Posts Tagged Barnes & Noble

It’s getting easier and easier to sell self-published books even through mainstream dealers like Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com, largely thanks to the e-book “revolution.”  However, I’d warn my fellow writers against doing such a thing unless they are already well-established and guaranteed good sales. (Wil Wheaton self-publishes through Lulu, and though he has a niche fanbase, it is well established and he already has reliable sales-numbers.)

It may be incredibly gratifying to finally see your name on the cover of a book, in a store, but for an unestablished author, this may be shooting yourself in the foot. Say you self-publish that first book and it sells a few copies, mostly to friends and family, of course, and a few others. Then, miracle of all miracles, your next book gets picked up by a Big Name Publisher. Big Name Publisher has more resources at its disposal and wants to make money from your book, so it will go out and promote it heavily.

However, the bookstores they try to market your book to pull up your name as the author and look at how many of your other books it has sold, and the number of books it buys is based on that. Big Name Publisher sees that the bookstores aren’t interested in selling your books, and that’s that.

There have been authors who have had to change their names just to get away from the low sales figures attached to their initial self-published books. This is not the path to a spot on the Bestseller lists, it is actually likely to work against you ever having that opportunity, no matter how good your writing is. If you choose to self-publish in spite of the problems with it, I’d recommend using a pseudonym. You can always come back and “reclaim” the book under your real name later if you do get the real big break, as Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman) and Anne Rice (A. N. Roquelaire) have done.

Offering writing for free over the internet to gain an audience is, however, a good way of promoting yourself, but even then you have to be careful. The same easy self-publishing platforms that authors are beginning to take advantage of are being used by unscrupulous publishers to steal content and offer it for sale.

Creative Commons offers an easy way to protect and license your content, but be careful that you do not accidentally sign away your rights to any money that is made from it.  If you choose to license your work with Creative Commons, make sure to choose a license that ensures that your work can only be used and shared non-commercially – that is, people are free to download, read, and share, but not sell, your work.  You can still offer your books for free over the internet with a full copyright rather than a CC license without giving up any rights to it at all.

Like I say, though you earn nothing from it, offering free samples or even complete books for free can be an excellent way to begin to gain an audience, as well as giving you a place to direct potential agents and publishers to so that they can easily see what you’ve done. The trick is to be careful and to keep a watch on the most popular self-publishing and e-book publishing websites to ensure that your work does not get stolen.

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It looks like Amazon has realized it’s mistake and reached an agreement with Macmillan over the prices of e-books for the Kindle, but the entire issue (and the strong-arm tactics Amazon chose to employ against Macmillan) only served to make me even more happy that I chose a nook.

You see, Macmillan wanted to charge a more dynamic range of prices (from about $6 to about $15) for its e-books, while releasing them at the same time as the hardcovers are released. Since a hardcover is typically priced at somewhere around $30, even the $15 e-book would be a bargain, but Amazon was insistent that all books for the Kindle be priced at $9.99 or below.

They call this “standing up for the consumer”, however they proved, with the de-listing of all Macmillan books, with the removal of purchased items from kindles, with DRM and ridiculously restrictive licensing, that the consumer is the last thing on their mind.

Because, you see, Macmillan was standing up for the people who produce those books, and Macmillan is one of the largest publishers of science fiction and fantasy literature in the country. When Amazon decided to de-list Macmillan entirely, they decided to wage war not just against a publishing giant, but against an entire genre, its fans, and the writers who write in that genre.

I’m glad that Macmillan held to its principles, here – if they are expected to offer e-books at paperback prices, it is perfectly reasonable to delay the e-book until the paperback release date, otherwise, it should be priced higher to ensure just compensation for the authors, editors, and other folks who work to produce that book. $15 is still a bargain to get a book on its hardcover release date, though if I want a book that badly, I’m likely to buy the hardcover anyway.

For my part, I’m so disgusted with Amazon’s approach to selling e-books that I’ve systematically changed all book links on this blog to Barnes and Noble. Because you see, as a writer, I expect to receive appropriate compensation for my work, and as a fan, I want to ensure that the people who produce the fiction I love don’t get shafted either.

On another, happier note, I’d like to encourage everyone to go visit the newly arrived blog of a friend of mine, Labyrinthine Library.  He’s a designer, a dad, a geek, all that lovely stuff, and can be expected to have some interesting commentary on art, as well as life, the universe, and everything.

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I got my nook this weekend, from the lovely BF (A Christmas gift that got delayed by lack of availability from B&N) and have been playing about with it here and there.

My initial first impression is good, even once I got over the requisite geek-girl squeeing over a new gadget. The interface is incredibly intuitive and had no learning curve whatsoever.  In fact, while opening the package it came in required instructions (I kid you not. And they were very necessary.), the only instruction manual you get for the actual device is in its own library, and virtually unnecessary.

It came pre-loaded with three classics (Dracula, Pride and Prejudice, and Little Women) – the inclusion of Pride and Prejudice admittedly won some points with me, as that’s one of my favorite books and likely one I’d have been buying if it hadn’t been there.  Both it and my first purchase via the nook interface, Coraline, look really spiffy rendered in the e-ink screen.

Connecting the nook to my B&N account, purchasing books from the store, etc. was handled admirably fast by the included (and free) AT&T wireless connection, and it seems that the interface lag that I’ve seen folks complain about has been dealt with.  While the AT&T doesn’t pick up at my house (nothing picks up at my house, no matter what service provider. I live in the boonies), it picks up everywhere else I go, and adding WiFi hotspots for my local library and office was simple enough.

My main reason for choosing the nook over the Kindle was because the nook did not use a proprietary e-book format, and allowed side-loading of non-B&N purchased e-books and documents.  Of course, here you have the issue of loading items that have not been specifically formatted for the nook, but the books I’ve loaded onto it in epub format do well. Anything in pdf format, of course, displays as an image and can get cut off. My local library offers e-books in epub format, so I haven’t had any problems with the few I’ve tried out.

I’m very pleased. This is by no means a substitute for actual physical books, I’m looking at it as more of a supplement to my book addiction  . . . and perhaps a way of ensuring that I don’t end up completely buried in books at some point. (This weekend, I pulled a mountain of books out of my car that, once catalogued and sorted, came out to a total of 197 books . . . BF says I should get better gas mileage.) Very likely, the nook will replace only my paperback purchases – the books that I really care about having for posterity, to read again and again and again, I’ll still be buying in hardcover.

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