Navigating the Digital Jungle
Posted by Zoe Winters on July 12th, 2010When I digitally self-published my first novella, people were thinking that “maybe” ebooks would take off. But no one was sure yet. This lack of certainty kept anything from getting too cut throat. I plopped the thing up on Kindle and Smashwords and didn’t have to think about it.
Now, it’s getting a little more daunting for indies. The issue is that the big companies (Google, Amazon, Apple, B&N) are really starting to see the potential and they all want to dominate. Casualties of this war are likely to be indie authors who are increasingly unsure of how to swim in this ocean.
With the agency model, publishers are able to completely control digital pricing. Etailers are then left to discount indies and small presses who don’t have the power to demand agency-model pricing. Several ebookstores now have policies that your suggested retail price must be the same everywhere. This is all fine and good, but some indies want to change prices, run sales, experiment with higher price points. You know, like a normal small business.
On the Kindle, you can change your price and it’ll be live in a few days, or hours in some cases. If you’re on Barnes and Noble, you’re there through a distributor (since their direct-pub option isn’t live yet). Most indies are going through Smashwords premium distribution to get into B&N. The problem with B&N is that they take 8 weeks to update anything with regards to your book.
Part of the joy of being indie is the flexibility and control. If you have to wait 8 weeks for B&N to get it together so you can change your prices on Amazon, that’s a problem. Amazon has webcrawlers that seek out competing price points and then discount on Amazon.
A few small pubs have said that Amazon will unpublish their titles if they have to discount for several days in a row. This seems to be based on sale prices others make outside the author or small publisher’s control, and not just list price. This could be a webcrawler issue.
There is a lot of back and forth confusion right now about this issue. Some are saying that Amazon only penalizes you if your list price (your suggested retail price that you set) is lower somewhere else than on Amazon. And some are saying that they are being penalized even for sale prices they have no control over.
This creates a significant problem for the indie author trying to follow everybody’s terms of service, but being unable to control everything up-to-the-minute due to the lags with distribution.
Most of the sales channels through Smashwords premium distribution work fairly quickly to make updates. Two weeks or less. But Barnes and Noble’s 8 weeks is just too long. I’ve personally opted out of distribution through Smashwords for Barnes and Noble. I just have too little control there. I can’t control my keywords or categories, or much about my product description.
Right now my books are just listed as ebooks without a subcategory. Which means, I’m not getting found in B&N nearly as often as I should.
I intend to use the PubIt option with B&N or at least look into it when it becomes available. I’m hoping with PubIt, there will be a MUCH faster turn-around time and much more control for indies over how their work is marketed on the site and sold. I’m also hoping for the ability to change prices as fast as I can on Amazon to avoid running into issues.
For those who think Smashwords is just too much hassle to deal with, you really DO need to be on Smashwords. You can opt totally out of premium distribution if you like. But you should be on Smashwords itself. Why? Because Smashwords accepts Paypal, which converts international currency. When you don’t have an option like that, you keep international readers from being able to buy your work.
I got an email the other day from a woman in Turkey who wanted to read me. (And let me tell you, every time I get an email from an international reader, it’s just so cool. It doesn’t matter if I have just ONE reader in Turkey, it’s still unbelievably cool to me.) She couldn’t buy me on Amazon or the Nook and wanted to know if there was another purchasing option for people overseas. I pointed her to Smashwords.
Smashwords as a site will not discount your books without your permission. They let the author run/control discounts or opt in for any site-wide promotions. So you won’t run into any problems there with places like Amazon, but you will be able to reach out to readers overseas.
Zoe Winters writes and self-publishes both fiction and nonfiction under a few different names and imprints. She’s been called a “publishing geek” and loves all the minutiae of publishing just a little too much. She’s very passionate about the indie author movement and helping other authors who want to self-publish learn how to do it in the way that best suits them and their goals. To contact Zoe, visit her at: smartselfpublishing.com or http://www.zoewinters.org
Tags: digital publishing, ebook price wars, ebook publishing, indie authorship, navigating ebook publishing, publishing on kindle, understanding digital publishing
The plot thickens.
Yeah, I stupidly changed Glimpse’s cover on my Smashwords edition and it has yet to appear on B&N even though it’s been out since April. If I’d known it was going to take months I would have just left it! LOL At any rate, I should probably just opt out because I intend to publish on Pubit too. (Even though the name makes me cringe-kinda like Publix grocery chain.)
Yeah, that was my thinking, Stacey. With PubIt hopefully we’ll have a little more control over things.
This is all so incredibly interesting to me. Its sad though, that the entire point of being self-published is so we can have control.
I’m totally computer stupid, but is there a way to just put your own file on your site and just have an amount button, where people could buy ebooks directly from the author?
Hey Lori, You totally can sell directly from your site, but the issue is getting enough traffic coming straight to you. I do a lot of marketing, yes, but a lot of people stumble upon me on Amazon, usually via “customers who bought this also bought this” and Amazon recommendations. I couldn’t sell what I’m selling now off my own site because I don’t have a way to get a ton of traffic coming directly to me at the moment.
Okay, I got ya. Thanks!