is cheap easy and everything rosy, the rest were eh no.

Things to consider, fiction and non fiction are completely different maerkets. With self publishinig being better fit for non-fiction.
with traditional, being in general better for fiction.
Why? if you are a consumer looking for a non fiction book on the underground railroad, you google it and come up with a list of 15 non-fiction books on the subject and buy the one which fits what you are searching for. No advertising needed.
With fiction, A consumer want's a romance between a vampire and a werewolf, a google search, finds 500 different ones. Which one gets chosen? The one whose authors name gets recognised.
Which means you are already established or someone (publisher / agent/ you have Oprah as a friend ) is doing a lot of advertising for you.
Word of mouth can work but so can winning the lottery, the odds in both are against you.

I wonder if books have a future. Or newspapers.

This is not a brave, new world, but rather an impoverished one, if what I fear comes to pass.

I think there's a Borders near Fiesta Mall in Mesa. If it's still there it will certainly be gone soon as the rest of the shopping center is empty.

I self published my first book in 1999. I talked with a publisher who offered me a one time payment of $5,000 and future royalties based on additional print runs. I talked to other authors who worked with that publisher, and few ever had a second print run.

I had the book printed locally (8.5 by 11" two color cover 86 pages for $3.20 each) and sold them for $19.97 plus by running ads in magazines. I sold the first run of 500 in two months, then did a second edition (8.5 by 11" two color 76 pages plus cover for $1.82 each) and sold them for $29.97 plus shipping.

I sent review copies with press releases to magazines and two of them ran the release as an article including a call out box with ordering information.

I did direct mail to library purchasing agents which resulted in few sales for about $5K in costs. I never did figure the library market out, but I'm sure there's money there.

I sold that book for 3 years and made a lot of money. Much more than the publisher would have given me.

Probably more importantly, I learned how to sell information products. Today I write how to books and sell them as PDF downloads.

10 years ago people who wrote books for publishers thought they were better than me. Now they're asking me for advice on promoting their books.

I gave up "status" by self-publishing my first book, but gained freedom. Status might get you a better table at a fancy restaurant, but it won't pay the check.

"Also, literary agents sell you to the publishers. They are not marketing experts."

That's how it is today. Today is ending very rapidly.

You hire a PR firm to get the best PR.

The good ones are few and far between. Unfortunately, it's hard to know if they are good up front, and PR firms are fucking expensive. Like adding a well paid full time employee expensive.

After firing a number ineffective firms, we've given up on professional PR, and instead started working getting to know relevant members of the press personally. Seems to work much better; most PR pitches just get circular filed anyway. Better to think of it as part of a long term conversation about topics of mutual interest, which sometimes include our business.

I'm still buying treeware when I want to read.

Most of the reason:

The Kindle/Nook/eReaders are pretty much north of $100 a piece for a decent one. Yes you get X numbers of free books. But then to still pay through the roof for the "rights" to a book just doesn't sit well with me.

This is the same thing that I objected to with RIAA. I bought the same music as an album, cassette and CD. All at $7+ a piece. Then I want to make it into an MP3 for my use -- and RIAA wants more money. KMA.

Some of my favorite treeware has been bought as hard back, before the release date. Now to rebuild my library, I'd have to pay another $17 or even $9 for the same thing?

Then the amount of books that are going to be lost because the publishers are going to do a Disney with the DMCA or similar acts.

Sorry but RIAA and MPAA, and whatever publisher's group -- the days of control to the mass market are waning quickly.

Another thing to think about for Copy Editing is using the Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) system.

I buy books, exclusively, but nearly always second-hand due to being very cash poor atm. I truly dislike reading long articles from screens, although would consider a kindle if spending a long time in a non English speaking country.

Anyway, very interesting piece Amy, thanks for writing this. As an aspiring writer looking for ways to launch a late career, it's all very relevant to me indeed. And I hear you on the slowness of writing! Revision after revision is one of those things about prose writing that nobody warns you about in writers'-wannabe-fantasyland, that's for sure! :-)

Library.

Seriously? You eat cat food?

Listen, I don't mean to give anybody a hard time or anything, but...

...Hah hah! Just kidding!...

There's a difference between wanting to "write books as a profession" and "having a bunch of ideas you want to project clearly into the minds of other people."

Someone saying they just want to write books is like me wanting to be a rock star at age 17. (Or 47.) In my teenage dreams of being a rock star, I didn't fantasize about hours of study of Italian to learn the history of music notation, or years of practicing of scales or reading a library of books about theory. I didn't even dream the first chorus of my new hit single. I didn't want to be loved for musically saying anything specifically great, I just wanted to be loved for saying things. That imagination didn't actual gel into something interesting.

Yeah, sure— It would be great if I could stand, in spotlight of wealth and adoration, at the pointy end of the funnel... At the most remunerative part of a vast and complicated fame-making industry. But the reason these enterprises (rock music and publishing) are dying is that they're full of intermediaries... Middlemen who gather materials and arrange shipping and print packaging and co-ordinate production and distribution all the rest of it... Thousands and thousands of people who have absolutely no personal interest in the feelings that the reader or listener will get from the product. In turn, those thousands and thousands of people are of no interest to the reader or listener.

So the thousands and thousands are losing their jobs. These enterprises are being dis-intermediated by the technology. People can make much faster connections to the talents who move them in a personal way.

(Here's the best article you'll read about this in 2011.)



Meanwhile—

If you want to polish your powers of expression day and night for whatever purposes fate puts in front of you, no one's going to stop you, right?

I still plink on guitars for about an hour a day. I've figured out things about music, and the work of the men I admire, that would not have become clear otherwise; it's not about wanting to tour with the Stones, wearing leather pants in front of pretty girls or anything.

It's at least possible, just possible, that if you really cranked your writing skillz into a higher gear –your observation, your note-taking, and then your final wording– you'd become a talent who people would seek and find, whatever medium you worked in.

Books are dead trees. Very few people buy them out of fondness for musty cellulose. Almost everyone is trying to make some kind of connection with a human being. Very few are trying to sustain an impersonal industry... Including someone who just wants to "write books as a profession".

If all you want is to move product....

I think there are three broad trends all contributing to making it tougher for writers:

1. Technological shifts are changing the business models and distribution channels

2. The recession

3. I am wondering if we are also not just reaching the creative "age of abundance"?

Consider music. 10000 years ago, if I wanted to listen to music, I had the choice of either listening to Ogg or Oog sing by the campfire outside the cave ... 1000 years ago, perhaps a few local performers in the local village tavern ... 150 years ago, I could add things like professional performances of classical works ... now, if I want to listen to music, I can sit in my armchair and pick and choose from literally hundreds of thousands of songs just a few mouse-clicks away, many highly professionally produced by very talented individuals, and professional performances of literally the entire works of every great classical musician combined constitutes but a tiny percentage of my music collection.

Books ... apparently, "[Bowker reports] that over one million (1,052,803) books were published in the U.S. in 2009, which is more than triple the number of books published four years earlier (2005) in the U.S." ... that's nearly 3000 new books per day in the US alone. If I want to read a book, I have easy access not only to the collective great works already produced by mankind historically, but literally over a million new books per year. And while a lot of it is junk, a huge amount is really good by absolute standards. And as reading material, it competes with other written material, as well as other forms of media, which are also proliferating abundantly.

Until recently we tended to regard excellent songs, excellent books, excellent movies, excellent TV shows, excellent comic books and graphic novels, even excellent video games as "rare treasures" produced by our culture. Now the onslaught of new works is becoming so pervasive we can't turn it off. We have thousands of good authors.

The main thing that was making it possible for some book authors to continue to make lots of money was e.g. the 'Oprah effect' ... get your book on Oprah, it's not necessarily that it's hugely better than the thousands of other excellent works being produced, you just struck it lucky. People like popular books as a shared cultural experience still, but even that seems to be diluting to me.

I'm not in the industry so I speak as an outsider. But I think Amy's comments on the importance of being good at promotion, and to work tirelessly on promotion, seem to corroborate this. It's not really about writing some great book and then trying to get it discovered anymore. There are tonnes of great books, it's now about getting the eyeballs out there to see yours, against all the others.