books – Page 2

Book Price Research

March 11, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. In this week’s blog posts I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

If you’re bringing your first crop of parsnips to market, at some point you find out what everybody else is getting for their parsnips. Maybe you randomly phone-check prices in several locations, or maybe you do insanely-thorough research down to the type of parsnip sold, the number sold and the time, date and weather conditions of each sale, but in the end the idea is the same: you try to figure out what your parsnips are worth based on what other parsnip growers are getting paid.

As noted in yesterday’s post, I’m not a big book buyer, so I don’t have a lot of real-world experience to draw from in pricing a short story collection. From the reading I’ve done over the past six months or so I’ve learned something about the price ranges for publishing products, with the emphasis on general, but I don’t know much beyond that. So doing a little product research seemed like both the obvious and easy way to go in resolving my pricing questions. [ Read more ]

Price Ranges

March 10, 2010 By Mark 7 Comments

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. In this week’s blog posts I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

More than once in my life I’ve had someone tell me they would like to own ItemX. When I asked how much ItemX cost, however, the person replied with, “I don’t know.”

Now, it’s not very often in our commercially saturated lives that we encounter a product which is outside our pricing experience. And that’s particularly true if we know enough about the product to know we want it. Which is why, when this scenario unfolds before me, I invariably respond like this: “Is it a dollar? A million dollars? Ten dollars? A hundred dollars? Ten hundred millions dollars?” And on and on, until the person calmly replies that one of those numbers is close to the mark. [ Read more ]

It’s Not Who You Know

January 26, 2010 By Mark 9 Comments

We’ve all heard the old adage:

It’s not what you know but who you know that matters.

Apart from being a conspiracy-theorist’s dream excuse, the adage does have a grain of truth in it. Relationships and networking may matter as much or more in business as your skill set.

I mention this because of a blog post put up by Debbie Stier, Senior V.P. and Associate Publisher at HarperStudio, and Director of Digital Marketing at HarperCollins. It’s a short personal piece about an epiphany in Debbie’s work life, but it also speaks volumes about the book business and how it actually works.

Like many would-be authors I used to think that writers wrote books in little cottages in the woods, bleeding truth onto pages already saturated with tears. When a book was done the author then agonized over query letters, blindly attempting to appease personal idiosyncrasies that each agent somehow believed to be an industry norm. If, against all odds, the author managed to land an agent for his book, the agent went through a similar process trying to generate interest in an editor at a publishing house. If, against these even-longer odds, an editor became interested, that editor then went through a similar process trying to get the support of the person or group that was responsible for pulling the trigger on an actual deal.

Read Debbie’s post about the five new books she’s excited to be working on and you’ll see none of that. In fact, there is no direct mention that Debbie read a single word by any of these authors as a means of discovering them:

I’d heard him speak at the Web 2.0 conference and I wanted desperately to work with him.

…

The next author to sign with HarperStudio was Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com. I’m a huge fan — have been following his blog, twitter, videos, etc. for some time…

…

Jill Kargman is a novelist. I saw her on Samantha Ettus’s show Obsessed TV six months ago and knew I wanted to work with her.

…

I’d been thinking a lot about merits and challenges of being a small company within a large corporation, and Bob suggested that there’s a book in that. Nick Bilton from the New York Times lead me to Ryan Tate at Gawker, and he is now writing a book for us called Skunkworks, which I can’t wait to read.

…

One more author who I want to mention who signed with HarperStudio, though it was slightly before that December epiphany, but still very much part of my process of realizing how much I love my job, is Melanie Notkin, the Savvy Auntie. She’s writing her Savvy Auntie’s Guide to Life.

Here’s what Debbie did not say: ‘I read Author X’s novel/manuscript and it knocked me out.’ And yet there’s nothing wrong with that. As noted above, this kind of book-production paradigm may actually be the norm these days. [ Read more ]

Publishing is for Professionals

January 25, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

As I’ve noted on several other occasions, and will continue to note in the future, at times there is a disconnect between the publishing industry’s self-aggrandizing rhetoric about protecting the cultural soul of our nation (or any nation for that matter), and its omnipresent and often low-brow efforts to exploit that cultural stewardship for cash. (See also: hypocrisy.)

Here are two quotes from a blog comment I wrote today:

Marketing will always be trying to leverage content for its own ends because it’s in marketing’s best interest to do so.

…

Maybe in a decade (or two months), when you click a button on your e-reader to look at the next page of your novel, you[‘ll] instead get an interstitial commercial which you cannot bypass.

Before you roll your eyes at this bold prediction — and I say now that some e-reader marketing weasel will implement exactly this type of marketing fail — a brief history lesson is in order. Back in the 70’s, when I was just getting into paperback fiction, I happened to run across a novel that had a card of some kind wedged in the middle of it. Thinking that someone had left a substantial bookmark behind I flipped to the card and attempted to remove it, only to discover that it was bound to the book. [ Read more ]

Living in the Moment

December 14, 2009 By Mark 8 Comments

Thinking about my reluctance to recommend an e-reader to anyone, I realized over the weekend that it’s not simply a belief I have that e-reader technology isn’t ready. That’s part of it, but there’s another issue for me — a more global concern that I tend to mute because I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it.

Twenty or thirty years ago, products were rated in two basic ways. How well they did the job they were designed to do, and how reliable or long-lasting they were. Between then and now, however, the question of reliability has changed. It no longer refers to a product’s ability to perform over time, but rather to a product’s ability to perform at all.

I have no proof of this, but I believe the change took place as the products in our lives became predominantly electronic, as opposed to mechanical. Where physical mechanisms used to power most of our devices, those devices are now controlled by circuitry that is inherently more complex, if not unfathomable. [ Read more ]

Updated: Sullivan’s Experiment in POD

November 19, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Andrew Sullivan’s print-on-demand (POD) experiment continues apace, with interesting results so far:

How did we get the price down by half? We did it the way publishing houses do it – with a twist. We didn’t guess the demand or market test it, we simply asked for pledges. We crowd-sourced the price. We got enough pledges to do a print run of 2,000 which brought the price down to $16.25. But unlike the publishing houses, we’re not pocketing the difference. We’re handing it over to you in a lower price.

The idea of pooling demand for a print-on-demand book, then using that aggregated demand to drive the per-book cost down, is interesting to me. Provided it doesn’t cut into the profits of the publisher (in this case, Blurb), there’s no reason not to do this, and particularly so for impending releases. (Pre-ordering of content is now quite common in the games biz, but there’s rarely a break on price for ordering early.) Here consumers win twice: they can elect to order prior to availability as a convenience, but can also drive the price down in the process.

In Sullivan’s case, however, the price drop seems to be a one-time event:

A catch: Once those 2000 copies are bought up, however, the price will return to $29.95, so secure one today.

I wonder if this is necessarily the case. It may be that there simply needs to be an additional mechanism added to the purchase of a POD book: one that offers to delay shipment until a certain number of offers are stockpiled, at which point the price drops accordingly. How much book-buying is spur-of-the-moment, and how much is for later gifting? Would consumers be willing to defer a purchase to save a few bucks? Or, once the purchase decision is made, will people see paying more (full retail) as the cost of getting it sooner? How can demand be pooled more than once? (For example, can I have the option to get a book now for the regular price, or choose to go into a pool of people waiting for a lower price?)

In the end, I think Sullivan’s example not only blazes trail, it indicates that self-publishing and POD are going to continue to evolve to meet market needs. The landscape we see today is not going to be the landscape we travel tomorrow.

— Mark Barrett

Ten (Non-fiction) Reads

October 8, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

When I was writing screenplays I watched a lot of movies. Binges of them. Blackout binges.

When I’m working on interactive titles I tend to play games obsessively and read up on the latest failed attempts at interactive storytelling.

What’s been really enjoyable about turning toward the publishing industry over the past few months is that I’ve re-established a long-lost love affair with the New Books shelf at the local library. In doing so I’ve worked my way through a surprising number of books, and I’d like to pass along* the titles** of the ones that stuck with me. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: IFB

October 5, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

IFB is my acronym for The Institute for the Future of the Book. If that sounds like an academic title to you, give yourself ten points and a big salty pretzel.

My personal experience with academic interest in newly-emerging media is that it’s just that: academic. I’m always interested in the research and the sifting and the critical analysis, and I’m always thankful that someone is documenting everything and poking around in the less-commercial corners. I’m also usually left wanting for something concrete. [ Read more ]

The E-Reader Technology Question

October 2, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’ve stumbled across a few posts recently about e-readers and how they compare to books. The overwhelming consensus is that e-readers aren’t there yet, but this rather obvious observation seems to be leading people to two completely wrong conclusions.

One group of people are concluding from the current technological shortfall that books will always be better than technology, therefore there will always be a need for books. Well, no…and yes. [ Read more ]

The Maltese Falcon, by Robert Polito

September 16, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

True story.

Maybe a decade ago now I was browsing Amazon.com when I came across a book written by Dashiell Hammett and Somebody Else. Having studied detective fiction in college I knew that the actual credit was Dashiell Hammett and Nobody Else, so I sent a note to the Amazon elves asking for a correction. A day or two later the elves wrote back to say that the other person was actually the editor of the book, but because the work was not an anthology this other person should not have been included as an author. Shortly thereafter the listing was changed, and Hammett was again given sole credit for writing a book that he had written all by himself.

Which brings me to this:

And farther down the page:

Now, I don’t now who Robert Polito is, and I’m sure he is or was a wonderful person. But he didn’t co-write The Maltese Falcon. I’m not even sure what he actually did do to warrant mention (his contribution isn’t specified), but I am confident that none of the books in the title are books that he wrote or co-wrote. [ Read more ]