A couple years ago I settled on discouraging customers from buying books directly from my site by doing away with a discount. This means that buying direct from me is the most expensive way to get my books, compared with special ordering through a bookstore or buying from Amazon with free shipping. Admittedly, the main reason I did this was that customer service was getting to be a hassle. Once you start shipping a couple books a day, you get pretty regular stream of "where's my book" e-mails from customers if you use Media Mail. By dropping the 20% discount, I reduced my direct mail order business by at least 70%, probably more if you take into account the growth in my web traffic since then.
On the other side of the equation, I saw some growth in Amazon ordering, and Barnes and Noble started stocking my most popular title in selected stores due to walk-in demand. The question is, did that sales growth offset the lost direct sales? I can't make a direct computation for various reasons but my gut feeling is it didn't. Since the move was motivated by the desire to cut back on customer service and not to increase sales, I can't call it a failure.
Losing some customers who visit a bookstore and don't find a book in stock or who don't feel like buying two books on Amazon for free shipping that day is just part of a changed business model. What does get under my skin is seeing visitors follow the link for my publishing book to Amazon and buy competing publishing titles without buying mine. I don't think it's a judgment on my book which has pretty good reviews, though the PowerPoint cover may be a turn off for some. I think it's just the hazard of sending a shopper off browsing, so that after a casual click or two, they forget who sent them. The consolation prize is that I probably earn about a dollar per sale in Amazon commission on those books.
So why don't I set up an Amazon A-Store with nothing but my titles, or fool around with Amazon web services to have people add directly to their shopping cart on my site? The truth is, I've made a couple half-hearted efforts with these things but I just don't find it that interesting. But if I was managing the retailing for another publisher, I'd force myself, so do as I say and not as I do.
Fast Means You Go Hungry
It's Kol Nidre this evening, so I'm looking forward to the fast. Being a bad Jew, it's the only fast I do religiously, I don't even notice when the other ones come up unless my sister calls to remind me. I enjoy fasting and have always looked forward to Yom Kippur as a chance to stroll up and down memory lane. I think I've found a lesson in the fasting which I can share with everybody. When it comes to your publishing business plans, the only thing fast about the fast lane is the speed at which your bank balance will go down. Fast means you go hungry.
There really aren't two popular camps when it comes to building a career in self publishing. Pretty much everybody hangs out in the break-through camp, where they talk about pushing the ball to the top of the hill and then letting it roll down, gathering momentum and sales. It's all about the big push, mortgaging the house and quitting your day job. It's about radio and TV, publicity firms and viral marketing. It's about telling millions of people about your book and getting them into a buying frenzy, and who cares if they read it.
I hate that approach to publishing for more reasons than I can list, but the #1 reason is because I have to hear about it from correspondents making one of the dumbest mistakes of their lives. When an author pushes a book over the top of the hill through deft use of their money and personality, any success they achieve isn't about the book, it's about the author. They can't tell you how to duplicate their path. Becoming somebody else is not a practical business plan you can follow, especially since there's a big helping of luck involved in becoming a minor celebrity. Even worse, the momentum for most titles is illusory. When the pushing stops the sales stop.
The slow approach to building a career in self publishing doesn't guarantee success any more than the fast approach, but it does remove luck from the equation. If you build your publishing business one customer at a time, you'll have built a career and an asset that will survive the day that the media loses interest in you and moves on to the next fashionable thing. I've heard from enough authors who have achieved minor celebrity status to have learned a couple things from their experiences. However entertaining an author is, people won't buy the book unless they have a reason. Even more importantly, most of those buyers aren't married to the idea, so they'll only buy the book if they come across it on display within a short period of time. That's why the trade industry functions the way it does, with storefront displays and super-sized print runs.
I finished filling out the rough framework for my online book about building a publishing career with a website. It needs a lot more work that I probably won't put in, because I'm convinced that most writers are addicted to the fast track approaches which run counter to everything I've written. I'd hate to be looking back on 2007/2008 from next Yom Kippur and saying, "What did you publish that book for when you knew nobody would read it?" Or maybe all it needs is a good title:-)
There really aren't two popular camps when it comes to building a career in self publishing. Pretty much everybody hangs out in the break-through camp, where they talk about pushing the ball to the top of the hill and then letting it roll down, gathering momentum and sales. It's all about the big push, mortgaging the house and quitting your day job. It's about radio and TV, publicity firms and viral marketing. It's about telling millions of people about your book and getting them into a buying frenzy, and who cares if they read it.
I hate that approach to publishing for more reasons than I can list, but the #1 reason is because I have to hear about it from correspondents making one of the dumbest mistakes of their lives. When an author pushes a book over the top of the hill through deft use of their money and personality, any success they achieve isn't about the book, it's about the author. They can't tell you how to duplicate their path. Becoming somebody else is not a practical business plan you can follow, especially since there's a big helping of luck involved in becoming a minor celebrity. Even worse, the momentum for most titles is illusory. When the pushing stops the sales stop.
The slow approach to building a career in self publishing doesn't guarantee success any more than the fast approach, but it does remove luck from the equation. If you build your publishing business one customer at a time, you'll have built a career and an asset that will survive the day that the media loses interest in you and moves on to the next fashionable thing. I've heard from enough authors who have achieved minor celebrity status to have learned a couple things from their experiences. However entertaining an author is, people won't buy the book unless they have a reason. Even more importantly, most of those buyers aren't married to the idea, so they'll only buy the book if they come across it on display within a short period of time. That's why the trade industry functions the way it does, with storefront displays and super-sized print runs.
I finished filling out the rough framework for my online book about building a publishing career with a website. It needs a lot more work that I probably won't put in, because I'm convinced that most writers are addicted to the fast track approaches which run counter to everything I've written. I'd hate to be looking back on 2007/2008 from next Yom Kippur and saying, "What did you publish that book for when you knew nobody would read it?" Or maybe all it needs is a good title:-)
New York Times Discovers Internet
The big news yesterday in the Wall Street Journal was that the New York Times has discovered the Internet. They didn't exactly put it that way, because the truth be told, the WSJ has yet to really discover the Internet themselves. It comes down to the publishers of both newspapers not having understood that the working model for Internet news distribution is free access. So, the NYT wins this particular race, discarding their subscription based model first.
This is just what I've been writing about lately, why authors need to create a resource on the Internet, rather than a store. That's what brings all those lovely visitors from the search engines who may then shop in the store if you add one, but who will go shopping in other stores for your books if you convince them they're worth reading. The NYT hadn't planned on Google et al becoming the driving force behind Internet traffic. They figured if somebody wanted "news" they would naturally go to the NYT. The WSJ figures the same thing, for financial news.
Where they both went wrong is thinking that people in the Internet age look for information in terms of news and non-news. People look for information in terms of the Google search box. The vast majority of what is printed in the NYT and the WSJ isn't news by any stretch of the imagination, it's analysis, opinion, health, human interest. When people want research the latest kidney treatment options or figure out why honey bees are dying, they wouldn't start with a newspaper, they would start with Google. If the newspapers aren't open to Google and the search engines, even if they have the best and freshest content, they are just throwing those visitors away.
I spend a lot of time poking fun at NYC publishers for only starting to talk about the new world ten years after the boats sailed. I suspect they'll get it right eventually, just like the Times, but they'll have lost a lot of steam to Wikipedia and small information entrepreneurs by then. Not that I'm complaining:-)
This is just what I've been writing about lately, why authors need to create a resource on the Internet, rather than a store. That's what brings all those lovely visitors from the search engines who may then shop in the store if you add one, but who will go shopping in other stores for your books if you convince them they're worth reading. The NYT hadn't planned on Google et al becoming the driving force behind Internet traffic. They figured if somebody wanted "news" they would naturally go to the NYT. The WSJ figures the same thing, for financial news.
Where they both went wrong is thinking that people in the Internet age look for information in terms of news and non-news. People look for information in terms of the Google search box. The vast majority of what is printed in the NYT and the WSJ isn't news by any stretch of the imagination, it's analysis, opinion, health, human interest. When people want research the latest kidney treatment options or figure out why honey bees are dying, they wouldn't start with a newspaper, they would start with Google. If the newspapers aren't open to Google and the search engines, even if they have the best and freshest content, they are just throwing those visitors away.
I spend a lot of time poking fun at NYC publishers for only starting to talk about the new world ten years after the boats sailed. I suspect they'll get it right eventually, just like the Times, but they'll have lost a lot of steam to Wikipedia and small information entrepreneurs by then. Not that I'm complaining:-)