Wheat, Meet Chaff. Chaff, Meet Wheat.

Scott Pack on the influx of self-published work to ebooks:

So I wel­come this influx, these pre­vi­ously unpub­lished hoards.

There’s more:

And here’s the thing: a ‘tra­di­tional’ deal is still the goal of most of these authors. OK, so there are many who have eschewed the sys­tem and will con­tinue to do so but the major­ity would love the cred­ib­il­ity, sup­port and, er, lower roy­alty rate that a deal with one of the major pub­lish­ing houses would bring. Most do feel that pub­lish­ers add value and see the self-publishing option as a new route to being ‘dis­covered’. And if they remain undis­covered they are still able make a few quid, which can soften the blow.

I guess I’m one of these authors look­ing for a tra­di­tional deal. Frankly, I’d rather have pro­fes­sion­als take care of the cover, copy­ed­it­ing, and so on. Many e-self-published writers feel this way. That’s the major plus against the minus of lower royalties.

★ Is the Kindle Store 1000 Times Better Than Apple’s iBooks and Smashwords?

Probably not.

But the data for sales of my novel, Déjà Vu, which I’ve pub­lished on the Kindle, iBooks and Smashwords, point to a sales ratio of about 1000:1.

Kindle Sales

Déjà Vu unit sales per month, begin­ning in March, are: 320, 938, 915, 738, 844, 643 and 581.

Smashwords (this includes Barnes and Noble, and a bil­lion other ebook stores)

For the same period: 4.

iBooks

For the same period: 1.

Overall, then, the ratio of sales Kindle:other is 4979:5. Call it 1000:1. If Déjà Vu is rep­res­ent­at­ive of more gen­eral trends (it won’t be; but it’s in the ball­park, I expect), the Kindle store could be around 1000 times more suc­cess­ful than the other stores com­bined. Remember that the blurb, cover image and price are identical across stores.

What Leads to These Differences?

All of my mar­ket­ing — if you can call it that — has poin­ted people to the Kindle store.

Amazon has a lar­ger cus­tomer base to begin with, so cross-promotion will be more effect­ive. That is, when Déjà Vu is recom­men­ded to people who have a his­tory of buy­ing sim­ilar titles, there are more of those people around to see the recom­mend­a­tion. It could well be that many people see Déjà Vu on Amazon when they’re not look­ing for it; few see my book on Smashwords or iBooks.

Amazon has a mature chart-based shop­front. I don’t think Smashwords does this very well. And when I (rarely) look at iBooks, the charts seem to be full of odd books, and they are all writ­ten by Jeremy Clarkson. Nothing wrong with that; but it sug­gests a smal­ler num­ber of readers.

For the ver­sion of Déjà Vu sold on Amazon, I can con­trol the look and feel of the ebook pre­cisely. The ver­sion sold on Smashwords is pro­duced using a Word tem­plate and, frankly, it looks like a piece of crap. Blockquotes don’t work prop­erly; indent­a­tion is shot to hell. Likewise, the ver­sion for iBooks looks awful. Now, ebooks aren’t meant to look beau­ti­ful — but the cre­ator should be able to provide a well-designed doc­u­ment whose struc­ture melts away so that the reader can enjoy the story.

A Caveat

It’s worth not­ing that both iBooks and Smashwords are push­ing huge num­bers of books. Scott Pack recently repor­ted large sales num­bers for Confessions of a GP. And my friend Stephen J Sweeney has been selling his Battle for the Solar System books like gang­busters across many plat­forms. But Amazon has the lion’s share of this mar­ket for now.

Thoughts on eBooks

Over the past week or so, I’ve being mak­ing rounds to vari­ous blogs. Over at Scott Pack’s place, I’ve been writ­ing about my exper­i­ences of pub­lish­ing Déjà Vu:

So I’m look­ing at this Amanda Hocking head­line. Flecks of tea are mov­ing down the screen of my laptop like the raw Matrix. The half-formed idea in my head — that I can make a book avail­able and I don’t need to have a pub­lisher — becomes about three-quarters formed. My audi­ence is going to be lim­ited to a few mil­lion Kindle cus­tom­ers, but that’s like say­ing my writ­ing is lim­ited by the alpha­bet; it’s enough, and nobody is going to tell me that only Random House can use the ‘Q’.

More of my epic wis­dom can be found over at Futurismic, where Paul Graham Raven has been ask­ing me ques­tions about the pub­lish­ing industry at large. I have no real basis for my appar­ent expert­ise in this area — which is, of course, part of the fun of interviews.

Various stat­ist­ics have been ban­died about show­ing that while growth in phys­ical book sales is slow­ing, growth in ebooks is accel­er­at­ing. As a per­son who owns a Kindle, it’s easy to see why. The buy­ing is imme­di­ate, cheap, and fric­tion­less; the device weighs less than my watch (so I have a heavy watch).

All good fun.

Tacitus Schmacitus

Scott Pack replies to a Guardian piece by Stuart Jeffries that (accord­ing to Scott; I haven’t read it) is another ‘why can’t book­shops be like the old days’ article.

Among other things, Scott writes:

Less than a dec­ade ago it would have been pos­sible to walk into a branch of Waterstone’s, espe­cially some of the London shops, and ask for the best­selling book in the coun­try only to dis­cover that they didn’t stock it because ‘it wasn’t our sort of thing’. I remem­ber an occa­sion when one branch refused to unpack a sci­ence fic­tion pro­mo­tion because ‘our cus­tom­ers don’t like sci fi’. The same shop would com­plain whenever we ran a Jacqueline Wilson offer as ‘she’s a ter­rible writer and our cus­tom­ers can’t stand her’. I am not mak­ing any of this up. Is this what Jeffries wants? Really?

I’m not entirely con­vinced that this is a bad thing. When — years ago now — I was hawk­ing my own book around branches of Waterstone’s, I had assumed (along with the pub­lic, I think) that such book­shops are essen­tially autonom­ous. However, on every occa­sion, I was told that the manager/manageress lacked the power to make buy­ing decisions (or was too wor­ried to exer­cise it), even when the decision centred on four or five books of a local author. So if there was a time when the man­agers of Waterstone’s branches were less timid, I’d say wind­ing the clock back would be no bad thing.

He goes on to say:

Waterstone’s has branches in towns across the land. In some of these places a new Andy McNab novel will sell 20 or 30 times more than a new Martin Amis. The stock and mer­chand­ising of the shop should reflect that.

Which I agree with. I can’t stand Martin Amis and thor­oughly enjoyed Bravo Two Zero when I was a teenager.

There is an inter­est­ing ques­tion at the heart of this debate. What do you or I want in a book­shop? Personally, I don’t really want book­shops at all. I want the recom­mend­a­tions of my friends and a web browser that gets me to Amazon.

Literature and the shops that sell it are two dis­so­ci­able entit­ies. As are, I think, words and books themselves.

► Tacit agree­ment | theBookseller.com

★ Don’t f*ck with the Pack

Scott Pack, pub­lisher with The Friday Project (HarperCollins), has a blog on which he provides bet­ting tips, reviews, and snip­pets of news relat­ing to the pub­lish­ing industry. His reviews are often detailed. Sometimes they are short. One of his short reviews was read by the author and storm of tea-cup sized pro­por­tions has broken out.

Oh dear. I seem to have upset someone with one of my reviews.

Read more →

Free schtuff

If any­body from the digital advert­ising agency i-level wants to send me — as an upstand­ing, mixin’-it-up-bloggishly-since 2003 digi-man — a free Sony ebook reader, you are most bloody welcome.

Page 123

Paul Raven, over at the Velcro City Tourist Board, has tagged me with a meme. Here’s what the meme, which ori­gin­ates here, tells me to do:

“To par­ti­cip­ate, you grab any book, go to page 123, find the fifth sen­tence, and blog it. Then tag five people.”

So, here goes. This is the fifth sen­tence of page 123 from a book grabbed at ran­dom from my bookshelf:

He asked us where we were going.

This is taken from Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, which is a lovely, life-affirming travel book that scared the hell out of me with all its talk of heights.

I’m going to tag: Debra Hamel, Roland Hulme, Petrona, Roger Morris, and Scott Pack.

I can’t res­ist see­ing what’s on magic page 123 of my own novel. Here it is:

It killed Shimoda outright.

The Friday Project

It seems as though The Friday Project — a new­ish, small pub­lisher bent on pub­lish­ing blog– and web-related con­tent — has been picked up by HarperCollins, end­ing some (yes, fever­ish) speculation.

HC [HarperCollins] bought TFP’s web­site, name and author con­tracts for an undis­closed sum from admin­is­trator Panos Eliades, Franklin and Company. TFP will be housed in the Press Books wing of HC, with pub­lish­ing dir­ector Clare Christian, pub­lisher Scott Pack and man­aging editor Heather Smith report­ing to Press Books m.d. John Bond.

A few months back, Scott Pack expressed an interest in pick­ing up Deja Vu. It didn’t come to much — best all round, I think — but TFP seems like a genu­ine out­fit. I hope the man­age­ment finds suc­cess under the HarperCollins auspice.

Via The Bookseller