The Death of the Book that Didnt Happen

Oh it was supposed to go the way of the IPOD. You know the book. It was over. We would all be listening to or reading our books on kindles and those anachronistic tombs would be just hanging around the shelves waiting to start a good bonfire. But...but...it didn't happen. Wait a minute. You mean the economics behind ripping a .99 cent song or spotify didn't apply to books? Come on. People are driven by economics and convenience and it surely is cheaper and easier to download a book than lugging around a pound and half of books in your backpack. So...RIP book.

But then it didn't happen. Maybe it was the college class of advanced fiction or intro English that tipped me off.   I told the students on the first day. Yes you can download the books if you want. How many people have kindles? Crickets. How many people download books to their computers. Crickets. Wait a minute. The vaunted eighteen year old tech savvy demographic was not behaving. At least not for the pundits and doomsayers of books. Then sales of ebooks flatlined and I started doing back to back book signings in Barnes and Nobles around Chicago. I mean lots of them. Twenty or so around the holidays and then I got my second shock.

My books are not discounted. I am not Tom Clancy and my publishers decline to break the price on my hardcovers. So my books cost around 32.00 or 36.00 out the door. People didn't blink. They didn't even ask the price. They just bought and bought and bought. No sign of the Kindle or Nook anywhere. I sold 24,000 dollars worth of hardcovers last season....so why didn't the damn book die? Well...people who read are different animals than those who rip songs from the Internet. Also, we work on our computers. Yeah that thing we lug around and haunts us in our sleep to the point we have to get stoned or take a drink to calm our jazzed brains does not lend itself to pleasure. And reading is pleasure.
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Now there are those who say well virtual reality will replace the book eventually. Yawn. Forget about the research that says when we watch something our brain just about goes to sleep and that words are about the only sparks that conjure up a scene in the tabula rasa of our brain. Virtual reality replace books. Sure it will. Just like we all drink lattes and have tattoos and ear rings and live in urban areas and have sleek new phones and cars. Not. Most people shop at Target. Pay the mortgage. Hope their kids have a better future and if they have a moment for a good story and have a book they will read that over just bout every other delivery device So lets hear it for that old thumbed and yellowed bit of parchment between  the covers. Long live the book...the book....the book. 

Why People Still Buy Books

I noticed that my sale of print books on The Pitcher keeps pushing past the Kindle copies. They usually sort of play it out like a major leaguer versus a minor league team with the kindle downloads leading the way. But lately the books have been fighting back and staying there. So in our ebook digital I don't know what to do with all these pulpy books and CDS age why are people still buying books? I have come up with a few ideas not based on any science at all.

One. We are creatures of habit above all else. We see this with people who still have land lines and don't carry smart phones. I talked to a man who is a general contractor who never got a cell phone. Business is booming. How does he do it. He says people just get hold of him. And of course there are people who run around with legal tablets instead of IPADS. This is their preferred method. So it must be with books. There are people who like the feel of a book and do not like burning their eyes on screens.

Second would be physicality. Lets face it with a download you do not have a thing. You have some code that produces words on a screen. That's it. You have no evidence you just paid nine bucks for a book. And when you finish reading your code the book disappears versus that book that sits on your shelf or all time and calls out to you every time you pass it. You own something with a book.

Finally people like the experience of reading a printed page. There is a difference. Your eyes engage with the word differently. You have a tactile sensation. I have been reading WILSON the monster biography and I could never read that  in a kindle. Why? Because Woodrow Wilson was a man of the early twentieth century and I just couldn't see him dancing in the light on a screen as compared to me getting coffee and jelly all over him and even dropping him in the tub once.

Or maybe it is because we are not bits and bytes but flesh. We are real. So it is with books.

www.williamhazegrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Paying For Reviews

Someone asked me the other day if I paid for my review in Kirkus. I did not. But the review was very good and the assumption was that I did pay for it. Which brings up the whole thing of paying for reviews. Lets face it the dam has been opened and we are now awash in authors willing to pay for just about anything to get their books noticed. You cannot blame them but these type of reviews along with the people who pop up with hundreds of Amazon reviews do not really help the cause. The truth is books are still sold by word of mouth or word of internet.

Lets start here with this. People envy money but they admire talent. Money can get you a lot of things and people want those things. We do envy the guy with the Porche or the guy with the nice house or nice boat or nice anything. We want those things too. But we don't admire the person. In fact we might detest the rich person. Look at the way the one percent is treated. We certainly don't admire the rich people but we sure envy them. So it is in the literary world.

We envy bestsellers. Who would not. But we admire a talented writer. We admire them when we read their books and we know that only a few people can do this. It is the way we feel when we read Fitzgerald or Faulkner or David Foster Wallace. There is something there has nothing to do with money. Since Fitzgerald died broke it must be something beyond the monetary. It is talent. And all the paid for reviews and ads and shoutouts and blitzing will not give us that admiration.

There are some things believe it or not that money cannot buy.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

What I have Learned from the Free Promotion of My novel

First of all the promotion is still going. Second of all it is the way of the future and I mean standard. Currently my book is #68 on Amazon in the Top 100 Books. #2 in baseball and #1 in Hispanic Literature. I was initially reluctant to do this but now I know it is the way. The model of giving away your novel to develop readership makes perfect sense. You will get people reading and if your book is good then they will tell other people. The bottom line is books are still sold by word of mouth.

This type of promotion was just impossible before the digitial age. You could not give away tens of thousands of books and not go broke. So the big authors could get their books around with say a couple thousand give aways to bookstores and publicity people but everyone else was stuck with a few hundred. Not true now. Now you can run a giveway for a week which I am doing and have THOUSANDS read your book.

Think the old album Frampton Comes Alive. Before that no one heard of him. After that everyone knew him. The point is that was his giveaway. It crashed onto the scene and everyone heard it. That is what you want to do with your giveway. Crash onto the scene and have everyone read it. Well back to work. Here is a link to get your free kindle download of The Pitcher. http://www.amazon.com/The-Pitcher-ebook/dp/B00DMOO3RM/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1

On Marketing Books: The Powers That Be Part II: By the Boards

The biggest shock comes when you get your first real media hit. You have been a one man band doing everything you can and then finally something breaks. You long ago gave up any idea of a publicist, they are expensive and they aren't that good a lot of times. The really good ones are extremely expensive. So you take it all on. You do the calling and the sending and the searching and you do it every day. And now you aren't even writing anymore. You have become this monk of a marketer who busts ass every day and you make nothing,

But a break. For me it was People Magazine. My book had come out with a press so small it only had one book. But there it was in People. Game over. I remember walking down a beach thinking it had not been such a hard climb after all. Just ten years of blood sweat and tears. But not so fast. That blip of demand is enough to push you onto the Bestseller List for a week. But then just as quickly you fall back down and the demand goes back to a trickle.

So you go back to it. And things are changing again. The bookstores that never even carried your books are dying. The internet is taking over. The ebooks are pushing up. You hear of people who sell a million books without a single review. A girl in Peoria uploads her fantasy novel and wham. A bestseller. She gets a check for a million dollars and buys her parents a home. This makes it almost worse. Could it be that everything you have been doing for publicity and reviews doesn't matter anymore?

Has the brave new world of Eat What You Kill just bypassed traditional publishing in a way that turns selling books into a lottery upload? Should you just be pumping out books the way someone pumps dimes into a slot machine?

Next On Marketing Books: Eat What You Kill Publishing

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher --Sometimes a Dream is all you have

The Real Difference between a Book and an E-Book

It is a matter of the way you read it. I know a man who brags he reads a thousand books on his Kindle. I don't doubt it.  The Kindle takes a book and turns it into the equivalent of an IPOD tune or a picture on your hard drive. Getting rid of the physicality of the book changes it. We no longer experience the book we experience an E File on a hard disk that is not so different from any other file on a hard drive. It has to be dealt with and then returned to oblivion. So the real difference between a book and an E Book is the experience.

One experiences a book. Literature we experience pulp we finish. In other words the ebook becomes something to be dealt with quickly. Accomplished. It goes back to that old saying that Midwesterners read for self improvement while Southerners read for pleasure. What are we reading for then with an Ebook? Is it the I better watch so many hours of Jeopardy so my brain doesn't turn to mush morphed into I better read this book so I can get to the next book and the next book so I can eventually say I read a thousand books.

Take it another way. The physical creature in our lap changes the experience. The book is experienced as a thing .The page turns slowly. It falls to the next page. The digital experience is a swipe a silent movement of a page appearing and then vanishing for the next silent swipe. Like a painting versus a picture of a painting the experience is changed. Ask anyone who prints out a picture versus looking at it on your phone. One is ephemeral the other is there for all time

So we may think we have all the answers with our Kindles and Nooks but like the IPOD the experience has morphed and changed. Digitization is all bout economy and convenience. That was never art and never will be.

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

Downloads Top Album Sales For the First Time

Something we all know has arrived. The download is now preeminent in the music world and those CD players we have are now in the junk heap of history. Sure Sure. People will still buy a physical medium to claim ownership, but that accessibility will trump ownership eventually and the digital medium is proving it more every day. A million kindles sold every week by Amazon. A million. If the writing gets any bigger on the wall there will be no more wall.

Not that books are songs. They are not. Readers are a persnickety group and a lot of people will prefer the book, but when my eighty nine year old father in-law and my eighty year old mother in-law are sitting in their La-Z boys hunched over their Kindle screens then something is definitely up. The speed of this transition is taking away our collective breath and is already leaving authors and publishers scrambling to keep up. The proof is in the download.

The Kindle is not the IPOD. Not yet anyway. You still want a break from the Kindle with a book. I know I do and have read the last three novels in the old paper format. Music has no such physical drawbacks. In fact having all your music in your pocket is fantastic compared to carrying around a bulky CD player or worse a boom box. But, portability is a big factor in the Kindle reader also. You don't lug books, but the tech revolution of the IPOD just doesn't seem as much of a Watershed as the Kindle. It is still a better tactile experience to read a book if not visually as well.

But the Kindle is still evolving. Paper screens may not be far off along with brighter screens that are easier on the eye. Who knows, maybe they will even get that pulpy old book smell puffing out as you read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...a hilarious well written novel about one mans search for the new American Dream James Frey

On Downloading Books

The fear for writers is that their books will all be stolen now. That a mass download will steal away all copyrights. This is happening. People are ripping books the way they rip songs. You can't stop it. So what does it mean to writers. A couple things. One. You will get read by more people. Two. You will probably get less money. A bad thing. But there is no way around it. The digital revolution is here and just about any medium is fair game. Look at the way the studios are freaking out now.

Limewire and Napster used to be the pirate sites. Amazing. You could just log in and start downloading songs. Suddenly you were not paying fifteen dollars for a CD. You were paying nothing. And you could get a thousand songs if you wanted them. Then Napster was shut down. Then Limewire, but now there is YouTube and UTorrent and a hundred other sites for music and movies and now books. 

The one saving grace for writers is this. A lot of people still like books. In fact the boomers prefer books and there are a lot of boomers. Reading on a screen is reading on a screen no matter how good it looks or sounds or even smells like a book. Not to say people won;t migrate into Kindle land but there will be a group that just won't go for the download. They will plunk down their money and take their pulp and hit their hammock and read a book.

For the rest of the populace Ok with reading on their PDA or their IPAD or their computer or their Kindle or their Nook or their Sony reader, then it is every writer for himself. Maybe we can get a few nickels from those downloads. Some have gotten millions. So it comes back down to a basic question for the writer. Why did you write in the first place? For the money? Or to be read. If your answer is both, then it might still work out for you. If your answer is be read, then no worries.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle or Paperback