Digital Book World Recap Day 2 and Defeating the Forces of Darkness

Digital Book World ended this afternoon and here are my double-tap, killing house, quick thoughts.

I feel old and tired and a slacker after being on the Doing It On Their Own: Self-Publishing Authors Find Success panel with Bella Andre this afternoon.  She had so much energy and drive, she reminded me a lot of Susan Wiggs, another bestselling author, except Bella is a self-published author who earned over a million dollars in 2011.  The amount is impressive, but more so her drive for the future.  I plan on bugging the hell out of her for more information that, I being the slug I am, have failed to uncover.  Also, I think Bella and I should co-write a romantic, Special Forces, thriller and translate it into a dozen languages.  Hey, I’ve co-written some romance before.  I bring the bullets, she brings the romance.  I do real body count, she does fun body count.

Tony van Veen from Bookbaby was a great panel member and I liked the way Bookbaby does business.  Straight up, you get what you pay for, and the rest is on you, author.  No percentages, just flat fee (and an incredibly small one in my opinion) for digitizing your content.

And our other panel member, Elle Lothlorien gets bonus points just for her name.  Yes, it’s real, not a pen name.  As you’ll see at the end of this blog, I’m going to mangle a quote from the LOTR movie.  Also, she started out self-pubbing with no backlist, and has been successful which is astronomically hard to do.  She achieved that dream of many writers:  earning enough to quit her day job to write full time.  So check her books out.

I have to thank Mike Shatzkin for putting together a great conference.  And Michael Cader for his usual deluge of information during his presentation and for Publishers Lunch.  If you write, sign up for it.  For $20 a month, it’s more than worth it.

I also had lunch with my wonderful sister, Ellen, in Grand Central Station.  She said let’s meet at the Apple Store there, so I walk down and am standing looking at a map of the station, trying to find the Apple Store, then look to my right, past the famous clock, and duh.  Can’t miss it.

I’ve got a stack of business cards I have to wade through, but you want to know the good stuff, the useful stuff.  So.  Hmm.

In the interest of being controversial, let me restate my feeling about digital publishing:  Authors produce the product.  Readers consume the product.  Everyone else:  Lead, Follow or Get The Hell Out of the Way.

That is from my days in the Infantry.  Listening to many of the people on panels here, they act like the author is almost a secondary consideration.  Others act like authors are partners.  Guess which of the two is going to be successful?

Open Road focuses on authors.  That’s leading. Some others.  Not so much.

Yesterday morning was a series of large group talks from the big guns.  I thought Ellen Archer of Hyperion made a lot of solid points.  It’s clear when people are seeing the big picture and when someone is focused on their niche.  But overall, I felt a lot of traditional publishers are still about a year behind on the digital learning curve.

The reality is with digital it’s going to be the same as print:  the big names will get the attention, while the midlist and the rest will wither on the vine unless the author gets lucky or does an incredible amount of work and gets lucky.  The latter just means you have a higher chance of getting lucky.  As Elle said on the panel:  I’d rather trust my fate to me.

A lot of panelists kept talking about their big successes, which are exceptions to the rule.  The rule is that this is a brutal business for authors.  It’s also called reality.  However, I’m taking a cue for that and going to discuss how things have gone for me in eBooks over the course of the next several blogs.  Not the rule, but my experience.  The first fact I’ll throw out is that in January 2011 I sold 347 eBooks.  By the end of 2011, the tally for the year was around 400,000.  So things picked up a bit as the year went on.  You could say.  I didn’t earn quite as much as Bella but not far behind.  I’ll give more exact numbers in a few weeks once all is tallied along with percentages, but frankly they’ll mean little to you unless you’re in my situation.

I re-iterate my point that publishers and agents need a formal training program for their authors.  I submit, once more, my Write It Forward program.  Still no takers.

Here are some interesting numbers you can make of what you will:

25 million Americans own ereaders.

34 million American own tablets, which includes 5 million kindle fires.

The Big 6 say 15% of sales are digital.  Hmm.  I always liked the line from The Wire:  Juking the stats.  I met my wonderful agent after the conference and she sees real numbers and even she said it’s much higher for her clients.  But I do take back one of my predictions for 2012 made just a few weeks ago.  I think it’s highly unlikely a big name authors will jump this year and go indie.  They’re being compensated well enough by their publishers and the work of being indie is just so incredibly hard.  Ask Bella or Elle.

Amazon plans to publish 400 plus titles in 2012.  The ‘big’ announcement that HMH will sell-in Amazon’s NY print titles wasn’t as impressive as many made it to be, since that’s not their genre imprints in Seattle.  Plus, the future for fiction is what Amazon does best:  eBooks.  I found a lot of antagonism toward Amazon from people, but hey, they sell books.  Sort of the way people went after B&N and said let’s support the indie.  Then the same people cried when Borders went under.  We’re all people who love books.  More on this at the end. But let’s stop fighting each other.  Except you.  Yeah, you over there.

By the end of 2012 it’s estimated there will be 40 million ereaders and 61 million tablets in the US.

Publisher optimism is waning.  Duh.  Isn’t this the year the world is supposed to end anyway?  They had a futurist, David Houle, give a presentation on Publishing  in the Shift Age and my first thought was:  this guy thinks there’s a future?  Remember in Black Ops:  You aint paranoid if they are out to get you.  Watch RED last night and LOVE that movie.  And hate to tell, despite being very funny, it was scaringly realistic.  Down to Malkovich picking up a Swedish K and loving it.  If you know what he’s talking about, then you know what I’m talking about, and now I gotta come kill you and put your head in a safe.

28% of publishers think their company will be stronger—which is down from 51% last year.  That’s telling.

We got asked by our panel moderator, Jeremy Greenfield, from F&W, what would entice us to go with a traditional publisher and we all kind of sat there and eventually said:  “Uh, nothing really.”

I don’t rule it out, but things would have to change dramatically.  I’m open to pretty much anything, being the publishing whore that I am, but I’m also very aware of the realities of the publishing landscape, particularly digital.

I’ve got more, and will have to do another blog post on it, but I wanted to get this out.  So I’ll end with a mangling of a stirring speech from the LOTR movie (wasn’t in the book BTW) as the good guys and gals of Middle Earth stand there on a pile of rubble surrounded by the forces of Mordor and Aragon does what good leaders are supposed to do:

Sons of Barnes & Noble, of Random House, of Amazon, of Indie Authors, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends, and break all bonds of fellowship; but it is not this day! An hour of woe, and shattered shields, when the Age of Men comes crashing down; but it is not this day! This day we READ! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men and Women of Publishing! TODAY WE READ”

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