"Typos Have Been Found in Your Book" - Questions About Kindle Quality Control

Anyone who reads many Kindle books has had the experience of getting a book with multiple typos, unintended line breaks, and formatting errors. That's annoying. Many customers are calling for quality control. And apparently Amazon has responded. But in a rather strange way.

Along with many Amazon KDP authors and publishers, I have recently received a couple of "Dear Publisher" emails from Amazon KDP. Here's one:

"During a quality assurance review of your title, we have found the following issue(s):

Typos have been found in your book. Examples:

*loc; 578; "I wouldn’t you to bust a blood vessel" should be "I wouldn’t want you to bust a blood vessel".

Please look for the same kind of errors throughout and make the necessary corrections to the title before republishing it."

KDP was correct about the missing word. But another proofreading of the book did not uncover any other missing words. We did find the word "willing" spelled with three "l's" and a couple of places where periods were outside quotation marks. We didn't find any formatting errors or unwanted line breaks. In fact, our book wasn't perfect, but it was pretty clean. Not surprising as the book had been carefully proofread before its original publication.

So I began to wonder about this "quality assurance review" of our title. How did Amazon happen to find this minor error that we had somehow missed. Have they hired an army of skilled proofreaders to go through all the Kindle books? I decided to do a little internet research.

Here's what I found. According to a post on reddit, some Amazon customers have discovered that if they complain about typos in a book, Amazon will refund their money and in some cases give them an extra $5.00 credit. Amazon makes it easy for the complainers by offering a feedback box at the bottom of every book page, where customers can click to report "poor quality or formatting in this book."

I know Amazon is proud of its customer-focused culture. But crowdsourcing as a way of identifying errors in books only works if the crowd members know what is an error and what isn't. And some Kindle readers don't know the grammar and punctuation rules in the major style guides. Unfortunately, Amazon is now sending out quality-control emails identifying "errors" that are actually correct useage.  

Author Robert Bidinotto reported on Kindle Boards that Amazon wanted him to remove "unnecessary commas," which turned out to be commas following the next-to-last item in a series. Bidinotto, a professional editor, replied that this usage of commas is consistent with the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines. Amazon backed off.

Author D.D. Scott received an email telling him his book contained "hyphens, underscores or other unreadable characters." When he pointed out to KDP that his "unreadable characters" were his use of the "en dash," which is grammatically correct, they responded that a reader had complained of finding his book difficult to read because of too many hyphenations and punctuation errors.

So far, Amazon has not pulled many books from sale because of customer complaints, and they have been responsive to authors/publishers who point out the reasons for the useage that has been flagged.

But this crowdsourcing system of proofreading is scary. It's hard to know what readers will mistakenly identify as errors. And it's unlikely that Amazon staff have the time to do detailed follow-up on customer complaints. This raises issues such as:

• What if an uneducated character in a novel speaks with poor grammar, or writes notes that are misspelled?
• What about dialects and slang?
• What about foreign words or words the author makes up?
• What if the book is a novel, written as a series of emails (as is our book referenced above)? Writers of email often ignore spelling and grammar rules. If in the interest of authenticity, the author puts spelling and grammar errors in the emails, will Amazon ask to have them corrected? 

Don't get me wrong. I love being able to publish ebooks through Amazon KDP. And I'm happy that they care about quality. And I appreciate being notified of errors in my books. In both cases, we corrected those errors and republished.

But I'm a little nervous about where this will go. Amazon may believe that the customer is always right, but I don't necessarily agree.

High-Priced Book Reviews: Can You Buy Status?

A new, very expensive, fee-based book-review service proclaims itself "the best, if not the only solution the problem of vetting self-published titles." How credible is her claim? The writer, Patti Thorn, was the books editor of the now defunct Rocky Mountain News, where part of her job was to reject all self-published authors who requested reviews. But now that she's started her own online book-review service, BlueInk Review, self-published authors are her bread and butter.

Just as an aside, it's interesting to note that reviewers of self-published books are quick to jump all over typos like Thorn's omission of the word "to"--as in "solution to the problem"--in the above sentence. In fact a recent BlueInk review lamented the "numerous grammatical and typographical errors" in the book. And the author of that book paid $395 for that review--or $495 if he wanted it done in 4-5 weeks rather than 7-9 weeks.

Thorn would see this as an indication of the quality of BlueInk's reviews. And maybe it is. Except I never see that sort of criticism in reviews of traditionally-published books, even though I often see typos in those books as well.

Thorn says her reviewers are "highly credible reviewers--critics who have had their work published in high profile publications." She pays them well and instructs them to write honest reviews, noting both the book's positives and negatives.

Thorn's ultimate goal is for BlueInk to become a filter for self-published titles, such that readers encountering a new self-published book will ask "Did BlueInk like it?" or "What did BlueInk say?"

But her potential customers are self-published authors, who she says face the problem of convincing readers that their book is worth reading. Authors who want their books reviewed must pay the $395 or $495 in advance. If the author doesn't like the review, she can choose not to have it posted on BlueInk's website, but it still may appear in industry publications like Ingram iPage and will not be removed under any circumstances.

In my opinion, Patti Thorn represents the old guard. She wants to be a gate-keeper who tells readers what is worth reading. She says her goal is to vet self-published titles. She denigrates other systems of discovering good books. Customer reviews? Untrustworthy opinions. Ebooks that are bestsellers? Mass opinion does not equal quality. Websites that offer free book reviews? Resulting reviews are often sophomoric. Book bloggers? Too overwhelmed to accept self-published titles.

Kirkus Indie (formerly Kirkus Discoveries) offers a similar high-priced review service (standard review $425; express review $575), as does Foreward Clarion ($335). These two have been around for a while, but as far as I can see, they don't post their reviews on Amazon. Probably because Amazon Guidelines prohibit reviews done for any compensation other than a free copy of the book.

Why would a self-published author pay hundreds of dollars for a book review that won't be posted on Amazon, that will be recognized as a paid review by publishing insiders, and that is from a source most readers have never heard of? I figure authors who buy these reviews are still hoping to make it in the traditional publishing world.

I have no problem with review sites charging authors a nominal fee to cover costs, but these fees seem exorbitant. These review sites are attempting to sell status. Do authors need that in this new age of publishing? Many readers--especially readers of ebooks--trust customer reviews more than professional ones. It's the modern-day equivalent of a friend passing on a favorite book.

I'd like to see sales figures from books that used these review services vs. those that didn't. If the reviews don't translate into sales, they're not worth the price. In today's publishing world, most authors have to promote their own books. Those who write books that appeal to a segment of readers, and who promote their books in a way that reaches their target audience, sell lots of books. That's all the status they need.

How Did John Locke Sell All Those Kindle eBooks?

Finally! A research-based approach to marketing ebook fiction. Exactly what I've been looking for. I LOVE John Locke's How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!

I've been a social science researcher for more than 30 years. In my day job--the one where I actually make money--I am a program evaluator. I work with managers of social programs to develop and implement outcome measures that give them information about how well their programs are doing what they were set up to do.

So in 2006, when I published my first novel, Too Near the Edge, I planned to keep careful track of the results of my marketing efforts. I knew what the outcome measure of success was. How many books am I selling? Answer: not many. Ditto for my daughter Laurel's first novel, Following My Toes, which my business PMI Books published.

Like Locke, we initially did all the stuff the experts say we should do -- signings, press releases, reviews, awards, blogs, website, social networking, etc. etc. The problem was we never sold enough books to validate any of our marketing efforts. Lots of input, not much income.

I searched for more expert advice. But the problem with most of what I found was lack of supporting data to help me sort out what had worked for other authors. And the advice that did have supporting data was virtually all for nonfiction, which is much easier to sell. Now and then I'd read a self-published fiction writer success story, but usually with no clear breakdown of which marketing efforts paid off and which didn't.

Of course back then we were selling print books only, with all the costs of printing, shipping, bookstore returns etc. When ebooks came along, I hoped for more. In 2008, I put both novels up on Kindle. Unfortunately, sales still did not take off.

In February 2011 I published Laurel's second novel, Starring in the Movie of My Life, and in March, my second novel, Too Far Under. Both came out in paperback and on Kindle and I also got all our books up on Smashwords and in their premium catalog. We got good reviews, but still sales were slow.

Then the Amanda Hocking phenomena hit. We could see the impact of pricing. We started experimenting with free and $.99 books. We got some results. So far in June & July, we've sold 1800+ copies of our two $.99 titles. Far more than we usually sell in a year! And approximately 72,000 copies of our 2 free titles have been downloaded.

The numbers are exciting. But seeing this happen made us believe we could do even better. So, how to do it? Beyond the price reductions, we saw no clear path until I saw mention of John Locke's new book where he tells how he did it.

Bingo! Downloaded that book onto my Kindle and read it in one afternoon. Best $4.99 I've spent in a long time. Why? Because he carefully dissects what worked for him and what didn't, and then he tests the successful system on a new harder-to-sell book series to see if it worked there. It did.

Will Locke's system work for me? Maybe, maybe not. But it charts a clear specific path to follow, and this path is one that at least worked for someone. So I'm going to give it a try. And I'm going to keep track of what I do and what results I see. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Should We Trust Customer Book Reviews?

Amazon customer reviewers are "at times ingenious, assiduous, and highly motivated, more often banal, obtuse, and blankly opinionated," says Morris Dickstein, distinguished professor of English and theater at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Dickstein's comment was part of a recent conversation among professional book critics on the future of book reviews, reported on in last week's Daily Beast by Jane Ciabattari, vice president and former president of the National Book Critics Circle.

Several participants raised concerns about the trend of customer reviews replacing reviews by professional reviewers who have literary qualifications. In particular they deplored the way opinion replaces analysis in customer reviews. In Dickstein's words, "Raw opinion, no matter how deeply felt, is no substitute for argument and evidence."

We agree. We find ourselves bewildered by some customer comments.

An example. My daughter Laurel's Kindle novella, Looking for Ward, is a short tale of love and loyalty written mostly in the form of emails back and forth among the characters. Last week, Amazon made Looking for Ward free to match promotions we were doing on other sites. Over 20,000 readers have downloaded the book and a few have commented. Most comments are positive like this one:

"This novella drew me right in from page one....I liked this book and would recommend it as a fun read."

But Looking for Ward also got this comment:

"This format is my absolute most unfavorite in the entire universe. So much so that it annoys the bleep out of me. Honestly, leave the email messages and memo formats at the office. To me, it's just too annoying a format and distracting."

Okay. You don't have to like the format. But the product description for Looking for Ward says, "The story is told through a series of e-mails," and explains that Laurel originally sent it in email installments to fans of her chic lit novel, Following My Toes. Even if you didn't see that information and downloaded the book by mistake, it's a free ebook. So why complain rather than just deleting it?

Even worse are customer comments that make you wonder if they are talking about a different book.

Most of the customer reviews of my  mystery novel, Too Near the Edge, say things like this:

"With an unusual and quirky cast of characters, this book kept me up reading all night long. I definitely enjoyed the myriad of twists and turns, as well as the author's writing style. Overall, this was a home run!"

But last week a customer wrote:

"The first issue is that it begins really slowly, for the first few pages it drags in building up the plot. The author made the rough choice of writing in the present tense, which is never the best option unless the author is a master. It's just very limiting."

I could simply tell myself that every customer is entitled to his/her own opinion--which I truly believe. But I did not make the "rough choice" of writing in the present tense. Too Near the Edge is written entirely in the past tense. And, as for beginning slowly, a character falls to his death from the rim of the Grand Canyon in the first paragraph. Maybe this customer was having a bad day and needed to vent somewhere, which can happen with a professional reviewer as well, but at least a professional reviewer would get the facts right.

Are Paid Book Reviews Credible?

What if you could get 50 people to post positive reviews of your book on Amazon? For a reasonable fee?

I know the importance of having reviews of my books on Amazon. A mix of professional reviews and customer reviews is ideal. But for indie publishers and self-published authors, reviews--especially professional reviews--can be hard to get. Many professional reviewers still refuse to review books not published by mainstream publishers.

Sites that will review our books are increasingly charging a fee for what they term an expedited review or for posting the review they write on sites like Amazon and B&N. While most of these book review sites continue to offer free reviews, they warn that due to increasing numbers of submissions, a book submitted for a free review may take months to get reviewed or might not get reviewed at all.

So should you pay for a review?

Purists on author discussion groups and blogs continue to insist loudly that paying for a review with anything other than a free copy of the book, it is wrong. They say these reviews have little to no credibility and will ruin your reputation.

When I researched and wrote about this issue three years ago, I concluded that paid reviews could be honest and meaningful and were a reasonable option for indie publishers and self-published authors. The debate, however, continues to rage. Irene Watson's editorial in this week's Reader Views Newsletter offers an interesting discussion of the issue of paid reviews of a variety of products as well as books. Sadly, her research found that many opportunities exist for reviewers to be paid for reviewing products (including books) they have never seen or used.

I did some research of my own and found a site, gettingbookreviews.com, that for $999 will pitch your book to reviewers until they get 50 reviewers to post reviews on Amazon.com and B&N.com. That's about $20/review, which is a low price as these things go. And apparently the author doesn't have to supply books or pay postage to mail books to reviewers. Once you have purchased your book review package, gettingbookreviews.com only asks you to complete a questionnaire and email them a pdf or Word doc of the book. They even say, "Pre-final edit versions are acceptable as we are focused on content."

While I'm not such a purist that I will take a stand against paying for an expedited review from an established review site, gettingbookreviews.com strikes me as a whole different animal. It's run by Todd Rutherford out of Tulsa, OK. He writes a blog called publishingguru, where his about page says he has "been involved with every aspect of writing, publishing, and marketing books for nearly 30 years." He currently lists himself as a writing, publishing and book marketing coach. I looked at Todd Rutherford's 261 reviews on Amazon and found that they are all 5-star reviews.

Further research led me to a recent post at WritersWeekly, written by Angela Hoy, co-owner of booklocker.com. Her extensive exploration of gettingbookreviews.com discovered that Rutherford advertises online for freelance writers to write reviews, for which they will be paid $10/review as long as the reviews are 5-star. The book author gets to approve or suggest changes to the review before it is posted to Amazon and B&N.

As Kindle owners, my husband and I buy virtually all our books from Amazon. We also buy lots of other stuff online.  And whether I'm looking for a book, a toaster, a zhu-zhu pet for my grandson, or a hotel to stay in on vacation, I pay attention to the reviews I find on product pages. But now I'll look at these reviews a little more skeptically. How can I tell which customer reviews are for real?

This situation with reviews is certainly unfortunate for indie publishers and self-published authors. Reviews are our best marketing tool. How can we preserve their credibility?

Jump on the Roller Coaster of Publishing Changes

The e-book revolution is taking off! And that is nothing but good news for indie publishers and self-published authors.

Back in 2008, I wrote on this blog:

The history of mankind is rife with examples of ideas, inventions and social policies that were originally considered foolhardy but are now mainstream....I predict that trajectory for publishing. Soon digital printing, e-books and publishing formats we haven't heard of yet will be the order of the day. It's a long uphill road, but a lot has happened in the last few years and movement is accelerating.

For example, back in 2003 The Rocky Mountain Writer, the newsletter of the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers reported on a roundtable discussion where local editors and agents commented on publishing trends. They asked the panelists, "Is there a future for e-publishing and/or POD?" The unanimous answer was an emphatic No! In fact, one panelist suggested that, if an author’s contract with a publisher mentions POD, “run like your hair’s on fire!”

Fast forward to January 2008...more than three-quarters of the approximately 200,000 books published in this country each year are self-published or published by a small press. And eBooks are taking off. Amazon already has over 99,000 books available for sale to readers who use their Kindle, which only came out in December.

Wow! Let's fast forward again to 2011. Amazon now has nearly a million books available for the Kindle, and reports that last summer it sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Barnes&Noble has more than two million titles for the Nook. Then there's the Sony Reader, Apple iPad, and more. Digital books are definitely taking off.

The digital edition of Steig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has sold a million copies, according to yesterday's New York Times -- a first for an e-book. The combined digital sales for all three books in Larsson's popular trilogy is now more than three million.

I have a Kindle and I love it, but what I love more about digital publishing is the way it levels the playing field. Any author or publisher can create and sell a Kindle version of their books through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing and/or release other e-book versions through Smashwords. You don't even need an ISBN number, except for distribution to Apple.

I'm not saying it's easy. The formatting of your manuscript for digital release takes some work. But Smashwords has a free style guide you can download in pdf. And April Hamilton offers a free pdf IndieAuthor Guide for publishing with Amazon Kindle. I carefully followed the instructions in both of these guides and got six PMI Books titles up for Amazon's Kindle and in the Smashwords Premium Catalog (for distribution to B&N Nook, Sony Reader, Apple iPad and more).

It takes some time and patience to do the formatting, but that's really nothing compared to the time and patience it takes to repeatedly query agents and publishers in an attempt to get your book out through traditional publishers.

How things have changed! Thanks to digital printing and e-books, today's writers—unlike those in past generations—all have the opportunity to have their work published, read, and listed for sale on online bookstores right along with traditionally published books. Jump on the roller coaster. You won't be sorry!

 

Buying Book Blurbs? Is That Ethical?

“A remarkable debut novel that kept me up all night turning pages. I found this book so engrossing, compelling, and entertaining that I plan to immediately recommend it to all my friends." --- Famous Author of Bestselling Book

Blurbs. You’ve gotta have them on your book cover. At least that’s been the conventional wisdom. So how do you get blurbs? You—or your publisher—send your manuscript to other writers, who you hope will read it and write a great comment that you can put on your book cover.If you’re with a major publisher, your editor or agent will very likely be able to get blurbs for your book from other authors they represent. It’s an insiders’ quid-pro-quo thing.

But what if you’re a new and/or relatively unknown writer whose book is published by a small indie publisher or self-published? Can you send off your manuscript to authors you admire and get blurbs from them?

Not likely. Other authors are busy writing and promoting their own books. And before blurbing a book the author (hopefully) has to read it. Then they have to write the blurb. If they're not doing it as a favor to their publisher or agent or to help a friend or former student, what do they get out of it? Getting their name on your book cover won’t be much incentive given that you’re an unknown author.

Could you maybe offer to pay them for their trouble? Uh-oh! Remember how people feel about paying for reviews? This is probably even worse. Or maybe you could save potential blurbers some time by giving them a summary of your book and some suggestions of what might make a good blurb? An even more ethically-challenged solution (but one that some authors actually use).

Last summer a couple of enterprising young writers decided to throw a new service into the blurbing stew, with a website, blurbings.com that gives authors a different way to get blurbs.Here’s how it works. You—the blurb-seeker—put a digital copy of your manuscript on their site and purchase a seeker package for $20 to $30 depending on how many blurbs you want. Blurbers—other authors or experts in the area you’ve written about—download the a link to your book file, after which they have 20 days to read your book and another five days to write their blurb. Once blurbings.com approves the blurb, it is posted to your book’s profile page and you can use it on your book cover, website, and other publicity materials.

But wait. Isn’t this buying blurbs? If you use this service aren’t you paying people to praise your book? Not exactly. It turns out that the blurbers are other authors like you. In fact you can be one. But you won’t get paid. In fact the site seems to vary between “letting” you write blurbs for nothing or charging you 99 cents for each blurb you write. Why will blurbers work for nothing or even pay for the privilege? Publicity. You get your name, and the title of your book, on the cover of someone else’s book and in their promotional materials.

Ever since a New York Times article last August brought blurbings.com to the attention of the public, the site has been discussed and discounted in blogs and discussion groups as a scam operation where authors pay other authors to go into raptures over their books. The clear message is that ethical authors will turn up their noses and stay far away from such an unethical system.

To me this criticism looks like one more putdown of an innovative approach designed to help authors whose books are self-published or published by small indie publishers promote their books. I haven’t used the site, but after reading all their material, I can’t see anything nasty or unethical about it. If you sign up, all you are paying for is a match-up service. Like any matchmaking service, the service gets all the money from the participants’ fees. But the participants have an opportunity to get what they are seeking—and many of them probably are satisfied with what they get.

It’s not clear whether blurbs from people no one has heard of will help promote your book, but as the site’s founders point out, readers pay attention to customer reviews on Amazon written by unknown readers.In any case, the $19.95 seeker package that covers ten blurbs seems like a small investment to try out this service. I guess I can’t see the harm in trying it. Am I missing something here?

Kindle Your Book

I finally got a Kindle edition of my novel, Too Near the Edge, up on Amazon this week! And I am so pleased. There’s just something so satisfying about having a paper-free edition of my book out there. Once I upload it, there’s no printing, no shipping, no extra costs for the publisher (me) or the purchaser. I love it!It took me a while because the most recent and complete edition of my manuscript was in PDF format (for Lightning Source) or InDesign (used for layout before creating the PDF. In their guide to uploading and converting content for Kindle, Amazon says,” Adobe PDF files are supported, but the quality of conversion is difficult to guarantee.” I optimistically tried uploading the PDF, which looked horrible, then downloaded the HTML from Amazon so I could edit it, but the process was so discouraging that I never quite got through with that editing. So months went by.

But then I discovered April L. Hamilton’s free free PDF guide, IndieAuthor Guide To Publishing With Amazon’s Digital Text Platform And MS Word 2003 Or Higher, which was a great help. Thank you, April. I ended up converting my PDF file to a Word file and doing some rather tedious editing, but it worked. My upload to Kindle looked great when I previewed it.And I’ve already sold a copy! Admittedly the $2.45 I made from that sale doesn’t go far towards paying for the time it took me to convert my manuscript. But now I know how to do the conversion. I went on to convert my daughter’s novel, Following My Toes, which is also live on Kindle now.

And I will continue.With rising fuel prices, hard times at publishing companies, and the increasing focus on green products for an eco-friendly lifestyle, I’ve come to believe that Kindle and similar reading devices are the wave of the future. If I had one, I wouldn’t have to lug a suitcase full of books with me on every vacation, or keep buying bookcases to hold my overflow, or fill my recycling bin with newspaper.

And readers who are downloading books onto Kindle will probably be less likely to care or even notice who the publisher is. I think Kindle will do a lot to level the publishing playing field.

I’ve started to have very positive feelings about Kindle. In fact, while I was messing around getting my book up there, I even watched the Amazon video touting Kindle’s features. Did you know you can search for a term in all the reading material you’ve downloaded? And you can virtually “turn over the corner” of a page you want to remember to re-visit. And the Kindle books cost about half the price of printed books.

I figure I only need to sell about 150 copies of my Kindle book to make enough to buy myself a Kindle. Maybe by Christmas?In the meantime, I encourage all indie authors who haven’t already done so to get April's free guide and get your books up on Kindle. I truly believe it will be worth your time and effort to do it. And you’ll have the satisfaction of putting out a green product.

Top Ten Reasons To Publish Your Own Book*

10. You don’t have to spend months or years composing and sending out queries that you hope will interest an agent or a publisher. Instead you can focus on polishing your book.

9. You don’t have to write synopses, books proposals, and marketing plans that meet the specifications of agents and publishers. Instead you can create your own marketing plan that fits your book and your preferred way of promoting it. And you don't have to write a synopsis or book proposal at all.

8. You can choose the title and cover design that you think best represents your book—instead of having a sales team choose the title and cover design they think will sell best.

7. You can decide what time of year your book comes out. (The one book I had published by a major publisher was released during the Christmas holidays, right before the publisher’s PR team took two weeks vacation).

6. You can maintain the integrity of your book. While editing is important for any book, there is editing that improves the writing and/or the content, and then there is editing that changes your book so much you feel like someone else wrote it. And they sorta did.

5. You can get your book out there in the marketplace quickly. People will read and respond to your book. Isn’t that why you wrote it? Keeping a manuscript in your desk drawer for years while you shop it around to agents and publishers is discouraging, and it doesn’t get you reader feedback or the satisfaction of having people read what you wrote.

4. Your book will stay in print as long as you want it to be out there. Mainstream publishers don’t give books much time to catch on with readers. If the book doesn’t sell well in the first few months, bookstores will return it to the publisher. Soon it will be remaindered and then out of print.

3. You can control the cover price of your book and whether it is hardcover or trade paper. Personally, I don’t see any reason to release fiction in hardcover, except for libraries. I don’t want to pay $25 for a novel and I don’t want readers to have to pay $25 for a novel I wrote. And if you publish your own book, you can buy copies inexpensively enough that you can offer good discounts to small local stores, book clubs, or other bulk purchasers

2. You retain all the rights to your book. If you want to put a sample chapter on your website or give a newsletter permission to publish an excerpt, you can. If you sell a chapter to a magazine, you get all the money. If you decide later to offer the book as an e-book or spin off parts of it into short booklets, you can.

1. You can make more money. You’re going to need to do most of the promotion for your book anyway, so why not get more reward for your efforts? You make very little money per book with a traditional publishing contract. If you are your own publisher, you can, and usually do, make more per book. If you are good at promoting your book, you can do well because you get all the profits.*

Note: These advantages apply to true self-publishers—which is where the author sets up a publishing business, purchases ISBN numbers, outsources tasks like editing, layout, cover design, and printing, and takes charge of the marketing and distribution of the book.

Book-Selling Business Wastes Energy through Antiquated Business Practice

FedEx reported a worse-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter loss today, which they said is due to higher fuel prices eating into profits. They plan to do as much as they can to reduce expenses. People around the country are also doing what they can to use less fuel. The Federal Highway Administration announced today that in April of this year Americans drove 1.8% fewer miles than a year ago—a decline larger than the only other time in our history that driving declined, which was during the energy crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s.

Yet the book-selling business continues to ship books back and forth across the country over and over again as part of a strange arrangement between booksellers and publishers that allows booksellers to return to the publisher for a full refund any books that the bookseller ordered but has not sold.

Last Friday, NPR did a story on this book-return system that quoted the CEO of Barnes & Noble saying that the returns system is “insane.” That’s certainly the way I see it, especially with today’s rising energy costs and signs of global warming.

Most people have no idea how the book-selling business works. They are stunned when I tell them that a bookstore can order a bunch of books, send them back for a full refund if they don’t sell, and then turn around and re-order them. Bookstores routinely do this. In 2005, roughly 1.5 billion books were shipped to bookstores in the U.S., according to the Association of American Publishers. Of those, 465 million, or 31 percent, were later returned to publishers.

It took me a long time to understand the system, myself. Our stress-management book that we first published in the 1980s was mostly sold through bulk sales rather than through bookstores. Later when I had a book published by a major publisher, I still didn’t know how the system worked. The publisher would send my agent statements of numbers of books sold, which my agent would forward on to me. I began to notice that the total numbers of books sold was going down over time rather than up, so I asked my agent what was going on. That’s when I found out that bookstores routinely order many copies of a book—which show up as “sold” on the publisher’s statement—but then return on average 25% or more of them—which removes them from the “sold” category. To this day, I have only a vague idea of how many copies of that book were actually sold.

Now that I am publishing fiction, I have learned that if I want bookstores to order my books to put on their shelves, I have to make my books returnable. My printer, Lightning Source (LSI), offers me two choices as to what happens to books that are ordered and then returned. LSI can destroy the returned books (a painful thought) and I will be charged the wholesale cost of the books. Or, LSI can return the books to me, for which I will be charged the wholesale cost of the books plus a $2.00 per book return fee. I have chosen the second option, thinking I would rather resell the returned books myself than have them destroyed and still have to pay for them.

To me, this seems like an inefficient, wasteful way to do business. Not only does this waste energy shipping millions of books around and storing them, but returned books must be processed by hand to remove stickers and determine whether the book is in condition to be sent back out to stores or must be destroyed.

What will it take to change the returns system? Small independent publishers like me don’t have the clout to start a movement to abolish returns in the book business. Major publishers will need to stop accepting returns and most are afraid that doing so would result in drastic cuts in their orders from bookstores. And large publishing houses can easily pay for their returns on the backs of their bestsellers. However, a new HarperCollins imprint (see my April 10 blog) plans to make its books nonreturnable. We’ll see how this experiment turns out.

Meanwhile, we can spread the word about this antiquated practice. If more people know how much energy is being wasted by this book-return system, maybe there will be some pressure on major publishers and booksellers to put a stop to it.

A Good Book Can Rise Above Publisher Bias

Here’s an inspiring story that should encourage all of us authors published by non-traditional publishers. I recently heard from Texas author Tony Eldridge, who published his action-adventure thriller, The Samson Effect, through iUniverse in 2007, that he has sold the film rights for the book to a major Los Angeles film producer. Interestingly, the film producer’s name is also Tony Eldridge.

Here’s what happened. Author Tony Eldridge had gotten some good pre-publication reviews for his book, which apparently resulted in producer Tony Eldridge getting some emails congratulating him on his soon-to-be-published novel. The producer, who hadn’t written a novel, did some research, discovered his namesake author, and requested a copy of the book. He got the book, couldn’t put it down, read it cover to cover in one evening and the next morning made a deal for the film rights.

Author Tony Eldridge is justifiably proud and excited about the film-rights sale. Producer Tony Eldridge is also pleased. He said, “Finding great material is what it’s all about. It’s like panning for gold. You just never know when you’re going to get lucky or where that nugget is going to come from.”Probably most of us don’t have the good fortune to share a name with a major Hollywood producer. So why should we be inspired and encouraged by this story?

Because it’s all about the book! The author’s name may have opened the door, but once inside the book spoke for itself. The producer bought the book because he thought it was a great book that would make a great movie. He didn’t care who published the book. He only cared about the book itself.

Author Tony Eldridge had some good luck in getting his book noticed. But if the book hadn’t been good, nothing would have come of it. Producer Tony Eldridge was open-minded enough to go ahead and read the book, even though it wasn’t published by a mainstream publisher. His reward was finding some great material.

I’m delighted to be able to pass on this story that reinforces a point that I’ve been making over and over on this blog: A good book is a good book regardless of how it’s published. Tony’s success can help all of us who don’t follow the traditional path to publishing hold our heads a bit higher.

Also—I read an excerpt of The Samson Effect on Tony’s website http://www.samsoneffect.com and found it well-written and engaging. You might want to check it out.

Author Breaks All the Rules and Makes Millions. What Should We Conclude? Are Book Publishing Rules Outdated?

Arrgh!! James Frey has a new book out. This time it’s a novel. Seems like a good choice on his part after the scandal a couple of years ago when it turned out that much of what he recollected in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, never really happened. Once his fabricated story was exposed and Oprah called him a liar to his face on her TV show, many of us thought he was finished. “Ha!” we said to ourselves with a certain amount of glee, “If an author breaks the rules, readers will dump him.”

But that’s not what happened. His partially-fictionalized memoir has sold nearly 4 million copies. After the scandal, Random House offered refunds to readers, but only about 1500 asked for one. The Anchor paperback edition is #780 on Amazon today.

He has a new publisher, HarperCollins for his novel, Bright Shiny Morning, (how's that for a symbolic starting-over title?) released yesterday. It’s a book that would embarrass most indie and self-publishers.

Entertainment Weekly calls it a “slack, self-indulgent mess,” that lacks a coherent story, and “never achieves narrative momentum.” They give it a D+ and criticize the publisher for lack of editing. The Los Angeles Times calls it “a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining,” and says the book gives a superficial, lifeless portrayal of Los Angeles.

The writing is characterized by run-on sentences with little regard for punctuation guidelines. Here’s a sample sentence:

“Instead of using his real name he started using the name of his site the more it was printed and repeated the more it was recognized the more people came the more people wrote about him the better stories he got.” 

Yet, Frey reportedly got a $1.5 million advance for this novel, which had an initial printing of 350,000. It’s #25 among books on Amazon today. He was the focus of a USA Today cover story yesterday, and appeared on the Today show.

So much for the importance of quality. If this were a self-published book, it would be held up as a horrific example of all that’s wrong with self-publishing. We independent and self-published authors are told and told that our books need to be as good as or better than traditionally-published books, that they must be well-written and carefully edited if they are to have any chance to compete in the marketplace.

Well I’m through listening to the old guard pontificate about the high standards of traditional publishers. I’m thinking I’d sell more books if rather than spending my time rewriting to improve my book, I instead engaged in some hugely scandalous, sleazy behavior that would get me noticed. Then I could ignore all the writing rules, write pap and get a big advance from a traditional publisher.

Fear Restricts Self-Publishing

When I look at the book publishing industry today, I see fear and an inability to adapt to new technology. I see walls that have been put up by authors’ organizations, book reviewers, award panels, and bookstores to keep out the flood of self-published books print-on-demand printing technology has generated. I see attacks on online book review sites and book awards that are open to independently-published books.

This unfortunate reaction to change was described in depth nearly 40 years ago by futurist Alvin Toffler, who put forth the idea that people find the accelerating pace of change overwhelming. His book, Future Shock, published in 1970 described a feeling of dread connected to rapid technological change, and a difficulty in adapting to it.

Today, even though self-published books, books published by family-owned publishers, and books printed using print-on-demand (POD) technology make up a large share of the new books published each year, this change is not welcomed in much of the publishing industry. We are the wave of the future, and we are making inroads. But attitudes don’t change as quickly as technology.

For example, a respected nonprofit website named Preditors and Editors, which bills itself as “a guide to publishers and publishing services for serious writers,” offers some general rules for spotting a scam publisher. They have a long list, which includes the following:

• The publisher gives no or very low advances.


• The publisher's books are rarely in any bookstores, particularly the large chain stores that carry books from just about all reputable commercial publishers.


• The publisher's books have never been seen on a bestseller list published by a reputable source such as the New York Times.


• The publisher's books rarely sell more than 5,000 books to readers in individual purchases.

Unfortunately, such outdated criteria put most self-publishers and many indie publishers in the scam category. The criteria show an inability to adapt to the new publishing world. They are based in fear and they scare authors away from today’s new publishing opportunities.

I'd like to be able to shake writers loose from the belief that if they can't get their book published by a major publisher, they might as well keep it in a drawer. I’ve seen some very good manuscripts that have been sent out to agents and publishers for years but never picked up. I think that's too bad. I encourage these writers to self-publish, but they fear they wouldn't be seen as "real" authors if they did.

I know how scary it can be to step out onto the cutting edge. Self-published authors are disparaged, stigmatized, and ridiculed by the old guard. My hope and mission here is to change this marginalizing of authors who don’t follow the traditional path to publishing.

A good book is a good book regardless of how it’s published. Authors who rise above their fears can get the books out there to readers. Isn’t that why we write books?

Are Authors Losing Their Special Status?

Even if you love to write, it’s a lot of work to write a book. It takes imagination and creativity to envisage the book you want to write. It takes energy, perseverance, and focus to organize your thoughts and set them down. It takes training and practice to hone your writing skills so your work is readable and communicates what you want to say. Until recently it’s been commonly believed that only a few special people—that revered group known as “authors”—are capable of accomplishing this feat. Most of us knew few published authors, and when we met one, we were impressed.

But it’s different today. Many more people are writing and publishing books. The number of books published or distributed in the United States jumped from 300,000 in 2006 to 400,000 in 2007, according to an essay by Rachel Donadio in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. That’s a 33% increase.

What’s going on? Have thousands of people suddenly figured out that they can write a book? No. Thousands of people have found out that they can publish a book. Lots of people have ideas for books and many of them have manuscripts sitting in their desk drawers. But getting books published has long been an endurance contest characterized by jumping through hoop after hoop only to accumulate a batch of rejection slips. The obstacles to getting published were so well known that many would-be authors didn’t even try.

Print-on-demand technology has changed all that. With minimal investment, authors can start their own publishing companies and have their books printed as needed through Lightning Source, CreateSpace or others. Or, if they don’t want to be publishers, they can have their books published for a fee through subsidy publishers such as iUniverse, Xlibris, and others.

Authors are using these options to get their work published in unprecedented numbers. In ten-plus years of operation, Lightning Source has printed over 500,000 titles from over 5,000 publishers. iUniverse publishes 500 books/month and has 36,000 in print, according to Donadio’s NYT essay. Lulu has turned out over 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002 and its number of new books is rising each month, according to a January 2008 AP article by Candace Choi.

So is writing easier than we thought? No. And that’s the rub. It’s still just as hard to write well as it ever was. Simply writing and publishing a book doesn’t mean it’s a book readers will enjoy, find informative, or want to share with their friends. And unfortunately, now that publishing is so much easier, we are seeing more books that don’t meet minimal standards of quality. I recently searched inside a subsidy-published book on Amazon and found the word “quiet” repeatedly misspelled as “quite.” This is the sort of carelessness that leads critics of non-traditional publishing to label all our books as trash.

Are we all capable of becoming authors? Maybe. But it takes work, training and a willingness to accept and respond to criticism. If those of us whose books are self-published, published by small indie publishers, or published by subsidy publishing companies want our books to be taken seriously, we have to make sure they are well-written, edited and proofread. Take classes, join writing groups, hire editors, do whatever you have to do.

I’ve been a strong advocate for authors whose books aren’t traditionally published. And I will continue to be. I also will continue to insist that books be judged by their merits, not by their publisher. Ergo, to be judged highly, a book needs to have merits.

This brings us back to the question of specialness. I think much of the tearing down of non-traditionally published authors by traditionally-published authors is due to the traditionally-published authors’ fears that when anyone can get a book published, authors lose their special status.

In my opinion authors aren’t special—never have been. Writing and publishing a book doesn’t in itself make someone special. Having a book selected for publication by a major publisher doesn’t make someone special, nor does publishing your own book.

But lots of books are special. And that’s not going to change. In fact, with more books being published, we can expect to see even more outstanding books. So let’s keep our eyes on the ball—or in this case, the book—and honor what really matters.

Who Is A Successful Author?

The names that come to mind tend to be famous authors whose books have been published by a traditional publisher, been favorably reviewed by major publications, won prestigious awards, and sold millions of books. A small minority of all the published authors out there. But is this the best or only definition of success for an author?

Success is tricky to define. We seem to have some agreed-upon criteria in our society, mostly involving the acquisition of power and material wealth. But not everyone accepts these definitions. Some people actively reject such worldly notions of success, preferring more personal bench marks.

I became very aware of the difficulty in defining success several years ago when, as part of my day job at Boulder County Aging Services, I conducted a major literature search on factors associated with successful aging. This turned up a major controversy as to what constitutes "successful aging." One popular model used objective criteria, defining successful aging as the avoidance of disease and disability, maintenance of high cognitive and physical function, and active engagement with life.

But others challenged the use of an objective definition of successful aging, pointing out that it omits older persons’ own views of what aging successfully means. To explore this, another group of researchers asked hundreds of older people to classify themselves as either aging successfully or not. Then they compared people's own beliefs about whether they were aging successfully to the objective standards of the popular measure.

The researchers found that lots of older people who didn’t measure up to the popular definition of successful aging thought they were aging successfully—50% of them believed they were aging successfully, but only 18% met the objective criteria for successful aging. And more than a third of those who the popular measure judged as aging successfully disagreed with their rating. They didn’t rate themselves as aging successfully.

Furthermore, nearly half (47%) of those the popular measure classified as not aging successfully disagreed with that rating. They rated themselves as aging successfully.I concluded that the concept of success is multidimensional, and I have come to believe that people’s success is best measured by whether or not they achieve their goals. This view of success is the same one I use in my work as an evaluator of the outcomes of social programs. Start with the program’s goals, then assess whether or not they have been achieved.

Similarly, it is far too simplistic to decide whether or not an author is successful by applying objective criteria like numbers of books sold, awards, numbers of positive reviews by prestigious reviewers, or whether their book has been published by a traditional publisher. If these benchmarks are the author’s goals, then achieving or not achieving them is a measure of that author’s success. But for authors who have other goals, and who are satisfied with their progress, it is presumptuous to tell them that they are not successful based on the number of books they’ve sold, and/or the profit they’ve made on their books.

Authors who self publish often have goals other than profit and fame. Some of these include:

• Getting the satisfaction of having their book printed and bound for themselves, and perhaps friends and family.


• Testing the waters to see whether there are buyers for a book. It’s hard to do that when all you have is a manuscript that you’re spending your time sending out to agents and publishers.


• Making specialized or technical information available to a small niche market.


• Speaking out on a controversial topic.


• Learning about publishing and marketing a book by actually doing it.

My view is that it’s up to me as an author to decide whether or not I’m successful. Outside evaluators may judge me by their own criteria such as how many books I’ve sold. But I don’t have to accept their judgement.

Ghostwriters Attack Self-Published Authors

A couple of weeks ago The Penn Group posted a blog trashing books they call self-published. It began with the statement, “Self-publishing companies are the dumpster-divers of the book world.” Of course the bloggers incorrectly used the term self-publishing when they actually meant subsidy-publishing, but either way their allegations are cruel and unfair.

They asked rhetorically, “So, what makes a book so bad that its author has to resort to self-publication?” Then they selected four books that they said answer that question. In other words, they see these four as true dumpster-diver books that exemplify all that’s wrong with self-publishing. They even went so far as to put up cover images and titles for the books—so as, we assume, to publicly shame the authors of these books.

So who is The Penn Group, I wondered, and why are they qualified to make these judgments? I Googled them and to my surprise found this self-description on their website: “The Penn Group is the largest and most successful ghostwriting firm in the country. Our work can be seen in bookstores, libraries, and homes all around the world.” Really? They’re ghostwriters and they’re criticizing self-published writers?

Here’s some of what they say they can do for you: “If you have a truly original story or idea and wish to transform it into a novel, nonfiction book, or screenplay, then you have already taken the first step towards success. The Penn Group's ghostwriter service has a proven record of transforming ideas into published, critically acclaimed works. Our clients are celebrities, top businesspeople, and other exceptional individuals.”

So hiring someone else to write your book and then putting your name on it is better than writing and publishing it yourself?

They charge $18,000 to $26,000 to write a full-length novel for you.

This holier-than-thou group of professional writers also has a college-preparation arm that “matches applicants up with writing specialists who guide them through every facet of the essay writing process, from brainstorming to final editing,” and also will “prepare all of your applications with an eye towards communicating what the admissions committee wants to hear.” As someone who has spent most of my life in academia, let me say that this makes a mockery of the college admissions process.

So what about the four horrible books they gave as examples of books so bad that their authors had to resort to self-publication? I was able to find three of them on Amazon. Two of those were published by AuthorHouse and the other by Trafford. I was able to look inside all three using Amazon’s search-inside-the-book feature.

One of the books had no customer reviews and was in need of serious editing. But the other two, while they would appeal only to very specific audiences, looked to be reasonably well-written and edited. One was a very academic analysis of Miami Vice, written by someone with degrees in Art History and Radio and TV Arts, as well as post-graduate degrees in American Culture and Communication. That book had 14 customer reviews, with an average rating of 4.5 stars. The other book was a personal story dealing with issues of sexual identity between two gay men. It had 21 customer reviews, with an average rating of 4.5 stars.

Maybe all the ratings were written by friends of the authors, and maybe the two books aren’t very good. I can’t say because I haven’t read them. But I think I’ve seen enough to be able to say they aren’t dumpster-diver quality.

What kind of society do we live in, where it is acceptable to pay someone $20,000 to write your book for you, but it’s not acceptable to pay someone to publish a book you wrote yourself? Is everything all about image? Should all books be molded to fit the standard-issue mainstream publisher criteria?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—it’s wrong to tar all subsidy-published or self-published books with the same brush. Books should be judged by their merits, not by their publisher.

Mainstream Publishing Takes A Giant Step

Unexpected news came out this week from NYC publisher HarperCollins. The company plans to launch a new book imprint that won't accept returns from bookstores and will pay little or no advances to authors. The new HC imprint is an experiment that will try to fix everything that’s wrong with the publishing business, according to the 51-year-old publisher who will head it—Robert S. Miller, founder of Disney’s Hyperion adult books division.

Wow. Fix everything that’s wrong with the publishing business. That’s a big chunk to bite off. But HarperCollins seems to have more of a future orientation than many mainstream publishers. I visited their website and found the following self-description, “Consistently at the forefront of innovation and technological advancement, HarperCollins is the first publisher to digitize its content and create a global digital warehouse to protect the rights of its authors, meet consumer demand and generate additional business opportunities.”

So HC is already using POD printing, at least for their backlist. Now they’re going to experiment with eliminating other sacred cows of the publishing business.

Instead of paying author advances, the new imprint will share its book sale profits with authors, possibly offering a 50-50 profit-sharing. It also plans to release electronic books and digital audio editions of all its titles.

The changes this imprint plans for bookstores are huge. Not only will the books be non-returnable, the imprint plans to focus its sales efforts on the Internet rather than paying for premium display space at the front of bookstores.

Not surprisingly, authors whose books are published by traditional publishers aren’t looking favorably at this HC experiment. Criticisms that I’ve read on group discussion lists and blogs include:

• This shifts the risk to the author away from the publisher. If your book doesn't sell, you don't make a dime.


• Bookstores won’t stock these books unless they are by big-name authors. Why would the bookstores treat this HP imprint any differently from other publishers who don't take returns?• Bookstores will order fewer of these books, which means fewer will sell and authors will make less from their books.


• This is not a new publishing model, it’s a scam on authors.


• A 50-50 split of profits is complicated because it depends on how “profits” are defined.


• The larger the advance, the harder the publisher works to recoup it. Publishers who lay out nothing for a book have no vested interest in pursuing its success.

But I think HC’s new imprint is great news for those of us who are small, independent presses and /or self-publishers. It goes a long way in blurring the lines between us and them. The publishing business is morphing into a new entity as quickly and quietly as the faces on one of those websites that lets visitors click and combine two faces into one new one. Sure this is a small imprint that plans to release maybe 25 titles a year, according to articles announcing the move in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. But is a move by a major publisher. HarperCollins’ revenues top $1 billion annually.

This trial run will surely make the old guard sit up and take notice. Now some authors published by an imprint of a major publisher won’t meet the criteria for awards, reviews, and conferences that require that authors receive specific levels of advances for their books and that the books be returnable. And who knows, HC may decide to use digital printing for some of these non-returnable books. If so, these authors wouldn’t meet some minimum-print-run requirements. How long can the old guard stick with these criteria when a major publisher is ignoring them?

And this could be the beginning of the end of the inefficient return system favored by bookstores who can order huge quantities of new titles and then send them back if they don’t sell quickly. If we didn’t have that system, books sold would actually mean books sold. When we get a big book order, we could rejoice instead of living in dread of having dilapidated books bounce back at our expense. And booksellers who have purchased the books they have in stock are probably more likely to hand-sell them.

Stay tuned. The tipping point approaches.

Amazon Power Play

This Monday, Amazon unleashed a firestorm with its announcement that it will now require that all print-on-demand (POD) books be printed inside Amazon's own fulfillment centers by its own print-on-demand subsidiary, BookSurge. Why? In a March 31, “open letter to interested parties” Amazon justifies its decision as follows:

“Modern POD printing machines can print and bind a book in less than two hours. If the POD printing machines reside inside our own fulfillment centers, we can more quickly ship the POD book to customers—including in those cases where the POD book needs to be married together with another item. If a customer orders a POD item together with an item that we're holding in inventory—a common case—we can quickly print and bind the POD item, pick the inventoried item, and ship the two together in one box, and we can do so quickly. If the POD item were to be printed at a third party, we'd have to wait for it to be shipped to our fulfillment center before it could be married together with the inventoried item.… Simply put, we can provide a better, more timely customer experience if the POD titles are printed inside our own fulfillment centers. In addition, printing these titles in our own fulfillment centers saves transportation costs and transportation fuel.” 

As an aside, I have to say I find this shipping-everything-in-one box justification strange. I recently ordered (in one Amazon order) five items for my three-year-old grandson (one book and four toys). The items were shipped in four separate shipments, within a day of each other. I saw this as a huge waste of packing materials and fuel—which bothered me not only because it’s bad for the environment, but also because (full disclosure here), I’m an Amazon stockholder.

It looks like the Amazon move is aimed directly at eliminating competition from the largest print-on-demand printing company, Lightning Source (LSI).

Publishers who use LSI to digitally print their books and don’t want to switch all their printing to Amazon’s BookSurge are offered two choices in the Amazon letter:

1. Use BookSurge just for those units that ship from Amazon and continue to use a different POD service provider for distribution through other channels; or


2. Use a different POD service provider for all your units, and pre-produce five copies of each title and send those in advance to the Amazon Advantage Program for in-stock inventory.

Publishers who choose option #1 (use Amazon’s POD company, BookSurge to print all books that ship directly from Amazon), face an unpleasant situation.

• BookSurge has a reputation for printing low-quality books, with pages falling out, missing pages, etc.


• BookSurge’s printing prices are higher than LSI’s, so the publisher and/or author will earn less per book sold.


• Publishers will have to modify the files they have set up for LSI because those files aren’t compatible with BookSurge’s specifications.


• Because BookSurge does not offer Ingram distribution, which is virtually essential for bookstore sales, publishers will want to continue to have their books available for printing though LSI, which provides the Ingram distribution. Using two printing companies means extra formatting and extra fees.

Publishers who choose option #2 (stay with LSI for all their book printing) would have to participate in the Amazon Advantage Program to sell books directly through Amazon. To do that, they will have to print and ship copies of their books to Amazon for them to warehouse and ship to customers. And they will have to pay Amazon $29.95 per year plus 55% of the list price of each book sold.

It not clear at this point whether Amazon intends to impose the new requirement on all publishers that use POD printing, which would include thousands of small presses, or if they are primarily targeting the subsidy (author services) publishing companies that use digital printing. I haven’t heard yet of any small independent publishers that have been affected by the new Amazon policy.

The story was originally broken by Angela Hoy, co-owner of BookLocker.com, in her ezine, WritersWeekly.com. She has continued to follow the story with frequent updates on a special WritersWeekly page. One of her most recent updates says that AuthorHouse/iUniverse has reached an agreement with Amazon to allow Booksurge to print their books.

Apparently AuthorHouse had originally refused to comply with Amazon’s demands, with the result that their book listings on Amazon had their buy buttons removed. This meant that a customer who wanted to buy one of the books would have to buy it from one of the marketplace vendors and the book wouldn’t qualify for Amazon’s free shipping offer. I checked some AuthorHouse book listings on Amazon earlier today (Wed 4/2) and the buttons were gone. Then after I heard about AuthorHouse reaching an agreement with Amazon, I checked again and the buttons were back.

My tiny publishing company has three books printed through the POD printing company, Lightning Source (LSI). I haven’t heard anything from Amazon saying that I should switch to BookSurge for printing, and the listings for our books are unchanged. I did get an email letter today from LSI President & CEO, J. Kirby Best, which said that LSI is following the discussions about Amazon requiring publishers to use BookSurge for their POD books in order to sell on Amazon, and reassured LSI cutomers that our titles are available to Amazon.com for shipment within 24 hours.This situation is changing way too fast to draw any conclusions. So what can we do besides follow the story and hope for the best?

• Some authors and publishers are circulating an online petition "Stop the BookSurge Monopoly," that has 600+ signatures. Personally I haven’t signed it, because the originator is anonymous. But some of you may want to.


• Some authors and independent publishers are removing links to Amazon from their websites and sending customers to BarnesandNoble.com instead.


• Some are trying to work through the professional organizations PMA (The Independent Book Publishers Association) and SPAN (The Small Publishers Association of North America) in hopes they will join together, question Amazon on behalf of their members, and advocate for their members’ interests.


• • Some are contacting Amazon officers and directors to express their displeasure and to let the directors know they will no longer buy from Amazon.

I’m still in the watch-and-wait camp right now. And maybe I should sell my Amazon stock?

Is Winning A Book Award A Big Deal?

Last week Reader Views announced the 2007 winners of its annual literary awards. The Reader Views award contest is open only to writers who self-publish or have their books published by a small press or independent book publisher. Work published by major book publishers, their subsidiaries, or their imprints are not eligible. This seems more than fair, given that there are so many award contests that are not open to those of us whose books are self-published, subsidy-published, or published by small, indie publishers.

But does an award set up for the likes of us mean anything?

I was unpleasantly surprised when one of the list gurus on a self-publishing discussion group I belong to posted a comment calling the Reader Views Awards a Special Olympics for subsidy-published books—based on the fact that none of the award winners were books published by large publishers, which the poster took to mean the contest hadn’t attracted any real competition. (Since books from major publishers are not eligible to enter the contest, it’s not surprising that no winners were from major publishers.) This post went on to criticize the contest for having too many award categories and too many winners, and dubbed it primarily a money-maker for the sponsor because it charges an entry fee. The post concluded that the award is hardly of the quality of a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award (duh!) and that being the "best of the worst" is hardly impressive.

I am familiar with this view of book awards that are open to non-major-published authors like me. Last year my novel, Too Near The Edge, won an IPPY award, which I discovered is also considered second-rate when I tried to use it to get “author status” at the Left Coast Crime (LLC) Convention. The LLC does not give author status to authors whose books are self-published, but the conference website said they would consider making exceptions for authors whose books had been shortlisted for certain mystery awards. Even though the IPPY wasn’t on their list of awards, I wrote them a very polite email asking if it would qualify me to be an author at their conference. They replied that I didn't meet the eligibility requirements and that awards like the IPPY are not on the list, "since they are primarily awarded to authors from non-traditional publishing houses."

Given these attitudes, is it worth sending off our books and entry fees to competitions designed to honor the best among self-published books or those published by small, independent presses? Some of these, in addition to the Reader Views and the IPPYs are the Benjamin Franklin Awards, the Writers Digest International Self-Published Book Awards, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards, and the National Indie Excellence Awards. All of these award contests have entry fees and multiple categories for entrants.

Yes. In my opinion the awards have meaning. For me the IPPY was an acknowledgment that a reader or readers selected to judge a book contest decided my book was of a high enough level of quality to win an award. And, although the contest had many categories, it also had thousands of entries, most of which did not win. I don’t know the statistics for these other contests, but it seems likely that there are more losers than winners, and that awards are only given to books that meet certain criteria.

The IPPY didn’t help me get media attention, despite the efforts of a local publicist, nor did it get me new reviews. But it did help me get my book into local independent bookstores, where I believe the award stickers give it credibility that leads to sales. And it helped my friends, family, and colleagues see me as a “real” writer, despite the fact that I published my own book.

A couple of authors on another discussion list I belong to are first-place winners in this year’s Reader Views Awards. They are delighted to have their books recognized, and have received many congratulations from other authors on the list, including me.

Awards help books stand out from the pack. And most potential readers will give a book a second look if it has won an award—even if the award is a minor one.

How Are You Celebrating Small Press Month?

March is small press month. Did you know that? I didn’t until this week, even though I own a small press. I found out about small press month when I went to the website of PMA—The Independent Book Publishers Association—an organization to which my publishing company, PMI Books belongs. But I don’t recall hearing anything about it before that.

According to its website, small press month is an annual celebration of the independent spirit of small publishers. As a small publisher, I am delighted to find out that we have a month and a website devoted to celebrating us. The small-press-month sponsors, of whom PMA is one, have arranged celebration events in large cities around the country.

Small press month even has an official quote from prominent American novelist, Walter Mosley, widely recognized for his crime fiction. Mosley’s official small-press-month quote says:

"The life’s blood of contemporary and modern literature is in the custodianship of so-called small publishers. Without them, there is no future for literature." 

Apparently this is the 12th year for the celebration of small press month. I’m wondering why I hadn’t heard about it before and why it isn’t a much bigger deal. There are lots of us small, independent publishers out there. The most recent statistics I could find on the Bowkers website reported that in 2005 their Books In Print data represented input from 81,000 publishers in the U.S. We know how few large traditional publishers remain after so many of them have bought each other up. So we small indies must be 80,000+ strong in this country alone.

If we look at our accomplishments, we have a lot to celebrate. Publishing is not a simple job. We’ve had to learn about ISBN numbers, book design and layout, printing, getting reviews, promotion, distribution, copyright law and more. And many of us who own small presses also write some or all of the books we publish.

So why aren’t we all out there tooting our horns and wearing buttons that say, “I’m proud to be an independent publisher”— or even “I’m proud to be a self-publisher”? I think it’s because we hear so many derogatory comments about publishing our books ourselves or through a small indie publisher that we aren’t proud. Deep down we accept what the old guard tells us—that having our books published through a major traditional publisher is better. Even though as new or mid-list authors we know we will get little or no promotion from a major publisher, and even though with a major publisher our books are likely to be quickly out of print, we continue to fall for the idea that having our books published by a major publisher is much better.

It’s hard to celebrate being something that others disparage. But we small publishers vastly outnumber the big guys. We’re changing the publishing industry and we shouldn’t be ashamed or apologetic about our business model. If more of us speak out about and celebrate what we do, we will help all small independent presses be seen as respectable publishers whose books deserve equal opportunity in the marketplace. Happy small press month!