Brand name authors increasingly dominate the bookshop front rows - though at least in one respect Kindle Indies have the last laugh.


Last year when I first put my back-list titles on Kindle, I also sent a notification to my email list.
    Now amongst those were several crime and mystery reading groups in the USA, many of which had their periodic get-togethers in local bookstores.
    Some duly responded with thank-yous for the notification, but one lashed back: 'How dare you send this to us! It's people like Amazon Kindle who are putting us small independent bookstores out of business.'
    Now at the other end of the scale, Kindle has been tremendous for many writers. Established writers have seen a whole new audience opened up with the advent of kindle - but the real boon has been to fledgling authors previously unpublished. Some/many, readers might argue, should have remained that way - unpublished; but in turn some/many are very worthy. Look at the various 'Indie' author blogs and comments and you'll see heartbreak tales of writers trying for years to get published without success. And just at the point of starvation or when they're about to jump off a bridge from the constant rejection, the shining knight in armour of kindle rides up to the rescue. Heartwarming tales indeed.
    But what I found ironic about this bookseller's retaliatory comment was that it has in fact been the 'greed' of bookshops which has brought about this cycle. A strange word to use, 'greed', you might say, in the advent of so many bookshops fighting for their lives, and the likes of Borders going to the wall not so long ago. So let me explain.
    The business of selling books has increasingly been driven by 'promotions' the past 15 years. Now in the mid 1990's, though these frontline bookshop promotions were paid for, the costs were not excessive and most publishers could budget them in comfortably for a new author. Also they gave opportunites for new authors to 'price-compete' because invariably the new Grisham or Clancy title would be sold at full price (they were far too grandiose to get themselves involved in the tawdry business of discounting).
    So a publisher could list a new author at 20-25% below the latest Grisham or Clancy, and if exposed on the front line of bookstores, sales could be very bullish indeed.
    But then two things happened: year by year the costs of front-line promotions went up (now a decent book-chain promotion can cost anything from $10,000 - $30,000) - so to hit bookstores on a multiple basis, the outlay can be $100,000 or more. Then the major authors also discovered that price discounting could greatly boost their sales, so they wanted first dibs on these; or perhaps their publishers made those decisions for them.
    However, as any agent will tell you: if a book is NOT promoted and does not get on that front line in the bookstores, the chances of it selling well are low. And that's even more acute for a new author. A well known author stands a good chance of selling well from the back rows. But reverse that position and imagine you're a little known author selling from the back rows of a bookstore at full price, while the front rows are dominated by brand name authors selling at a discount or 2 for 1. 
    I recall the ex-MD of Penguin UK, Helen Fraser, lamenting how it had unfortunately become (largely as a result of these bookstore price-promotion policies) an 'All or nothing' game. The costs of getting into these bookstore promotions were so high and the resultant risk so great to launch new authors that increasingly publishers were shying away from even attempting to do so. And so we return full circle to the Indie author with a worthwhile book losing the will to live after countless rejections, with some insight now to the backdrop as to why this is happening.
    So, paradoxically, we have a price-promotion strategy starting as a bookstore ethos which when passed on to publishers makes them cut back on the new authors they take on. Kindle then arrives and opens up new opportunities for those previously unpublished authors, and as it develops starts to threaten the bookstores and the very structure of traditional publishing which originally closed so many doors to them. A certain poetic irony, you might say. 'Karma in practice' and the 'Goths and Rome cycle all over again'; and all the other worn comments that probably sound better after a doobie or two.  
    

When like half of the world I heard about the E.L. James Fifty Shades of Grey boom, I thought to myself: West London housewife, she probably sent it off to a London agent and, hey presto, she got a book deal from a major publisher en route to world domination. Wrong!
    Then I read that she was in fact a self-publishing sensation, until a leading blogger commented that she'd never heard of E.L. James before seeing stacks of her books piled high in her local bookstore. And this from a leading US blogger who prided herself on keeping abreast of the leading Indie authors. So, wrong again!
    In the end I heard the full account from my agent over dinner a few weeks back. Fifty Shades in fact started life as fan fiction based loosely on Twilight. She built up a steady online audience through weekly instalments, and at some stage the transition came to serious standalone erotic fiction.
    In the midst of this an agent did in fact approach London publishers, who roundly told her to get lost. Same story too in the USA. Too this, too that, not enough this, too much of that... the old familar comments that are now cliched at a time when 'cliche' seems to be the in word with editors: cliched characters, cliched plots, scenes, etc.
    Along the way she then teamed up with a small Austalian ebook publisher, almost a literary blog community - by which time she had two books in the final trilogy finished. This small ebook publisher managed to sell 75,000 copies, a whopping result for the Australian market.
    It then swung back to US publishers, then UK -- some of whom had in fact given it the thumbs down 18 months previous. A 'transitional', unconventional publishing route to say the least - so not easy to categorize simply as self, small press or trad published. In the end it appears to have been 'fifty shades' of all three. 

Converting your printed book to Kindle through optical scanning? Think again.

Last year when I was first considering putting my back-list titles on Kindle, my UK agent, the illustrious Robert Kirby (who also represents Ricky Gervaise, Anthony Horowitz and Dawn French) mentioned that a number of agents had been pitched by Amazon at the London Book Fair about a special book-to-Kindle service.
    Part of this involved optically scanning books (known as OCR in the trade) and then converting them to ebook Kindle format. However, at the time I'd gained good input from other authors and also I had all of my books on electronic files on my computer. In other words, the kdp conversion process was easy.
    So, I went at it without using this specialized Amazon service - until I got to the fourth book in my list - The Shadow Chaser. For some strange reason, I had two thirds of the book on file but the rest was missing. I phoned Penguin to see if they had copies on file - no luck.
    So in the end I was stuck with using OCR for the final third of The Shadow Chaser. The converted copy that came back was a nightmare. At least five misread words per page, sometimes far more, with on occasion entire lines mangled and rearranged. It took me ten days solid to go through it and take out the gremlins. A whole book I envisaged would take nearer a month. I got to thinking that it might have been quicker and easier re-typing the whole thing.
    The problem with OCR is that it takes the nearest approximation to the word it 'thinks' it sees. Check out the same problems found with an early Kindle edition of Game of Thrones. The region known as Dorne was misread as Dome. The word 'don't' with a thick apostrophe might be misread as donut, etc. This appears to be a common problem with the OCR system. 
    Having worked so tirelessly to get rid of these errors, it appears that two or three still remained and only recently I found myself going back into the script to correct them. If any other authors have experienced the same problem with OCR, I'd be pleased to hear about it. Or indeed readers finding Kindle editions with multiple errors from mainstream publishers where you'd expect better.