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Digital Natives Prefer Print

March 1, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

Ran across an article in the WaPo that was interesting both for its contents and the fact that the paper is now owned by Jeff Bezos, emperor of Amazon:

Frank Schembari loves books — printed books. He loves how they smell. He loves scribbling in the margins, underlining interesting sentences, folding a page corner to mark his place.

Schembari is not a retiree who sips tea at Politics and Prose or some other bookstore. He is 20, a junior at American University, and paging through a thick history of Israel between classes, he is evidence of a peculiar irony of the Internet age: Digital natives prefer reading in print.

Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, it’s definitely worth a read. Despite Silicon Valley prophecy, human beings are apparently not so easily led to the digital light.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books, print, reading

Personal Publishing, Micromarkets and Meaning

February 4, 2013 By Mark 1 Comment

Toward the end of last year, as a holiday gift, I put together a self-published book for my family. The manuscript was originally written by my grandmother (1910-2009) when she was in her eighties, and brings to life teenage trips she took to visit her eldest sister, who lived on a Wyoming homestead. To that original document were added photographs from the trips, a short page about the author, and a cover.

My grandmother originally intended her manuscript as a young-adult title. She submitted it to a few publishers, but after finding no interest she rewrote it as a more personal family memoir. In putting a book together based on that text I was conscious both of the work’s history and of her intent, but even more so of the responsibility of presenting her fairly and well. Fortunately, she did most of the heavy lifting with her own words.

What surprised me most about producing such a work was the impact the physical book had as an object when I finally held the first proof in my hands. The words had been around for decades, the pictures for decades more, but merging them into a book created something greater than the sum of its parts. And this feeling was shared by members of my family as well.

There is, obviously, something about a book as an object that confers a sense of importance about the contents. However that book came to be, and whatever the quality of the contents, at a bare minimum someone took the time and effort to assemble it — to create a new object from various pieces of source material. The result might be the functional equivalent of a scrapbook or personal journal, but the fact that it can be held and shelved alongside other tomes gives it a familiar, almost universal purpose and place that it would otherwise lack.

The question of an object’s worth — of a book’s worth — often devolves to critical and commercial assessment. At the same time, however, most people recognize that living a life dominated by (if not determined by) money and the artistic judgment of others leads to an inevitable corruption of self. If you can make a living pounding out words or creating images or raising and lowering hemlines that’s fine, but who are you when the crowds go away and you’re alone with your millions? (You may care about your money, but your money doesn’t care about you.)

To the great, brutish publishing industry this tiny little tome has no value of any kind. If traditional publishing cast even a glance my grandmother’s way it would do so only to sputter and spit about vanity publishing, as if I was trying to sneak past the industry’s desperate gatekeepers in order to make a buck or a name for myself without first coughing up whatever percentage they feel they deserve. But this simple book was not created to get around anyone or anything. It was created as an act of love, to honor someone who lived a full life and gave as much or more than she got.

I own a fair number of books, some of which I love for personal reasons and some of which I love because of the invaluable information they contain. My family is and always has been bookish. My grandmother probably read more books in a year than I read in a decade. But of all the books that have come through our collective lives, it would be hard to say that any of them are more meaningful to us now than this little self-published title that sprang from the hand of a woman who did so much for us all.

The fact that this book is a personal work aimed at a tiny micromarket says nothing about its inherent value and everything about how important self-publishing can be.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books

Revisiting the Book Review Problem

September 16, 2012 By Mark 12 Comments

A few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece on the inherently dubious business of paid book reviews. If you’re an independent author or are writing a book for any reason other than personal interest the article is a must-read, but not for the reasons you might think.

As anyone knows who’s ever tried to search the internet for the best spatula or best toaster, finding credible reviews on the internet is impossible. No amount of persistence and no set of keywords will ever produce what you’re looking for because keywords are the life blood of both search engines and the soulless, SEO-driven marketing weasels who exploit them. The only chance you have of getting an unbiased opinion about anything is to already know sources you trust, and to hope they’ve reviewed the product you’re interested in. For many products ConsumerReports provides that kind of objective, metric-driven coverage, but when it comes to books there’s little chance a title you’re considering will have been reviewed by someone who doesn’t have a personal axe to grind or who isn’t part of the publisher’s own extended marketing effort. Worse, if you’re an independent author there’s almost no chance that you’ll be able to have your book reviewed by a reviewer who has established their own credibility.

The internet workaround for this problem has been to allow customers to post reviews of products they’ve used. The practical result of this workaround in the book world is that authors and their friends and family salt and sock-puppet their own positive reviews when a book comes out, while competitors and griefers and put-upon students post scathing negative reviews about books they have often never read. The resulting noise can be sifted through endlessly or judged in the aggregate, but even then it tends only to reinforce whatever sense of the work the prospective customer already had.

As the article notes, almost all of the current paid-review options are not in fact reviews at all, but sponsorship and marketing. And consumers of reviews are not confused about this transactional relationship. In fact, whether you pay for a review or not, the default assumption by the public is and must be that your review is corrupt. And since it doesn’t matter how sincere a paid reviewer is, that consumer bias only corrupts the process that much faster, with the lion’s share of the paid-review business going to the most corrupt reviewers. (What authors are paying for when they buy a reviews is a positive review, and paid reviewers know this.) I have no doubt that the best of paid reviews are better than the worst, cleverly avoiding, for example, over-the-top claims of grandeur, but the goal is always the same: to help sell, rather than to independently judge.

Made almost comically explicit in the article is the idea that traditional arms-length reviewers do not have this credibility problem because they do not participate in the review process as adjuncts to marketing and sales. But that assertion is patently false. It’s true that the New York Times Review of Books doesn’t take checks or cash up front, but they certainly take phone calls from publishers, and it’s a fair bet that the people at the highest levels of the traditional publishing industry all know each other and how business is done. If the good friend of an editor writes a book it somehow ends up on the top of that editor’s stack. If a book is written by a despised peer the title somehow gets lost, or savaged by a hostile reviewer chosen for exactly that purpose. If there are humans involved, and money and power hanging in the balance, you can be certain that the process is inherently corrupt no matter how squeaky clean the press releases are.

[ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Publishing Tagged With: books, credibility, Fiction, new york times, novel, reviews

Independent Authors and the Bookware Biz

December 23, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

In a recent post I rejected the idea that self-published authors always need to own their own ISBN’s. My rationale was primarily financial, but it was also influenced by my belief that independent authors should not try to mimic the publishing industry’s traditional business model:

Still, as a self-publishing author I think it’s important to remember that what I’m doing is not what most people in the greater publishing industry are doing.

I may be looking to use the same sales channels that everybody else is using, and I may be packaging my content in the same delivery vehicle (a book), but in terms of scale there are significant difference that shouldn’t be ignored.

It’s understandable that independent authors would look to the book industry for a template upon which to base their own self-publishing efforts. It’s understandable, but it’s also a mistake. To see why, imagine for a moment that you’re a potter. Your goal is to make your own pottery in your own studio, and to sell that pottery in a small shop. Would it make sense to base your manufacturing and sales decisions on the business models used by Corningware or Dansk? Or might you find more practical utility in mimicking the business models of other local artisans, even if they produced paintings and jewelry?

[ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books, self-publishing

Best Buy, Borders and Buying Books

September 14, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

Over the weekend I went into a Best Buy. I checked out some music and some movies, then went looking for the software shelves. There weren’t any.

I don’t know if you shop at Best Buy very often, but no tech-centered store does more to stay abreast of current trends. When MP3 players got hot, Best Buy made room. Now that mobile phones are all the rage they are also center stage at Best Buy. Still, the fact that there was no boxed software came as quite a shock to someone who has watched the PC revolution from its infancy.

But it was nothing compared with the shock I felt when I found myself staring at actual physical books for sale. Sure, the shelf was an orphaned unit, awkwardly placed. And the selection was small — maybe thirty titles in all. But there they were, mostly music-related titles, defiantly low-tech in a high-tech store that couldn’t be bothered to stock software. If I ever needed confirmation that books will never die, that was it.

This anachronism also prompted me to recall what I believe to be my only-ever visit to a Borders store. It came a month ago or so in Manhattan, and the whole time I was wandering around looking at titles I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was visiting a terminally ill patient in a hospital.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books

The Peril of the Parking Lot

August 4, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

A few days ago I posted this on Twitter:

Is this too simple? Bookstore + foot traffic (location, location, location) = survival? Bookstore + mall parking lot = death?

Yesterday, Barnes and Noble announced that they were looking for a buyer:

The retailer said its board decided to explore a possible sale and other strategic alternatives because its stock was “significantly undervalued.”

I don’t think brick-and-mortar bookstores are going to disappear, now matter how easy the internet makes the book-buying process. I also don’t think independent bookstores will die out, while corporate bookstores will survive. Rather, I think select independents in prime foot-traffic locations will remain viable, while everyone else will either die a slow death or be subsumed into other outlets. (Imagining B&N as three aisles of a Sears, K-Mark or Wal-Mart store is not hard to do.)

At the macro level the internet continues to replace the interstate and all of its tributaries. Where before we drove to destinations to purchase products, now we search and click online.

As a generalization, then, if your business success is tied to a parking lot, you’re probably going to be hurting in the future. To the extent that some malls and shopping centers will always be attractions in themselves, the great majority of ganged brick-and-mortar retailers will be continue to be bled by the internet, in the same way that most content mediums have already been afflicted.

I don’t see anything turning this trend around. Not even a sharp drop in fuel prices.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books, independent

Five Days

March 29, 2010 By Mark 3 Comments

Catherine Ryan Howard of Catherine, Caffeinated fame put up a nice series last week titled Five Days to a Self-Published Book. The five days are metaphorical, but if you’re just now looking at the daunting task of creating your own content that’s probably a relief.

The full series can be found here.

Update: The series references CreateSpace, but I’m not recommending it on that basis. Rather, I think it’s an excellent work flow example to follow, and I believe it was intended as such. (On the subject of CreateSpace, Lulu and POD, see also this recent comment from Joel Friendlander.)

Later Update: Mick Rooney has an interesting post up about Lulu. I asked Mick a few follow-up questions in the comments, and I found his answers illuminating. Anyone considering Lulu.com for self-publishing should give his post a read.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books, self-publishing

Price, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

March 23, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series of posts on that subject, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Months ago, when I began idly wondering what my short story collection should sell for, I repeatedly found myself thinking in relative terms. In hindsight that approach seems to make sense given the rampant uncertainty in the e-book market , but it was more coincidence than prescience. I didn’t know how much I didn’t know, and I certainly didn’t know how much the industry didn’t know.

The comparison that popped up the most was what I took to calling hamburger pricing. Invariably this analogy would present itself while I was driving, because it’s impossible to travel anywhere in the United States for more than fourteen minutes without passing a hamburger stand. (I made that statistic up, but please feel free to quote me. The world can always use more urban myths.)

What I kept thinking at the time was that whatever my short story collection was worth, it had to at least be worth the average cost of an average hamburger at an average drive-up window. Without doing any research I pegged that number around $4, and in a lot of ways I felt like the idea made sense.

Which of course it doesn’t.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books, e-books, p-book, price, print

Consumer Expectations and Price

March 19, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series from last week, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

We all have expectations. Sometimes, particularly when we’re young or old, our expectations can be out of step with reality. When we’re young we don’t have the cognitive ability to understand the world as it is, so we fantasize. When we’re old we may have trouble keeping up with the pace of change, and the world may move on without us.

Perhaps no other aspect of daily life in America defines our expectations more than the price of goods. We are a consumer society, and as such we gauge our worth and meaning by what we have and what we can afford. Goods that are priced out of reach make us feel poor. Goods that are within reach make us feel wealthy — or at least as if we have options.

Everyone has heard a child request a new car or new house in the same way that they ask for a piece of candy or scoop of ice cream. To a child price is no object because money has no meaning. And who hasn’t heard an elderly person comment that a candy bar used to be nickel or a gallon of milk a dime? To an elderly person prices may mark the zenith of their life experience, while also serving as a reminder of the threat posed by inflation and rising prices.

People in the prime of their working lives generally have more realistic expectations about prices, but they can still experience dissonance when the cost of goods change. Gas at $4.00 a gallon is an outrage. Gas falling back to $2.50 is a windfall. But note: these emotions and responses are usually relative, not based on an actual understanding of the costs of production. Because we live lives abstracted from our own survival needs, and because our economic lives are abstracted through bank accounts, direct-deposit paychecks and credit cards, there is often no contextual reality to the prices we pay. We pay what we pay because that’s what an item costs, not because we know that’s what an item is worth.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books, consumers, e-books, industry, Macmillan, price

Price, Profit and Market Size

March 15, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series from last week, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Assume for the moment you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that at least one person will buy your book no matter what the price is. What price would you set?

Obviously, $AllTheMoneyInTheWorld.

Unfortunately, history suggests a shifting relationship between price and demand (sales), meaning you may not always be able to employ this pricing strategy. As a fallback, it can help to imagine how the relationship between price and sales might play out for your product, given multiple variables. Unfortunately, doing so usually involves a great deal of market research, lots of wild guessing, and facility with a spreadsheet that I don’t have.

One thing I can say about the relationship between the price of my short story collection and sales of my short story collection is that my ability to maximize profit is not a pressing concern. To whatever extent I might be able to squeeze a few more dollars out of the market by endlessly worrying about price, I’m confident the variance between that maximum profit and the average profit is going to be fairly small, simply because the total number of people interested in the product will be small.

Thus liberated by my own limited appeal, it still seems valid to assume that setting a lower price will move more copies, while pricing the content at higher levels will decrease the number of people who buy the e-book. This is obviously why people advocate for the free/freemium pricing model: it promises that the price of your product will not negatively affect demand.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books, demand, e-books, price, profit

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