I’m researching the First
World War again at the moment, this time for a short companion piece for my
traditionally-published debut novel out next year.
It’s a marketing idea borrowed
from independent authors: a cut-price short story or novella, promoted on
social media via the five-day give-away option on Kindle Select, and designed to
tempt readers to your Amazon page, where – hopefully – some will buy the novel too.
Whether it will have any
impact on sales I’ve no idea (I’ll let you know next year) but the story is
asking to be told, and I find historical research brings its own rewards, so
I’m going for it anyway.
However…
I am troubled by the assumption
behind this strategy: that cheap is best when it comes to selling stories. After
all, this discount culture is one of the main charges levelled against Amazon
by traditional publishers and bookshops which do so much to promote authors.
The debate about aggressive
discounting of children’s books became particularly impassioned last week
following this blog by Tamsin Rosewell, bookseller at Kenilworth Bookshop in
Warwickshire:
What provoked her to speak
out were the heavy discounts being offered by the biggest names in book retailing
on pre-orders for Philip Pullman’s La
Belle Sauvage, volume one of The Book of Dust. At the time of writing Amazon,
Waterstones, WH Smith and Foyles were all offering hard copies for £10.00, half
the recommended retail price.
As Ms Rosewell said in her
blog: ‘To be part of the buzz, we would (as it looks
at the moment) have to sell this book at a loss or for no profit at all, or we
could consider not stocking it. But how can we possibly not have The Book of Dust in our stock and
prominently on display in the shop? What kind of bookshop would not stock The Book of Dust?!’
Book people on Twitter reacted to her blog with shock and dismay. Philip
Pullman himself joined the debate, saying he’s always been a strong supporter
of the former Net Book Agreement, which once guaranteed retail prices. By the
time Ms Rosewell had to open her shop at 9 a.m. she said she’d received
hundreds of replies.
Coupled
with her concern about the impact of discounting on author incomes (the lower
the shop price, the lower the royalty) her pleas for fairer pricing made me
think again about my responsibility towards bookshops like hers in the face of
cut-price competition.
Now there’s
nothing I can do about Waterstones or Foyles; the price of my novel will be set
by my publisher and the stores. But what about Amazon? Should I avoid it
altogether as some supporters of the physical book trade advocate? Am I helping
to cut the throat of independent bookshops everywhere by giving away my novella,
or selling it at the same price as a can of baked beans?
Perhaps.
On the
other hand, is there any point whatsoever fighting against one of the greatest revolutions
in retailing ever? Amazon won’t notice our protests. And with average advances
so low, how can authors afford to boycott this global marketplace?
I think my fatalism about Amazon
has a lot to do with my early days as a journalist when (and I’ll say this in a
whisper) I worked on Fleet Street at a time when vans stacked with the Evening
Standard and Sun would roar out from the side streets with the newsprint
literally hot off the presses. I even subbed on the ‘stone’
– a damn great granite worktable supporting the heavy frames for the
broadsheets – with a compositor setting the city pages of the Financial Times
in hot lead metal. It was another world, another time. The battles fought by the
unions against Rupert Murdoch’s new computer technology now seem futile and doomed
to failure.
Yes, I know that today there
are figures ‘proving’ that e-books are on the wane in the UK and physical books
in the ascendance, but I’m afraid that I don’t trust them. I think they’re partial statistics
being used to make a case that traditionalists dearly wish to be true. As an investigative
journalist, I want to dig down beneath the headlines into the real data to find
out what’s actually going on. I suspect I’d find at least some of those lost
adult fiction sales in the e-book market.
OK, I might also find that
children’s books are the exception. But five year olds have phones these days.
Why should they only play games on them and not read e-picture books? And
what’s easier than giving your child or grandchild Apple Store or Amazon credit
as a birthday present? Kids don’t need a bank card to shop for books online.
I worry that by resisting
this online trend, by not aggressively seeking out e-sales, traditionally-published
authors (and our publishers) risk missing out on a growth sector that should be
central to our long-term economic planning.
So yes, I do think authors
have to adapt to Amazon whether we want to or not, just as independent shops
like Kenilworth Books have to shrug when the big High Street retailers discount
the latest Wilbur Smith or Robert Harris, and accept there’s no point in them stocking
it.
But like Ms Rosewell, I also
think we have to shout out when a big launch like La Belle Sauvage could (possibly) be the Harry Potter for a new generation,
and benefit the wider industry from an upsurge of interest in great children’s books.
@HouseRowena
8 comments:
Being so very far away from the purchasers of books, I was a bit removed from this debate. Thank you for pointing out salient features which I had never realised.
You're very welcome. It's a huge debate. Sometimes I think it's like a bag of eels: hard to get a grip on!
I've self-published, with my brother Andrew Price, a picture book of Three Billy Goats Gruff - and it sells quite a lot on Kindle. It's also borrowed (Amazon pay us a small fee for each loan, rather like PLR). As Amazon shows you how many pages a buyer has read (because the loan amount is calculated per page)we can see that each loan of the short picture book has been read many times.
So there is interest for picture books on smart-phones and tablets.
Speaking as someone, who at an exceptionally skint moment of my life,walked into my local Morrisons supermarket. I spied at a counter, one of their shopping baskets full of a particular type of digital camera memory card. At 50p each.
I went to a library, looked up the typical selling prices of this type of card, then dashed back to the shop. Credit carded about 200 of the items, then sold them over the space of 3 or 4 months at around £10 each.
On Amazon.
I loathe Amazon. Their monopolistic attitudes, the way they treat people who work in their distribution centres. The way that if someone 'buys' a book on Kindle, they never really own it. They can't pass it on, sell it, lend it to their friends. And if they so choose, Amazon can delete it from that persons Kindle device.
That defines an organisation that really needs to be broken up, or forced to change their ways. And, in the case of books, the cryptographic access key be given, at point of sale, to the purchaser. Who is then free to do with it what they want. Change it, to keep Amazon away from that copy. or loan the key out on a one time basis to a friend. Who must in some form return the key. After which the key can be given out, or loaned again.....
It's your book, you paid for it, who are Amazon to prevent you doing with it as you wish ?
As a non-writer, someone who does not read books professionally, who reads rather than consumes them, who reads mostly library books, and when I buy, it's usually from Waterstones ( convenient to where I do an amount of shopping )..., I just think that unlocking Amazons grip on e-books would also unlock the ability of independent bookshops
to set up their own e-platforms, actively market, inexpensively, to their own customers, and revitalise things for everyone. That is, a free, mixed market of sellers and purchasers.
Glad to hear of your success, Susan. I hope sales go really well for you. And Andrew, I'm not a fan of monopolistic capitalism, just a pragmatist.
Pragmatist, fatalist..., not the same you know.
Perhaps things have changed with Amazon, or..? But, when I did a little selling there, I concluded that sellers were like prisoners. Amazon create the aura of trust for purchasers. But you as a seller ? What do you know about your buyers. Can you email them ? Can you market to them through Amazon ?
When was the last time some writers got together, and demanded meetings with government. Noises about anti-competitive practices.
Sorry, if this doesn't quite fit into directly into the theme of the post.
Great article Ro. As you know, I plan to publish my book on KDP & IngramSpark - it'll be available as a paperback & an ebook - I'm not pursuing the traditional route out of choice not necessity. But either way I think authors are selling themselves short if they don't use all markets available to them. I wish you well with your novella x
Thank you, Jak. And I'm really looking forward to reading yours. Choice is a very valuable thing. xx
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