Samhain Publishing is winding down and will close

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

If you had a dime for every bad indie book, I've tried to read you wouldn't have to worry about an electric bill or food till around 2020.
Make that several of us wouldn't have to worry.

When I started years ago to do deals and freebies for our romance thread I had to wade through daily the slush pile to find the gems to post.

I think word of mouth is the best way to make it from the slush pile to the bestseller list. A talented writer won't stay hidden long. When I read something I really like I tell everyone. lol I can think of several indie writers that are now mainstream.

Several Samhain authors have gone on to be mainstream as well. The market is flooded with too much slush and not enough RITA quality writing.

Sent from my Nexus 7

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Apache

I do not mind the bad indie books that I have tried to read over the years. It has led me to discover some excellent one also. If it isn't good enough, I can drop it. If it is good enough I can't put it down.
Apache

Preach on, brother.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

As far as I can understand it, the situation is as follows:

For a while over the last five years or so, indie authors and independent publishers were able to sell their books on Amazon and their own sites at a profit. They had visibility on Amazon, and readers bought their books at a profitable price.

Something has happened.

Readers no longer buy from independent sites. They buy from Amazon.

And Amazon is no longer giving as much visibility to indie authors as it was before. It has shifted to giving greater visibility to the Big 5 publications. Amazon did this by changing its algorithms and advertising system. Why did this happen? About two years ago, Amazon came to agreements with the Big 5 publishers. What happened in the relationship between Amazon and the Big 5 that Amazon decided to more aggressively market Big 5 books, and to let indie books sales wither?

There is also the issue that readers are buying less indie books, or are not willing to pay as much. That could be because of Amazon's shift in focus.

There is also Trump. This might have affected people's buying habits.

Really, I don't know. Did I get it wrong? I'd love to be enlightened.

You're not wrong.
But you're missing a roughly $200M piece of the puzzle: Kindle Unlimited.

When people buy a book, print or digital, they buy for a variety of reasons. It might be a gift, it might be to read right away, it might be a replacement for a copy they read years before. Or it might be to read it at a future date.

It is a fairly safe bet that at any one point in time, the number of books sold exceeds the number of books read by that buyer.

Kindle Unlimited changes that: Kindle unlimited only delivers money to the author and/or publisher when books are read. This means that every book via KU is displacing a sale of that book (unless the reader really really likes it) or another book that might've been purchased if KU were not an option. Eyeball hours dedicated to reading being pretty much a fixed value for each reader.

Now, one ways of looking at that $200M annual payout from KU is that the average full book-read payout is reportedly somewhere around $2, which translates to 100M books worth of KU reads last year, displacing a potential 100M book sales. (Assuming TBR lists didn't get much shorter in 2016.)

For context, last month's DBW conference brought a much improved survey of sales (print & digital, traditional & non-tradpub) that gives us fairly trustworthy absolute unit sales numbers.

(Here's a pretty good summation: http://www.sfwa.org/2017/02/really-sold-2016/

The ebook unit sales numbers for adult fiction:

175M tradpub
150M Indie
50M Amazon Publishing

Print books unit sales:

141.4M tradpub
21.8M Indie
1M (almost) Amazon

Now, KU is primarily a channel for Indie and ePub titles so those books read through KU are mostly Indie. (There's well over a million titles in there.) Those lost sales are still delivering money to Indies but only Indies in KU. Which is Amazon-exclusive.

Some of those 100M KU reads lead to followup sales in the Kindle store but they sure as heck don't lead to sales anywhere else. And they may not all represent displaced (and thus lost) sales but a pretty solid fraction of them surely do.

Anyway you slice it, KU is bleeding out a significant fraction of ebook sales and turning them into page reads. How big a fraction we could spend weeks debating.

It could be as high as 30% or as low as 15% but whatever the number it will not be zero. And, regardless of how many subscribers KU retains and how much of a profit Amazon makes off it, those displaced reading hours aren't being spent outside the Kindle ecosystem.

That is not good news for Amazon competitors big or small.

Just as the BPHs push to grow print sales at the expense of digital--because all they produced was more sales for Amazon--KU growth only feeds the Amazon ecosystem and nobody else. Thanks to agency and the push for print, adult fiction is becoming an Amazon Casino: no matter how you play, no matter if you win or lose, the house always wins.

Edit: BTW, the genre breakdown numbers from the DBW session are eye-popping. For some genres, like african-American fiction, they are simply outrageous.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

You're not wrong.
But you're missing a roughly $200M piece of the puzzle: Kindle Unlimited.

When people buy a book, print or digital, they buy for a variety of reasons. It might be a gift, it might be to read right away, it might be a replacement for a copy they read years before. Or it might be to read it at a future date.

It is a fairly safe bet that at any one point in time, the number of books sold exceeds the number of books read by that buyer.

Kindle Unlimited changes that: Kindle unlimited only delivers money to the author and/or publisher when books are read. This means that every book via KU is displacing a sale of that book (unless the reader really really likes it) or another book that might've been purchased if KU were not an option. Eyeball hours dedicated to reading being pretty much a fixed value for each reader.

Now, one ways of looking at that $200M annual payout from KU is that the average full book-read payout is reportedly somewhere around $2, which translates to 100M books worth of KU reads last year, displacing a potential 100M book sales. (Assuming TBR lists didn't get much shorter in 2016.)

For context, last month's DBW conference brought a much improved survey of sales (print & digital, traditional & non-tradpub) that gives us fairly trustworthy absolute unit sales numbers.

(Here's a pretty good summation: http://www.sfwa.org/2017/02/really-sold-2016/

The ebook unit sales numbers for adult fiction:

175M tradpub
150M Indie
50M Amazon Publishing

Print books unit sales:

141.4M tradpub
21.8M Indie
1M (almost) Amazon

Now, KU is primarily a channel for Indie and ePub titles so those books read through KU are mostly Indie. (There's well over a million titles in there.) Those lost sales are still delivering money to Indies but only Indies in KU. Which is Amazon-exclusive.

Some of those 100M KU reads lead to followup sales in the Kindle store but they sure as heck don't lead to sales anywhere else. And they may not all represent displaced (and thus lost) sales but a pretty solid fraction of them surely do.

Anyway you slice it, KU is bleeding out a significant fraction of ebook sales and turning them into page reads. How big a fraction we could spend weeks debating.

It could be as high as 30% or as low as 15% but whatever the number it will not be zero. And, regardless of how many subscribers KU retains and how much of a profit Amazon makes off it, those displaced reading hours aren't being spent outside the Kindle ecosystem.

That is not good news for Amazon competitors big or small.

Just as the BPHs push to grow print sales at the expense of digital--because all they produced was more sales for Amazon--KU growth only feeds the Amazon ecosystem and nobody else. Thanks to agency and the push for print, adult fiction is becoming an Amazon Casino: no matter how you play, no matter if you win or lose, the house always wins.

Edit: BTW, the genre breakdown numbers from the DBW session are eye-popping. For some genres, like african-American fiction, they are simply outrageous.

Is the house Amazon or the reader?

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

As far as I can understand it, the situation is as follows:

For a while over the last five years or so, indie authors and independent publishers were able to sell their books on Amazon and their own sites at a profit. They had visibility on Amazon, and readers bought their books at a profitable price.

Something has happened.

Readers no longer buy from independent sites. They buy from Amazon.

I am a U.K. MM Romance reader. Before the UK changed the tax law on ebooks so it was levied on where someone lived I bought exclusively from independent publishers. Now not many are left but one independent, Dreamspinner Press, is a classic example of why I now buy their books from Amazon. A new release costs $6.99 + 20% tax, that's $8.39 which at today's exchange rate of a generous 1.22 = £6.88. That book on Amazon averages £5.60 (I have a pre order I'm watching that currently costs this). Now every month they have a sale, anywhere from 25/35% off. When that happens the newly released books drop on Amazon to £4.20, when the sale finishes on Dreamspinner the Amazon prices do not go back up.

So why would I buy a book direct from Dreamspinner for £6.88 when I can wait until a month after release and buy it on Amazon for £4.20. Plus Dreamspinner producd audiobooks so buying it from Amazon allows me the possibility of a Whispersync'd audio price in the future.

Yes I know Dreamspinner make far less per book, as do the authors, from an Amazon sale, but as a retired person I only have so much disposable income. I can't afford to pay extra to keep a publisher going. Now independent authors, like Josh Lanyon and RJ Scott, to name just two, price new releases between £2.99 and £4.00 depending on length, so again why would I pay Dreamspinner over £6.50 for a single book.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Is the house Amazon or the reader?

Amazon is the house.
Readers are the medium of exchange.

Publishers are the gamblers looking for a "system" to beat the roulette or the one-armed bandits.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by Josieb1

I am a U.K. MM Romance reader. Before the UK changed the tax law on ebooks so it was levied on where someone lived I bought exclusively from independent publishers. Now not many are left but one independent, Dreamspinner Press, is a classic example of why I now buy their books from Amazon. A new release costs $6.99 + 20% tax, that's $8.39 which at today's exchange rate of a generous 1.22 = £6.88. That book on Amazon averages £5.60 (I have a pre order I'm watching that currently costs this). Now every month they have a sale, anywhere from 25/35% off. When that happens the newly released books drop on Amazon to £4.20, when the sale finishes on Dreamspinner the Amazon prices do not go back up.

So why would I buy a book direct from Dreamspinner for £6.88 when I can wait until a month after release and buy it on Amazon for £4.20. Plus Dreamspinner producd audiobooks so buying it from Amazon allows me the possibility of a Whispersync'd audio price in the future.

Yes I know Dreamspinner make far less per book, as do the authors, from an Amazon sale, but as a retired person I only have so much disposable income. I can't afford to pay extra to keep a publisher going. Now independent authors, like Josh Lanyon and RJ Scott, to name just two, price new releases between £2.99 and £4.00 depending on length, so again why would I pay Dreamspinner over £6.50 for a single book.

Excellent point. Indie books can just cost too much.

I know alot of people who have returned to physical books because you can get them cheaper. A gently used paperback for a quarter at the library store vs $6 for a digital copy.

Sent from my XT1528

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

You're not wrong.
But you're missing a roughly $200M piece of the puzzle: Kindle Unlimited.

When people buy a book, print or digital, they buy for a variety of reasons. It might be a gift, it might be to read right away, it might be a replacement for a copy they read years before. Or it might be to read it at a future date.

It is a fairly safe bet that at any one point in time, the number of books sold exceeds the number of books read by that buyer.

Kindle Unlimited changes that: Kindle unlimited only delivers money to the author and/or publisher when books are read. This means that every book via KU is displacing a sale of that book (unless the reader really really likes it) or another book that might've been purchased if KU were not an option. Eyeball hours dedicated to reading being pretty much a fixed value for each reader.

Now, one ways of looking at that $200M annual payout from KU is that the average full book-read payout is reportedly somewhere around $2, which translates to 100M books worth of KU reads last year, displacing a potential 100M book sales. (Assuming TBR lists didn't get much shorter in 2016.)

For context, last month's DBW conference brought a much improved survey of sales (print & digital, traditional & non-tradpub) that gives us fairly trustworthy absolute unit sales numbers.

(Here's a pretty good summation: http://www.sfwa.org/2017/02/really-sold-2016/

The ebook unit sales numbers for adult fiction:

175M tradpub
150M Indie
50M Amazon Publishing

Print books unit sales:

141.4M tradpub
21.8M Indie
1M (almost) Amazon

Now, KU is primarily a channel for Indie and ePub titles so those books read through KU are mostly Indie. (There's well over a million titles in there.) Those lost sales are still delivering money to Indies but only Indies in KU. Which is Amazon-exclusive.

Some of those 100M KU reads lead to followup sales in the Kindle store but they sure as heck don't lead to sales anywhere else. And they may not all represent displaced (and thus lost) sales but a pretty solid fraction of them surely do.

Anyway you slice it, KU is bleeding out a significant fraction of ebook sales and turning them into page reads. How big a fraction we could spend weeks debating.

It could be as high as 30% or as low as 15% but whatever the number it will not be zero. And, regardless of how many subscribers KU retains and how much of a profit Amazon makes off it, those displaced reading hours aren't being spent outside the Kindle ecosystem.

That is not good news for Amazon competitors big or small.

Just as the BPHs push to grow print sales at the expense of digital--because all they produced was more sales for Amazon--KU growth only feeds the Amazon ecosystem and nobody else. Thanks to agency and the push for print, adult fiction is becoming an Amazon Casino: no matter how you play, no matter if you win or lose, the house always wins.

Edit: BTW, the genre breakdown numbers from the DBW session are eye-popping. For some genres, like african-American fiction, they are simply outrageous.

There are a lot of niches out there in the reading world. My mother use to take a bag of books with her to the used book store and return with the bag filled with other books. I suspect that KU fits the same niche as the old used book store, where you were really just renting books.

I think that what you miss is that for the most part, these niches rarely compete with each other for the same customer. Someone who is a big KU user is unlikely to be someone who would have bought many new ebooks at list price sans KU. It's a bit like stores. WalMart doesn't compete with Neiman Marcus, it competes with Target. Neiman Marcus is hurt by the decline of the Major Malls, not by WalMart moving into the area, even though the two may have happened at the same time.

In general you have several different niches in the book world - The "I just want words as cheap as possible" group, the "I just read a couple of best sellers a year" type, the genre reader, and a number of others. Sometimes there is overlap, but not enough to make a difference. My basic reading buys hasn't changed since I was in high school. What has changed is the format and where I buy those books.

The biggest issue that a big 5 publisher ebook store faces is the combination of contracts with the various publishers and (this is the biggest) backlist of big 5 authors. This is where ebook stores like Sony, Kobo and B&N have struggled, not over the indie market.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Amazon has very little to do with it other then they are allowing anyone to publish anything.

I'm confused. This contradicts what other posters have stated. Clearly Amazon plays a pivotal role in indie electronic publishing. They are the big gatekeeper. Other posters have said that the way Amazon advertises (and lists?) books is now less favorable to indies and more favorable to the Big 5.

Is this true? If so, how has it changed, and why?

Originally Posted by pwalker8

The biggest issue that a big 5 publisher ebook store faces is the combination of contracts with the various publishers and (this is the biggest) backlist of big 5 authors. This is where ebook stores like Sony, Kobo and B&N have struggled, not over the indie market.

Could you clarify that?

[Pajamaman]

Another point: I'm reading a lot of anecdotal evidence that indie-publishing is suffering. Is that actually true. Is there and data on it, though obviously data can be debated all day, and is

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

...


Could you clarify that?

Two pieces.

First, an ebook store needs to have contracts with various publishers. We use Big 5 as short hand, but this is basically all the publishers and imprints that one normally sees in the major bookstores. That's a fair number of contracts that need to be negotiated.

The second is backlist books, whose rights may belong to the publisher, or to the author. That's a lot different people and a lot of contracts.

You need a pretty big legal department and back office to arrange all that, plus set up the infrastructure to support getting the various ebooks in the right formats.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Several Samhain authors have gone on to be mainstream as well. The market is flooded with too much slush and not enough RITA quality writing.

There was crap before and there is crap now. That doesn't explain why (if) people are buying less of it.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Two pieces.

First, an ebook store needs to have contracts with various publishers. We use Big 5 as short hand, but this is basically all the publishers and imprints that one normally sees in the major bookstores. That's a fair number of contracts that need to be negotiated.

The second is backlist books, whose rights may belong to the publisher, or to the author. That's a lot different people and a lot of contracts.

You need a pretty big legal department and back office to arrange all that, plus set up the infrastructure to support getting the various ebooks in the right formats.

Okay. This partly explains why only big players (like Amazon) have a successful store. It doesn't say anything why indie-sales are suffering (if they truly are). I thin the other reason the Amazon store has done so well is the integration with the Kindle platform. But that's fairly clear and not really what interests me.

[BearMountainBooks]

Indie sales have slowed as compared to five years ago. KU, libraries, poor quality of some books, FREE books by the boatloat, and less advantageous placement on Amazon/visibility are the big reasons.

I base this on my own sales/momentum and also on authors I work with (I do editing on the side and some cover work now). I've also seen the difference in sales/momentum via my blog which is an affiliate at Kobo and Amazon (used to be B&N, but they no longer offer affiliate payment on Ebooks).

I actually have seen a pickup in affiliate book sales in the last 3 months. Some of that is Christmas/gift cards. But as I said in the earlier post, I'm seeing a much larger reluctance to accept the new pricing from the big six. As of the first of the year (or possibly earlier but that's about when I noticed) any best selling author is priced at 10 and UP. 14.99 is not unusual. What that appears to have done is cause readers to search out 2.99 books and below. Anything under 5 still sells some copies. Anything over? Nada. Even boxed sets over 5 are having a hard time of it.

Kobo sales have slacked off too, in part because they offer fewer coupons. Their pricing is often slightly more expensive that Amazon's pricing but with a coupon, they are generally below Amazon (I know this more from being a shopper there than an affiliate). I don't advertise full priced books on Kobo very often...maybe never? So I can't say how or if sales of the big six have slacked off there. Kobo does run daily deals on some big name authors and those get clicks. Results vary as far as sales with Scottland Yard mysteries and British mysteries doing the best.

[Atunah]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

I'm confused. This contradicts what other posters have stated. Clearly Amazon plays a pivotal role in indie electronic publishing. They are the big gatekeeper. Other posters have said that the way Amazon advertises (and lists?) books is now less favorable to indies and more favorable to the Big 5.

Is this true? If so, how has it changed, and why?
Could you clarify that?

That is assuming that readers shop for books by looking at advertising. I don't care what Amazon advertises, I don't want to see it. Any sponsored link I scroll right on by without looking. I don't want to see ads, I want to find what I like to read. I like browsing on my own, in the genres I like, seeing what gets released. Lets just say the wading through garbage has become too much. If they favor trade published stuff when it comes to my recommendations, its really just a function of the algorithm as I have shifted away from indy stuff back to trade published books. So its working.

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

There was crap before and there is crap now. That doesn't explain why (if) people are buying less of it.

I am buying less indies because there is so much more crap now than ever before. There really wasn't as much crap out there before indies. Really wasn't. The crap that is out now would never have made it past someones desk.

I, along with many other readers, was an early reader of self published titles. I got my kindle in 2008 and I love romance. Among other genres. Indy+romance, match made in heaven right? It was for a while. It was fantastic. I read a lot of stuff indy that ended up being picked up by trade. It was quality stuff, fresh.

Last couple of years? Forgetaboutit. Really the down spiral started when everyone tried to jump on the bandwagons. Around the start of KU. Stuffing any kind of crap short into the system to make a buck. All the copy cats jumping on the 50 shades wagon, the billionaire wagon, the shifter wagon. Flooding the market with mediocre cookie cutter stuff that has no heart and pretty much just sex. Any day now when I try to find something to read that is all there is. 1000's of them taking up the listings in releases.

What happens to the indies that actually write good stuff? They get drowned out. Many of us have shifted back to reading the proven greats of genres. Backlist titles, some gone back to paperback.

And who is getting smart about it all? Trade publishers. They are now the ones coming out with the stories that are interesting and they also now have the best sales. $2.99, $1.99, I find many books on sale all the time now. And I buy all at Amazon as its all in one place. Why would I go elsewhere. There is no incentive.

Blossom is not the only one to see all the low quality slush.

I have actually read more library books in the last year than I ever before. I also have KU and oddly enough I have bought way more books in the last year than I did the year before that. In KU I read mostly Amazon imprints and indy authors that are proven and have a lot of books out. And back list titles which I don't really count as indy as they were published with a big 5 in the past.

If I could read the font in paperbacks still, I would probably scout out used books also. But I can't, so that option is gone for me. Voracious readers I think like to share their books, can't do that with digital.