Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Correct.
More precisely, authors and publishers have a *visibility* problem for lack of effective marketing. With the explosive growth in actively available books, both new releases and backlist, it is increasingly hard for any but the biggest name authors to be noticed by non-fans. That is their problem, though.
Readers have no shortage of effective ways to find reads and discover new authors. Especially online. That the authors and publishers have a problem doesn't mean readers have a problem. Therd is no causal link between the two processes. At most, rezders have a selection problem: two many books, too little budget/time.
Unfortunately for B&N, the two most effective reader discovery systems are Amazon and Goodreads. They already have a copy of Amazon's book section and are trying to mimic Goodreads. But it's a wee bit late to be trying that. Plus they have bigger problems than marketing books. Starting with marketing themselves to avid readers to try to reverse their continuing decline in traffic.
B&N itself has a visibility problem.
|
Certainly there is a major selection problem. Readers have to wade through too much garbage to find the books they want to read. Amazon has brought that on with their business model of pushing the maintenance of their book database on to the "publishers" which in many cases is just people trying to scam the system.
Certainly, the publishers could do a lot more to market their authors. Tor does a pretty good job with the weekly newsletter. Baen did a great job back when Jim Baen was still alive.
There are occasional authors who do a good job of marketing themselves, but the big issue is that marketing is a huge time sink that takes away from writing. Even the authors who once were very active on that front seem to drift away. People like David Weber and Jim Butcher have fairly extensive web sites, but both seem to have turned that over to third parties and rarely engage anymore.
The publishers biggest issue is that the book stores are their direct customers, not the readers, so they don't really have direct access to the readers. In the ebook business, Amazon has access to the customers and jealously guards that monopoly. Unfortunately, they are focused on pushing books that they want to sell rather than letting me find books that I want to buy.
It seems to me that the most straight forward tool that any author would want is a tool that notifies anyone who signs up when they have a new book. Next would be a tool that lists what books an author has available and links to where you can buy them. The issue with both tools is critical mass and maintaining the database. That's why I mentioned in my previous message that if I were the publishers I would put together a joint database with the other publishers of all the books that were available and let people mine that database.