The Missionary Impulse
So if all of the people who are so committed to the idea that the whole wide world of writers should be self-publishing their books on Amazon would devote just a wee bit of their energy to getting some more of the developers near our current office to shovel the sidewalks of their development sites so my employees don't slip and fall on ice sheets, I'd be very happy.
Where does one begin to dissect this incredible piece of self-publishing "science" by Hugh Howey...
First, the science doesn't rest on actual figures of how much anyone is making. Rather, the starting point is to look at a list of Amazon bestsellers, and to determine the future from this list, and this list alone. Ugh! I had my first experience with bestseller list quackery in 1990, when a book that I knew wasn't selling very well in hardcover somehow managed to appear on the Locus bestseller list for multiple months. More recently, Myke Cole has been aiming for the #1 bestseller in the Space Marines category for a book with no Marines in it. I've seen books appear on the NY Times bestseller list with very little correlation, especially on the mass market side, to their hard sales numbers as reported on Bookscan. So any article that starts out with breathless promises of answering all questions by analyzing a trove of Amazon bestseller information is looking a little dubious to me.
Then, there is a very beautiful chart putting the average review score of a book next to the average price for the book, with little bars based on whether the book comes from a big five publisher, an indie publisher, etc.
Even assuming that we want to consider Amazon reviews the be-all and end-all of qualitative analysis, this data is questionable. For one, how do you categorize the many books that are currently from one type of publisher but used to be from another?
But Amazon reviews don't correlate necessarily with quality. There are the one-star reviews because the e-book costs too much. There are the one-star reviews because the book that says "graphic novel" in the description is a graphic novel. I didn't know for sure until I got the manuscript, but I was a lot less surprised than a lot of the one-star review givers that Sookie chose Sam, because the vampires -- hate to break it to anyone -- weren't exactly princes of kind-heartedness and generosity when dealing with Sookie. Yes, there are some cases where I'd like to take a client of mine, point them in the direction of their Amazon reviews, and say there are some lessons to be learned, but there are way too many cases where the Amazon reviews are not indicative of anything.
The article then jumps from there to saying that the better average reviews for books priced less expensively suggests that readers are grading on a curve and perhaps giving better reviews to cheaper books from self-published authors because e-book prices are too high.
There is a logical fallacy here. One second, it says Amazon reviews are reliable. The next second, it says Amazon reviews are graded on a curve where readers are more inclined to be generous to books that offer better value. A reliable review shouldn't be given on a curve. It shouldn't have the moral relativism of a politician that likes filibustering judges until either the majority party in the Senate or the party affiliation of the President changes, when all of a sudden night is day and day is night. The logic is circular, fallacious or both.
Also, ebook prices are not too high. Compare the value of reading a book to multiple other entertainment options. The average price of a movie, of an album, of a magazine, of a ticket to a concert or a show -- all of these things are more expensive than books, and usually of shorter duration. Yes, there are some things like getting Netflix for a month that are cheaper than the price of a book, but on balance, a book give solid value for the money in whatever format you buy it in.
Another thing to keep in mind -- this study basically starts out by saying e-book prices are too high without any underlying rational, other than to say that cheaper e-books get better Amazon reviews.
So we move on to Act Two of the essay.
A chart shows us that Big Five publishers account for just over a quarter of the bestseller days for the most popular e-book categories. One thing I can agree with -- romance, sf/f and mysteries are among the most popular categories for e-books. The chart shows that the Big Five publishers account for just over one-quarter of the bestseller days, that this is under-representative, and suggests that the Big Five publishers are therefore under-publishing in the most popular genres. I might agree with this. It would be good for my business if there were more sf/f markets, that's for sure. But the implication that publishers aren't doing anything with this data is flat-out wrong. In the UK, multiple new sf/fantasy imprints have started up in recent years, we have several clients who are selling in the UK only on account of those new options and imprints, and the e-book business to be had by doing sf/fantasy has to be the motivating force for those imprints, because it sure can't be the Bookscan sales for print editions of these books, which are often below 1,000 copies for the home market.
The next conclusion drawn is that publishers should lower e-book prices. Which isn't a conclusion that follows automatically from anything else. Maybe that is why I have seen publishers react to this news by publishing more sf/f in the global English marketplace, but not by lowering their prices.
Next chart. Daily unit sales by category of publisher. Again, the category of publisher is a hard nut to crack. Every book published in the JABberwocky e-book program was once published by a bigger publisher. I will concede that it is possible to get an approximate sense of sales by looking at Amazon rankings, but it is only approximate. As an example, being #5 on an Amazon bestseller list on December 23 means more than being #5 on that same list on August 23. There is then the "eye-popper" of a revelation that indie authors are outselling the Big Five. Is this an eye-popper? The Big Five aren't big because of the volume of titles they publisher, they are big because of the revenue they generate for the titles they publish. In 2013, Simon & Schuster had sales over $800 million.
Then more breathless reporting of news that isn't news, which is that e-book sales in the major e-book categories are higher than the overall sales percentage for e-books.
Run this by me again. You have one number that is an average, then you have the people that are above average, and you are shocked to find out that the above average people are above average. This is like breathlessly reporting the discovery that the average GPA is a 2.5, and the Phi Beta Kappa students have a higher GPA than that.
This isn't a secret. I don't take out ads in the NY Times, but I think I have mentioned in blog posts or on twitter or on panels or in conversation with people that e-book sales were reaching parity, then at parity, then surpassing. Which isn't to say that plenty of people studying up on the e-book business won't find this to be newsworthy, but it isn't news, or isn't a secret.
From there, Hugh Howey's blog post goes on to discover that big publishers make more profit from e-book sales than print news. Not news. Hugh could have read a blog post entitled "Do The Math" that reported this news two years ago. Two years ago.
After a lot of fuzzy math and bad statistics that occasionally intersect with the truth, Howey comes up with this conclusion: "Our data suggests that even stellar manuscripts are better off self-published."
Sorry, Hugh. There is absolutely nothing in your blog post that justifies that conclusion. This is not the same as saying that your conclusion is wrong. Maybe it's right. But if it's right, it's not because of anything -- anything! -- in your blog post.
Your post fails to look at the revenue big publishers can generate from sales other than e-book sales.
It fails to look at the opportunity cost for the writer of having to self-market books rather than have a publisher do so.
It fails to look at the present value of a guaranteed advance vs. royalty money that may or may not come along down the road.
Your advice to publishers is for them to (a) lower e-book publishers (b) give a bigger share of their lower revenue to the authors they publish. Obviously, the publishers are not going to take this advice. There is no business model for them in taking in less money while simultaneously giving more to the authors.
I don't say these things because I am in bed with the major publishers. I fight with the major publishers all the time, including fights to get reversions of rights so the authors can self-publish or utilize our e-book program to publish those same books. JABberwocky offers e-book services to our clients in part because we want to demonstrate that there are alternative publishing models, and hope that those alternative models will lead to higher e-book royalties. But that certainly won't happen if the publishers also price every e-book at -- well, what price? The entire Nightside series by Simon Green is available for $5.99 per book. Myke Cole's just-published Breach Zone is $5.99. The entire Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, under $14, and his Way of Kings $8. Should that be $2.99, $4.99, what lower price?
And what then happens when everyone has lowered prices as you suggest? If every e-book is $2.99, what price does the self-published author go to in order to present as a bargain? $1.99? $.99?
How elastic is the demand for books? Yes, at the margins, you can increase sales some by lowering prices. But after a point, that stops working. There are only so many people who like to read with only so many hours in the day to do it. You can't have a never-ending price war.
Comparisons to the music industry don't help. The publishing industry has offered a wide range of products at a wide range of prices, and most of those prices reasonable. The music industry tried to sell $14.99 albums to people who wanted $1.49 singles. But most people want full novels, not the A side or the B side of the single. And even in 2014, a typical paperback book costs half or just over what a CD cost in 1989. Also, authors can't tour. Unless readers want to go to pay-by-the-panel conventions, authors are stuck making most of their money from writing, so if the publishing business ever does become like the record business, authors are cooked. All the $1.99 e-books in the world won't be able to keep the typical author going.
More e-book posts to come...
What does the sale of Richard Curtis' e-Reads to Open Road say about the e-book business, e-book marketing, and the costs and benefits to the e-published author.
Where does one begin to dissect this incredible piece of self-publishing "science" by Hugh Howey...
First, the science doesn't rest on actual figures of how much anyone is making. Rather, the starting point is to look at a list of Amazon bestsellers, and to determine the future from this list, and this list alone. Ugh! I had my first experience with bestseller list quackery in 1990, when a book that I knew wasn't selling very well in hardcover somehow managed to appear on the Locus bestseller list for multiple months. More recently, Myke Cole has been aiming for the #1 bestseller in the Space Marines category for a book with no Marines in it. I've seen books appear on the NY Times bestseller list with very little correlation, especially on the mass market side, to their hard sales numbers as reported on Bookscan. So any article that starts out with breathless promises of answering all questions by analyzing a trove of Amazon bestseller information is looking a little dubious to me.
Then, there is a very beautiful chart putting the average review score of a book next to the average price for the book, with little bars based on whether the book comes from a big five publisher, an indie publisher, etc.
Even assuming that we want to consider Amazon reviews the be-all and end-all of qualitative analysis, this data is questionable. For one, how do you categorize the many books that are currently from one type of publisher but used to be from another?
But Amazon reviews don't correlate necessarily with quality. There are the one-star reviews because the e-book costs too much. There are the one-star reviews because the book that says "graphic novel" in the description is a graphic novel. I didn't know for sure until I got the manuscript, but I was a lot less surprised than a lot of the one-star review givers that Sookie chose Sam, because the vampires -- hate to break it to anyone -- weren't exactly princes of kind-heartedness and generosity when dealing with Sookie. Yes, there are some cases where I'd like to take a client of mine, point them in the direction of their Amazon reviews, and say there are some lessons to be learned, but there are way too many cases where the Amazon reviews are not indicative of anything.
The article then jumps from there to saying that the better average reviews for books priced less expensively suggests that readers are grading on a curve and perhaps giving better reviews to cheaper books from self-published authors because e-book prices are too high.
There is a logical fallacy here. One second, it says Amazon reviews are reliable. The next second, it says Amazon reviews are graded on a curve where readers are more inclined to be generous to books that offer better value. A reliable review shouldn't be given on a curve. It shouldn't have the moral relativism of a politician that likes filibustering judges until either the majority party in the Senate or the party affiliation of the President changes, when all of a sudden night is day and day is night. The logic is circular, fallacious or both.
Also, ebook prices are not too high. Compare the value of reading a book to multiple other entertainment options. The average price of a movie, of an album, of a magazine, of a ticket to a concert or a show -- all of these things are more expensive than books, and usually of shorter duration. Yes, there are some things like getting Netflix for a month that are cheaper than the price of a book, but on balance, a book give solid value for the money in whatever format you buy it in.
Another thing to keep in mind -- this study basically starts out by saying e-book prices are too high without any underlying rational, other than to say that cheaper e-books get better Amazon reviews.
So we move on to Act Two of the essay.
A chart shows us that Big Five publishers account for just over a quarter of the bestseller days for the most popular e-book categories. One thing I can agree with -- romance, sf/f and mysteries are among the most popular categories for e-books. The chart shows that the Big Five publishers account for just over one-quarter of the bestseller days, that this is under-representative, and suggests that the Big Five publishers are therefore under-publishing in the most popular genres. I might agree with this. It would be good for my business if there were more sf/f markets, that's for sure. But the implication that publishers aren't doing anything with this data is flat-out wrong. In the UK, multiple new sf/fantasy imprints have started up in recent years, we have several clients who are selling in the UK only on account of those new options and imprints, and the e-book business to be had by doing sf/fantasy has to be the motivating force for those imprints, because it sure can't be the Bookscan sales for print editions of these books, which are often below 1,000 copies for the home market.
The next conclusion drawn is that publishers should lower e-book prices. Which isn't a conclusion that follows automatically from anything else. Maybe that is why I have seen publishers react to this news by publishing more sf/f in the global English marketplace, but not by lowering their prices.
Next chart. Daily unit sales by category of publisher. Again, the category of publisher is a hard nut to crack. Every book published in the JABberwocky e-book program was once published by a bigger publisher. I will concede that it is possible to get an approximate sense of sales by looking at Amazon rankings, but it is only approximate. As an example, being #5 on an Amazon bestseller list on December 23 means more than being #5 on that same list on August 23. There is then the "eye-popper" of a revelation that indie authors are outselling the Big Five. Is this an eye-popper? The Big Five aren't big because of the volume of titles they publisher, they are big because of the revenue they generate for the titles they publish. In 2013, Simon & Schuster had sales over $800 million.
Then more breathless reporting of news that isn't news, which is that e-book sales in the major e-book categories are higher than the overall sales percentage for e-books.
Run this by me again. You have one number that is an average, then you have the people that are above average, and you are shocked to find out that the above average people are above average. This is like breathlessly reporting the discovery that the average GPA is a 2.5, and the Phi Beta Kappa students have a higher GPA than that.
This isn't a secret. I don't take out ads in the NY Times, but I think I have mentioned in blog posts or on twitter or on panels or in conversation with people that e-book sales were reaching parity, then at parity, then surpassing. Which isn't to say that plenty of people studying up on the e-book business won't find this to be newsworthy, but it isn't news, or isn't a secret.
From there, Hugh Howey's blog post goes on to discover that big publishers make more profit from e-book sales than print news. Not news. Hugh could have read a blog post entitled "Do The Math" that reported this news two years ago. Two years ago.
After a lot of fuzzy math and bad statistics that occasionally intersect with the truth, Howey comes up with this conclusion: "Our data suggests that even stellar manuscripts are better off self-published."
Sorry, Hugh. There is absolutely nothing in your blog post that justifies that conclusion. This is not the same as saying that your conclusion is wrong. Maybe it's right. But if it's right, it's not because of anything -- anything! -- in your blog post.
Your post fails to look at the revenue big publishers can generate from sales other than e-book sales.
It fails to look at the opportunity cost for the writer of having to self-market books rather than have a publisher do so.
It fails to look at the present value of a guaranteed advance vs. royalty money that may or may not come along down the road.
Your advice to publishers is for them to (a) lower e-book publishers (b) give a bigger share of their lower revenue to the authors they publish. Obviously, the publishers are not going to take this advice. There is no business model for them in taking in less money while simultaneously giving more to the authors.
I don't say these things because I am in bed with the major publishers. I fight with the major publishers all the time, including fights to get reversions of rights so the authors can self-publish or utilize our e-book program to publish those same books. JABberwocky offers e-book services to our clients in part because we want to demonstrate that there are alternative publishing models, and hope that those alternative models will lead to higher e-book royalties. But that certainly won't happen if the publishers also price every e-book at -- well, what price? The entire Nightside series by Simon Green is available for $5.99 per book. Myke Cole's just-published Breach Zone is $5.99. The entire Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, under $14, and his Way of Kings $8. Should that be $2.99, $4.99, what lower price?
And what then happens when everyone has lowered prices as you suggest? If every e-book is $2.99, what price does the self-published author go to in order to present as a bargain? $1.99? $.99?
How elastic is the demand for books? Yes, at the margins, you can increase sales some by lowering prices. But after a point, that stops working. There are only so many people who like to read with only so many hours in the day to do it. You can't have a never-ending price war.
Comparisons to the music industry don't help. The publishing industry has offered a wide range of products at a wide range of prices, and most of those prices reasonable. The music industry tried to sell $14.99 albums to people who wanted $1.49 singles. But most people want full novels, not the A side or the B side of the single. And even in 2014, a typical paperback book costs half or just over what a CD cost in 1989. Also, authors can't tour. Unless readers want to go to pay-by-the-panel conventions, authors are stuck making most of their money from writing, so if the publishing business ever does become like the record business, authors are cooked. All the $1.99 e-books in the world won't be able to keep the typical author going.
More e-book posts to come...
What does the sale of Richard Curtis' e-Reads to Open Road say about the e-book business, e-book marketing, and the costs and benefits to the e-published author.
Comments
Post a Comment