Virtual floor placement and retail sales

More evidence that the comments on The Passive Voice are well worth reading: M. Louisa Locke wrote a great analysis of why most indie authors don't have good sales on Barnes & Noble--but some do.

She writes:

First of all, when you first go into the books store [on Barnes & Noble's Web site] and look at the side for the categories (which I see as looking for book shelves) and choose Fiction, you are given 4 choices versus 19 for Amazon’s Fiction listings. Say you are interested in historical fiction–there is nothing for you. So then you look at the stuff in the center of the page–and you get the equivalent of the tables at the front of a bookstore (you know, best sellers, new releases, editors picks)....

[She eventually finds historical fiction, but it takes forever and she's not sure she could do it again.] As the author of an historical mystery, I know that these odd byzantine browsing paths help explain why I sell so few books on Barnes and Noble, while other authors (who are in one of the main 4 categories or instant collections) are selling well. The readers just aren’t finding my books.

 

Floor placement is incredibly important to brick-and-mortar retail. It's why a company like Coca-Cola will pay extra to have their product placed on the eye-level shelves or (even more expensive) stacked up at the end of the aisle of the grocery store. It's why when you go into a department store, the first floor is cosmetics and handbags--those have a higher profit margin than the actual clothing you have to go up three floors to try on. And it's interesting to see that floor placement is every bit as important in a virtual store.

I've seen theories that Barnes & Noble just attracts a different audience than Amazon--and I'm willing to believe that they do to some degree, because different brands typically appeal to different demographics. But clearly one piece of Amazon's success in selling indie authors (and they are very successful at it--a large majority of indie writers make the large majority of their sales on Amazon) is their virtual floor plan. If you highlight only the best sellers, then that's pretty much all you'll sell. If you make it easy to find weird and obscure titles from people no one has ever heard of, then you'll sell those, too.

(And yes, the post she left the comment to is the result of a tip from me, because I knew Passive Guy would be interested in the subject. But her post is actually on another topic, so I don't think we're too far down the rabbit hole here....)

Progress report

After a few days of not being able to work on the layout, I finished it today! Huzzah!

Ordinarily I would go ahead and print it out and proof it and then find some really tiny mistakes and then input those corrections into both the layout and the e-books. But, man, those LibraryThing reviews! Even people who had issues with Trang want to read the next book ASAP. So I think I'm bumping Trust up to top priority, with the large-print edition of Trang downgraded to being the project I work on when I haven't had any sleep.

Funny numbers

Not shockingly, there's been a lot of coverage of Barnes & Noble lately.

Whether or not the company is going to go under is pretty much an academic concern for self-published authors. (And here's a more optimistic assessment than mine, although I feel a certain obligation to point out that that position is hedged with such inspirational examples as Research In Motion.) Authors are suppliers, not employees or investors, and the cost of putting a book up on B&N is zero, so, you know, if they get out of the soup, very nice for them, and if they don't, presumably other retailers will pick up the slack. Really the only numbers a self-published author needs to worry about with B&N is his or her own sales figures.

But being a former business reporter, I wanted to note something that Passive Guy first pointed out: No one knows what B&N's share of the e-book market actually is. How could they know that they have 25% or 26% or 27% or 30% of the e-book market, when overall e-book sales aren't reported anywhere? Certain numbers that public companies report are federally regulated--lie about your 2012 profits, and you get in all kinds of trouble. But most numbers (especially those companies like to throw around in press releases) aren't--and guess what category "percentage of the e-book market" falls into?

This is an old, old problem in publishing: Even with print books, the best data available is far from perfect, and it doesn't cover e-books. I don't know that it's possible to gather good data about e-books: Even if you had audited reports from the major retailers, publishers and authors can sell books from their own Web sites, so how are you going to account for that?

So we're left with that old journalistic standby--guesswork! Guesswork and (my favorite) not telling people that it's guesswork!

For example, in The New York Times, you see "the company has made quick work of capturing almost 30 percent of the e-book market in two years." And then you see a bunch of quotes from B&N executives saying that, wow, this is an amazing business to be in--look how much market share they've captured! And so quickly! Certainly it makes lots and lots of sense for someone to come along and buy it!

Of course, there's also this, also from The New York Times, "I.H.S. iSuppli, a research company, estimates that Barnes & Noble has 13 percent of the e-reader market after two years in the business, versus 67 percent for Amazon. The company tracked shipments of display parts to prepare its estimates."

Oh! So B&N controls only 13 percent of the market!  It's not the same market--they could control 13 percent of the e-reader market and almost 30 percent of the e-book market simultaneously. But the Nook is an e-reader, not an e-book. It's not B&N's e-book business. Nor is it B&N.com. It's a device, and they control 13 percent of the market for that specific device, not including tablets or cell phones or other things that people read e-books on.

(ETA: Of course, the 13 percent figure is also guesswork, but at least it honestly identifies itself as guesswork and provides the reader some idea of how it was determined, which helps a reader decide whether it's a good guess or not. That's a lot better than regurgitating data provided by an interested party as though it were sacred writ.)

Again, this is of academic interest, really, but it may help you make more sense of future events. There's a bit of a snow job going on right now--nothing wrong with that, really, it's not like I post the "meh" reviews of Trang here. Just be aware that reporting is usually regarded by companies as a venue for marketing.

B&N not doing so well

Barnes & Noble is looking to sell assets and may spin off the Nook. It looks like they're running out of money. This can happen when you're trying to develop a new business at the same time your old business is collapsing--you just don't have the funds to invest properly in the new line or to get past that initial money-losing period of development.

It will be interesting to see what happens to their Web site and the Nook. (Nobody wants the brick-and-mortar bookstores--not even Barnes & Noble itself.) A new player who isn't encumbered by B&N's financial history could step in and make a big success of one or the other, or both could just go away. B&N itself is obviously going down, and I am not optimistic regarding their prospects of finding a buyer for their more-appealing assets: Their problems are longstanding and well-known, so at this point any potential buyer will probably wait until B&N actually goes into bankruptcy and then snap up those assets on the cheap.

(Oh, and I've been unproductive the past couple of days because of kids and general life crap, but I should get back in the saddle today.)

The review page is up!

It's here! Look at what nice things people say! Aw....

You know, this really does help with the motivation--it's hard to get going if you feel like the end product is something no one cares about or wants. But now, people are all excited about reading the next book! Sounds like I need to get off my ass and finish it, doesn't it?

I find it especially cool that people who don't ordinarily read sci-fi like the book. Sci-fi is worth reading!

What authors want

So, yeah, I still haven't figured out Google e-books. It occurred to me that maybe I'm not allowed to put a book up there, because I'm self-publishing and not a publishing house? But of course I couldn't find that information.

Now there's a rumor that Apple will do it's own self-publishing platform, plus Kobo (which has a larger presence overseas) may do one as well.

It seems like people are just now figuring out, Hey, Amazon is making some good business off of them there self-publishing authors! The cost to Amazon of, say, keeping Darcie Chan's book on their servers is minimal, and she's made them more than $250,000 in six months! You can't beat that with a stick!

So everyone wants in now, but as often happens with these "me-too" businesses, everyone wants to ignore what made the original business successful. Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords ARE EASY FOR WRITERS TO USE. Got that? Yes, creating a file people can easily read is a little complicated, but actually uploading it and making it available for sale? EASY EASY EASY EASY. Like I said, you never saw whiny posts about that aspect of the process until I tried Google e-books (and then I made up for lost time).

One aspect of the Apple rumor that is particularly amusing if it is true is that they will be demanding exclusivity from authors. That's a joke, right? Amazon only recently began offering authors certain perks in exchange for exclusivity. It's a totally voluntary program, and what popularity it has is because Amazon can really move books for you--but even with Amazon's selling power, they are only asking for three months' of exclusivity (and plenty of people object even to that), and it's certainly not a requirement for listing your book. I can't imagine anyone giving up access to, say, Amazon or B&N or even Smashwords in exchange for being in the iBookstore (which you can get into via Smashwords anyway).

Oh, and another thing? The current players PAY WELL. A royalty of more or less 70%.

Are these new players going to succeed? Well, if they make it impossible to use the service, if they put draconian requirements on writers, and if they don't offer them enough money, I'm going to go out on a limb and say no.

It's almost like this is a business, and authors are rational economic actors, is it not? I realize that authors have a reputation of being patsies, and that this reputation is sometimes deserved, but I'm going to be generous to authors and note that for a very long time, they had basically no choice other than to get screwed. Nowadays things have changed--past tense, have already changed. Apple isn't some White Knight riding into the rescue here--if it's actually entering the field, it's entering one that's pretty well occupied by some pretty generous players.

Progress report

I laid out SIX chapters today--whoo! Yeah, it's amazing what I can accomplish when I actually have the time to work on something.

You know, one problem with breaking compound words so that the break separates the two words is that it makes it really confusing when you're trying to figure out which hyphens to keep and which to ditch in a new layout. "Walk-ing" is easy, "Five-Eighths" is easy, but "life-like" or "non-committal"? Those sent me reaching for Webster's.

With this layout, I'm experiementing with using Word more (I know, it's my nemesis, but I try to make it a useful nemesis). One of the problems with Word is that if you take a two-page view (which you need to do to make sure the two blocks of text in a spread are the same length) it assumes that your chapter's first page is on the left-hand side of the spread, which isn't always true. Acrobat doesn't have that problem, so before I'd switch back and forth a lot between the two, which was a pain and really time-consuming.

So I'm trying to use Word's two-page view. When the chapter starts on a right-hand page, I cut the page onto the clipboard while I'm noodling in Word. Then I paste it back into place before I move everything over to Acrobat. That's actually worked fine. The larger problem is that, you know, I'm using Word, which just isn't as reliable as one might like. Word moves lines around and repeats them and pretends that they are someplace they aren't, so even if it looks like everything's going great, I still stop and put the layout into Acrobat every ten pages or so. Otherwise I'll discover things like six missing lines (seriously, six!) on the third page of a 45-page chapter (remember, this is the large print edition, so these chapters are HUGE), and I have to lay out the whole damned thing again.

Creating clickable table of contents; or, There's more than one way to skin a cat (sorry, cats)

One of the nice things about the Passive Voice blog is that it attracts a lot of self-published authors, so the comments on the posts are usually informed and well worth reading.

For example, in the comments to that Diego Basch post, we wound up discussing how we create clickable tables of contents--everybody has a slightly different method, and all appear to work. Working with software seems to be one of those things where a method that person A finds quite simple utterly confounds person B (plus person B may not have the same software as person A), so if you're trying to figure out how to make a clickable table of contents, definitely poke through there and see what seems doable to you.

If you're wondering why you should bother making a clickable TOC, this same comments section inspired Jaye Manus to write a post about how important they are to navigating a book. (The short version: You can only flip one page at a time in an e-reader, so jumping back five chapters to refresh your memory about who that character is? Not so easy.)

Progress report

Today was busy again--the problem with holidays is that you spend all this time and effort getting ready for them, and then you do them, and then you have to do all the stuff you were too busy to do because you were getting ready for the holiday. Maybe I'm old, or maybe I'm trying to find a frigging work routine right now and resent the interruption, but I'm kind of relieved all the chaos is over. Have a happy 2012 despite my Grinchiness!

Anyway, I did manage to lay out two chapters plus the front and back matter. I'm now up to chapter 8 on a 19-chapter book....

"I haven't watched TV in a couple of years."

This is a post by Diego Basch (found via Passive Voice) musing about how getting a Kindle a few years ago has changed his habits--primarily his reading habits, but as the above quote shows, it's affecting his other media consumption habits as well. He's not one of these people who is too good to watch television, it's just that he's got this really handy device (more than one, actually) with all these books on it, so why wouldn't he read instead?

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, at which point there was a lot of gnashing of the teeth over the decline of the written word. People didn't read, they watched television. They also didn't write, they made phone calls.

The concern was that people were being neurologically re-programmed so that eventually they wouldn't be able to read and write at all, and that would be the end of civilization (the fact that humankind managed somehow to move from complete illiteracy to reading and writing in the first place was ignored). It turns out that, yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as neuroplasticity, and the brain that can rewire itself around major physical damage can also manage to re-learn the habits of reading and writing. Indeed, nowadays one challenge facing telecommunications companies is that no one makes voice calls any more; we just text and e-mail and use Facebook.

So why did we go from writing letters to making phone calls to writing texts/e-mails/posts? The short answer is convenience. Technological changes make it more convenient to call people, and then they made it more convenient to e-mail/text/Facebook.

E-books are convenient--they're cheap and they're easy. Now instead of turning on a TV, a person can fire up their little device and read just as easily (if not more easily--try finding a TV showing something you want to watch during the moments when your spouse is using the bathroom at a restaurant).

If you still want to feel really badly about humanity--and who am I to judge?--you can call this laziness and take heart in the fact that human nature is consistently bedeviled by the sin of Sloth. That way you can continue to flagellate yourself, which I'm sure is a relief to certain people.

Thoughts on reviews

I know, today I'm more using the blog as a tool for procrastination rather than a tool to prevent it, but I was thinking about the LibraryThing reviews and how best to use them, and I think I'm going to create a "Reviews" section on this Web site. I'm also going to put a little disclaimer on there noting that these aren't paid reviews or written by my friends.

Also, so far they are quite positive, which I think is further evidence that the book is now positioned correctly. Interestingly there's a lot of "I liked the mystery aspect!" which actually works well with an idea I had for advertisements (which I do plan to do some day). I was wondering about using that to noodle with the Amazon categories, but I hesitate because it's not in any sense a traditional whodunit. (Maybe there's something like "futuristic suspense"?)

Goals and failure via Dean Wesley Smith

Dean Wesley Smith is starting a new series of posts titled "Goals and Dreams 2012," and I really like the two posts he's done so far. His first post is about how, yeah, you're gonna fail, but as long as you're making progress, don't sweat it. Writers tend to be perfectionists, which is a double-edged sword--I think on a certain level, a writer needs to be a detail-oriented perfectionist, otherwise you'll forget plots, have incoherent characters, and write long winding sentences that don't actually make any sense.

But you have to be wary of what are called in self-help/psychology circles the Three Ps: Perfectionism, Procrastination, Paralysis. If your perfectionism gets out of control, you'll put off actually producing anything for fear it won't be "perfect." If this continues unchecked, you won't ever do anything, because you might make a mistake.

I think the balance is achieved by just making sure you're moving forward--or just forward enough. To take the examples Smith uses: He had certain weight loss, fitness, and short-story writing goals that he didn't meet. He did, however, write a bunch of stories, exercise more, and lose some weight. By "failing" to meet his story-writing goal, Smith made $3,500 per year that he didn't have before, very much enjoyed himself, and proved to himself that he could crank out stories at high speed. I have no idea whether this applies to Smith or not, but with some people a small reduction in weight or small increase in fitness can have an outsized impact on their blood pressure and cholesterol levels. So the larger goals (more money, developing beneficial work habits, better health) are being reached even if the specific goals for 2011 were not.

The second blog post has some really nitty-gritty advice about making time to write. Possibly the most important bit is to discuss your new and exciting scheduling needs with your family and significant others at the very outset. I don't mean to insult your loved ones, but the world is full of people with some really stupid ideas about what writers do. I see this a lot particularly with younger writers--they hook up with some fine young thing who wants them because writers are all cool and arty and sexy and alcoholic, and then they don't get any support for their need to spend long hours cooped up by themselves with a computer (while not suffering from a debilitating hangover) like some nerd. It doesn't get any easier once you start making money--I have people in my family who have never understood that freelancing and being self-employed are not the same thing as being unemployed, and they have never understood that not being tied to a 9-to-5 schedule doesn't mean that a person doesn't have to spend most of their time working. (I'm not sure how they thought I was supporting myself all those years, although with that generation "a man" seems to be the go-to answer to any and all questions.)

Evaluating a business and an industry

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a good post here about holiday sales--looks like people are using their new Kindles to pick up free copies of Jane Austen and Mark Twain (which is amusing, considering how Twain wanted to treat Austen's corpse). That's good news if you want people to read good books, but as she points out, if you're expecting some huge post-Christmas spike in your own sales, you may be disappointed.

Of course, whatever you're expecting, you may be disappointed, because no one really knows how e-book buyers will behave. It's a new industry--really, really new. What people will buy, when they will buy, how they will buy, how much they will pay...all a mystery. Nobody knows. The more certain you are about specific, short-term stuff, the more likely it is you'll be wrong.

I think that's fine. Obviously if you're counting on your e-book to save you from imminent fiscal collapse, you may not agree, but in all honesty, if you're counting on any book to save you from imminent fiscal collapse, you badly need to reassess your financial strategy. (No joke: If you want to get rich quick, lottery tickets are the better risk.) Dean Wesley Smith has a great blog post on how you're likely to make money writing--slowly, that's how.

That long-term perspective not only makes sense on the level of personal finance, it's a good one to take on the industry as a whole. I know I've said this many times before, but if you're selling a product for $6 or $3 or $1, and you're able to make a decent profit off of that, then you have a huge advantage over someone who is selling a similar product for $26 or $17 or $14, especially if they are locked into those high prices because of their costs.

Does this mean that the person charging a high price is going to go under right away, or ever? Not necessarily. There are plenty of ways to fill a high-priced niche--offer luxurious books, fancy authorial brand names, and exceptional service. A more germane question is: Does the low-cost provider need the high-cost provider to go under in order to thrive? No. If Bentley has a great year, that doesn't hurt Kia one bit. What we're in now is a genuine industry revolution that is opening up whole new markets for authors. That's great--but when new territory opens up, you can't expect it all to be neatly mapped out for you.

Blargh

Tried again to get Google e-books to work. No dice, of course. I keep giving them sensitive financial information, and they keep acting like they never got it, which of course just gives me so much more confidence in them. (Seriously, if you are wondering why I never did these long, whiny posts about getting an account set up on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords, it's because it was super easy! I cannot for the life of me understand why Google is making this hard.)

I also started the large-print edition. I figured I could merge the old large-print layout with the new revised layout, but Word decided that I couldn't. Thanks again, Word--you're always there for me. So I am laying out the whole thing again--I'm reminding myself that it didn't take very long last time, but I didn't get a lot of sleep last night and am tired and (you guessed it!) cranky. So I think I'm just going to call it quits after one chapter--yes, I'm slacking; no, I don't care.

Summing up e-book production

So, if you missed it, Crabby McSlacker of Cranky Fitness fame (go read it, it's REALLY funny and has a lot of good advice) posted a question about self-publishing. I want her to publish her novel for the very selfish reason that I want to read it, so I was e-mailing her about how to produce e-books. Then I decided that what I had written wasn't a bad summary of the process, so I'm going to copy it here, with the regular disclaimer that the whole thing will probably be completely different six months from now:

 

Converting the file isn't hard, and all the software you need is available for free. The only thing is that it's a little misleading, because both Amazon and B&N act like you can upload a Word document, preview it in their previewer, and voila!--it will come out looking great.

I learned the hard way that that's bullshit--their converter sucks, and their preview tool sucks so you don't know how bad the conversion is. It turns out that this is not a big deal--I just have to convert to the file to ePub myself and upload it. Of course, I had no idea how to do that, or even that I had to do that, but eventually I figured it out, and it's actually not especially difficult (and I am not especially tech-savvy).

Right now my process for creating and uploading an e-book to Smashwords, B&N, and Amazon goes like this:

1. I take the Word file and I reformat it according to Smashwords' instructions. Basically this clears away any bad formatting that might cause problems with the conversion.
2. I upload the Word file to Smashwords (with the cover image inserted into the file). That's all you have to do with them.
3. I take that Word file, pull out the cover image and the Smashwords-specific language, and I convert it into HTML.
4. I take an HTML editor and I make a table of contents with anchor links to each chapter heading (this is to create a clickable table of contents, which is essential to navigating the book)
5. I use Calibre to convert the HMTL file into an ePub file that contains the cover image.
6. I open that file in Adobe Digital Editions to make sure it looks right.
7. I upload that ePub file to B&N.
8. I use Calibre to convert the HMTL file into an ePub file that contains no cover image.
9. I open that file in Adobe Digital Editions to make sure it looks right.
10. I upload that ePub file to Amazon, asking them to include the cover image.

Steps 8-10 are because Amazon seems to do a better job converting ePub to Mobi than Calibre does, but if I include the cover image myself, it winds up looking weird. I've used MobiPocket Creator to make my own Mobi files, but they don't look as good (and I haven't taken the trouble to figure out why).

Sorting out what I need to do

I'm having kind of a chaotic holiday season here, so although I'm trying to settle back into some kind of actual productive groove, it's a bit of a challenge.

Here are the things I need to do:

1. Process the feedback on Trust and make the appropriate revisions. Once that's done with, I can start actually getting it ready for release.

2. Update the large-print edition of Trang.

3. Write Trials.

And there's random annoying crap, like today I got the print copies of Trang to use for a Goodreads giveaway. So I went to look that up...and they'll only let you give away books that have been published in the last six months. (Seriously? Gee, thanks. I guess I'll figure out something else to do with those copies. I mean, I was hoping to give them away for free. But if you think your readers would rather not....) And Google e-books still has not figured out how it might pay me, because it is stupid.

Anyway, getting back to my to-do list...looking at it, I'm thinking I just need to let go of Trials for the moment. I kind of don't want to do that because I made a real start on it, but I've told people that Trust would be released in the spring, and by rights, I should have already updated the large-print edition of Trang. (I mean, yes, no one has bought it yet, but I would be really embarrassed if someone did and it was all riddled with errors--it really puts the lie to my dedication to accessibility if the large-print edition is crappy, doesn't it?)

Another advantage of working on the large-print edition is that, unlike revising Trust, it is the kind of project I can work on even when my time is all broken up, which it is right now. It shouldn't take too long to do, and hopefully by then things will settle down a bit, and then I can calmly focus on Trust.

And then tax time will be upon us. Oh my dear sweet Lord.

(P.S. I'm still giving out e-books to the LibraryThing people, but already there are five reviews up on LT. So those people work fast! And they seem to take reviewing very seriously--a lot of them told me they wanted a Smashwords coupon instead of a file because that way they could leave a review there.)

Wow, Google e-books is a mess

So, I'm trying to put Trang up on Google e-books. Holy crap, is that site not designed to make me feel any less cranky toward them--it's just the worst in terms of figuring out what the hell you need to do.

In order to get paid when people buy your book on any on-line retailer, you need to include information to identify you to the IRS as well as an account number where they can deposit the money. Everyone else makes this a really easy 1-2-3 process: Step 1, enter taxpayer ID. Step 2, enter account info. Step 3, you're ready to rock.

With Google, it's more like:

HERE IS STEP

Um, gee, this isn't working. Where are the directions?

(dig around for several minutes until I find an appropriate help page)

Oh, yeah, right--that's step 3! I need to do step 1 and 2 before  I do step 3. Where's step 1?

(dig around for several more minutes)

Ah! Here's step 1! And step 2! Nowhere near step 3, or each other!

(do step 1. do step 2)

OK, it doesn't look like step 2 is working. Is it really not working, or is it just that one of those steps haven't gone through yet?

(dig around for several minutes more--because why would you ever put all the relevant information in the same place, or link it together in any way?)

Oh, crap--it's not 1-2-3! It's 1-2-3-4-5!

 

So, we shall see if I ever wind up on sale on Google, and if I do, if they'll ever pay me.

Smashwords has been around for, what, five minutes? It has a tiny fraction of the staff and resources Google has. B&N only began doing this a year ago. And both companies, along with Amazon, have an interface is about a thousand times easier to use and looks about a thousand times more professional than Google's. Seriously, if I had started out on Google, I would have given up self-publishing as a bad business.