Writer Sanctum
Writer's Haven => Quill and Feather Pub [Public] => Topic started by: Joe Vasicek on December 19, 2018, 03:05:33 PM
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I honestly have none, I just want to read yours. :angel:
Okay, here's one:
The global economy slows down, and perhaps enters a recession. Barnes & Noble finally goes under, and that knocks over a bunch of other dominoes in the industry. However, with less money to spend, more people turn to ebooks, especially cheap indie ebooks. So things get easier in some ways—or rather, new opportunities are opened.
What are your predictions?
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Barnes & Noble has been dying for years now and I no longer hold my breath. I also don't see the Big Five dying off anytime soon, because they are owned by huge global media conglomerates for whom books are just a tiny part of their business. Small presses and medium-sized publishers may have more issues, but I don't see e.g. Baen, Harlequin/Mills & Boon or Kensington go under either. There may be mergers and the number of titles published may be reduced, but traditional publishing is here to stay for a while yet.
As for indies, I don't think the content mills will drive us all out of business, but I suspect more indies will go wide, as the content mills suck up KU visibility. Some indies will vanish, others will go (back) to traditional publishing and new ones will come into the market. In short, business as usual.
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I predict Amazon will augment Prime Reading (somehow) and shutter Kindle Unlimited.
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I agree on more indies going wide, and to combat that, I foresee Amazon coming up with a plan to entice indies back by offering them a lower royalty rate, but allowing them to to wide at the same time. Or maybe that's a pipe dream.
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I predict that most, if not all predictions, won't come true. grint
:cheers
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A lower rate? How is that an enticement?
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I predict it will still be there. That's about the only thing I've ever been right on.(https://emoticons.datahamster.com/drums.gif)
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A lower rate? How is that an enticement?
"You can be in KU and also wide, as long as you accept less than 70% for your Amazon sales" is the suggestion.
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I predict (hope!!) that we'll start seeing more royalties from KU now that book stuffers are being kicked out. That should mean the KU money pool will get spread out a little more....right? :icon_think:
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I predict (hope!!) that we'll start seeing more royalties from KU now that book stuffers are being kicked out. That should mean the KU money pool will get spread out a little more....right? :icon_think:
Hasn't happened yet. Won't happen in the future.
I predict more "authors" releasing 100 books under their name in 2019.
And also more "debut" authors dropping 10 sleek books in rapid succession.
Higher prices for advertising. Lower payouts for KU.
More small-niche authors crossing into bigger genres that have higher ceilings then having a hard time competing with the crowds.
More $500 courses that promise the moon and stars.
We'll hear a lot about audio sales, but it'll be feast or famine thanks to the merchandising powers that be at Audible who are the kingmakers. Don't listen to what these people suggest you do for promotion. Their best advice is that you start a podcast. I. Can't. Even.
:band: :band: :band:
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I predict (hope!!) that we'll start seeing more royalties from KU now that book stuffers are being kicked out. That should mean the KU money pool will get spread out a little more....right? :icon_think:
Hasn't happened yet. Won't happen in the future.
A guy can hope, right? :icon_rofl:
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When I look into my crystal ball for 2019, I see . . .
Facebook will start Facebook Books to compete with Amazon and they'll pay you 80% royalties if you agree to be exclusive to Facebook Unlimited.
They will introduce a Facebook Reader similar to a Kindle except you'll only be able to read books or visit Facebook on it.
They will also sell the real identity behind your pen name and all your personal messages to any company or anyone who gives them a decent sum of money.
And then they will unveil their new ad slogan, "Suck it, losers! Where else you gonna go? MySpace? LOL."
Bear in mind my crystal ball is plastic so I'm not sure how its accuracy compares with genuine quartz.
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When I look into my crystal ball for 2019, I see . . .
Facebook will start Facebook Books to compete with Amazon and they'll pay you 80% royalties if you agree to be exclusive to Facebook Unlimited.
They will introduce a Facebook Reader similar to a Kindle except you'll only be able to read books or visit Facebook on it.
They will also sell the real identity behind your pen name and all your personal messages to any company or anyone who gives them a decent sum of money.
And then they will unveil their new ad slogan, "Suck it, losers! Where else you gonna go? MySpace? LOL."
Bear in mind my crystal ball is plastic so I'm not sure how its accuracy compares with genuine quartz.
Your crystal ball sounds better than mine...
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Simon & Schuster is pushing a free ebook if you sign up for its newsletter and download the Glose app. Most of the free books are old, and many are public domain. A few are recent releases. I predict more lame stuff like this, where the intent is to capture you as a customer, but the incentive is nearly worthless and far too complicated to access.
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A tidal wave of authors who lack publishing chops (audience targeting, marketing, promotion, branding, etc.) will abandon the idea of making a living writing books.
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A lower rate? How is that an enticement?
"You can be in KU and also wide, as long as you accept less than 70% for your Amazon sales" is the suggestion.
There was some buzz a while ago, I don't know if it was in 20books or my Kindle Scout group, about some authors who added books and mistakenly saw a 50% option for royalty. There was speculation that it was a test they were inadvertently added to where authors could select the 50% rate, be in KU, and still go wide. I don't think it was ever proven, but it'd make sense if Amazon wanted to be even more competitive.
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A tidal wave of authors who lack publishing chops (audience targeting, marketing, promotion, branding, etc.) will abandon the idea of making a living writing books.
Maybe. But then 2 tidal waves of hopefuls will take their place. That's why I'm preparing my $500 course about how to guaranteed make six figures annually on 2 novels published.*
*Per hour.
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My prediction: Books will be published. Some will be sold.
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A tidal wave of authors who lack publishing chops (audience targeting, marketing, promotion, branding, etc.) will abandon the idea of making a living writing books.
Maybe. But then 2 tidal waves of hopefuls will take their place.
I think the volume of incoming hopefuls will diminish as time passes.
It's like building a site to rank for competitive terms (e.g. mortgage loans, payday loans, etc.) on Google. In 2002, it was easy. By 2010, the difficulty of doing so had increased by an order of magnitude. Many hopefuls gave up, lacking the capital, time, and skills required. Today, no one ranks for "mortgage loans" unless they're bankrate, wellsfargo, or another authority site.
There are no longer any hopefuls in that game (without VC money).
I suspect indie publishing will follow a similar path.
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I think the volume of incoming hopefuls will diminish as time passes.
It's like building a site to rank for competitive terms (e.g. mortgage loans, payday loans, etc.) on Google. In 2002, it was easy. By 2010, the difficulty of doing so had increased by an order of magnitude. Many hopefuls gave up, lacking the capital, time, and skills required. Today, no one ranks for "mortgage loans" unless they're bankrate, wellsfargo, or another authority site.
There are no longer any hopefuls in that game (without VC money).
I suspect indie publishing will follow a similar path.
I see it becoming easier and more acceptable for hopefuls to self-publish. But when they do, they'll be shocked by how hard it is to sell the books. This has been happening with my local writing group. People are able to get professional covers and editing and marketing advice. They release a decent book in a niche genre, and then... crickets.
Unlike the early days of self-pub, where newbies could get a second chance by fixing their covers, there won't be any second chances for the newbies of 2019.
ETA: That's a good point about search engine optimization. I was building websites in the late 90s. I had a few real estate agents who jumped on the internet at the right time and leaped ahead of their fellow agents, just by providing a bit of basic information and a form for doing a home valuation.
We have seen this business cycle in all sorts of businesses, so the future won't be too surprising.
If I can keep writing something I enjoy, and have enough sales that it feels like my hard work is being appreciated, I'll be grateful. But I do miss those early years of feeling like a big break might be right around the corner. The real challenge is to be pragmatic but not cynical, efficient but not dead inside LOL
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That's why I'm preparing my $500 course about how to guaranteed make six figures annually on 2 novels published.*
*Per hour.
grint grint grint
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I see it becoming easier and more acceptable for hopefuls to self-publish. But when they do, they'll be shocked by how hard it is to sell the books. This has been happening with my local writing group. People are able to get professional covers and editing and marketing advice. They release a decent book in a niche genre, and then... crickets.
Unlike the early days of self-pub, where newbies could get a second chance by fixing their covers, there won't be any second chances for the newbies of 2019.
ETA: That's a good point about search engine optimization. I was building websites in the late 90s. I had a few real estate agents who jumped on the internet at the right time and leaped ahead of their fellow agents, just by providing a bit of basic information and a form for doing a home valuation.
We have seen this business cycle in all sorts of businesses, so the future won't be too surprising.
If I can keep writing something I enjoy, and have enough sales that it feels like my hard work is being appreciated, I'll be grateful. But I do miss those early years of feeling like a big break might be right around the corner. The real challenge is to be pragmatic but not cynical, efficient but not dead inside LOL
I agree. It has never been easier to self-publish than it is today. And it'll be easier still tomorrow. Kinda like building websites. These days, you can slap together a great-looking site in minutes. But I remember hand-coding php and css style sheets in the old days. It wasn't hard. It was just annoying, and I ended up outsourcing everything.
Because considering the money you could make via search, I got to the point where I felt...
Late 90's and early-mid aughts were the glory days of lead gen for the solopreneur. Build niche sites (e.g. auto insurance, class action attorney, subprime mortgages), drive targeted traffic to them, qualify the traffic, and sell the leads to various businesses. I had hundreds of sites, and it was a serious gold rush. :)
Again, back then, it was a chore to build sites that inspired visitors' trust. With today's tools, it's easy peasy. Sort of like self-publishing a book.
But bringing home serious earnings? As you noted, that ain't so easy peasy. And it's only going to get harder.
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A household-name author will turn to indie publishing to finally release that lifetime masterpiece or pet project that their agent or editor couldn't or wouldn't touch. They'll hire the same editor and cover designer that they use with their Big 5 publisher, hire the same publicist and distributor they've been working with for twenty years, capitalize the sh*t out of the launch, and when it hits the shelves there will be no way to know it didn't come from HarperCollins or Tor or whoever and nobody, no reader anywhere, will care. It'll be a massive, world-rocking success and pick up award nods and an Oprah sticker, and the bar of reader expectation will get raised back to where it was twenty years ago, because that book will be what readers come to expect from an "independent release."
Maybe not next year, but it's coming. I give it five years, tops.
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A household-name author will turn to indie publishing to finally release that lifetime masterpiece or pet project that their agent or editor couldn't or wouldn't touch. They'll hire the same editor and cover designer that they use with their Big 5 publisher, hire the same publicist and distributor they've been working with for twenty years, capitalize the sh*t out of the launch, and when it hits the shelves there will be no way to know it didn't come from HarperCollins or Tor or whoever and nobody, no reader anywhere, will care. It'll be a massive, world-rocking success and pick up award nods and an Oprah sticker, and the bar of reader expectation will get raised back to where it was twenty years ago, because that book will be what readers come to expect from an "independent release."
Maybe not next year, but it's coming. I give it five years, tops.
I've actually wondered why a few of them haven't done this already.
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I think the volume of incoming hopefuls will diminish as time passes.
It's like building a site to rank for competitive terms (e.g. mortgage loans, payday loans, etc.) on Google. In 2002, it was easy. By 2010, the difficulty of doing so had increased by an order of magnitude. Many hopefuls gave up, lacking the capital, time, and skills required. Today, no one ranks for "mortgage loans" unless they're bankrate, wellsfargo, or another authority site.
There are no longer any hopefuls in that game (without VC money).
I suspect indie publishing will follow a similar path.
I guess very few of the website builders of 2002 were genuinely interested in mortgage loans, payday loans, etc... They merely built those sites for the money.
However, a lot of people enjoy telling stories and writing books. These people will continue to flock to self-publishing. Some of them may learn and stick around, others might not.
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I've actually wondered why a few of them haven't done this already.
I've had this discussion with some fairly major authors as I've been doing cons over the past year. They didn't even know that it was possible to hire your own professional team and just foot the bill yourself, until I explained that I'd done very well by doing exactly that. And then, wow, the questions.
One of them has hired us to help build a promo campaign, website, and revamp her branding and SEO. Her self-published book is coming out next year. We were this close to releasing it through our publishing company but we couldn't risk the capital at that time. (We didn't know that The New Magic was going to do as well as it has.)
The book she's releasing may not be the book that blows the top off, but we're definitely going to see more and more big-name authors going hybrid.
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It's going to suck even more. :banana-riding-llama-smiley-em
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I've actually wondered why a few of them haven't done this already.
Contracts with agents that give them a piece of everything, self-pubbed or not. Noncompete clauses. Fear that the publisher will blacklist them (because many of these monster earners don't actually realize how much power they have).
It would have to be someone of the status of a Rowling. Oh, wait--she already did it, basically, by forming her own publishing company. As did Patterson. Probably others.
Yes, we do have to wonder why a solid high-midlister like JA Jance, someone at that level, doesn't simply move on to being an indie. I don't think they really understand how they'd probably triple their earnings for any new release. They're taking their 50K + 12.5% and being happy with it, not realizing they could get 150K the first year and 70% every year thereafter on their own.
Just my educated guess.
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I predict ...
More books
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Less story
:smilie_zauber:
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I predict that Indie writers will get better at finding their readers.
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A lower rate? How is that an enticement?
I think the idea is that under a modified agreement, you can be in Kindle Unlimited but with lower royalties and still be wide. So, right now, KU pays roughly .5 cents per page. Maybe you get .3 per page but you can also be wide with other distributors?
I'm really wondering what most authors will do:
1) The content mills and scammers are soaking up a lot of money in KU. (All of those fraudulent page reads are reducing the average per page payout ... it's simple arithmetic)
2) As Russell Blake has posted, Amazon playing with also boughts and leveraging Kindle into a "pay to play" advertising platform at the expense of organic discovery is making Kindle more expensive for authors.
So, as a whole, Kindle, while still the dominant platform, is quickly becoming a lot less attractive, especially KU. It would seem to me that the obvious solution is for authors to take up more promotion on their own outside of Amazon ... and if that is happening, what incentive is there to promote Kindle over other platforms?
Amazon squeezing authors for ad dollars may end up undermining their massive market share in the long run.
(I'm wide on general principle, so it's an emotional not a business decision, but at least I don't have to worry about my strategy.)
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I predict (hope!!) that we'll start seeing more royalties from KU now that book stuffers are being kicked out. That should mean the KU money pool will get spread out a little more....right? :icon_think:
Hasn't happened yet. Won't happen in the future.
Latest KU pay rate
US = .005206
previous month's rate was .004841
Nov 2017 rate was .0046
That's something at least. I think 🤔(?) it's the highest rate since 2016.
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I could go pessimistic or optimistic.
Pessimistic: Content mills (with and without botting and other techniques) make such a circus out of KU that Amazon shuts it down and replaces it with an invitation-only program that cuts out the rest of us and makes discoverability even harder. Or perhaps Amazon goes even further, decides KDP is more trouble than it's worth, and basically shuts down self-publishing. (Other vendors might sustain it for a while, but their initial embrace of it was a reaction to Amazon having it.) This isn't as strange as it sounds. Over the past couple of years, Amazon has phased out indie creative outlets like Kindle Worlds or closed them to new indie submissions (Kindle Press dropped the Kindle Scout program, Kindle Singles reopened as a program tied to Amazon Publishing that no longer accepts unagented submissions.) Amazon could easily peal off the top indies by offering them Amazon Publishing contracts on good terms and then dump everybody else, content mills and prawns alike. (Some top indies would want to stay indie, but what if KDP ceased to exist?)
Optimistic: New initiatives like the Kobo-Walmart alliance begin to eat into Amazon market share. Smelling blood in the water, other vendors up their game as well. The Big Five form some kind of join initiative to buy Barnes and Noble and revitalize it. Amazon realizes that an overemphasis on ads and gimmicks is ruining its bookstore, even as ad blindness is causing ad revenues to decline. In an effort to hold on, Amazon starts treating authors better, and the most talented indies flourish. It will even drop the exclusivity clause from KU. (What do KU readers care whether the work is available to buy elsewhere? And Amazon's effort to starve other sites of content can't really work as long as they have all those trad titles to push.) The sheer growth in the number of indies and the number of books is still going to make visibility tougher, but the people who struggle forward and have the talent will be rewarded better than they are currently. As self publishing gains wider and wider respect, self published share of book income will continue to increase.
The reality will probably fall somewhere between those extremes.
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I predict Amazon will augment Prime Reading (somehow) and shutter Kindle Unlimited.
Amazon wants to keep its customers in its environment as much as possible. About 2 weeks ago my husband saw two semis carrying 4 Amazon delivery vans each in Memphis (the metro area has 2 Wholesale Foods, which Amazon owns) and I saw an Amazon delivery van out doing its rounds a couple weeks before that. Keeping customers in their environment means people buy their groceries on the kindle, buy their clothes on kindle, buy their books and movies on kindle, watch a crap ton of free content on Kindle Prime and read free content on KU. So KU is going nowhere IMO, although I deeply wish it were otherwise.
Another factor, Amazon is making decent money off AMS for KU books and books trying to compete against KU books. I know KDP books are a small part of Amazon's business, so AMS $ is an even smaller drop in the bucket, but I don't see KU getting shuttered for that reason and the above reasoning.
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I think the volume of incoming hopefuls will diminish as time passes.
It's like building a site to rank for competitive terms (e.g. mortgage loans, payday loans, etc.) on Google. In 2002, it was easy. By 2010, the difficulty of doing so had increased by an order of magnitude. ...
Funny because a number of the authors I know (legit) or knew (kinda scammy) jumped from having dozens or more sites they managed for ad revenue to trying their hand at the kindle gold rush. And, yes, I expect a lot of them to move on now.
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A household-name author will turn to indie publishing to finally release that lifetime masterpiece or pet project that their agent or editor couldn't or wouldn't touch. They'll hire the same editor and cover designer that they use with their Big 5 publisher, hire the same publicist and distributor they've been working with for twenty years, capitalize the sh*t out of the launch, and when it hits the shelves there will be no way to know it didn't come from HarperCollins or Tor or whoever and nobody, no reader anywhere, will care. It'll be a massive, world-rocking success and pick up award nods and an Oprah sticker, and the bar of reader expectation will get raised back to where it was twenty years ago, because that book will be what readers come to expect from an "independent release."
Maybe not next year, but it's coming. I give it five years, tops.
And we want this to be us. All of us. We will launch the book.
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A tidal wave of authors who lack publishing chops (audience targeting, marketing, promotion, branding, etc.) will abandon the idea of making a living writing books.
Sure, but just like with any other waves on the shore, another wave is soon to follow. And another one right after that.
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I've actually wondered why a few of them haven't done this already.
I'm guessing it's because they don't see the need. Thinking seriously about it, why would Stephen King ever go indie? He makes millions already, someone else is always taking care of things for him, such as editing, covers, marketing and so on. Why would he leave the world of tradpub behind and try to learn how to indie publish? I just don't see it for any of the top shelf authors. King, Lee Child, Dan Brown, JK Rowling and boatloads of others. They make comfortable livings without doing anything, but writing their books.
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About 2 weeks ago my husband saw two semis carrying 4 Amazon delivery vans each in Memphis (the metro area has 2 Wholesale Foods, which Amazon owns) and I saw an Amazon delivery van out doing its rounds a couple weeks before that.
We're going to be seeing a lot more of that over time. One of the things I like to do when I'm pushing the keyboard away is to watch Virtual Railfan videos on Youtube, which are live feeds of various railroad depots. It was nothing to see a freight train go through with dozens of UPS and FedEx trailers on the cars. Now, we're seeing Amazon trailers sprinkled in there and I think it's going to be something we see a lot more of in the near future. Amazon has already started buying its own planes to compete with UPS and FedEx.
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New prediction: Barnes & Noble holds on for another year, and as soon as Riggio dies, it takes off like a rocket and becomes a strong competitor to Amazon in the book space.
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New prediction: Barnes & Noble holds on for another year, and as soon as Riggio dies, it takes off like a rocket and becomes a strong competitor to Amazon in the book space.
Grin Grin Grin :icon_lol2: Grin Grin Grin :icon_rofl:
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New prediction: Barnes & Noble holds on for another year, and as soon as Riggio dies, it takes off like a rocket and becomes a strong competitor to Amazon in the book space.
Grin Grin Grin :icon_lol2: Grin Grin Grin :icon_rofl:
That wasn't a joke.
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New prediction: Barnes & Noble holds on for another year, and as soon as Riggio dies, it takes off like a rocket and becomes a strong competitor to Amazon in the book space.
I like it. We'e been declaring B&N dead for how many years now? It's not dead yet. I have a column on the slow death of the Nook, which still sounds perfectly plausible now, but I wrote it two years ago. I've even bought stock in the company since. I also spent time in one of their stores while Christmas shopping, and it was hopping.
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New prediction: Barnes & Noble holds on for another year, and as soon as Riggio dies, it takes off like a rocket and becomes a strong competitor to Amazon in the book space.
I like it. We'e been declaring B&N dead for how many years now? It's not dead yet. I have a column on the slow death of the Nook, which still sounds perfectly plausible now, but I wrote it two years ago. I've even bought stock in the company since. I also spent time in one of their stores while Christmas shopping, and it was hopping.
My local Borders store was hopping--right until it wasn't. Stores with high rents can look busy, especially around Christmas, and still be losing money. That said, I hope you're right.
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Borders isn't closed, at least not internationally. It's been doing quite well in Mexico these last couple of years. We may see the rebirth of Borders in the US this year, and/or a merger with Barnes and Noble.
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I've actually wondered why a few of them haven't done this already.
I'm guessing it's because they don't see the need. Thinking seriously about it, why would Stephen King ever go indie? He makes millions already, someone else is always taking care of things for him, such as editing, covers, marketing and so on. Why would he leave the world of tradpub behind and try to learn how to indie publish? I just don't see it for any of the top shelf authors. King, Lee Child, Dan Brown, JK Rowling and boatloads of others. They make comfortable livings without doing anything, but writing their books.
Interestingly, Stephen King tried to go indie. Remember The Plant? Not very many people do, but it was King's attempt to sell a novel online in installments. The explicit purpose was to cut out the middlemen (publishers and distributors). King was ahead of his time in that respect. People weren't used to buying books that way, and even with his popularity, he couldn't sell the concept on his own. Had he waited until KDP took off, it might have been a different story.
As for JK Rowling, when she got big enough, she took as many of her rights as weren't already nailed down and created Pottermore. (I suspect one of the reasons publishers became more rights-grabby is in an attempt to avoid future Pottermores.)
That said, most authors who are perennial bestsellers are happy in their current situation. They are the few people for whom traditional publishing undeniably works. Could they make more as indies? With their enormous fan bases, probably, but there is risk in jumping out of a model that's worked well for them. I also suspect that they can turn down attempts to lock them into more onerous contract terms. It's the newer authors who don't have huge fan bases they might take elsewhere who are more likely to get stuck. They just don't have the bargaining leverage to easily say no to a major publisher.
Such writers would be ripe for a model with some of the benefits of trad and some of the benefits of indie if anyone could design one. I thought Amazon had the right idea with Kindle Scout: trad publishing with more author creative control and reasonable terms, including easy rights reversion. At the time it started, I thought Amazon was trying to snag the future Stephen Kings and JK Rowlings by giving them an alternative to the Big Five. I was wrong about that. Kindle Press, the imprint into which Kindle Scout books fed, ended up as the poor stepchild among the imprints. It gradually did less and less to promote books. Even as Amazon imprints in general were taking a bigger piece of the sales pie, a lot of KP books just sank. They weren't even included in programs like Kindle First Reads and other opportunities that Amazon could have given them easily. Kindle Press also lacked the vision to develop relationships with authors. Even authors whose books did well didn't always get picked up again. Editors had a very narrow, book by book vision, and often picked up only one book in a series, even if the first book did well. We learned during the phase when finalists were getting editorial comments that books could be rejected over relatively nitpicky things that could easily have been fixed in editing (a side-effect of the only-on-round-of-editing process). The biggest heartbreaker for me was the rejection of a book (which wasn't mine) that the editor described as "brilliant." It was rejected because the author didn't seem to know anything about promotion. Isn't that the publisher's job? No wonder that process didn't work.
OK, enough Kindle Scout bitterness. In the future, if someone with vision and patience tried a model like that, it could probably be made to work. Even KS had a few success stories to its credit. Someone looking at the future instead of just the book right in front of them, someone understanding that partnership with authors is better than the servitude a lot of trads are imposing, might really create an enterprise that would take off.
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Borders isn't closed, at least not internationally. It's been doing quite well in Mexico these last couple of years. We may see the rebirth of Borders in the US this year, and/or a merger with Barnes and Noble.
I think someone must have bought the Borders name. Yup, at least if Wikipedia is to be believed. Some Borders stores are operating, but not by the same company. CompUSA went through a similar transformation, but the new owners never expanded to anything like the proportions of the old chain.
That said, I'll keep my fingers crossed. But in the US, Barnes and Noble bought whatever pieces of Borders were left, including store leases, customer data, and name. The only way a bookstore named Borders could come back into existence in the US would be with B & N's blessing.
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The biggest hurdle any established Stephen King-level author would face in taking a book out on their own is print distribution. Most of us indies make so much (most or all) of our sales from ebooks that we forget how important print still is. It's still the case that trad publishing owns the means to print and distribute books for lower per-unit costs than we can.
If King wanted to publish a book entirely on his own, he'd either have to pair up with a publisher for print-only to get his books into the same places his other books can be found, or decide print wasn't worth the bother.
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That said, most authors who are perennial bestsellers are happy in their current situation. They are the few people for whom traditional publishing undeniably works.
That right there is what I'm getting at and probably not voicing clearly. How many top-tier writers want to run businesses? As most of us indies realize, being an indie means being a business owner and operator. For Stephen King and others to have the same success as indies they would have to start publishing companies of their own. How many of them want to do that? Yes, JK Rowling did it, as did a few others, but I suspect most are happy letting others handle the business side of things while they sit at their computers and write.
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That said, most authors who are perennial bestsellers are happy in their current situation. They are the few people for whom traditional publishing undeniably works.
That right there is what I'm getting at and probably not voicing clearly. How many top-tier writers want to run businesses? As most of us indies realize, being an indie means being a business owner and operator. For Stephen King and others to have the same success as indies they would have to start publishing companies of their own. How many of them want to do that? Yes, JK Rowling did it, as did a few others, but I suspect most are happy letting others handle the business side of things while they sit at their computers and write.
Having the *option* of going indie has probably given them all leverage for even better deals with trad. They didn't need to go indie. Just the option to.
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The biggest hurdle any established Stephen King-level author would face in taking a book out on their own is print distribution. Most of us indies make so much (most or all) of our sales from ebooks that we forget how important print still is. It's still the case that trad publishing owns the means to print and distribute books for lower per-unit costs than we can.
If King wanted to publish a book entirely on his own, he'd either have to pair up with a publisher for print-only to get his books into the same places his other books can be found, or decide print wasn't worth the bother.
I could see him doing an ebook first and then contracting with a trad publisher for the print rights. They'd be valuable because there are so many King collectors who would want the book(s) in hardcover or paperback at least. But I don't really see why he would bother. I doubt his publisher would cavil at any story idea he has, and for him, the publicity machine gets rolled out in a big way, and it costs him nothing.
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Rise of the Planet of the Content Mills
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That said, most authors who are perennial bestsellers are happy in their current situation. They are the few people for whom traditional publishing undeniably works.
That right there is what I'm getting at and probably not voicing clearly. How many top-tier writers want to run businesses? As most of us indies realize, being an indie means being a business owner and operator. For Stephen King and others to have the same success as indies they would have to start publishing companies of their own. How many of them want to do that? Yes, JK Rowling did it, as did a few others, but I suspect most are happy letting others handle the business side of things while they sit at their computers and write.
Without question, letting someone else handle the business side is attractive. That's why some successful indies moved over to trad. Most of them probably would if the terms were right.
Unfortunately, trads don't have any real competition for that aspect. As far as I know, there's no one out there willing to take the business end of things out of an author's hands, leaving the author with the creative control and a bigger chunk of the royalties than the trads tend to want to relinquish. From a business standpoint, I can see why no one does that, but it would be nice if someone did.
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Didn't Stephen King write an ebook for the Kindle back in 2009?
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Didn't Stephen King write an ebook for the Kindle back in 2009?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/feb/10/stephen-king-kindle-ur
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Prognostications!
I don't think B&N crumbles this year. But the trajectory is not good . . . and I don't think it's because of the brand or bookselling in general. Horrible, horrible management. It really seems that the upper management is far more concerned with draining B&N dry than running a bookseller. Despite the unstable financial footing it's still a dividend stock, and there are a host of executives taking massive salaries while steering the ship into the rocks. I'm reminded of the news from a year or so ago when B&N fired many of their long-term employees to save a few million dollars, while still handing out dividends and multi-million dollar executive salaries.
https://teleread.org/2018/02/14/barnes-noble-lays-off-hundreds-of-experienced-employees-may-not-be-long-for-this-world/
It's really being run for the benefit of the large shareholders and the executives - disgusting, predatory capitalism at its worst. 'Merica.
But I think the business is still viable, and the brand is strong. I predict that after the blood is drained from the corpse the parasites in the boardroom will strap on their golden parachutes and float off into the sunset, and then a buyer will emerge that will revitalize the stores. There's too much potential for it to stay dead.
On the issue of trad authors going indie . . . it won't be the Kings or the Rowlings or the Roberts. They have more than enough money, and they love the fame that comes with being feted in trad publishing. What I predict is that more and more strong mid-list authors will go indie . . . the authors that release a hardcover book every year or two, get a decent advance and critical acclaim, but still have to hold down another job to pay the rent. It's a surprising number of authors - household names, award-winning name in houses that love particular genres, who are being exploited by trad publishing. NK Jemisin - who has won multiple Hugos and is one of the biggest names in Fantasy - could only go full-time as a writer through Patreon donations. Kameron Hurley - another writers with 10+ books to her name - several quite successful - wrote a blog post about her income from trad. Despite so many successful books her income (advances and royalties from her writing) was only 16,000 last year.
https://www.kameronhurley.com/writing-income-made-2017/
Now, a lot of these trad writers would prefer the social respectability that comes with trad over the money and freedom of indie. But I think a lot of them don't actually realize the potential - they almost intentionally ignore the news of indies making living wages because it sends cracks through the foundation of their world view. But some will start to make the jump, and then others will follow. And this will increase competition.
Successful indie writers will continue to get poached by trad publishers. This past year a bunch of the top indie fantasy authors have signed deals with major publishers - Kel Kade, Duncan Hamilton, Brian Anderson - the difference is that these deals aren't for past works (like when Blood Song and The Riyria Revelations or the Shadow of What Was Lost was re-published) but rather new works. (Though we did see several indies books republished - Senlin Ascends and Gray Bastards, though they weren't huge sellers before so the rights might have been reasonable) Trad Publishers - smartly - are realizing that getting attention in this new publishing landscape is extremely hard, so it might be more practical to partner with indie authors with significant followings than trying to develop debuts from obscurity. I was even contacted by a senior editor at Tor asking to see my next series. The indie ways of getting attention - AMS and Facebook Ads / Groups and KU and email lists built through various means - are proving more successful than the old trad ways (bookstore placement, reviews like Kirkus, etc)
I think the top tier of indie books will keep getting more professional. The covers, the lettering, the editing, and the writing. The era of mediocre work succeeding based solely on price is fading, and as KU and other indie readers find more high-quality books they will turn away from the stuff that's just okay. The low-price books will still exist, as in volume they can clearly still be very profitable, but the quality of what moves will keep increasing.
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New prediction: in 2019, indies are going to lose a lot (and I mean A LOT) of money on advertising. Over time, this will blur the line between the indie movement and vanity publishing. Before the end of the year, many black-pilled authors will argue that KDP is little better than a vanity press.
Long-term, the future of publishing is not with indies or with the large publishing houses, but with small presses. The successful indies who don't die out will gradually transform—indeed, are already transforming—into single-author small press publishers. The trick for authors seeking to be picked up by a small press will be figuring out which ones offer genuine value and learning how to spot red flags.
One potential area of interest is author collectives, where indies band together to publish their books under a common banner and/or cross-polinate their audiences.
Another AoI is short fiction. Authors who make a name for themselves in the pro-markets can leverage that to build an audience for their other books. Over the next few years, short fiction is going to become an increasingly important part of career writing success.
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One potential area of interest is author collectives, where indies band together to publish their books under a common banner and/or cross-polinate their audiences.
This is exactly the thing I fear.
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Audiobooks will continue to grow as a share of the story market. Storytelling via text will change so that the text can be performed in order to create a better audiobook experience.
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New prediction: in 2019, indies are going to lose a lot (and I mean A LOT) of money on advertising. Over time, this will blur the line between the indie movement and vanity publishing. Before the end of the year, many black-pilled authors will argue that KDP is little better than a vanity press.
Long-term, the future of publishing is not with indies or with the large publishing houses, but with small presses.
This is a bold prediction. I can see it, really. The problem is that there's a balancing point there. How long until the small press that's really attentive to all of their titles, that's able to market each one with care becomes just another medium sized publisher that doesn't have the time or resources to promote books that are more than a month old?
How do they keep from falling into the traps of scale?
The successful indies who don't die out will gradually transform—indeed, are already transforming—into single-author small press publishers. The trick for authors seeking to be picked up by a small press will be figuring out which ones offer genuine value and learning how to spot red flags.
This is just semantics unless you can point out some way an indie and a single author "small press" are different. Both do exactly the same things and probably have similar corporate structures.
One potential area of interest is author collectives, where indies band together to publish their books under a common banner and/or cross-polinate their audiences.
Agreed. Collectives are great, until someone doesn't pull their weight. Then what? What if Bob's series isn't making any money and John is lazy and refuses to market? Tragedy of the commons and all that.
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This is just semantics unless you can point out some way an indie and a single author "small press" are different. Both do exactly the same things and probably have similar corporate structures.
Indies try to do most of the work themselves. Single author small presses either hire employees or contract out for most of the work, with the publishing company set up as its own entity (LLC, etc). Admittedly, it's a bit fuzzy, since plenty of Indies are LLCs and still try to do most of their own work, but it is an important transformation.
I suppose another thing to watch for would be successful single-author small presses taking on multiple authors.
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This is just semantics unless you can point out some way an indie and a single author "small press" are different. Both do exactly the same things and probably have similar corporate structures.
I might be misunderstanding this, but I see this as the difference between being a DIY'er and an entrepreneur. I don't consider myself an indie author because I'm anything but independent; I have a team of professionals that I hire for nearly everything short of the whole putting-words-in-a-row thing. I'd be dead in the water without them.
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This is just semantics unless you can point out some way an indie and a single author "small press" are different. Both do exactly the same things and probably have similar corporate structures.
I might be misunderstanding this, but I see this as the difference between being a DIY'er and an entrepreneur. I don't consider myself an indie author because I'm anything but independent; I have a team of professionals that I hire for nearly everything short of the whole putting-words-in-a-row thing. I'd be dead in the water without them.
Yes, this is my point. Only the rawest of hobbyists will try to do everything by themselves. If that's what you're calling indie then I don't want to be that. :D
I've got beta readers, editor, cover artist, typographer. The things I do are ebook and print layout and the writing.
So if that's the case that prediction boils down to the newbs getting screwed completely or becoming "pro"
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Advertising is the key area indies are missing out on.
I remember when trad publishers inserted full page ads into paperbacks.
Can we do the same with our paprbacks and/or ebooks?
Does Amazon tack on their promotions at the end of our ebooks?
If so, does adding that or anything else violate our copyright?
Perhaps I'm coming our of left field with these concerns.
But we haven't thought out what we're really giving up as indies.
We ran from the trad gatekeepers, but where are we now?
Authors built a long court history of fighting censors. Yet we allow our ebooks to be vetted by folks in third world countries with different cultures to object to our covers and subject matter and dump us into the dungeon.
We need to really look at these things.
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One potential area of interest is author collectives, where indies band together to publish their books under a common banner and/or cross-polinate their audiences.
This is exactly the thing I fear.
Why do you fear it?
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I'm going to go out on a limb and say that advertising is not going to transform KDP into a vanity press.
The old vanity presses were con artists who got people to pay to print thousands of their own paperbacks without telling them that no book store would ever touch their books. KDP does provide store access, and it does avoid having to order a huge backlog of paperbacks that we can't sell.
I see the challenge to visibility as not coming just from advertising costs. It's the growing number of books and authors (who drive ad costs up by bidding higher and higher to rise above everybody else) that is actually the problem. That's inherent to self-publishing as we know it.
I don't see small presses as a likely response to this problem. Remember that a lot of legit small presses have gone out of business since the rise of self-publishing. I do see the possibility of indie cooperatives, but that's more like organized cross-promotion than it is like a full-scale publisher. (And yes, I'm in the group that sees single-author publishers as being indies under another name. Today, most successful indies farm out parts of the work.)
What I do see happening is a winnowing out process. (Literary Darwinism?) I hope that doesn't result in domination by content mills. If those become too powerful, I think Amazon will take steps to check them, as others have suggested. Definitely, self publishing will eventually become an opportunity only for those who can work full-time (or at least move to full-time as quickly as possibly) and who have a fair amount of money to invest. Hobbyists will still exist (because they aren't dependent on their writing to produce an income, but the days of people using part-time indie writing as a supplemental income may be coming to an end.
That may seem grim, but making a living at writing has always been tough. If anything, the early days of the KDP gold rush were highly atypical. I think self publishing will remain as an opportunity to get one's foot in the door, but the foot will have to be backed by a lot of effort and money to get even minimal results in the future--just as has almost always been true. Before self publishing, the vast majority of writers were unable to make a living from writing. Why would now, with a much larger number of writers competing for attention, be any different?
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Why would now, with a much larger number of writers competing for attention, be any different?
It is different now because ebooks have made it possible for new writers to get a foothold without having to invest in real-world stock upfront or to trek round real-world stores to try and get some shelf space. Even although this has led to an exponential increase in the overall number of books available, it's still possible for writers to get an audience if they produce something marketable, and it doesn't now have to appeal to cynical big publishing companies but to real readers.
Personally I am one of the hobbyists who makes some supplementary income from writing, but there is still a lot of satisfaction in finding and growing my readership, and I don't expect that to change for a while yet.
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Advertising is the key area indies are missing out on.
I remember when trad publishers inserted full page ads into paperbacks.
Can we do the same with our paprbacks and/or ebooks?
Yes, but then people will accuse you of "page stuffing" or be disappointed the book ends before the absolute very last page.
Authors built a long court history of fighting censors. Yet we allow our ebooks to be vetted by folks in third world countries with different cultures to object to our covers and subject matter and dump us into the dungeon.
We need to really look at these things.
My personal opinion is that what is really needed is an industry standard for eBooks, such as ePub. Proprietary eBook formats should go the way of the dinosaur. Or, if ePub is not to be the standard but mobi (or whatever Amazon calls their format these days), then maybe Amazon should follow Adobe's PDF example. PDF is an industry standard now. Multiple applications these days can create a PDF. And there are multiple applications to view and print PDFs. If you have a PDF, you can take it anywhere, use it on any device or platform. Windows, Mac, doesn't matter.
Books are the same way. You can take a paperback anywhere. Not so with eBooks. You're typically stuck in one ecosystem. If you buy a Kindle book, you can't (easily) move that to a non-Kindle device or app. You cannot even create a Kindle book for sale outside of Amazon without violating the terms of service for KindleGen. As for getting books to your Kindle, sure, you can sideload it, but covers won't come through right and they don't show up under Books but rather Documents or whatever.
You should be able to move and read the eBooks you've purchased as easily as a PDF. The eBook file should be device and platform agnostic, like a PDF.
But, what's the incentive for Amazon to do that? And how would we convince readers to demand such a thing? I don't know. But if it were as easy to buy an eBook from a website as it was Amazon, and you could easily load that eBook onto your device without complicated sideloading and sending the file into the "Documents" dungeon, that would tend to decentralize eBooks. It would make it easier for competitors to sell eBooks and for authors to sell direct from their websites. It would be good for readers too. Without Amazon as the middleman, we could keep 100% of our money or we could sell our books for 70% of their normal price. The latter would mean lower prices for readers.
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Dan - This doesn't address your main point, but regarding the 'Documents Dungeon' there is Send to Kindle:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle
It sends the file to the ebook Library of your device. I compile .MOBI files out of Scrivener and use Send to Kindle to get them on my Kindle and phone so I can see what they look like. Scrivener will also compile .EPUB files, but I'm going into KU so I may as well stick to .MOBI for now.
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Advertising is the key area indies are missing out on.
I remember when trad publishers inserted full page ads into paperbacks.
Can we do the same with our paprbacks and/or ebooks?
One potential area of interest is author collectives, where indies band together to publish their books under a common banner and/or cross-polinate their audiences.
To address both these points, I'm part of a group of fantasy authors called Sigil Independent. The idea behind it is that the authors in the group are vetted, and so readers can expect that Sigil books are of a certain quality.
https://www.sigilindependent.com/
We maintain a website and do some marketing together, and for my latest release I included a full-page ad at the end of my ebook advertising the group. I wonder if more authors will band together to make similar collectives.
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QUOTE:
". . . then people will accuse you of "page stuffing"
Well, I don't accuse newspapers of "page stuffing" with ads.
Two points I was trying to raise about ads in our books:
- do we get a cut of the ad revenue, and if not, why not?
- does the inclusion of ads or promotions at the end of our books by Amazon violate our copyright by adding material we didn't create?
And are readers really complaining about that?
I also raised another point: censorship by folks in third world countries who can dump our books in the dungeon. In past years before the digital world, authors won several battles against censorship, but now those cases don't help us.
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I might be misunderstanding this, but I see this as the difference between being a DIY'er and an entrepreneur. I don't consider myself an indie author because I'm anything but independent; I have a team of professionals that I hire for nearly everything short of the whole putting-words-in-a-row thing. I'd be dead in the water without them.
You're independent because you're the boss and they're your team. YOU are not dependent just because you depend on having a team, because you could hire and fire and always find more team members, if that's what it takes.
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I believe the self-publishing industry is going to see even more writers doing this for the art. The 'gold rush' days are over as KKR calls them. There's still money to be made, but I believe we'll see more books written for love over money.
Maybe I'm an optimist, but I do think this will open up some interesting discussions about how we can offer readers concepts and ideas, while still entertaining them. I know many authors do this now, but I think it will become a more popular reason to self-publish.
We have a lot more influence than I think we sometimes realize. :smilie_zauber:
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One potential area of interest is author collectives, where indies band together to publish their books under a common banner and/or cross-polinate their audiences.
This is exactly the thing I fear.
Why do you fear it?
Goodness, how much time have you got? :hehe
There's a whole other thread about this particular subject under the heading "Team Writing" where I've laid out my fears ad nauseum...and then some...lol.
Suffice it to say, I worry that authors banding together in the form of "collectives" under one or a few common brand names essentially gives rise to the content mill model. No?
Well, if that is the case, I worry that model could come to dominate the market leaving individual indies with little recourse but to join them or try for trad in the face of prohibitive visibility costs as the mill collectives drive the price of ads beyond what most individuals could afford - that represents a fairly substantial paradigm shift - and I would argue not in a positive direction for individual indies looking to remain independent. What I'm saying is, that it essentially plunks us back into the kind of gatekeeper land we lived in prior to 2008.
The good news is, in that 'Team Writing' thread, regardless of my dire outlook, there is some cause for continued optimism for individual business owners from some of the posters there - while also reconciling that the content mill model may still rise to prominence in the near term.
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Author collectives can be content mills a la Michael Anderle or Chris Kennedy, but they don't have to be.
The Bookview Café is an author collective of several SFF authors, usually with a traditionally published backlist. The Ursula K. Le Guin was a member. However, while they are an author collective, they are not a content mill.
And there are other examples along those lines.
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Goodness, how much time have you got? :hehe
There's a whole other thread about this particular subject under the heading "Team Writing" where I've laid out my fears ad nauseum...and then some...lol.
Suffice it to say, I worry that authors banding together in the form of "collectives" under one or a few common brand names essentially gives rise to the content mill model. No?
Well, if that is the case, I worry that model could come to dominate the market leaving individual indies with little recourse but to join them or try for trad in the face of prohibitive visibility costs as the mill collectives drive the price of ads beyond what most individuals could afford - that represents a fairly substantial paradigm shift - and I would argue not in a positive direction for individual indies looking to remain independent. What I'm saying is, that it essentially plunks us back into the kind of gatekeeper land we lived in prior to 2008.
I mentioned the collective I'm a part of. We collaborate on marketing and support each other but we are certainly not a content mill.
https://www.sigilindependent.com/
And I wouldn't be too worried about content mills. Only some readers are satisfied by the product they create. In fantasy, at least, they do not dominate AMS. The biggest self-published writers in fantasy - Kel Kade, Will Wight, Jonathan Renshaw, Duncan Hamilton, etc - are not involved in farming out their names and worlds to ghostwriters and collaborators.
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Sigil is a great looking site, Alec. And the works displayed on there look very professional.
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Author collectives can be content mills a la Michael Anderle or Chris Kennedy, but they don't have to be.
The Bookview Café is an author collective of several SFF authors, usually with a traditionally published backlist. The Ursula K. Le Guin was a member. However, while they are an author collective, they are not a content mill.
And there are other examples along those lines.
Once again, Cora is there to pull me back off the ledge. lol See, I was not aware that these kind of collectives existed. This must be the kind of thing Joe was referring to in his post. I'm glad to be corrected about this. Thanks, Cora.
Goodness, how much time have you got? :hehe
There's a whole other thread about this particular subject under the heading "Team Writing" where I've laid out my fears ad nauseum...and then some...lol.
Suffice it to say, I worry that authors banding together in the form of "collectives" under one or a few common brand names essentially gives rise to the content mill model. No?
Well, if that is the case, I worry that model could come to dominate the market leaving individual indies with little recourse but to join them or try for trad in the face of prohibitive visibility costs as the mill collectives drive the price of ads beyond what most individuals could afford - that represents a fairly substantial paradigm shift - and I would argue not in a positive direction for individual indies looking to remain independent. What I'm saying is, that it essentially plunks us back into the kind of gatekeeper land we lived in prior to 2008.
I mentioned the collective I'm a part of. We collaborate on marketing and support each other but we are certainly not a content mill.
https://www.sigilindependent.com/
And I wouldn't be too worried about content mills. Only some readers are satisfied by the product they create. In fantasy, at least, they do not dominate AMS. The biggest self-published writers in fantasy - Kel Kade, Will Wight, Jonathan Renshaw, Duncan Hamilton, etc - are not involved in farming out their names and worlds to ghostwriters and collaborators.
Thank you for this, Alec. I guess the author collective thing isn't anything to fear after all.
I'm glad this forum exists. :banana-riding-llama-smiley-em
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Yes, Sigil looks quite professional. How does one go about joining one of these collectives? :icon_think:
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Yes, Sigil looks quite professional. How does one go about joining one of these collectives? :icon_think:
I imagine networking with existing members helps :D
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Yes, Sigil looks quite professional. How does one go about joining one of these collectives? :icon_think:
I imagine networking with existing members helps :D
Connections. It's always about who you know, and if your dragon's egg was in the right nest and did the magick work and were the dwarves tossed at the right angle.
This is no way to run a business! :hehe
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This is no way to run a business! :hehe
As someone incapable of making connections, I agree.
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There's a new group on Facebook. Fantasy Focus.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1641299382682520/
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Yes, Sigil looks quite professional. How does one go about joining one of these collectives? :icon_think:
I think everyone in the group participated in the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off and most of the writers were finalists in the competition.
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The global economy slows down, and perhaps enters a recession.
Ummm... Ah.... Shocking prescient, if a year too early.
Cheers,
R. C.
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Ummm... Ah.... Shocking prescient, if a year too early.
Yep! But don't forget the second part:
…more people turn to ebooks, especially cheap indie ebooks. So things get easier in some ways—or rather, new opportunities are opened.
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... rather, new opportunities are opened.
Too true. A couple of days ago I started a "Ten Days of Free Books and Short Stories" campaign. "If you need a nice diversion from the chaos that has enveloped our collective conscious, how about a free book or short story?"
The results, while not profitable, have been terrific in increasing my "brand" awareness. As I write this, traffic through my site is up 1950 percent in six days. But any up from almost nil is all good. A couple of the short stories have jump up quite a bit in small, specific, categories.
#41 in 90-Minute Teen & Young Adult Short Reads
#22 in Teen & Young Adult Time Travel eBooks
Net, net: Economic bad times are here and will not recover quickly. Improvise, adapt, overcome... I think I heard that somewhere. :)
Cheers,
Roger