Subscribe to RSS 2.0State of the nation Q&A
Thanks for the comments on the state of the nation post, below. There were a couple of questions, as well as pretty universal interest in our eBook plans. I'll cover eBooks tomorrow, but in the meantime, here's my response to Wayne's question about retailers.
Wayne asked: "One thing I'm curious to hear more on is your perspective on how the situation with booksellers today, ie: Waterstone's scaling back etc., has affected indie publishers? Do you think that booksellers in general are more likely to cut back on lesser known genre authors in favour of stocking another shelf with the Kings and Nesbos and Larssons of this world?"
Thanks for the question, Wayne. It's a good one, but it's not a new one. Since we started, every month I've thought 'phew, another month when [insert retailer name] has kindly selected our books for promotion / listed them in range / maintained their stocking levels. But next month is bound to be harder!'
Getting a book accepted into range or onto promotion is always a big deal, and it's Snowbooks' primary aim in publishing. Getting a book into a good spot in a chain bookstore is, rather obviously, a very good way to sell it, and the effort we put in to achieving this is much greater than the effort we go to to get newspaper reviews, to plan launch parties, or to attend literary festivals. (In other words, we put close to zero effort into those things that, based on our experience, we know to have a close to zero effect on sales, and masses of effort into retailers.)
We have always been lucky with our books. Retailers have supported us enormously well. I hope, however, more often than not, retailers don't have to make a choice between maximising margin per linear foot and listing indie titles. Indies provide the same discounts as larger publishers; the same promotional support; the same returns agreements. We provide depth to a range, and give the retailer a genuine chance to get behind new writing. Snowbooks' covers look the part and our writing is as good as it gets, so it's not exactly a charitable effort on the part of the retailers to list our books.
I don't see a significant difference in the last 12 months to the last 8 years. It's always an achievement to get books into retailers. It's as hard, or easy, as it ever was. I'd say that our covers help enormously, and the fact that our books do in fact deliver sales.
And remember, Larsson is published by an indie!
Comments: 4
Thanks, Emma!
And you're right - Larsson is published by an indie! Wahey for the indies! :)
Posted by: WayneSimmons on March 31, 2011 09:00 AM
Hi, Emma – I know you’re dealing with eBooks tomorrow but this is semi-related:
I regularly check out the horror top one hundred on Amazon, and it was only a few months ago that I could go on there and see Wayne and Thomas Emson’s books kicking around the top ten or twenty. Now these titles are being squeezed out by cheap, self-published titles which Amazon is obviously encouraging. How does an indie publisher tackle the loss of exposure their titles would normally get? I know the old saying about cream rising to the top, but hell! 49p for a novel? Who cares if it’s cream or curdled semi-skimmed, it was only 49p.
I can even see Amazon’s lust for profit coming back to bite them on the arse and working in favour of the bricks-and-mortar booksellers: Soon the high street will be the only place you can buy a book where you know you won’t have to wade through the mire of substandard titles from wannabe authors. And I know there are good and bad writers in both camps, but at least the high street bookstore has some quality control. There is none on Amazon.
Posted by: Darren Guest on March 31, 2011 09:54 AM
Hi Darren,
I guess it's just capitalism. What the market wants, the market gets. And to roll out another trite saying, you get what you pay for. Sure, people will buy the crappy, 49p novels, but they'll get 49p's worth of value. I'm not sure, therefore, that we'd see switching (when a customer buys one book instead of another) - we're more likely to see a growing market, because that 49p effort will most likely get abandoned after the first chapter. Which might be Amazon's strategy - or they might not have a strategy other than 'fling a load of stuff at the wall and see what sticks' (which is, let's face it, the primary strategy of publishers universally). With low overhead, they can experiment with the price elasticity of demand* to a much greater extent than their high street counterparts.
My position on this is: let the retailers do what they want, and support them in it. We all try strategies which sometimes turn out not to work. And looked at in the round, the benefits that the sum of their actions bring to Snowbooks are far greater than the downsides.
* the degree to which a change in price affects the number of books sold.
Posted by: Em on March 31, 2011 11:39 AM
I think the 49p novel explosion is in part due to the popularisation (is that a word?) of e-readers - people getting their first Kindle look around for what they can download for free (some classics etc.) and then, when they've picked all of that up, they look at what they can download for 'almost free'. I think this fad will pass fairly quickly, once the novelty value of the downloading experience itself wears off.
Of course, with the publishing proces being simplified if you go down the e-books route alone, some established authors are experimenting with self-publishing their work, maybe a reverted rights back catalogue, instead of offering it to a publisher. There have been rumblings that this stands to be a greater challenge to publishers than the 49p self-published newbies and I guess time will tell. Personally, I think there'll always be a role for a publisher - even if it's just to act as quality control, the gatekeeper who ensures that what you get will be a quality item. and then - as Emma has said in previous blogs - there's the feeling of being selected from the pile: that's something that every budding author should always value.
As a side note, if/ when I pick up a Kindle, I've got my eye on all the old pulp and dime classics that can be downloaded for a quid :)
Posted by: WayneSimmons on March 31, 2011 12:45 PM