Indie News Beat: Which Perspective Would You Like with 2014?

As another New Year kicks off, it’s worth taking a look around at what’s being said about this crazy industry we call publishing. For many of us, it’s the data that matters: the most popular sites for readers, the titles they’re buying, which genres are ‘hot’ (and is there a snowball’s chance in hell we could bang out 50k words before that genre goes cold?). However much we may dislike marketing our books, we need to decide where they should be, what the ideal price point is, and many more variables which could see a few more copies downloaded.

So what might this year hold? If you can make it through the hyperbole, a good place to start is Ten Bold Predictions for 2014. Yes, last year was the best ever, except that now the price of eBooks is “plummeting”. Good news for readers, but if the mainstreams are finally bringing eBook prices down to what Independent Authors have been selling them at for a while, where does that leave the latter? Another telltale factoid is that “ebook revenue has tapered off”, which also supports the suggestion that mainstreams now understand they’ve milked the eBook market as much as they can. The problem for Independent Authors is that it removes a fundamental selling point: that our ebooks were cheaper.

An interesting perspective, and much useful information, is to be had in this article by Paul Jarvis. He describes his own experiences with using Indie sites to sell his books, and talks about publishing a book on Amazon as though it were a bit of a chore: “It took 12 hours [for his book to be on sale] which isn’t bad… Basically, there’s a lot of waiting for Amazon…” I found Jarvis’s use of Indie sites to sell his books to be a refreshing change, given that in my experience, Amazon is the number one place where a book has to be available. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Which Perspective Would You Like with 2014?”

Indie News Beat: Can Helix Reviews Help You Produce a Better Book?

Can a computer program help you produce a better book?

I logged on to my paperback printer, Lulu, the other day to find a new button next to each of my titles, labelled ‘Buy a Helix review’. Thinking that this must be a variation on the notorious paid reviews, I clicked to find out how much money my printer wanted to not read my books and still give them five stars. However, it turns out that a Helix review is something different. It’s a computer program which reads your book and gives you a report, so that you can compare your book against “more than 100,000 bestsellers catalogued as part of The Book Genome Project.”

My curiosity and confusion increased in equal measure, mainly thanks to the marketing guff Lulu offered to explain this. According to the site, a Helix report contains metrics about your book under five headings: Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Can Helix Reviews Help You Produce a Better Book?”

Indie News Beat: TV Talent Shows for Writers? Seriously?

Literary media has been buzzing with the news of Masterpiece, an Italian game show which is offering one lucky author the chance of mainstream publication with a planned 100,000-copy print-run. Well, it had to happen, didn’t it?

Masterpiece whittled down 5,000 applicants to 70 wannabes, and thence to four “contestants” in each edition. The key section of each 90-minute show is to drop the writers in an unfamiliar environment (for example, spending a day with the blind), then take them back to the studio, sit them in front of a computer – and a studio audience, and give them 30 minutes to write what they can about it. For the two contestants who survive to the final round, each gets 60 seconds to give their “elevator pitch” to the Editor-in-Chief of the sponsoring publishing house as they travel with her in, er, an elevator. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: TV Talent Shows for Writers? Seriously?”

Indie News Beat: The times, they keep on a’ changing

Indie Publishing NewsIn a month when the top story should have been the Frankfurt Book Fair, what excited many people was the news that UK retailer W. H. Smith suddenly removed all self-published books it had only recently started carrying. It did this because a customer complained that a search for children’s books with the keyword “Daddies” returned titles of an adult, and in some cases gross, nature. From this naive filter failure, it was only a short but entirely predictable step to the retailer reassuring its UK middle-class customer base that they would not have to suffer such distress any further, and blaming the uncontrolled orgy (pun intended) of self-published books for the problem.

While many commentators pointed out the hypocrisy in this stance, there can be no surprise. Independent Authors continue to suffer the most outrageous discrimination as mainstreams use their influence to defend their shrinking market shares, in this case by having a major UK retailer pin the blame for its own simple mistake on the perceived tawdry subject matter of many self-published books. Clearly, the message is that adult material is only acceptable if it first has the mainstreams’ seal of approval. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: The times, they keep on a’ changing”