Louis Shalako
Amazon
and its price-matching are a real pain in the butt sometimes.
I
know we’re not supposed to get angry in this business, but there are times when it
gets real personal.
What
happened was that one of our authors had a story that was actually selling on
Amazon.
It’s an ebook, and it’s in a specific category. If romance has ten
million titles on Amazon and fantasy five or six million, (just a wild guess), the
category this one is in might have had a few thousand titles. It might have had
half a million titles. It stood a better chance to begin with. It’s in a
smaller category—that’s all.
We’ve
all heard a little too much about passive
discoverability. We’ll get to that in a minute.
In
about three weeks we sold sixty books in the U.K. and thirteen in the U.S. And
then one day the sales were gone. I peered at the Kindle Digital Publishing
dashboard and realized the bastards had started price-matching.
They’ve
given away two hundred and fifty-four copies of our story. After a brief
exchange of sharp words, (on my part, because they just don’t care and can
afford not to take it too personally as they get some kind of weekly minimum wage),
they put the price back on it.
I have
serious doubts about that book picking up its previous momentum. Many people
have remarked there is no real sales bump after a free giveaway. I still find
the more books I give away, the more books I sell. This was, in fact, our best
month ever—although that’s not saying very much.
But
it seems Amazon,
presumably following their own best interest, took the wind right out of our
sales on that book. What is especially irksome, is that you can rarely get them
to price-match when you want them to.
Countless
times, I have taken a link from one of our free books on a competitor’s
website. I have gone to the Amazon page for the exact same book, clicked on
‘report a lower price’, and pasted it in—all to no avail. Do that a few times,
get no result and there is your answer.
What
they tell you is that they have sole discretion in terms of price-matching. If
you don’t like the terms of service, you can go elsewhere. No one ever does,
because Amazon is the biggest player, they have the traffic. They have the
readers and the buyers.
Pricing
is a powerful tool. Amazon is the only retailer at present who doesn’t allow
the author or publisher to set the price of a book at free. I can set a book
for free on any other website. In places such as Google Play,
that change is reflected instantly. Price-pulsing is a useful and recognized
tool for making sales. Traditional publishers have admitted that they do it
too.
Who wouldn’t use it if they could? On Amazon, there is that eight or
twelve-hour delay. And you can’t set it for free, and there are an estimated
thirty-three million titles on that website.
There
is no such thing as passive discoverability on Amazon, (and please listen
carefully) because we are unknown, not previously published authors. We are not
disgruntled ex-mid-list authors who were dropped for poor sales numbers, a
change of editors, or their previous publisher going bankrupt.
We
do not have an established following. We start off with one book, no back-list, no experience, and no readers. It takes a long time to build readership, and
that’s true whether you can write, spell, edit, proofread, publish, or not.
That’s one reason, after five or six years of assiduously reading blogs on
writing, the industry, or ‘how to attract a literary agent’, we no longer listen
to the advice. It was simply inappropriate for us.
It
might have been more useful to others, and it’s only fair to say that.
On OmniLit,
and some other platforms, I can give books away for free all day long. I can go
there at night, set up a title with a price, and sell a couple of books. Before
I go to bed, I can set it for free again, building up some heat in those pesky
algorithms. We can’t do it for all the books, but some books do sell. That is
the thing that really grips the imagination.
Imagine
me—some guy no one ever heard of, selling books across a number of genres, getting
reviews, making a little money and learning our way around this, the
independent side of the business.
For
our purposes, some of the advice was really bad, and we wish we hadn’t taken
it.
On Smashwords,
changes appear instantly, but this is one of our poorest-performing websites.
We sell very few books through SW, and their distribution channels do take some
time to reflect price or other changes. Some changes never go through including
that all-important metadata, new covers, etc.
When
you have a hundred and twenty titles, it is a real pain to go through a half a
dozen sites and see if all your changes have gone through.
Speaking
of passive discoverability, traditional publishers realized that back-list is
pure gold. It was a bunch of free products that they didn't have to pay for, except for royalties already negotiated and rates set. They don't have to pay until they sell a book.
What they did, when they realized this was a whole new revenue
stream, one that they had pooh-poohed and completely ignored, was to grab and
upload as many back-list titles as they possibly could, before the rights
reverted back to the authors.
A
lot of those authors had no time limit on their contract. In some contracts,
the publication of a new edition, say a translation in Spanish of an
English-language title, extends the license for a stipulated number of years.
In the contract I saw, (but did not sign), a two-page contract, what was left
out was more troubling than what was in it. Each new edition would have
extended a two-year license for an additional two years. That part was in
there, at least. I at least understood some of the implications. With all due
respect to the party in question, it would be fairly easy to put a machine
translation, (arguably proofread by a native speaker) up in Swahili, and extend
the license of a book that might have been doing all right in English.
What
do they care if they sell two books a year in Swahili? What do they care if the
product, published under a subsidiary name and imprint, in another language,
was a bad translation?
The author would never know. All the author would know
is that they had sold two books in Swahili and a few thousand or so in English,
and that they were never going to get their intellectual property back. That’s
because two years later the publisher could conceivably publish it in Dinka, or
Urdu, or whatever. When you consider the literacy rate in some of these third
world countries, native speakers might have a hard time reading the book, but
then they might just assume that it’s beyond their reading level. Even they might not know it’s a bad
translation, unless and until some educated person reads it and reviews it.
The
really interesting thing is that the book that was selling used the exact same
type of book cover as the books that were not selling. We had the exact same
editor, the exact same formatting. The whole thing kind of put the boots to the
people who give the same old advice every time.
Write
a good book. Use a professional cover, use a professional editor. If you can’t
spell, can’t proofread, can’t be bothered to turn on spell-check and grammar
check, then absolutely—you need an editor. In our own case, our editorial
skills are more than adequate.
What they really want you to do, of course, is
to load up your first novel with five or ten thousand in costs before it’s ever
published. They want you to go broke, quit the business and never come back.
Understandably,
they’re a bit shy about telling you that part.
***
My
mother asked me a good question the other day.
“If
someone who had never done this before came to you, and asked for your advice,
what would you tell them?”
For
one thing, it really wouldn’t hurt to submit your first few books around. We
had about a hundred and twenty-five rejection slips before we ever published
our first title. We also had three contracts offered to us, which we did not
proceed with, as my initial impression was that it was a vanity press.
We’ve
submitted hundreds of short stories around and managed to place a few of them.
Somebody else decided the thing was printable. In the early days, this offers
both reassurance to the newbie author and some small measure of credibility.
The money never hurts either, when you are building up your writing business.
My
number one piece of advice is figure out what you want from all of this. Want
to attract a literary agent? Read
up on the query letter. Want a traditional publishing contract? By all
means pursue it, and yes—listen to those people who have experience and
knowledge of that side of the industry.
But
if you want to explore independent publishing, those well-meaning folks might
not be giving the best advice for you.
And
yet that advice might be extremely
relevant to somebody else.
Be very,
very careful who you listen to.
Don't take my word for anything, Do your own experiments, learn the business and just keep going.
END
