I forgot to mention that my novel Senator is currently on sale for the criminally low price of $0.99. Like, at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And even GooglePlay. I have no idea how long the sale will last, so act quickly!
As always, if you enjoy the book, a good review is much appreciated.
This made news a few years ago. The difference this time is now Amazon apparently may purge reviews from someone an author “knows” online.
Yes, you read that right. This can be someone who has friended you on Facebook, followed you on Twitter, or has done business with you in a way that’s detectable to the Amazon review police….
Amazon spokespeople say that anybody who knows the author might “benefit financially” from the book’s sales, and financial beneficiaries have always been forbidden to review. (I wish I knew how to benefit financially when one of my 873 Facebook friends has a bestseller, but I’m obviously not working this right.)
So how do they determine if you “know” an author, anyway?
They’re not telling.
I’m all for taking down reviews that are fake or paid for in some way (even by the promise of a free book). But that seems, er, excessive. The modern method of book marketing involves authors having an online presence–via a blog, Twitter, Facebook…. You’re supposed to find “friends” out there. Why penalize someone who finds them?
If the purge ever reaches me, I don’t think it will have much effect. The vast majority of the reviews my books have received have been from complete strangers . . . I think. But I don’t really know, since a user can follow my blog with one name and review one of my novels with another. Can Amazon figure this out?
Yeah, I suppose it can.
My publisher keeps getting more organized. Recently they launched author “landing” pages for the folks they represent. Here’s mine. They’ll include a link to this page at the end of each of my books, to make it easy for readers to check out my other very fine novels.
Now if only I could get more organized . . .
But I don’t know how long we can stay in business offering these crazy low prices! Here it is on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
You can find it here. Notice the exciting Follow button beneath my photo. Click it, and apparently Amazon keeps you updated on my new releases and maybe other cool stuff.
(For those keeping track, I’m about halfway through the second draft of the sequel to The Portal. I was hoping to get it out this year, but I have a feeling it’s going to leak into 2016.)
Every once in a while my ePublisher sends out an email giving their thoughts on the state of ebook publishing. The latest one is pretty interesting. In a section titled “Reality Sets In” they talk about the glut of ebooks on the market:
With the filters removed, the market is flooding with dreck. It’s hard to get an exact number, but there are about 4 million ebooks on the market right now with nearly 100,000 new titles added each month. Shockingly, most will never sell a single copy. Of the remainder, only about 2% will sell at any meaningful quantity.
Unfortunately for many, self-publishing was sold as the easy path to notoriety and fortune; simply publish your story and readers will send you mountains of cash! But many found out the hard way that the only thing more demanding than publishers are readers and their unbridled reviews. A few discovered success, while the masses simply found a harsh dose of reality; this business is tough.
With time, this realization will thin the ranks as the hopeful become discouraged and opt for other pursuits.
They point out one way that Amazon (and other vendors) could help thin the ranks:
The available inventory of ebooks needs to be purged. At some point, natural selection will reign and the purge will happen.
We’ve already seen the first waves in the subscription services, and, at some point, resellers will also tire of being loaded down with dreck and will perhaps begin charging to maintain books in their system. Imagine the income Amazon could draw down if they charged $1 per month per title? Once one eRetailer does it, the others will follow. Then, all books that never sold a sustainable number of copies will leave the system and things will normalizefor a while.
It never made much sense to me that Amazon (and other vendors) would just store everyone’s ebooks on their servers for free. Sure, storage is cheap, but it costs Amazon something to store millions of books, from most of which they will never see a penny in revenue. I would certainly pay a storage fee if it would help get rid of the dreck.
My ePublisher’s advice to writers has been constant for a while: quality matters. So does productivity. Series are better than individual titles. Long, complex narratives don’t do as well as simpler narratives. Attention spans aren’t what they used to be. Readers have lots of other ways to entertain themselves–often on the same device on which they’re doing their reading. So get back to work.
Which I will now try to do.
Via The Passive Voice, I see the Wall Street Journal reporting on the decline in e-book sales from the major publishers. This is in the wake of the new contracts they signed with Amazon, which allowed them to continue to set their own prices.
A recent snapshot of e-book prices found that titles in the Kindle bookstore from the five biggest publishers cost, on average, $10.81, while all other 2015 e-books on the site had an average price of $4.95, according to industry researcher Codex Group LLC.
“Since book buyers expect the price of a Kindle e-book to be well under $9, once you get to over $10 consumers start to say, ‘Let me think about that,’” said Codex CEO Peter Hildick-Smith
…
Hachette cited fewer hot titles and the implementation of its Amazon deal as reasons that e-books fell to 24% of its U.S. net trade sales in the first half of 2015, from 29% a year earlier. Declining e-book sales contributed to a 7.8% drop in revenue in the period.
Then there’s this paragraph:
One high-level publishing executive disputed that the Amazon pacts are contributing to the e-book sales decline. “This is a title-driven business,” he said. “If you have a good book, price isn’t an issue.”
This is, of course, insane. Price is always an issue. Maybe you’ll pay more for a new Stephen King book, but there is a price at which you won’t bother to buy it. And how much money are big publishers leaving on the table by not appropriately pricing their backlist? The novelist James Salter died recently. I had heard of him but never read anything by him. I went on Amazon, and all his ebooks were $9.99 or more; recently one showed up on BookBub for $1.99, so I scooped it up. As the Passive Guy says:
Since Amazon is the biggest bookstore in the world, one which obsessively collects and analyzes data concerning customer behavior, it is much better qualified to set optimum prices to maximize revenues from the sales of ebooks than a bunch of provincial publishers who have never run any sort of store and have virtually nothing in common with a typical reader.
If you give a kid a stick of dynamite, why would you expect anything other than trouble?
Now that I have a Kindle Paperwhite, I’m paying more attention to my book-buying thought process. Yesterday I was thinking fondly about A Fan’s Notes, and I was prepared to purchase the ebook, but I just couldn’t bring myself to click the button — $9.99 just seemed too high a price for an impulse purchase where there was a good chance I’d be disappointed. I would certainly have bought it for $4.99, but I wouldn’t have gone much higher.
The big publishers essentially won their battle with Amazon over agency pricing for ebooks. They get to set the price, and they don’t seem to want to go below $9.99, even for a 47-year-old mid-list book like A Fan’s Notes. I can’t really say they’re over-charging simply based on my personal level of price resistance. But:
We’re hearing widespread but totally unofficial reports that big publisher ebook sales are dropping noticeably when their new higher Agency prices are activated.
And:
What appears to be happening, writes Shatzkin, is that higher Agency pricing by publishers may be placing the majors’ ebooks right out of the market for many potential buyers.
I did pay $11.99 recently for the ebook version of Faith vs. Fact. But that was at least partially because I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment over the years from reading Jerry Coyne’s website Why Evolution Is True and wanted to give something back to him. I find it hard to imagine I’d pay that much otherwise.
Interesting times for traditional publishers.
I finally splurged and bought a Kindle Paperwhite–and immediately thereafter Amazon went ahead and announced a new improved model at the same price. Oh, well.
My lovely wife got an early-model Kindle a few years ago, and neither of us used it much–the interface was clunky, and the resolution wasn’t very good. I then used the Kindle app on my iPad 2, which was much better, but the iPad’s weight and form factor weren’t ideal for casual reading. The Paperwhite is much better.
Thoughts on the Paperwhite so far:
And, of course, there’s the content. I was listening to Being Mortal, a wonderful book about old age and dying. The author mentioned Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I haven’t read in decades. So I went to the Kindle store and found it for $1.99–in a book with everything else Tolstoy ever wrote. So now I have War and Peace and Anna Karenina on my Kindle, just in case. If I get tired of Tolstoy, I can always dip into the complete stories of H. P. Lovecraft, which I also picked up for $1.99. (I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Tolstoy is a better writer.) Or the complete stories of Chekhov. Or an old P. G. Wodehouse novel. Or the Federalist Papers, which I never got around to reading when I was in school.
So far I haven’t spent more than $1.99 on anything I’ve bought for the Paperwhite, and I probably have enough on it to last me the rest of the year. The older content has its share of typos and faulty layout, but the price is right.
Have I mentioned lately that my novels are all available for the Kindle Paperwhite at astonishingly low prices? No typos, no faulty layout.
I just read Jerry Coyne’s Faith vs. Fact about the incompatibility of religion and science. The arguments will be familiar to anyone who frequents Coyne’s website Why Evolution Is True. The book is a full-throated endorsement of science (broadly construed) as the only way we have of finding out what is true. That “broadly construed” is important to Coyne’s case; it’s not just “scientists” who do science, in his formulation; a plumber does science when he 
makes a hypothesis about why a pipe is leaking, tests the hypothesis, and either confirms or rejects it. That’s the way we achieve truths about plumbing and, Coyne suggests, about anything. Religion (or listening to Beethoven, or reading Shakespeare) can’t tell you why a pipe is leaking, or how the universe began, or what causes malaria.
It also doesn’t help you solve crimes. My novel Where All the Ladders Start is, among other things, about the private eye as scientist. Our hero, Walter Sands, is investigating the disappearance of a cult leader. There are conventional explanations–the guy was murdered, or kidnapped, or just took off on his own. But there is also a religious explanation advanced by many cult members: God loved the guy so much that He assumed him into heaven. Walter is not impressed by the religious explanation, however. He is relentlessly practical: private eyes aren’t interested in miracles; they’re interested in people — in means, motive, and opportunity. So he does what private investigators do: he searches for facts, and eventually he uncovers the non-miraculous truth.
That’s all well and good, but there’s a bit of a twist at the end (in a private eye novel, there’s always a twist at the end). Walter uncovers the truth, but he can’t escape religion’s clutches. Because, he is told, in everything he has done, he has actually been following God’s plan. And he finds himself unable to dispute this, because, really, how can he? How can anyone? If God has a plan, a private eye is not going to uncover it.
(For those not of a certain age, “Just the facts, ma’am” is a catchphrase associated with no-nonsense Sergeant Joe Friday of the 50’s (and 60’s and 70’s) TV show Dragnet. Snopes tells us, though, that the character never says exactly that.)
Richard Bowker 