Hit Lit by James W. Hall

What makes a bestseller? (No fair saying "a lot of people buying the same book." I mean, that's true, but it's not terribly helpful.) What attracts millions of readers to the same book, and what makes that happen really quickly?

Thriller writer James W. Hall, under his other hat teaching graduate writing students at Florida International University, decided to examine that question some years ago. (He's a little vague about exactly when.) And since he is a professor, the way he examined it was by having a class on the subject, so he could get paid to look into it and his students could pay for the privilege of figuring it out for him. (Professor Hall is no dummy, you can plainly see.)

The class ran for a number of years -- it's not clear, but Hall might still be teaching it today -- even once Hall had codified what he thinks are the aspects all really huge bestsellers have in common. (That's not really a surprise, I guess: professors are supposed to know the thing they're teaching before the classes start at the beginning of the semester.) And, in the grand tradition of "publish or perish," Hall wrote up his findings and set off to have them published. But unlike most similar academics, he already had strong big-publishing contacts from his decade-plus career as a successful writer of thrillers, and he had a topic that was of great inherent interest to Big Publishing. (We all love to hear stories about ourselves, don't we?)

Hit Lit is the book distilled from the years of that course: a class in the American bestseller of the past seventy years or so, organized into a dozen essential traits and embodied in a dozen exemplar books. (Though not all of the books live up to all of the traits, and the books are not quite all of the biggest bestsellers of those seventy years, no matter how you define "bestseller." But a little fuzziness around the edges is expected in an academic theory, right?)

The dozen books are:

•  Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (which turns out to be an outlier in a number of Hall's areas, making me wonder why he didn't pick something more typical to make his theory work better)
• Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
• The Godfather by Mario Puzo
• The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
• Jaws by Peter Benchley
• The Dead Zone by Stephen King (an outlier in a different way: Hall describes it as King's first big bestseller -- though I think he means hardcover, which is a major distinction -- and it doesn't fit his description for a Big Bang-style bestseller)
• The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
• The Firm by John Grisham
• The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

If you're not Professor Hall, you might think what those books have in common -- most of them, at least -- is that they hit a Zeitgeist-y topic squarely at the right time, they were published well and were lucky in the marker, they were almost entirely first novels (or first big novels, early in a writer's career), and they all became big successful movies fairly quickly. But Hall has more detailed analyses to dig into, and a dozen Procrustean beds that these books more or less fit (there are some stretchers, and some severed feet, before we're done).

Hall's dozen elements include -- here I'm being very reductive -- secret societies, maverick protagonists, enough sex to be mildly scandalous without getting completely banned, corrupt cities vs. upstanding country, mild questions about conventional Christianity, similarly mild questioning of and unpacking of the American Dream, hot-button topics, a big scope, detailed-sounding information about interesting real-world facts, and family strife. Hall does his best, but the reader might come away with the sneaking suspicion that his "twelve features" are loose enough to be applied to almost any work of fiction, and thus not all that helpful for showing how big bestsellers are different from other similar books.

(Oh, and the subtitle is inaccurate, since Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, and is not part of the Twentieth Century. As long as I'm picking nits.)

I don't think Hall has really identified anything specific here; his book is so full of caveats and qualifications and explanations of the levels of particular elements in particular books that there are no rules here. This was never going to rise to the level of scientific rigor, but his elements are so vague that, as I said above, a reader can pick basically any piece of mainstream American fiction and find all of these elements. It doesn't work for strongly genre books as easily -- though a lot of crime fiction, particularly thrillers, will fits solidly into all of his elements -- but it basically defines mainstream mimetic fiction by Americans. And that is not the most useful thing in the world.

Schadenfreude Alert!

Bloomberg Business Week has an article about Amazon's preparations for this Christmas shipping season -- looking at it through the lens of last year, when a sizable fraction of packages were delayed beyond December 24th. Amazon is doing all of the expected business things -- opening more warehouses, to be closer to more customers, and building redundancies into their supply chain -- and doing it in their usual smart way.

However, what's delicious about all this is the clear indication that Amazon got burned by over-reliance on a single shipper, UPS, and that they're trying to avoid having all of their eggs in one basket this season.

Why, it's almost as if they've discovered that monopsony is a bad thing!

Amazon and the Glorious Price of $9.99

I can't seem to stop writing about this...

Many, many people have dug into the cherry-picked Amazon statistic of the month, the fact that "For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99."

For the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to assume that:
1) Amazon does have a large enough dataset to make this claim with confidence
2) They really do mean that this is the case for every possible e-book, and not some more narrowly defined sub-set

As John Scalzi and others have said, there's a big excluded middle there: huge numbers of major trade fiction and non-fiction titles [1] are priced between $9.99 and $14.99. Actually, I believe that standard agency-model contracts require ebook price points in the low teens for hardcovers priced in the $25-$30 range.

Also, the self-published end of the business is almost entirely under $9.99, mostly in the $0.99 to $2.99 range and topping out in most cases at $4.99.

So Amazon did not pull $14.99 out of a hat; it deliberately chose a little-used price point higher than most similar books on its site to make the best possible case for its preferred price point of $9.99.

And, again, Amazon can price any ebook at $9.99, or even lower, right now. They're not an agency account; they can set their prices however they like. If a $9.99 ebook price maximizes revenue for that book, they can do that now. But, of course, they want a larger piece of that revenue, which is what they're currently fighting with Hachette about. (And, less disingenuously, they are likely paying more than $9.99 for those ebooks -- but they've been regularly selling below cost since the first Kindle, both hardware and software, to buy market share.)

As I've said before, Amazon's claim is entirely silent about the effects of a blanket $9.99 price on two categories of sales of that same book: sales of the print edition on Amazon, and sales of all editions of that book anywhere else. They clearly can't directly measure the latter, but we can expect that Amazon does not expect this policy to increase sales elsewhere; what they want to do is to maximize their own market share. And their trading partners do all want Amazon's sales to be healthy and preferably to grow every year -- but to grow by increasing the market, not by grabbing market share from other retailers. [2]

But Amazon also wants to shift sales to ebooks from print. Sure, they are wizards at logistics, and have an impressive network of warehouses. But they're even better at moving electrons around, the margins are better there, and that dovetails more closely with where they want to move their global business. If they can shift 10% of their current print book sales to ebooks, that's an immense savings in warehousing costs and labor. So my assumption is that Amazon's model explicitly shows that the .74 extra copies as a $9.99 ebook also means a definite reduction of hardcover sales, which they likely sell for around $16 (35% off a $24.99 list price).

We don't have all of the other numbers behind this, so we can't build a model. But Amazon is only claiming a 15% total increase (in this very best case) of ebook revenue, so it would not take much downward sales pressure on the hardcover to wipe that out entirely.

In sum, in case anyone is wondering why no major-publisher authors have taken Amazon's offer seriously, this is why: they know that any increase in sales as an Amazon ebook will be offset -- and probably much more than offset -- by reductions in sales as a print book everywhere, and likely as an ebook elsewhere as well. The single statistic Amazon has provided has very clear and obvious holes, and we can see through those holes to the likely dataset behind them. As it has done so often before, Amazon has picked one very shiny number and is trying to make it work much harder than it actually can.


[1] I personally work in an end of publishing that rarely dreams of putting out any product as low as $14.99; Amazon isn't even trying to talk to me and my colleagues here. But perhaps it behooves all of us to remember that the universe of publishing books is immensely larger than the tiny ground of low-priced trade fiction, and even more immensely larger than the sub-set of that ground that's made up of e-books.

[2] To put this more bluntly, since a lot of people don't seem to get it: Hachette absolutely wants to see sales of Hachette books increase at Amazon this year and every year -- increase in units and increase in revenue. But they also want to see sales of Hachette books increase at other accounts, and overall. Amazon, like any retailer, wants to crush their competition, see them driven before the heel of Bezos, and hear the lamentations of their women.

The Co-Op Shuffle

I just left the following comment on this post over at John Scalzi's blog, but I'm posting it here as well, mostly so I can keep track of it in the future. (I have no illusions that there's even one single person who would see it here and not at the mighty Whatever.) It's driven by the odd Amazon letter that came over the weekend -- I'm signed up for KDP myself, since I keep thinking I'll turn a Book-A-Day run into an ebook, just because, so I got the letter myself Saturday morning -- which has not had the public reaction that Amazon probably expected.

Just a factual note: several people have said (or assumed) that co-op is free, or perhaps free only for big publishers.

This is very untrue; co-op is incredibly expensive, and one of the pieces of this conflict that has gotten overlooked is that Amazon is trying to turn into paid co-op some aspects of retailing that most people would consider the basic essentials -- such as having a buy button that works, or appearing in searches for the book's title. (Note that this is not unique to Amazon: Barnes & Noble has an extensive co-op program, and the details of what supermarkets do would curl your hair.)

Co-op is governed by the contracts a supplier has with a retailer, and those are inevitably secret, so no one will speak about specific terms in specific cases. But Amazon's co-op is a very large and pricey program, including such things as paying the entire cost for specific Amazon staffers to actually market one's books. Generally, co-op becomes more expensive the larger a publisher is: it increases with sales volume, and more opportunities open up with that volume as well. (So it increases not only overall, but as a percentage of sales.)

So neither Amazon nor Hachette will talk about any of these terms, but I expect the menu of exactly what services Amazon will provide and exactly what each of them will cost Hachette is one of the central details of this negotiation. It's entirely possible that ebooks are something of a sideshow, but it is the piece of the negotiation with the most public interest and media hooks, so it's the piece that drives the media attention.

Amazon and the Myth of Perfect Pricing

For the "world's most consumer-centric company," Amazon has real trouble actually talking to people. Their corporate communiques tend to be written in clotted, hermetic language; are few and far between; and appear only when posted on obscure corners of their own site. Amazon's managers and leaders are never quoted in the media, except for an occasional Bezos sighting. And both customers and suppliers struggle to connect with a human being at Amazon at all times.

And yet Amazon has a universal reputation for making customers happy, driven primarily by low prices and lenient return policies -- in this, as in so many other things, they've been using their investors' money to buy customers for almost two decades now. It has definitely been a successful strategy: they outcompeted, outlasted, and outgrew their Web 1.0 rivals to become the dominant online retailer and one of the world's top retailers, period.

Now, though, there's a sense that Amazon has to actually become strongly profitable soon -- like Bullwinkle and the hat, this time for sure! There's finally some mild pressure from the investing community to show profits commensurate with their valuation and sales, and the stock took a minor hit from the lousy recent quarterly results. For most companies, this would be an everyday occurrence, but Amazon has had a charmed life with investors for a long time -- they've gotten more time and benefit of the doubt than any other company in American history.

This is what's behind Amazon's current simmering conflict with Hachette: Amazon wants to be able to continue as it's gone (discounting to equal or better the competition's prices; expensive loyalty programs to lock in customers; aggressive expansion into new devices, new business models, and new territories; benign neglect from The Street and an ever-soaring stock price) and also generate more cash. The easiest way to generate more cash, as Walmart discovered before them, is to squeeze your suppliers: once you're that big, they're more dependent on you than you are on them, so you're likely to win that squeeze.

Amazon, though, wants to be loved. It's not enough that they force their suppliers to pay to have buy buttons that work, or pay to have their products actually show up in searches, or pay for an Amazon employee that the supplier can actually talk to and get results from. (Though Amazon has been forcing their suppliers to do all of these things for a long time. And Barnes & Noble forces their suppliers to do similar things, as do Walmart and your local grocery-store chain.) Amazon is an Internet-era company, so they need the world to admit that they are right and that their way of doing business is better and more special than anything the world ever saw before the Glory of Bezos was unfurled.

And putting their urge to be loved along with their borderline-incompetent public relations causes some interesting results: lots of wonky talk about "demand-weighted units" (what you or I would call books) and naked attempts to subvert the authors of the world away from their current publishers to the Glorious Land of Amazon, where payments are currently 70% (but can be changed, without notice, to any figure, at any time, on Amazon's sole discretion -- including giving it away for free to anyone who might want your book). This has not been notably successful: authors are fractious and squabbling -- and have never been terribly happy with publishers in the best of times -- but can all read, and most of them recognize bad contracts when they see one.

So Amazon's boosters remain who they have always been: the few self-publishers who won that particular lottery and have made a lot of money because of Amazon's terms and market. (Every publishing ecosystem is a lottery, and only a very few writers are ever big winners in any of them -- the trickier question is which ecosystems are better for the vast majority of authors who will never hit big.)

But they keep trying. Even after a couple of failed "offers" to Hachette, for both sides to give away their profits to compensate authors, they keep trying. (Those offers were very carefully chosen -- Amazon is full of smart, sneaky people, and their tactics are routinely brilliant when they don't have to account for the preferences of small groups of individual, grumpy authors -- to do the maximum damage to Hachette, cause the minimum damage to Amazon, and seem the most generous possible offer to authors. Unfortunately for Amazon, the authors realized this.)

Now, they're going back to one of their favorite tactics: the naked unsupported statistic, carefully deployed. Their latest salvo against Hachette -- again, remember that their real audience is Hachette authors; they're trying to demoralize the rank and file of the opposing army and force a capitulation -- relies on declared Amazon experience on the sales of ebooks to "prove" that $9.99 is the best price for an ebook.

(And many Amazon boosters have missed that message, actually -- they're crowing that Amazon has declared that lower prices are always better. Read more closely: Amazon is declaring that $9.99 is better than $14.99 for maximizing revenue. They say nothing about lower prices, which may be because they don't want to spook traditionally-published authors, or may be because prices lower than that decrease revenue. Or there may be some other reason: we don't know. What we do know is what Amazon is implying -- that $9.99 is the price point that maximizes revenue from an ebook.)

But note what Amazon is ignoring: primarily, the existence of other formats of that same content, with varying prices and varying responses to ebook discounting. (And secondly, the existence of a market outside of their own site -- though any damage to sales elsewhere due to their pricing changes would clearly be a feature rather than a bug.) That $14.99 ebook is likely also a $19.95 trade paperback or $24.95 hardcover. Presumably, Amazon can track the effect of sales on Amazon of print editions correlated to changes in ebook pricing, but they say nothing about such sales.

Does dropping the ebook to $9.99 lower hardcover sales by 25%? Or 75% Or none? Could it perhaps slightly increase sales of the hardcover, due to greater buzz and publicity? Amazon doesn't say; it takes no stance on the changing sales of print editions. (And note that, according to the latest BookStats report, ebooks are approximately $3 billion of the total $27 billion book market, having dropped very slightly from 2012 to 2013. There's a massive not-ebook market to be concerned about.)

Given that silence, one could assume that print editions take a hit when ebook prices lower. That fits expectations, and is a reasonable assumption. (Which means that it's certainly wrong, in at least some cases.) And it would only take a slight drop in print sales to wipe out the revenue gains Amazon trumpets as the whole point of moving all ebook prices to $9.99.

Authors: you each need to weigh your own situations, your own contracts, and your own sales, and do what's best for your own careers. That may even mean maximizing units sold rather than revenue -- particularly if you write the kind of nonfiction that leads to more lucrative consulting work, for example -- depending on your particular goals. And you need to be clear what data Amazon is extrapolating from, and what pieces of that dataset they know but aren't talking about.

But please don't forget that Amazon is explicitly trying to drive a wedge between you and your publishers. They would prefer that authors deal with them one-by-one, because in that situation they have all of the power and can use those we-change-them-when-we-feel-like contracts. Always know what your contracts allow -- the worst-case details were written in there for a reason, by someone specific, and they weren't put in frivolously. (This applies to contracts with anyone, mind you.)

There's less to say to consumers: you generally prefer lower prices, obviously. Everyone prefers that prices are low when they buy and high when they sell. And arguments that a certain level of revenue are necessary to keep an industry running at such-and-such a level are not likely to convince anyone: I'm not about to agree with some blogger who says I need to make sure I pay at least $2.50/pound for my apples to maintain that industry, so I won't try to make an argument like that about books. But I do buy apples from my local greengrocer, because they're fresh, because I can inspect and pick them myself, and because that business pays people who live in my community. And a similar argument can be made for books.

(Of course, if you disagree, you can use this link.)

Genres and Audiences, Women and People

I followed a PW link to this screed at the Guardian today, which makes a few good points but is confused about the core issue.

First: "Women's fiction" is a genre. It may be a genre with a problematic name, but it can line up with Sci-Fi, Mystery, and Romance with their similarly problematic names. Genre names are problematic; they often prescribe rather than describe, and seem to overly limit what goes on in their boundaries.

But, more importantly: "Women's fiction" does not mean the same thing as "fiction written by women." Sidney Sheldon wrote women's fiction. Nicholas Sparks does so today. The Bridges of Madison County, one of the biggest bestsellers in women's fiction history, was also by a man, Robert James Waller. A number of men write women's fiction, because they understand the history and boundaries of the genre and tell stories that the audience for that genre really loves.

Yes, there is plenty of sexism in publishing (as in the world at large). The fact that a major and hugely bestselling genre of fiction with several distinct threads -- the big ones: bildungsroman about women whether serious or comedic, "group of women" stories, and family sagas -- has such a reductive title does show that legacy of sexism. And, yes, maybe this is a genre name that you'd like to change. (At which the proponents of Speculative Fiction laugh a bitter chuckle and the Crime Fiction boosters look only slightly smug -- it's difficult to change what people call something.)

But it's not called women's fiction because only women write it. It's called women's fiction because the assumption is that only women read it -- and that's the gendered behavior to attack. The real issue is that publishing, and the world in general, thinks that the story of a young man growing up and finding love is literature, while the same story about a young woman is chick-lit. That is the real problem: the assumption that women's lives are for women, while men's lives are for everyone. (And that sexism seems to be even worse, and more smug, on Harris's side of the Atlantic than it is on mine.)

Also, as to Joanne Harris's assumption that only women get attacked by ignorant readers, just try googling any random male writer you like and the word "plagiarism" to be proven wrong. I tried it with one of her examples, Neil Gaiman, and quickly got to this page, where various message-board idiots accuse him of ripping off Miayzaki and Douglas Adams. Those idiots are no more correct than the idiots complaining about Harris -- though, as we've seen in other areas, there are likely more idiots complaining about women, and those idiots are more likely to use gendered terms and threats of violence when directly communicating with those women.

In Case the "Black" In Your Black Friday Shopping Refers To Ink

There are scads of sales going on over the next few days in North America, but only a few of them are on comics, making those sales even more special than they would normally be.

First off, the fine Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly is having a very rare holiday sale -- available both online and in their actual Montreal storefront, for those of you either local or up for an immediate road-trip -- of 40% off everything through Monday, December 2nd. I've already spent my money on Vanessa Davis's Make Me a Woman, Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Fallen Words, and Anders Nilsen's Big Questions (which I reviewed when I read it from the library -- but I think I'm going to want to read it again, since it's that big and impressive).

And what used to be my local comics store -- Manhattan's own Midtown Comics, which is probably the place I still get more comics from than anywhere else -- is also having a big sale, both at their three physical locations and online. All graphic novels are 40% off, and a bunch of other things are "up to" 40% off as well. And everything in the store is 25% off in the store on Friday until noon. I'd tell you what I'm buying there, too, but I'm still assembling my cart. (But, if you do buy from them online, they have free shipping over $75, and they pack as carefully as only a retail-employed comics geek can.) The main sale here seems to continue through next Wednesday, but some categories may just run through "Cyber Monday," so don't delay too long.

Sure, you can get deals on toasters and linens and car parts elsewhere, but are those things as good as comics? Obviously not.

Amazon Sales

The Beat has just collected a number of recent scattered posts about Amazon sales and contextualized them for its comics-reading (and -making) audience, making it clear we're in the middle of another period of the Amazon style of Kremlin-watching.

So I thought I'd share something that may be vaguely useful.

A few years back, I did a quick cheat sheet to estimate Amazon sales for print titles, based on Amazon's overall sales rank. Now, before I give you the fruits of my inquisitive afternoon, a few disclaimers:

• I did this about three years ago, and have not updated it -- and sales patterns may have shifted (though I believe they're still broadly correct).
• This was only for print books; e-books may have a different pattern, and I've never investigated them.
• This assumes steady sales, which is not always true. Some books spike because of a media hit, and then drop as swiftly as they rose.
• Sales volume of books varies greatly on Amazon from week to week, with obvious peaks in early December and late August and other spikes driven by specific books, media events, or Alien Space Bats. So this is only a vague guide.
• The top ranks of sales are spikier and more variable than the lower tiers, so those numbers will be less accurate overall. The top twenty, in particular, often sell substantial multiples of the books just beneath them.

With that in mind, here's what, more or less, an Amazon sales rank means:

500,000+ -- probably didn't sell a copy this week
250,000 -- 3-5 books a week
100,000 -- 5-7 books a week
25,000 -- 40-50 books a week
10,000 -- 50-75 books a week
5,000 -- 100-150 books a week
1000 -- 200-300 books a week
500 -- 400-500 books a week
100 -- 1000+ books a week

So if your best author friend burbles that her novel The Dark Mace of Aka'Fujjji has been in the Amazon Top 1000 for 6 weeks, you can now estimate that she's sold at least 1500-2000 books. And, if I know authors, hate her for it.

Euphemisms

Reading Shelf Awareness this morning -- particularly this article about Kobo describing the difference between their "regular customers" and the influx of new business from ABA stores -- I hit a term I'm not familiar with.

That term is "active romance."

My assumption -- since that's the way my mind always goes -- is that the "active" in "active romance" refers to the characters' genitals, and this is another way of saying "erotica" or "hot romance" or "spicy romance" or whatever last decade's term was; that this indicates a romance with a lot of sex in it, or a book with a lot of sex in it that tries to sneak in as a romance because the main characters stay together. [1]

Anyone out there able to confirm or deny?


[1] I make this distinction because romances, like every other mature genre, have important genre and subgenre markers, and so there are things that look like romance to civilians that real romance readers consider the equivalent of Michael Crichton for SF readers. I don't know enough to define all of those markers, but I'm smart enough to realize that serious romance readers care about them.

You Have Another Chance to Buy Matthew Hughes Books

Honestly, folks, if you haven't bought Hughes's excellent far-future SF/fantasy mysteries Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Hespira -- a fine series of freestanding novels concerning the greatest discriminator of the penultimate age of the Earth -- I'm not sure how many more times I can tell you how excellent they are or burble once again about Hughes's sparkling prose.

But would the fact that you can now get those books in electronic form for the low, low price of only $2.99 entice you? Even better, it's direct from Hughes himself, so if you're the kind of reader who obsesses about fairness and wants to see the author get the best deal, this is exactly the offer you want.

So what are you waiting for?

Carving Out a New Nook in the Market

When Barnes & Noble hints that they're going to slow-track their Nook e-reader business and "focus more on licensing their content to other device makers" -- as reported by The New York Times on Sunday -- what on earth are they talking about?

B&N is a retailer; they don't own the content they sell. They don't even own the relationship with the content providers -- that's all on the publishers. So how can they possibly find a successful business strategy out of trying to shove themselves into the middle of a marketplace that has been aggressively shedding middlemen for several years?

Are they trying to imply that they think Nook technology is so special and unique -- unlike a thousand other e-readers, most of which failed -- that they can live on licensing it to some other company that wants to beat its head against Amazon's predatory discounts for a few years?

Seriously, is there any strategy that could conceivably work behind that quote, or is it just bland waffling to hide the true cluelessness beneath?

Borrowing E-Books

PW today has an article with lots of numbers -- though surprisingly little analysis or thought -- about Amazon's e-book borrowing program, part of its Amazon Prime subscription business. It burbles about how "the monthly pool for borrowed e-books in January grew to $1.7 million, the largest in the history of the program" without ever explaining how this pool is defined, how and why the value of the pool fluctuates, or how it works.

I assume this is because Amazon, as usual, is being deeply opaque, and only releasing a few numbers carefully chosen to make them look as good as possible. As far as I can tell, the "pool" is set by Amazon fiat -- they decide how much money they feel like spending on ebook "borrowing" that month, and then divide it up according to some unspecified algorithm. (There's clearly at least a breakdown geographically, since there's both a "global fund" and a "monthly pool," though their relationship is not made clear.)

I would have to dig into the Kindle Direct Publishing agreement to be sure, but my guess is that Amazon has not promised to give any money to the authors of these ebooks, and that they're papering over that in their ongoing attempt to convert as many of their customers as possible to Prime. (Because subscription revenue is what everyone wants -- particularly when you run a website and no one can call you on the phone to cancel.)

So authors should take note: Amazon may have decided to give you $2.23 per ebook "borrowed" in January, which is potentially higher than you would have made from a sale in that same period. But every piece of that transaction -- and every penny of resulting revenue -- is under Amazon's complete control; it looks like they don't have to pay you a cent for that "borrow" if they decide (after the month is over, like this time) not to.

And don't get me started on "borrowing" ebooks. Do you have a digital file in your possession? Then it only expires and leaves your possession if you (through choice or laziness or ineptitude) let it do so -- once you have a digital file, there are plenty of tools for any of us to copy and save and transmute it. So it's only "borrowing" by courtesy -- or only "borrowing" in the legal language laid out by the people giving you contracts to sign.

Some People I Know May Need This

This would go on the tumblr, if I weren't deliberately putting all content here to make it seem more lived-in and cozy.

(via one of those massively parallel content farms I refuse to link to.)

And this is now the second time within a week that I've wanted to create the tag "Snap Snap Wink Wink Grin Grin," which means I have to do it.

More Books Than You Can Shake a Stick At

Most people will look at these pictures of an Amazon warehouse and talk about how big, complicated, and organized it is.

I must have been working in finance/supply management publishing for too long, because what I see is no automation, massive amounts of handwork, and those unfortunately oddly sized objects (known as books) which cause trouble for robots to pick and pack, as they would in a proper warehouse. It's sad but bracing to realize that one is never happy with anything.

(Oh, and if this drives you to think of buying something-or-other from that particular retail behemoth, here is a handy link to allow you to do so.)

The Great Amazon Squeeze, Once Again

This week, Jeff Bezos admitted what numerous teardown analyses have shown: that Amazon sells its Kindle devices at "cost" to drive content sales. There's no indication of how optimistic Amazon is when it determines its "cost," so the general suspicion in publishing that they actually sell devices at a slight loss is still entirely plausible.

And those with memories that stretch back more than a couple of years remember that the famous $9.99 Kindle price point was also, in the vast majority of cases, selling at a loss. Since the end of the great antitrust suit means that Amazon is free to once again discount major-publisher books below its own cost, is there anyone who doesn't believe that Amazon will do so again?


(The comparison in that Forbes article is with videogames, where Sony, Microsoft, etc, do take a small loss on each $300-$500 console...but then make that up by making hefty profits on each piece of $60 software for that console, plus the gravy of direct-to-consumer DLC. I don't need to point out the differences between that and the book market, do I?)


So, to review: Amazon sells hardware at what is at best a breakeven price to sell more content, and then sells content at a loss to maintain lock-in with their customers. It must be nice to have a pile of money so large that you can burn it off idly like that.

But, if I owned Amazon stock, I know I'd be screaming right now.

Stating the Obvious

This story is a week old, but I neglected to mention it when it hit: Amazon declares that Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games" trilogy is the highest-selling series ever for them in the US.

This does not mean that Collins's books have sold more copies overall than, for example, J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series, which was the prior record-holder. And it doesn't mean any of the things implied in Sara Nelson's self-lauding statement at the link.

What it means -- and what everyone who works in publishing already knows, but doesn't usually like to say in public -- is that Amazon is capturing an ever-larger share of the book business, which means that they sell a larger percent of books now than they did ten years ago -- so of course the big sellers now are bigger for Amazon than the big sellers were ten years ago. (Look for a similar statement about those "Fifty Shades of Grey" books in another year, especially if a movie does get made.)

This is good if you think that a single retailer should dominate the entire retail landscape for a particular kind of product. If you don't think that's such a good thing, your mileage may vary.

But what the statement really is saying is "we own the book market now, suckers." So you might as well learn to love Big Brother.

A Little Levity for a Friday

These may not actually be the absolute 10 Worst Book Covers in the History of Literature, but they're definitely on the shortlist.

My favorite is right here:

Double Penetrator! Try to tell me that was inadvertent! Just try!

Ready for Another Tour of the Sublimely Hideous Javitz Center

So I've gotten my marching orders for this year's Book Expo America (BEA, the book-industry convention that I'm old and dull enough to still think of as ABA), where, for the very first time, I will be working official hours in the Wiley booth. [1]

(I'm not sure if that means that there's a rigorous five-year vetting period, or if I'm one of the dwindling number of people who care enough to go at all; I've been in publishing long enough that going to BEA was a perk -- which I didn't get for more than a decade -- so it still feels thrilling.)

Anyway, I'll be demonstrating something -- I believe our enhanced ebooks, or other techy stuff; there is training promised, but it hasn't happened yet -- in the booth from 11 to 1 on Wednesday, June 6th. I'll also have other time doing something else in the Wiley booth -- my department head has let me know that, though not what or when -- probably the same day.

So my current plan is to be at the dumpy Javitz center just that one day, the 6th. (Wiley's in Hoboken, so schlepping over there is somewhat more cumbersome than it is from many other publishing houses.) If there's anyone out there that I should stop by and see (or vice versa), e-mail me, and we can set something up.

Or, conversely, if you want to avoid seeing me, the 6th is the day you need to be more careful, and in particular avoid the Wiley booth.


[1] Which seems to be substantially larger this year, if I'm reading the layout correctly. I have no idea why -- decisions like that are way above my pay grade -- but anything that emphasizes how powerful, stable, and utterly awesome we are is fine with me.

Update:

I will also be the official  Business Marketing Group person-on-duty in the Wiley booth on the 5th from 1-3 and on the 6th from 3-5, giving you three times the opportunities to find me, should you want to. Feel free to torment me by asking me questions about other marketers' books!

Note that this now means that I will be at the Javitz for a day and a half -- the afternoon of the 5th and all day on the 6th -- making it that much harder to avoid me.

Tor Dumps DRM

In what I believe is the first major-publisher fiction imprint to do so, Tor/Forge announced today (via a press release and a posting on Tor.com) that their entire publishing program will be available in electronic formats without Digital Rights Management schemes by early July of this year.

DRM had generally been considered necessary to prevent piracy, but examples in both directions -- the continued pirating of massive numbers of ostensibly "protected" books, without much obvious effect on actual sales, on one hand, and the example of mostly technology-books publishers, led by O'Reilly (and joined by, among others, several of the tech imprints of my own employer, Wiley) on the other -- had made that accepted wisdom more and more seem less acceptable, and less wise.

Tor and Forge are imprints of Tom Doherty Associates -- and Doherty's leadership in this area, and deep knowledge of how books are sold, isn't to be taken lightly -- but I suspect the more important point might be that TDA is itself part of the Macmillan publishing empire, and Macmillan has been the leader in several recent industry changes related to e-books, most importantly the move to agency pricing.

So good for Tor for taking this step, and good for Macmillan for allowing them to do so. With any luck, the rest of the world will notice in a few months that the sky hasn't fallen, and DRM will become an endangered species.

Barry Eisler Continues to Shill for Amazon

This time, it starts even before his first sentence proper, when he claims that "legacy publishers" -- he means specifically "the Big Six" US trade houses, but he's writing in The Guardian for a UK audience, and conveniently ignores many houses of similar or larger size (one of which is providing the computer on which I'm typing at this very moment).

I'm sorry, the stupid has infected me, and that sentence is a complete loss. I'll try again.

Eisler is sad that the mean ol' legacy publishers are trying to do things like "windowing" -- not publishing a work simultaneously in all formats and pricepoints, which most of us would simply call "publishing" -- and setting prices for their own goods. Eisler wishes, apparently, that they'd just stop doing that, and let nice Mr. Bezos handle all of the fiddly details -- his ideal world would not be a monopoly, but letting a bunch of publishers make their own decisions (even when those decisions go against the Will of Bezos) would be a monopoly.

It's clear that dear l'il Barry doesn't actually know what a "monopoly" is, or he wouldn't try to argue that six competitive companies embedded in a larger, and even more competitive, landscape qualify.

(There isn't much of his usual Lake Wobegone-esque "all self-publishers are creatively freed millionaires in control of their own destinies" bumf, but that undertone, of course, is the only reason anyone takes Eisler the least bit seriously at any time.)

Tell me, are his books this dull, poorly thought out and tedious? I have a dim view of the average level of writing in thrillers to begin with, but I'm afraid Eisler is driving that to new depths.