I just finished reading Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" and I genuinely enjoyed it. Chris offers a fairly comprehensive look at how modern information and distribution systems have greatly increased the number of unique products available, and how that affects the businesses involved in producing and selling those products. While the book doesn't offer a formula for success in the publishing business, it's about as close to a "must read" as I've seen for people who wonder where it's all going to end. The Long Tail was ranked #2 on Amazon yesterday, about as far from the tip of the tail as you can get!
Publishing has always been a business with a long tail, but most of the only people who used to make a living on the long tail were the second-hand bookstores and a few giant distributors, like Ingram and Baker&Taylor. These days, the main beneficiaries of selling a large number of slow-selling titles are Amazon, Lightning Source, third party sellers using internet store fronts (especially the Amazon Marketplace), and a couple large publishers with very large backlists.
Authors can't make a living on the Long Tail by definition. It's somewhat ironic that the very paradigm that allows for anybody to be a "star" ensures that the sky is so full of stars that only a few particles from each will reach earth each year. It's great that over a million unique titles will sell a couple copies this year, but nobody makes a living selling a couple books a year, even if they've authored dozens. The only parties that profit from Long Tail sales (other than the consumers) are the middlemen.
Neither authors nor publishers aspire to having their titles show up on the long tail. Everybody want to be in the short-head, the top ten books, the top 100 books, the top 1,000 books. By the time you get out of the top 10,000 books, they aren't commercially viable in any sense of the word, unless they are self published and the author is netting the publisher's share. A large proportion of the commercially viable books sold every year aren't new, they are classic fiction, classic non-fiction, books in edition, etc. What this means is you can't look at the 100,000 or so new books published in the U.S. each year (some people put the number closer to 200,000) and say, "10% will be successful". The real number is much lower.
The rest of the books end up on the long tail of publishing. They generate a couple years of depressing royalty reports for the authors, give the reminder houses something to do, and cost a new crop of acquisitions editors their jobs. The also contribute significant income to Amazon's bottom line, to Lightning Source, and to a large number of home-based bookstores who play the mail order game. As an author and a publisher, I don't want to see any of my books appearing on the Long Tail, but based on the time I've spent around big animals, I guess I'd rather be on the tail than under it:-)
The Long Tail of Publishing
POD vs Print on Demand Publishers
I was all geared up to write a mind-bending post about the difference between the subsidy presses who have been given the POD publishers label, and the print-on-demand technology used by trade publishers, academic presses and independents alike. I used to get all worked up when I saw POD being used as a generic term for books from companies like iUniverse, Lulu, PublishAmerica, xLibris and AuthorHouse, but I've concluded that it's silly to fight against the tide of language usage. I imagine there are some lawyers at Google who are bothered that using their Google as a verb will result in trademark dilution, so compared to them, I have nothing to lose by going with the flow. Too bad I was born a salmon.
A couple years ago, I put together a list of a thousand or so random books that were printed and distributed by Lightning Source, including titles from some of the biggest trade publishers and academic presses. I thought that today I'd sit down and list them all, and then ask the question: Do you define this title from Wiley or the Cambridge University Press a POD book? Unfortunately, I can't find the list in the clutter of my hard drive, so I decided to try to recreate it (the publishers’ part) from memory by looking up random titles on Ingram and checking for the Lightning Source On Demand emblem.
After checking a few titles I was sure were published with print on demand and coming up dry, I began to worry that my memory is even less trustworthy than I imagine. It finally occurred to me to check some of my own titles, and the Lighting Source emblem was gone from them as well. I don't know if this is a temporary Ingram glitch or if it's a permanent change, but it's a bit inconvenient for people studying the spread of POD through the publishing world. On the other hand, if Ingram has decided to keep confidential which titles are printed by Lightning Source, it will put an end to bookstore clerk snobbery based on the "POD stigma."
Personally, I'd rather have the emblem back. The deciding factor as to whether or not a store will order a book through Ingram when requested is their store policy on special orders and the discount assigned by the publisher. If the publisher assigned a 55% discount at Lightning Source, the book should show up in the Ingram catalog at the trade discount, usually resulting in a 40% profit margin for the store. I'm firmly in the short discount camp. I currently assign a discount of 25% at Lightning Source, which means some bookstores will not special order, or will add a service charge. I've written a great deal about that business model on this blog, and I've indexed a bunch of the posts with excerpts.
Back to the semantics argument. If you asked me the difference between POD (subsidy) publishers and small publishers using whatever printing technology, it comes down to marketing. Subsidy and other non-traditional presses don't market books unless you pay them, and that kind of marketing just doesn't work. You can hire editors, proofreaders and book designers who are just as good as any large trade staff (if not better) on a freelance basis before signing with a non-traditional publisher, but you can't buy meaningful book promotion. You have to do it (or be it) yourself. What bothers me more about language use in the publishing industry than the abuse of the POD acronym is the confusion between self publishing and paying to get published. Self publishing is a business for the author. Paying a subsidy to get published is a business for the subsidy publisher. The only way you can be a self publisher is to be the author and the publisher.
Writing Articles to Promote Books
When I got back into self publishing around seven years ago, I thought that writing articles for large circulation magazines and websites would be a pretty good way to promote books. I did get some articles published in large circulation magazines, prestigious in the area I was publshing a book, and likewise with some authority websites. I didn't see any boost in sales, but then again, I did a number of things wrong. My worst two mistakes were getting a book excerpt published in a magazine a full year before the book was available for sale and not noticing the magazine had made a typo in the "about the Author" info that referred readers to a website that didn't exist!
Many authors focus almost exclusively on article writing to promote their books, and I've seen instances where it works pretty decently with magazines and newspapers. Newspapers, in particular weekend human interest inserts, have a surprisingly welcoming policy to thinly veiled promotional material, as long as you get on the editor's good side. I lack the people skills for that sort of thing, and I've never been enthusuastic about generating one-time pops in book sales. Grinding out article after article or repreposing existing material and trying to pass it off as new is too much like, well, writing a self publishing blog.
What triggered me to post about article writing today were two requests this morning from websites who wanted permission to repost some of my articles. I turned them down, as I always do, for a number of reasons. For one thing, granting permission to somebody else to use your material always opens the door to abuse. I'm not a lawyer and I don't want to have to hire one every time somebody asks for permission to republish my articles; it's easier to just say no. If it was the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, I'd give them permission in a heartbeat, but I'm not going to open the door to some unknown business run by unknown people.
Another issue is duplicate content penalties. Although this shouldn't be an issue as long as they include a link back to the original, you never know how the search engines may change their algorithyms in the future. There's also the issue of mission creep on the part of the republisher. I don't want to have to check their site on a regular basis to see if they are using my material in accordance with whatever agreement we've reached. The potential upside simply doesn't outweigh the potential downside to me. If you want to write some articles for other websites to help you get off the ground when you launch, write original content that fits their site better than yours, and in addition to avoiding duplication, the article will generate more traffic (and visitors to your site) then something that doesn't quite fit.
There's an even better reason than any of the above not to pursue writing articles for website distribution, which I'll call "focus." If you're focused on building your own authority website to promote your books and build a platform for the future, you should focus on doing that and not get distracted by the fools gold of "free" publicity. There's a reason why publishers of other websites are interested in republishing your articles, and it's not to send you traffic. It's to increase their standing and draw more traffic themselves. To some extent, the Internet, and even the publishing world in general, is a sum zero game. In some cases, a browser on another site might follow a link to you, but most traffic is driven by the search engines, and people tend to stop looking when they find what they want. Do you want them to stop on your website, or somebody elses?