Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. Anyone still drinking the Konrath-Howey nectar of indies single-handedly taking over the world and living happily ever after might want to stop reading now. If you want to be told want you want to hear, go read The Passive Voice. For the rest of us, there’s an old military adage all indies should have printed off and taped over the top of their screen. Hope for the best. Plan for the worst. A report just emerging from the UK does not bode well. Amazon UK, even though holding just 20% of the market, is the dominant retailer of music and film on DVD, CD and vinyl. It got there by the usual aggressive tactics of subsidized pricing, pernicious enforcement of its MFN clause, and of course by offering great customer service, fast delivery and convenience. A year ago the MFN clause was ruled illegal across the EU and Amazon agreed to remove it from its Market Place t&cs. That will have made a small (but important) contribution to a recent development that should leave all indies looking over their shoulders. Because this is great news for publishing, but not so great for indies. HMV, for those unfamiliar, was a big box music store that dominated the UK high streets for many years. Until the inevitable toll of digital, of online competition and of declining foot-traffic combined with the cruel realities of bricks & mortar existence – rent, rates, staff, overheads – to plunge HMV into a messy liquidation. It looked like the end for the UK b&m music industry. And how the pundits loved it. Proof, if ever needed, that online giants like Amazon were invincible and we were all wasting our time with anything else. Fast forward eighteen months and HMV is back. And how! HMV has not just risen phoenix-like from the ashes of oblivion, but is poised to OVERTAKE Amazon as the UK’s leading retailer of DVD and Music in the UK. This despite now having LESS THAN HALF the number of stores it had before the closure! You couldn’t make it up… In the Amazon-centric world of Konrath and Howey all bricks & mortar bookstores are doomed, and the music industry experience is always trotted out as proof of how one store will conquer the world. Well, HMV is living proof that it ain’t necessarily so. At a time when music and video have never been more easily accessible online in the UK, a bricks & mortar store is all set to reclaim its crown as the top-dog seller in its niche – a niche Amazon dominated - despite downsizing and only having 125 stores across a nation of 60 million people. One reason for HMV’s success is summed up by the new management: “(We are) making sure that when you come to our stores you enjoy the experience… This is about being an authority in music, not selling music as a commodity. The Amazon cheerleaders love to point to every new closure of a bookstore as evidence of the invincibility of the Everything Store, but as HMV are showing, trimming deadwood is an essential part of business, not necessarily a sign of failure. Despite all the predictions to the contrary, print continues to rule the publishing world. Digital is great, and for pretty much all indies it’s essential, as most of us have no print presence to speak of, even online, let alone in the real world of b&m bookstores where 70% of the US and UK market and 95% of the rest of the world market is happening. There is absolutely no reason why what we are seeing now with HMV and music and DVDs cannot happen with books. Only, with books the big chains (Borders aside) have not gone into liquidation, so they are already in a far stronger position to challenge the ever-loosening grip of the Everything Store. In the US Barnes & Noble is set to spin-off the Nook store, which will bring much needed revenue from the sale, and divest B&N of a schizophrenic existence trying to build a digital base without cannibalizing its core business. In the UK both Waterstone’s and W H Smith continue to thrive despite hosting ebook stores, while in New Zealand the biggest b&m bookstore, Whitcoulls, walked away from ebooks completely to focus on its core business of selling print books. For every report of an indie bookstore going under you can find two or three reporting how indie stores are seeing a resurgence in business. The Zon cheerleaders will shout out about discoverability, but as any most indies will tell you, being lost in an ocean of several million ebooks is no fun. Not a problem if you’re getting the red carpet treatment from the retailer, or have a loyal print following from yesteryear, or have some sort of celebrity status, but most of us have none of these assets to help us along. And volume of titles aside, most bookstores are far more user-friendly and far more discoverability-friendly than any online store. More on this in another post. Here just to dwell briefly on the key point. Despite the wishful thinking and open hostility of the Amazon cheerleaders, the so-called “legacy” system is blatantly failing to adhere to their widely-predicted trajectory into oblivion. Repeating the same old mantras about heads in sand, rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, and constantly telling us trad pub doesn’t know the digital world exists and that self-pub is an open goal may be what we all want to hear, but that doesn’t make it true. The so-called legacy system is actually adapting rather well. Not least because, as the cheerleaders love to point out, digital costs are negligible, and once the outlay has been made to bring a book to fruition, as print and digital or, increasingly, as just digital, it’s just profit, profit, profit once those initial costs have been recouped. The fly in the ointment for trad pub and indeed us all has always been reaching consumers, but with digital the playing field is, if not quite level, a lot more even for those with the money and muscle to try. Take HarperCollins, for instance. NewsCorp owned HarperCollins – the world’s second biggest publisher – has just re-launched) its UK online store. harpercollins.co.uk/ And yes, I do mean store. HarperCollins are actively selling direct to consumers, both print and digital. Of course we all know this will end in tears because, as the Amazon cheerleaders keep telling us, Big Pub doesn’t do digital, doesn’t get digital, and when it does do these things it doesnt do, prices itself out of the market. Which is why ebook-lovers cant download a HarperCollins app and get ebooks from the HarperCollins store for, say, 0.99. Except, they can. And are. And of course HarperCollins will be keeping 100% of that, not handing 65% to the middleman retailer as we indies have to do if we price at 0.99 on Amazon. On which point worth adding that while Amazon grab 65%, B&N’s Nook take just 60% and Apple just 30%, making Amazon one of the most expensive options to give readers an ebook bargain. And speaking of bargains, the Amazon cheerleaders will constantly remind us how Amazon is always the cheapest place to buy anything, and especially ebooks. Well, they say it so often that it ought to be true, but of course it isn’t. Indie titles on Apple UK, Nook UK and ‘txtr UK are regularly cheaper than on Kindle UK. And it’s not just indie titles that are cheaper. Many trad pubbed titles are too. Here’s one example where Amazon is no cheaper than trad pub, singled out here not to promote the book, but to make another point. Nichola Hunter’s Ramadan Sky, published by HarperCollins, is 0.99 on Kindle UK - amazon/Ramadan-Sky-Nichola-Hunter-ebook/dp/B00DAK6US8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409651244&sr=8-1&keywords=ramadan+sky+nichola+hunter. One entire penny more expensive on Tesco’s Blinkbox Books - https://blinkboxbooks/#!/book/9780007540778/ramadan-sky. But just as cheap as Amazon, at 0.99, on ‘txtr UK - gb.txtr/catalog/document/mm3arg9/ramadan-sky--nichola-hunter/. Oh, and on Apple UK - https://itunes.apple/gb/book/ramadan-sky/id660409727?mt=11. And on Nook UK - nook/gb/ebooks/ramadan-sky-by-nichola-hunter/9780007540778. And on Waterstone’s - waterstones/waterstonesweb/products/nichola+hunter/ramadan+sky+28ebook29/10080943/. And on Hive - hive.co.uk/search/ramadan+sky+nichola+hunter/mediatype/all/. And Foyles - foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/ramadan-sky,hunter-nichola-9780007540778. And Sainsbury - sainsburysebooks.co.uk/book/Ramadan-Sky-Nichola-Hunter/7573484. And W H Smith - whsmith.co.uk/pws/ProductDetails.ice?ProductID=9780007540778&keywordCategoryId=wc_dept_ebooks&keywords=Ramadan%20Sky%20Nichola%20Hunter&redirect=true. And of course it’s also just 0.99 on the HarperCollins website - harpercollins.co.uk/9780007540778/ramadan-sky. So let’s be absolutely clear here. Far from pricing itself out of the market, HarperCollins knows exactly what it is doing. But I selected this title for two reasons, not just to make the point about pricing (there are plenty of other HarperCollins and other Big % titles at 0,99, or even free!). Those of us who have been around the indie block a few times will remember that HarperCollins was behind Authonomy, one of the peer-group critique sites (YouWriteOn is another – there were many more) from the last decade, that was the stepping stone for many wannabe-authors to launch their indie careers. Not here to rehearse the many downsides to those sites, (and anyway, as per a future post, many of the problems that blighted the peer-group sites are now history), but worth noting some sites, like Authonomy, are still going strong and still launching many indie (and some trad-pub) careers. What’s significant here is that HarperCollins are actively directing their readers to Authonomy to check out works under development by indie authors, and more significantly still, it is actively promoting Authonomy imprint titles on the HarperCollins website home-page. Not to mention making them available on sites like W H Smith, Tesco Blinkbox and Sainsbury which are totally off-limits to indie authors. Of course the nay-sayers will recite the usual BS about how this author could have done so much better had she gone indie and self-pubbed. 70% royalties, and do everything digital that trad pub can do, only better. Only, at 0.99 the only place this author will be getting 70% from is Apple. Amazon will be taking 65%. Agreed, that still leave 35% which is more, no doubt, than HarperCollins are handing over, but this author will be picking up sales in key ebook stores like Tesco Blinkbox, Sainsbury and W H Smith which are totally off-limits to indies, not to mention sales in countless international ebook stores which are inaccessible to indie authors. Potentially those sales could collectively make all the difference. The fact that HarperCollins is still actively supporting Authonomy (Authonomy users are under no obligation to publish with HarperCollins and are free to go indie at any time) is one small ray of hope in this post about the gloomier realities of the publishing prospects for indies as we head into 2015. A resurgence of bookstores a la HMV, and the active embracing of direct-to-consumer retailing by Big Pub, while great for publishing and literature as a whole, is not going to do us indies any favours. True, we could up our game and take POD seriously and get some sort of realistic b&m presence and grab a small share of that 70% of the US and UK and 95%+ of the global market that has yet to embrace digital, but for most of us that isn’t a realistic, let alone convenient, option. Far easier to slap a doc on CreateSpace than to go through the more demanding rigoursof IngramSpark, etc, where the distribution rewards are better. But even if we did that with some degree of success, we certainly aren’t going to be seeing our ebooks in stores like Blinkbox and Sainsbury, let alone publisher-run stores like HarperCollins. Yes, we can all recite the Amazon cheerleaders mantra that we don’t need them. But unless we’re getting the red carpet treatment from a certain big retailer then most of us do need them. Because that’s where the readers are. As the Amazon cheerleaders like to say, the only people that matter in the equation are readers and authors. Nice sentiments, but without a middleman to bring the two together such thinking is pie in the sky. We all need middlemen. And of course, we all know which middleman the cheerleaders have in mind… But it’s a curious stance to take in the first place – saying that only authors and readers matter - when being exclusive with one store and shutting readers out, and actively promoting one store while pretending the others are irrelevant. Readers are all-important, but readers using one store are evidently more all-important than others. What other message does being exclusive with one store send out to readers who for whatever reason choose to shop elsewhere? Not just the 35% of American and Australian and 25% of British ebook readers that don’t buy from Amazon, but also the 60% of the German ebook readers that choose not to use Amazon, and the 90% of the rest of the world that cannot (blocked) or will not (surcharges, better alternatives) use Amazon. As the indie honeymoon grinds to a halt there’s never been a better time to diversify.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 11:43:17 +0000
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