Ev BogueMy experience of the modern book publishing business is that it's changing rapidly at this very moment.
I've been paying close attention to publishing news, and it all points towards huge growth in e-book sales. There are now more e-books being sold in the world than physical books. Borders Books is bankrupt. Kevin Kelly has predicted that Amazon's Kindle device will be free by November (which may or may not happen). Recently Amazon scooped Timothy Ferriss (author of the 4 Hour Work Week) away from publishers by signing him and his next book exclusively to Amazon.
Required reading for this new digital publishing world is Craig Mod's Post-Artifact Books & Publishing.
Some publishers are clinging to the physical, while others are racing to digital. Meanwhile, where do we all fit into this picture?
Well, increasingly, there are a lot of options for book publishers.
In Taking Your Book to the Web, I'll be covering many of these options in detail. This is an introduction to the work for my public site.
I'm beginning to see publishing books on the web as an on-going experiment. In order to see what works, and what doesn't, I need to test many of the options to see if they succeed or fail.
There isn't anyone who's going to tell me: this is the right way.
I'm working on a new book. It's called Untether. I'm excited about this book, and I hope you are too. However, even though I've published three paid e-books straight to the web over the last two years, I still recognize that there's no tried and true way to making a living from publishing.
The best I can do is experiment every day in order to figure out what works, and what doesn't, as soon as possible so that I can sell enough copies to make a living as a writer in 2011.
Here are some of the publishing options available:
1. Straight to Kindle.
This is one of the most popular paths that independent authors and even the publishing industry is taking. Instead of being my own distributor, I aim for a third party network.
Pros: Amazon has its own device (Kindle), distribution net (WhisperNet) and format (Mobi)
Cons: Mobi is a very restrictive format design-wise. It's designed to display properly on Amazon's Kindle, which uses E-Ink -- which is kind of like a sheet of paper that changes letters. You can see it in the sunlight! But it's also black and white, so highly restrictive in what I can display on it.
The facts: Amazon can take a large percentage of sales, if you decide to control your own price. If I want Amazon to sell my book at 4.99 or 7.99, they give me 70%. If I decide to sell my book at $23, Amazon only gives me 30% of the sales. Highway robbery or a good way of forcing everyone to charge the same price for their e-books? Only experiments can decide.
My experiments: I published The Art of Being Minimalist to Amazon for its entire run from Feb 2010 -- Feb 2011. Sales directly from my site always far outsold the Amazon copies. My question: is this still the same? The only way to test this out is to experiment.
2. Self-publish exclusively
Many authors are choosing this path. Ignore Amazon, Ignore Apple, publish directly to people via digital goods delivery.
Pros: I control distribution, so I get almost all of the money. I can publish in any format I want, or all formats. There's no reason why I can't publish a Kindle book in Mobi format and bypass the giant Amazon Gatekeeper. A Book Apart does this with their books, when you buy them directly from their site.
Cons: I'm responsible for everything, so there's no one to blame but myself if something goes wrong.
The facts: In my experiments, this has worked best for me -- so far. When I published Minimalist Business, with a medium price-point for a business book of $37-$47, I wasn't leaking tons of money to a gatekeeper in order to bring my book to the web. Instead, I got to keep all of the money. Great! I only needed to enlist a third-party digital goods distributor to deliver the book automatically when payment from buyers was received.
My experiments: For the last two years I handled almost everything in-house. This meant that only I was responsible when things went wrong. Self-publishing might seem harder, and there's a bigger learning curve. I've found it to be the most rewarding, so far.
3. Affiliate marketing
Some authors have chosen to go the affiliate route for distributing their work. This means that they pay anywhere from 25-75% to readers and other authors in order to get the word out.
Pros: If you don't currently have many people reading your work, this might help with distribution.
Cons: When I used affiliates, I'd commonly give up a lot of control as to how my work was presented. Some people did an amazing job presenting the work in an honest way, others talked hyped my work in an unrealistic way.
The facts: Affiliate marketing can come across as sketchy to both readers and other people on the web if it's not handled in a professional way. Affiliate marketing is completely legal in most places, but can sometimes come across as sketch-a-rama to people who aren't familiar with the business model.
My experiments: In the early days of distributing The Art of Being Minimalist and Minimalist Business, I relied partially on affiliates to get the word out. This meant that 10%-25% of my sales were coming through affiliates. This gave the community a little income, as well as myself. Two years ago, many authors were encouraging their readers to affiliate market for them. These days it's rarer. I've personally moved away from actively promoting it as a distribution option for my books for the past 6 months.
There are of course other options, such as genre-specific curators and smaller distributors who are attempting to compete with the Amazon/Kindle behemoth.
I'll be covering these options in more depth as well as many of the other elements in Taking Your Book to the Web.