How Barnes and Noble Can Survive and Thrive

Barnes and Noble has been under siege for some time by Amazon. They just hired another CEO to get sales moving in the right direction. They are scratching their head on how to compete against people clicking away on their books. Barnes and Noble is not exploiting their biggest advantage, their physicality and the physicality of their authors. Let me explain what I mean.

I do a fair amount of book signings at Barnes and Noble. My book Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson came out in the fall and my latest is out May 1 Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt. So I have been in the stores. Here is what I tell the manager. Put me in during your busiest days if you can if not I will take whatever time you have. When I am in the store I usually sell every copy of my books. And I don't have people coming to the store to see me. In fact I sell all my books to people who had not even heard of my books when they walk in. How do I do it?

What I do is when people pass my signing table I talk to them. I tell them about my book about the story of our First Woman President Edith Wilson who took over the White House in 1919 and ran the government for two years. I tell them about Teddy Roosevelt losing his wife and mother on the same day and then going West for three years. People want to hear a good story. They want to read a good book. And then I tell them I will sign the book and it is game over. A sale. It doesnt matter if I have 5 books to sell or 20...I can sell them all by just talking to people.

If I was the powers that be at Barnes and Noble, I would have authors in the store every day of the week and surprise people by having them talk to people about their books. I would not have them sitting behind a table and waiting for people to talk to them. Have them rove the store. The very advantage of a physical store over the internet is that it is full of real live people. I see people walking around in Barnes and Noble looking for a good book. Imagine if  "surpise authors" all over the country were chatting it up in the stores with customers. The books would fly off the shelf. No one is more motivated to sell their book than an author.

Believe me, I know.

William Hazelgrove Website

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson
Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Price is an issue in Publishing and then again...

If you follow the Amazon struggle with publishers then you know it is about the price of the ebook. This is what the war is being fought over. Should Amazon be allowed to undercut publishers and get a bigger cut of the profit.  It is true that people are price driven but then again there is that thing called quality. When I sold books at the Printers Row here in Chicago of The Pitcher I sold twenty five books.

Now I charged full bump and I had three hardcovers priced at twenty seven dollars. The people buying The Pitcher seemed to not care at all. Well you say that is because you had a captive market and no competition. Actually no. Right across from my booth was a discount bookseller who started at eight dollars a book and worked his way right down to one dollar a book. And he was not quiet about it.

As my people were paying sixteen dollars for my book and then twenty seven the guy selling discount books literally yelled across the aisle ALL BOOKS ARE A BUCK. Still people did not flinch they simply wanted to read the book. Now in Ebook land the .99 title is king. But there is a sneaking suspicion that people would spay 2.99 or 3.99 or 7.99  if they decided that was the book they wanted. And yes there are people who live for the cheap book but they are always there.

My point is that if someone wants your book they will pay just about anything for it. Price may be king in some areas but a good book has a funny way of setting it's own price. Or market.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Pitcher is #1...How Books Are Sold Now

            The Pitcher is currently #1 in these categories.

• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Urban
• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Sports
• #1 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Urban Life

 

The Pitcher is selling more right now than monster Bestsellers published by the largest publishers. Book selling has changed permanently. The fight between Amazon and traditional publishers is really the last Battle of the Bulge in a war that has been going on for some time. The fact is that books used to be sold very differently.

 

The stage was narrow because of the physicality of bookstores. Literally stores could only stock so many books and so the Big Authors or Bestsellers were put out where everyone could see them. These books were purchased first and behind them were some obscure midlist authors that were purchased occasionally. Finally was everyone else who never saw the light of day. There just wasn't room.

 

Now in the digital age authors are on equal footing. Of course the Bestsellers dominate the bookstores and always will but people are shopping with their computers and that is taking the lack of space out of the equation. Independent bookstores are still vital because they do bring forth the undiscovered but for the digital shopper the author can bring him or herself forth and have the same displaying power of even a giant like Grisham or a James Patterson.

 

Now a book must still be good for the digital world. No amount of behind the scenes pushing can make a bad book last.  It may sell but books especially in the digital world are sold by word of mouth and eventually the bad book falls. But if your book is good and you work hard then you at least have an equal chance as the big boys.

 

It is truly a different world out there.

 

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher

 

The State of the Book in 2014

You could argue it both ways. Go to the Kindle boards and you will see the new frontier of publishing. Writers taking their work and bypassing the publishing and putting it out there to sell on the kindle. The ebook certainly broke the dam of writers who would never see print. And there are writers who sell in the millions who have never signed a publishing contract and conversely they have become millionaires. They are the one percent of one percent.

For the rest of the self publishers it is a brutal slog and many sell few downloads of their book. But of course you could argue this beats obscurity. And for the traditionally published writers it is the year of reckoning. You have to compete on all fronts and with the advent of the ebook the free download has changed the field of play. People literally give way their book while traditional publishers sit on their prices like trolls at the gate. You cant blame them they actually have invested money in their books and they need to hold the line.

Profit has become a word only for the big sellers for these publishers. Print on Demand books have allowed them to compete with the price to sell market of ebooks but these also bring a stigma that keeps most POD books out of the bookstores so essential to selling now. It will be the year of the Independent this we know. Barnes and Noble is taking water so fast we might just see her slip beneath the waves in the first quarter. The Nook truly was the anchor thrown over the side with no real plan to compete with the Amazon behemoth.

And Amazon will rule its domain yet she was stymied when the independents didn't take her books. So we have gone full circle. Books are still stubbornly selling and independent bookstores are the future of book selling and are gaining strength while the ebook morphs into the interactive beast it is destined to be. Community will make or break the art of book selling for the independents. And what of the author in all of this?

Writers have greater opportunities to fail or thrive than ever before. If there is one consistent mantra it is this for the modern author; If you don't do it no one will. This is the unassailable truth of publishing. Never before have authors had to have thicker ankles than right now. It is a peasants work this selling of our wares but the truth is you have only one responsibility in the end and that is to your talent. And that has never changed and never will.

Full speed ahead.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The King of Crap

There is a new paradigm in publishing now. Who will be the King of Crap.  Crap being what games the algorithms on Amazon. The publishing world is changing so fast it takes your breath away and then makes you want to hold it for the stench it is producing. I am talking about the crap that is moving into the cyber vacuum and it is crap. It is whatever is put behind an ecover and flung into the blogosphere. The King of Crap doesn't care. Because the computers kick up the title for a  nice bump and a list appears.

#45 on Ants/literature/walnuts/books about toilet paper. And this then is taken as gospel. Bestsellerdom. Throw some free giveaways into the mix and you have The King of Crap crowing from the rooftops #1 on Toilet paper books about wiping! This then is the new modality. The new fame of the self published author who is not about literary quality. In fact the KOC makes no bones. "Whats the point of being good at something if you cant sell?" An actual quote. Commodification at it's lowest point.

And so KOC publishes. And publishes mightily. One hundred titles a year is a stated goal. You heard right and take it from me producing one hundred titles of self published Crap is not hard. You just sit and write one and three days later upload with your cover. And the computer will treat you as a darling. This is what aspirants to the crown know. Algorithms dictate sales. New books get pushed up front. So you repeat and repeat and repeat until the crown is yours.

The newly crowned and admired King of Crap. Welcome to the publishing world of the early twenty first century. We can only go down from here.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The New Publishing World: Quanity over Quality

You must know that publishing has changed. Well it has. It is driven by algorithms...specifically algorithms coded by Amazon. And in this world more is better. Amazon recognizes content and it doesn't matter what kind of content. As long as it is new. Authors know this, especially kindle authors and so the new mantra is quantity over quality. Gone are the authors who spend years on books and then publish. There are now authors who publish every week. Some every few days. It is a very different world out there.

And these authors have sales to prove it. Some. Not all of course. But Amazon ranks the authors with a lot of books higher than the ones who have just a few. Now this is not official but it is known among the successful book marketers. And so people publish just about anything. A short story. A novella. A novel. A one page story. It doesn't really matter in this bits and bytes world. As long as you have the next book ready to go.

Series rule. They are the gold standard now. You must have a series. This accomplishes several things. One a book followed by another gets the same reader. Two it keeps the publishing rocking so Amazon can recognize this is an author who deserves to be pushed. So we have this quantity over quality modality that is now putting immense pressure on authors. Everyone feels it who buys into the whole "its a brave new world out there and I must adapt" mantra. Even I have stared eyeing old manuscripts...maybe...

But there is also this. One good book can outsell a hundred bad books. It is all how you want to build your spaceship. My books usually take years. But who knows. Maybe I can shorten that up. At least by a year or so.

The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have

The Early Days of Amazon

I just had my second novel out and was grunting away in a basement trying to promote it with only a small press at my back and I was a computer geek when computer geeks were still sort of rare and this weird Amazon site was there and I was talking to this guy named Jeff Bezos who ran the site and I would get him on the phone every now and then and like a lot of guys who had just started new Internet companies he sounded like me, desperate, willing to try anything and so I asked him to put my book Tobacco Sticks on the home page of Amazon to promote it. 

I don't remember exactly what he said, but I was a persistent bastard who kept calling and getting some other dude who sounded like he was working in a basement too ( we all worked in basements in those days) and so he didn't commit, but said he would talk to Jeff about it and I told him Bantam had just bought the rights and he said he would mention that too. But I just figured it was another goofy site like other sites I had found friendly to books and who knows if it would help or not, but I kept on it.

And finally, after another bunch of calls, Tobacco Sticks, appeared on the home page as the book Amazon was promoting that day. I did a really crude screen shot and printed it on a thermal printer. ( I still have it like a dead sea scroll) and I guess it helped sales, but the thing is, it gave me some instant legitimacy when I needed it most. I think I called and thanked Jeff and the other guys who I figured were barely hanging on, because there was all this press at the time how Amazon would just disappear because they just kept losing money.

How times have changed, huh?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Amazon is competing now with Libraries

Just when you thought the world of publishing couldn't get any weirder, it does. Why don't we just call publishing an entity of permanent change. Amazon is getting into the world of the librarians with brown brogans and reading glasses. Except the authors have to go along. I was contacted as I am sure many of you were who have books with Amazon in their kindle collection. KDPSELECT is the name of the program and basically you let people read your books for free...well its free to them. Let me explain

So Amazon has a big fund that you as the author get a part of when people read your books. The PRIME members get access to this vast library for free. They get to read your work and you get exposure and some remuneration. It is the wild west of ebooks and everyone is trying all sorts of new marketing gimmicks. Since libraries will now be heavily into Ebooks with lending going on in cyberland like never before, Amazon is hearing some footsteps and figured they  would create their own library.

And what does the author get out of it. For the bestselling authors it is not such a great deal. They probably lose on this deal with a smaller cut, but for the mid list authors who are still developing market presence it might not be such a bad thing. You can take the Kid Rock approach and not offer your stuff on Itunes because you believe people should pay for a quality product, but writers want to be read and this might get you a few more.

The cynical view is authors are just getting ripped off again, maybe, but then again you have to take the long view. I have tried it for ninety days with my books and I am not sure if it will make a difference or not. Maybe there are some who will not take a flyer on my books for the price of an ebook but with the enticement of a free download, a Hazelgrove novel might be just the ticket. Or maybe I'm just another writer getting screwed over again. Who knows.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one mans war with suburbia