Self-publishing on a larger stage

Not surprisingly, bestselling erotic trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, which started out as Twilight fan fiction, got a lot of attention at Frankfurt as a self-publishing success that became even more successful once it was picked up by Random House. The trilogy is rumored to have sold over 50 million copies, but James couldn’t have done that on her own, writes Publishing Perspectives editor-in-chief Ed Nawotka: “It took Random House and Bertelsmann’s global network–and editorial, production, distribution and sales expertise–to make that happen.” He cites 50 Shades as a prime example of how self-pubbed authors and traditional publishers can work together: “Amid the continuing economic recession, the publishing industry needed 50 Shades of Grey. James didn’t need a publisher as such, but once she turned to the pros, her relatively modest success was turned into a maelstrom of money.”

At Frankfurt, publishers were on the lookout for more self-published titles to snap up. Penguin bought the UK rights to crime novel Natural Causes by James Oswald, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies as a self-published book, in a six-figure deal; German publisher Goldman Verlag also made a six-figure deal for the title, and offers were in from Brazil and Italy.

Amazon continued its promotion of its self-publishing platform KDP. The company held daily sessions about the benefits of using self-publishing through KDP, and also announced that it is expanding the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library — which lets Amazon Prime members who own Kindle devices borrow one ebook a month from a library of over 200,000 titles, most of them self-published — to the UK, Germany and France.

In order to offer their books in the KOLL, self-published authors must make them available exclusively through the Kindle store.This is “dangerous…for the ebook rivals who have yet to open their doors to self-published content,” Eoin Purcell writes. “In reality, only Kobo has a fully functional platform for self-publishing authors beyond the USA (Apple does too, but only to the extent that those who have a nice Mac can access their iBookstore, but not everyone has a Mac). Nook’s [self-publishing platform PubIt!] is US only, though the talk is that this will change soon. The longer B&N and Microsoft exclude non-U.S. citizens from the service, the longer Amazon has to lock in exclusive content for three months at a time.”

Speaking of Kobo, the company announced a few more initiatives to compete on the self-publishing front through its self-publishing platform Writing Life. It acquired French digital software company Aquafadas and will make iBooks Author-like tools available to users. Writing Life is available in new languages — German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch — and the company said authors from 82 countries are now using it.

Three bookselling startups to watch

Three of the most-talked-about startups at the Frankfurt Book Fair focus at least in part on new ways of selling books. Ganxy lets authors and publishers create “showcases” to sell books and control marketing and promotions. They can ssell books directly through the showcase or simply provide links to retailers. The entire showcase can then be tweeted, embedded in a blog, website or Facebook page, or can stand alone as a website.”

BookShout! lets users import ebooks they’ve purchased from Barnes & Noble and Amazon into its app. Once BookShout! has verified the purchases, users can access a DRM-protected version of the file uploaded by the publisher.

BookShout! is already working with Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Wiley, but the practice of providing a third-party site with your Amazon user name and password is causing controversy: As Baldar Bjarnason writes at FutureBook, “We don’t know nearly enough for us to decide whether we can trust Bookshout. If they use their own servers as a proxy for the process, then those machines become a prime target for hackers. Compromising them would give them instant access to a host of Amazon accounts and their associated credit cards.”

BookShout! founder Jacob Illian addressed some of the concerns in a comment on paidContent’s story, writing, “At BookShout, we do not store your Amazon or B&N password when you import your books. In fact, if you import your books, buy another book from Amazon and then want to import the new one, you have to enter it all over again.”

ZolaBooks, founded by former literary agent Joe Regal, will begin selling ebooks by the end of this month, Regal said at the Tools of Change Frankfurt conference. “We intend to have every book from every publisher,” Regal said. Most books sold on Zola are protected with the company’s “proprietary” DRM — that was a requirement of the big-six publishers Zola is working with — which Regal claims is “unbreakable.” And, he said, “our answer to competing with Amazon is not to compete with Amazon…Our value system is so completely different from theirs.” He claimed “they’re not fundamentally editorially driven. [Amazon, which is publishing its own print and ebooks, might disagree.] They are pure commerce…Their value is price.”

Going global, thinking mobile

As digital reading expands globally, it won’t look the way it has in the West. In particular, mobile phones could be key in less wealthy countries, but many of those opportunities are so far untapped. ”I’ve been perplexed by the relative lack of interest for books on mobile,” Andrew Bud of the Mobile Entertainment Forum told Publishing Perspectives. “Yes, it’s a harder sale, but as the traditional products that do well on mobile–ringtones, for example–are fading, there is an opportunity for publishers to become a stronger part of this morphing market.”

Ebooks are already selling well on mobile phones in China. At the International Rights Directors Meeting on Tuesday, Gary Tan, owner of the Grayhawk Agency in Taipei, offered a brief overview of China’s mobile ebook market. China has over one billion cell phone users and 300 million smartphone users as of March 2012 and China Mobile, one of two major telecom providers in China, is the country’s largest ebook platform. Publishers may be reluctant to sell foreign rights to China Mobile, as it takes a huge cut of sales — at least 50 percent and sometimes as much as 70 percent — and sells the ebooks at a 90 percent discount from the print price. “These terms sound really bad,” Tan said, but China Mobile has such a large user base that if a book becomes a bestseller on the platform, “we might be talking about six-figure U.S. revenue.”

A panel on potential for ebooks in sub-Saharan Africa also focused on mobile. Ben Williams, a South African bookseller and founder of Avusa Digital Books, a platform for African ebooks, mentioned mobile payments company M-PESA as “one of the most sophisticated banking services you can have in Africa” and said digital bookstores could be built on top of it. He also cited initiatives like Paperight, which rely on photocopying machines in “the copy shops that are all over Africa” to print out copies of ebooks. (There’s advertising on the paper’s margins.” “The copy shop is now like a library or bookstore,” Williams said. Nevertheless, Togo’s Yasmîn Zahra Issaka-Coubageat, publisher of Graines de Pensées, noted that only “thirty percent of the population has a mobile phone in Togo,” and so for many countries even a mobile phone revolution could be a few years away.

Globe, bookshelf photos courtesy of the Frankfurt Book Fair

Amazon launched KOLL in the United States last November with a library of about 5,000 traditionally published titles — some of which weren’t included with the publishers’ permission but, rather, were purchased by Amazon at the wholesale price each time a user borrowed one. This caused a controversy that has since subsided as KOLL has primarily become a vehicle for self-published authors to promote their books: Amazon opened it up to self-published authors in December 2011 through a program called KDP Select, and the library now contains over 200,000 titles, nearly all of them self-published. Authors are paid out of a fund each time their ebook is borrowed. (In exchange for including books in the KOLL, self-published authors must sell them exclusively through Kindle for a period of at least 90 days.) All seven Harry Potter ebooks are also available through the KOLL in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

It is unclear how many people in Europe will be eligible to borrow ebooks from the KOLL. Amazon has not released Prime membership numbers in any country, but it seems safe to assume that there are fewer members of “Amazon Premium” in the UK, France or Germany than there are in the United States, and fewer still who own a Kindle. But the expansion of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to Europe comes at a time when Amazon is heavily promoting its self-publishing capabilities on the continent. At the Frankfurt Book Fair this week, Amazon has been holding daily sessions for international audiences about how to self-publish their books on Kindle.

In the press release announcing the expansion to Europe, Amazon said it is increasing the pool of money that self-published authors are paid from to $700,000 for October, from $600,000 last month, and “a larger increase anticipated in November.” The company says “in September, authors earned $2.29 per borrow, which is more than many KDP books earn per sale.” (Of course, not all books are borrowed even one time.)

Amazon also says that “in September, KDP Select books that enrolled in August earned 77% more royalties from paid sales than the three months before they were enrolled in the program.  This figure is conservative and only includes books that were available via KDP for the entire three months prior to enrolling in KDP Select.”

Self-publishing, part I: “There are no unrealistic expectations anymore”

Self-publishing platform Smashwords announced this week that it’s making self-publishing faster: Smashwords authors who sell e-books on Kobo and Apple will see faster “shipments” to those platforms, meaning that if they update their e-book’s price the change is reflected in near-real time. “We try to listen to people with unrealistic expectations,” CEO Mark Coker told me, “because their unrealistic expectations are the leading indicator of where we need to go.” Near-instantaneous price changes would allow an author to, say, sell an e-book “at $0.99 for the next five hours only.”

Smashwords is now working with library distributors 3M and Baker & Taylor’s Axis360 so self-published authors can get their e-books into libraries. Right now, the libraries buy Smashwords books at list price (publishers like Random House, meanwhile, charge more for the e-books they make available to libraries). Soon, Smashwords will allow its authors to set special pricing for libraries, Coker told me. “A lot of them are going to want to offer libraries lower pricing,” he said, or “will want to offer their books for free to libraries.”

Smashwords will soon let authors specify the countries where their books are distributed. Right now, authors (and the agents Smashwords works with) have the rights to sell their e-books in some territories, but not others. With the changes, for instance, an author could define that his or her e-book should be distributed “globally, except for commonwealth countries.” Smashwords will also let authors specify their prices by currency — a change from now, when authors have to price in dollars and retailers convert the currency automatically.

Also, Coker said, Smashwords will start accepting EPUB files (as opposed to Word files) later this year. With EPUB 3, that means the company could “potentially take more sophisticated books or enhanced books.”

Getting rid of DRM: This is going to take forever

Macmillan’s Fritz Foy announced at the Publishers Launch BEA conference that the company’s sci-fi/fantasy imprint Tor/Forge will launch a DRM-free digital bookstore this summer, and it may include DRM-free e-books from other publishers too. Meanwhile, distributor IPG announced that it will give client publishers the option to sell e-books DRM-free, and Kobo will give authors the option to sell DRM-free through its new self-publishing platform Writing Life. Still, publishers are moving slowly and it looks as though changes are going to happen in trickles.

Penguin global digital director Molly Barton said at Pub Launch that “Penguin is interested in methods of file security that would allow greater interoperability between platforms,” but Random House president of sales, operations and digital Madeline McIntosh called the DRM discussion “a red herring in a publishers panel at the IDPF conference, Publishers Lunch reports (paywall). She noted DRM’s not the only thing that keeps readers using a particular digital bookstore’s platform: “We have to be clear about what the goal is and commercial reason [to remove DRM].”

Self-publishing, part II: It’s getting closer

“We saw that seven percent of the units sold [on Kobo] were coming from self-published authors,” Kobo EVP of content and merchandising Michael Tamblyn told me, making those authors “collectively the size of a major publishing house,” so we “wanted to get closer” to them. Thus the launch of Kobo’s new self-publishing platform Writing Life. Authors using it get a 70 percent royalty on e-books priced between $1.99 and $12.99 and a 45 percent royalty on books below $1.99 or above $12.99. By “looking at how e-books sell in general,” Tamblyn said, “we know that after $12.99 there’s a drop…and after that it’s difficult to generate significant demand.” So the royalty structure “encourages authors to stay within that space.”

Amazon took up a lot of floor space, with separate sections for Amazon Publishing and self-publishing platforms Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace. At KDP, the company set up rows of chairs and, all day long, self-published authors gave presentations on why they use KDP. “I also sell on Nook [Barnes & Noble's self-publishing platform is PubIt],” I heard one author say, but Barnes & Noble doesn’t rent a public booth at BEA — which seems kinda dumb considering both Amazon and Kobo’s emphases on self-publishing at the show. Kobo, too, had the self-published authors participating in the beta launch of Writing Life speaking at its booth.

Startups: Maybe we’ll find a better way next year

The Javits Center’s vastness makes it tough for publishers and startups to randomly encounter each other, a lame “Digital Discovery Zone” is removed from the rest of the floor, and terrible or nonexistent WiFi prohibits quick demos or many interactions you need the Internet for. (Can I throw in one more complaint? There’s no WiFi in the press office and the woman who runs it yelled at me for “drinking all the water.”) The founder of one fairly well-known startup told me he was finding it tough to meet with the publishers who could get use out of his product. Despite a few panels that try to bring traditional publishers and newer companies together, BookExpo America remains, primarily, an event where publishers and authors pitch new books to librarians and booksellers. Maybe that’s what it should be, but since it’s also the largest book industry event in the United States, it’s not surprising that digital companies arrive with expectations about who they’ll meet and leave wanting more. It seems as if there should be a more efficient way to make these meetings happen — stay tuned on that.

Don’t hold your book party on a rowboat

OK, this one’s not digital. Author Robert Sullivan took BEA-going booksellers to the Hudson to promote his upcoming book “My American Revolution,” which is about the historical importance of New York Waterways. As the New York Times reports, “two rowboats – built at the boathouse to imitate 19th-century New York Harbor craft known as Whitehall gigs – left the pier loaded with booksellers, volunteer coxswains and local residents.” Unfortunately, one of the boats “struck a pier” and flipped, “dumping three BookExpo conventioneers, two instructors and two others into 60-degree water.” Five were able to climb onto the pier. “The other two drifted 100 yards away.” There were no fatalities.

See also

Social reading, discoverability and other unsolved problems at BEA 2012

Kobo launches e-book self-publishing platform, Writing Life

Macmillan’s Tor/Forge will launch DRM-free digital bookstore this summer

Wattpad raises $17 million to become the YouTube of writing

Photo courtesy of BEA

Writing Life is in beta tests with 50 authors now and will launch in English by the end of June, “with new language and country-specific support added in the coming year,” it said in a blog post.

In a separate press release, Michael Tamblyn, Kobo’s EVP content and merchandising, says, “When we started working on Kobo Writing Life, the first thing we did was ask authors what they felt was most important in a self-publishing platform. They were incredibly clear: openness, control, great royalties, incredible reporting and global reach. It should be powerful but drop-dead simple.”

On its website, Kobo takes a jab at Amazon: “Unlike some self-publishing portals we could mention, Kobo doesn’t bind you to us. Publish to Kobo and take your ePub to your adoring fans, no matter where they might be. You’re free to sell your eBook the way you want.” To be fair, Amazon’s KDP doesn’t require exclusivity, but its KDP Select (which lets self-published authors include their titles in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library) does. The main difference between Kobo and Amazon is outlined in the press release:

Unlike competitive self-publishing tools, Kobo allows authors to set their book price to “FREE” at any time without restrictive exclusive agreements, in addition Kobo pays 10% higher royalties on sales in many growing international markets and allows authors much more freedom on pricing.

Jane Litte at Dear Author reports that Kobo is paying a 70 percent royalty on e-books priced between $1.99 and $12.99, and a 45 percent royalty on e-books below $1.99 or above $12.99. By contrast, Amazon pays a 70 percent royalty on KDP e-books priced above $2.99 and a 35 percent royalty on those below $2.99. And she notes that authors can sell their books with or without DRM.

Writing Life also gives authors an analytics dashboard showing real-time sales stats, including sales by country. “The ability to see the performance of my books across different markets helps me to understand how my advertising and promotions are influencing sales so that I can engage with more readers around the world,” self-published author Bella Andre, who is beta-testing the program, says in the release.

Kobo’s international growth: Now 8 million users in 190 countries

Separately, Kobo released some year-on-year growth stats (though no actual numbers): e-book downloads up 400 percent, e-reader device sales up 160 percent and the number of people reading internationally with Kobo up 280 percent.

Kobo was acquired by Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten for $315 million in November and says it “will be launching in Japan, with subsequent launches planned for Portugal, Spain, Italy, with more launches to follow. These markets have distinct needs for digital reading and Kobo intends to provide access in regions where printed books are inaccessible and where electronic devices can be more easily obtained.”

Recently, though, Amazon shared some data about Kindle Singles with me, and allowed Kindle Singles authors to share their sales figures with me as well.

Amazon launched Kindle Singles in January 2011 as a home for “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length.” There are now 165 Singles, and Amazon adds around three more each week. Authors and publishers have to apply to have their work included. Most Kindle Singles are exclusive to Amazon. Others come from traditional publishers — like Random House and Hachette — or new e-singles publishers like Byliner and The Atavist, and are sold across platforms, not just on Amazon. While Barnes & Noble and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) recently launched sections for e-singles on their sites, they don’t sign original authors and provide little of the marketing support that Kindle Singles authors receive.

How Well Are They Selling?

Amazon says that in the 14 months the program has been running, it has sold over two million Kindle Singles. Seventy percent of each sale goes to the author or publisher, and Amazon keeps 30 percent. Amazon wouldn’t disclose its total revenues from those two million singles, but the minimum price of a Single is $0.99 and most are $1.99 (the author or publisher sets the price). So with an average price of $1.87 multiplied by two million, a rough estimate of Amazon’s 30-percent cut is $1.12 million. (How much are some authors making? See our post later this morning.)

How does this compare to other e-singles sites? Total sales through the Kindle Singles store dwarf those at e-singles sites like Byliner and The Atavist, but the Kindle Singles list is much larger. Byliner has published 18 “Byliner Originals” (15 of those available as Kindle Singles) and told me it “expects to sell over 1 million copies this year” across Amazon, Apple, Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Kobo and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS). The Atavist has published 13 e-singles (12 of those available as Kindle Singles) and would only say that it has sold “over 100,000″ copies.

A Home For Unknown Authors?

Kindle Singles editor David Blum, an adjunct professor at Columbia and former editor-in-chief of the Village Voice and New York Press, sees Kindle Singles as a place to promote the work of unknown authors, including some of his former writing students. In my conversation with Blum, he often described Kindle Singles in relation to the world of magazine writing. “There are a lot of obstacles in the traditional magazine world,” he says, calling Kindle Singles a “middle ground between magazine and book writing,” with “the shards of the magazine industry on one side” and “the decline in the publishing industry and magazine industry working against writers with ideas that don’t fit easily into one or the other niche.”

The program receives around 50 unsolicited submissions a week, and just a handful of those are accepted. Considering that three new Singles are published each week, that is an acceptance rate of six percent (probably less since Blum also solicits some titles himself).

Of course, many of the writers in the program aren’t newbies to the book world. Amazon gave me a list of the top 10 Kindle Singles bestsellers (by units sold), and seven of them are works by previously published big-name bestselling authors: Lee Child, Stephen King, David Baldacci, Dean Koontz, Karin Slaughter, Jodi Picoult, Jon Krakauer. (Picoult’s “Leaving Home” and Slaughter’s “Thorn in My Side” are only available as Kindle Singles; the other titles are not exclusive to Amazon.)

As the Kindle Singles store gets larger — and more brand-name writers decide to take part — individual authors may have a harder time standing out. Right now, one of Kindle Singles’ biggest benefits for authors — one that differentiates it from Nook Snaps and Apple Quick Reads – is the heavy promotion the list gets on the site. “It sits right on a level with many other big sections of the store,” Russ Grandinetti, VP Kindle Content, said. “If you’re on that list, it’s a lot easier to get noticed.” Kindle Singles are also sometimes included in Amazon’s e-mail newsletters and Kindle Daily Deal program.

There are 165 Kindle Singles now. If three more are added every week, that would put the total around 280 titles by the end of this year, decreasing the program’s showcase effect.

All of the authors that I spoke with enjoy working with Blum. Many say they see him as a literary presence within Amazon — a tastemaker. It appears that he has been able to operate independently; the one other editor working with him used to be his intern.

“Let’s say you work for an underfunded literary magazine and your private mission is to promote literary good tastes and writers you think are talented and having something meaningful to contribute to the culture,” said Oliver Broudy, a former Paris Review managing editor who has written two Kindle Singles. “Now let’s say you have millions and millions of dollars to devote to that cause. That could be the Kindle Singles program. Dave is accountable to the rest of Amazon, but I do believe there’s something of that spirit in his enterprise.”

But will the lit-mag vibe survive if the operation becomes bigger and more commercial? I asked Grandinetti if he thinks more big-name authors will join Kindle Singles. “I hope so,” he said. “The more that publishers think about this as a companion opportunity to their main activity; the more that editors start to understand this is an option for things that come across their desk-that’s a real opportunity.”

Kindle Singles’ Function Within Amazon

Grandinetti wouldn’t disclose Kindle Singles’ share of total Kindle revenues, but said it’s “going to grow a lot, and that will partially be a function of how attractive writers and publishers find the format relative to more traditional books.” When considering the submissions to Kindle Singles versus the titles self-published through the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, “we don’t have a pre-conceived goal of how much ends up in Singles versus [in the broader store],” he said.

Kindle Singles and Amazon’s other publishing initiatives sometimes feed each other. Blum refers authors who aren’t accepted to Kindle Singles to KDP. One Kindle Single, Evan Rail’s “Why Beer Matters,” was originally published on KDP and “we just moved that over,” Blum said. Twenty-nine Kindle Singles are already in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which allows Amazon Prime members who own Kindles to borrow one e-book a month.

I asked the authors I spoke with — many of whom had also published full-length books with traditional publishers — if they’d consider publishing future books with Amazon. They all said they’d at least give Amazon a look at full-length projects, because of their experience with Kindle Singles.

In that way, Kindle Singles allows Amazon to draw in authors who deem the program low-risk because it’s not in conflict with other publisher relationships they may have. Those authors may then stick around, especially if they believe that doing a full-length project with Amazon has the potential to be as lucrative as Kindle Singles have been for many of them.

How lucrative? See the next post.